Leading Beautifully: The Creative Economy and Beyond

“These times are riven with anxiety and uncertainty” asserts John O’Donohue.1 “In the hearts of people some natural ease has been broken. . . . Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen. . . . The traditional structures of shelter are shaking, their foundations revealed to be no longer stone but sand. We are suddenly thrown back on ourselves. At first, it sounds completely naïve to suggest that now might be the time to invoke beauty. Yet this is exactly what . . . [we claim]. Why? Because there is nowhere else to turn and we are desperate; furthermore, it is because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such a terrible crisis.”2 Twenty-first century society yearns for a leadership of possibility, a leadership based more on hope, aspiration, innovation, and beauty than on the replication of historical patterns of constrained pragmatism. Luckily, such a leadership is possible today. For the first time in history, leaders can work backward from their aspirations and imagination rather than forward from the past.3 “The gap between what people can imagine and what they can accomplish has never been smaller.”4 Responding to the challenges and yearnings of the twenty-first century demands anticipatory creativity. Designing options worthy of implementation calls for levels of inspiration, creativity, and a passionate commitment to beauty that, until recently, have been more the province of artists and artistic processes than the domain of most managers. The time is right for the artistic imagination of each of us to co-create the leadership that the world most needs and deserves.

[1]  Richard J. Boland,et al.  Managing as Designing , 2004 .

[2]  Nassim Nicholas Taleb,et al.  The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable , 2007 .

[3]  Gordon Müller-Seitz,et al.  Positive Organizational Scholarship , 2007 .

[4]  Cristina V. Lopes,et al.  Breakthrough ideas , 2005, OOPSLA '05.

[5]  N. Adler,et al.  When Knowledge Wins: Transcending the Sense and Nonsense of Academic Rankings , 2009 .

[6]  F. Franck.  Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action , 1993 .

[7]  P. Senge.  The necessary revolution , 2009 .

[8]  P. Senge.  The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World , 2008 .

[9]  M. Csíkszentmihályi,et al.  Positive psychology. An introduction. , 2000, The American psychologist.

[10]  T. Kuhn,et al.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. , 1964 .

[11]  Gregory A Petsko,et al.  Too big to succeed? , 2009, Genome Biology.

[12]  J. Marecek,et al.  Positive Psychology , 2008 .

[13]  David Dunne,et al.  Design Thinking and How It Will Change Management Education: An Interview and Discussion , 2006 .

[14]  Donna Ladkin,et al.  Leading beautifully: How mastery, congruence and purpose create the aesthetic of embodied leadership practice , 2008 .

[15]  Roger Martin.  The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage , 2009 .

[16]  J. Dutton,et al.  Positive Organizational Scholarship , 2007 .

[17]  Global Business as an Agent of World Benefit: New International Business Perspectives Leading Positive Change , 2008 .

[18]  G. Marwell,et al.  Economists free ride, does anyone else? : Experiments on the provision of public goods, IV , 1981 .

[19]  K. Cameron,et al.  Introduction: Contributions to the Discipline of Positive Organizational Scholarship , 2004 .

[20]  Daniel H. Pink.  9| The MFA Is the New MBA , 2004 .

[21]  Susan E. Merritt.  What does beauty have to do with business , 2010 .

[22]  James Risen,et al.  State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration , 2006 .

[23]  J. Schneider.  The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and the Scandalous Fall of Enron , 2004 .

[24]  I. Braverman,et al.  Use of fine art to enhance visual diagnostic skills. , 2001, JAMA.

[25]  Frederick G. Bird.  The Muted Conscience: Moral Silence and the Practice of Ethics in Business , 1996 .

[26]  Douglas Carnall,et al.  Death and dying , 2000, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[27]  Fabrizio Ferraro,et al.  Economics Language and Assumptions: How Theories Can Become Self-Fulfilling , 2003 .

[28]  Breakthrough ideas for 2004 , 2004, IEEE Engineering Management Review.

[29]  S. Skomal.  What Does It Mean to Be Human , 1991 .

[30]  Nancy J. Adler,et al.  Global managers: no longer men alone , 2002 .

[31]  N. Adler.  Did You Hear? , 1998 .

[32]  J. A. Moyne,et al.  The Essential Rumi , 1995 .

[33]  G. Hamel.  Leading the Revolution , 2000 .

[34]  R. Damian,et al.  The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Edge , 2012 .

[35]  N. Adler.  The Arts & Leadership: Now That We Can Do Anything, What Will We Do? , 2006 .

[36]  Shaping history: global leadership in the twenty-first century , 2005 .

[37]  Bethany McLean,et al.  The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron , 2003 .

[38]  P. Sparrow.  Handbook of International Human Resource Management: Integrating People, Process, and Context , 2009 .

[39]  Nancy J. Adler,et al.  Global Companies, Global Society , 2002 .

[40]  M. Seligman.  Positive psychology: Fundamental assumptions. , 2003 .