Charles Spinosa has been a management consultant for the last 27 years. He draws on thinking from philosophy and literature to develop leaders, change organizational cultures, and develop new customer propositions. He has worked with clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups in Europe, the US, Canada, Latin America, and China. Before entering management consulting, he taught Shakespeare at Miami University in Ohio and then philosophy at U. C. Berkeley.

With Fernando Flores and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Charles published Disclosing New Worlds (The MIT Press, 1997). The book looks at innovation in business, politics, and culture from a philosopher’s perspective. In 2024 with Matthew Hancocks, Haridimos Tsoukas, and Christopher Davis (on organizational culture), Charles published Leadership as Masterpiece Creation (The MIT Press). The book provides conceptual and practical frameworks for leaders to create morally distinctive organizations: masterpieces. Charles received his B.A. from Columbia and his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley. Charles lives in New York City.

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In your opinion, which of the material you provide in Leadership as Masterpiece Creation will be most valuable to those now preparing for a career in business or who have only recently embarked on one? Please explain.

For someone just starting out in business, I recommend Chapter 2 on the basics of business and leading a good life from a moral perspective and then Chapter 3 on managing moods, Chapter 4 on trust building, chapter 5 on seeking and saying truth, and Chapter 9 on identifying one’s foundational story. These are the basic skills needed to ask the basic questions that lead to creating a masterpiece: What always goes wrong here? What would I love instead? What moral risks do I need to take?

If they could only read one chapter, I’d say chapter 2. Perhaps, I am being too philosophical. Many readers new to business tell me that chapter 3 on managing moods is a breakthrough for them.

To the owners or CEOs of small-to-midsize companies?

In my experience owners and CEOs of small-to-midsize companies already have some idea of the masterpiece they’d like to create. They know the wrong in the industry they want to right. They have a rough, but only rough, idea of what they would love to do. But many people around them are advising them to follow the conventional recipes of scaling. So these owners and CEOs need to receive the inspiration of Churchill and Madam Walker from Chapter 1, to stand against safety as in Chapter 5, to see the conceptual importance of moral risk-taking and its requirement of courage in Chapter 6, and to plan their moral risk-taking strategy as in Chapter 8. They will probably welcome the formation of their legendary story in chapter 9. If they have already started implementing the conventional recipes for scaling, they might need to start where we start with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

If they could only read one chapter, I’d say Chapter 8.

To C-level executives in Fortune 500 companies? Please explain.

CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are drawn in so many directions and answer to so many constituencies that the recipes of management have almost always become important prosthetics they employ. We need to help them recall why they got into the industry to begin with and then remake the culture as their own. So, we start with the workplace culture which we describe in Chapter 7. Alongside that we work on their legendary stories from Chapter 9 and inspire masterpiece creation by looking at Chapters 1 and 6. Of course, the requirement of truth-seeking and truth-saying  of Chapter 5 is frequently important.

If they could only read one chapter, I’d say Chapter 7.

Which question had you hoped to be asked during this interview – but weren’t – and what is your response to it?

There are two additional questions I’d like to answer.

First, a two-parter: “Why does creating a masterpiece in business always require moral luck? Why can’t it simply require talent, skill, intelligence, love, courage, trust-building, listening for difference, mood management, and other dimensions of character?” I do not believe that any morally distinctive organization can be created on the basis of talent, skill, intelligence, or other elements of character alone. The reason is in the nature of morality.

When we are breaking norms to create new norms, we know that we are probably harming certain people who will likely never forgive us. Indeed, we accept some sense of the rightness of those norms under which they will condemn us. We grew up in those norms. Gauguin knew it was wrong to abandon his family. Madam C. J. Walker knew it was wrong to steal Annie Malone’s formula.

Likewise, we know that our actions and words in breaking those norms to create new ones do not by any stretch of the imagination take account of all the relevant variables in creating what is right for people. Indeed, we cannot feel confident that we know even what the new normative order will be like. At best we know the direction we are moving it towards. Churchill did not know; Madam C. J. Walker did not know of the personalities she was creating (even in her own daughter); Anita Roddick could not know how far caring for the body would or will still go; Bezos did not know of or seek hyper-convenience at the beginning; Robertson did not know that she was going to attack gray profits. And if we only know the direction of the moral change we are driving, we certainly do not know if people will find it right or, even more important, whether it will in fact be right.

Finding something morally right involves a whole lot more than finding something that a lot of people will spend money on. Moral rightness goes beyond what any community, even the pragmatist’s last, most epistemically privileged (wisest) human community, thinks is right. We know the signs of rightness. When people see what the right norms are, they see their lives as a whole more clearly; they see how they should live more clearly; they see what they should do now. But they do not see these things with certainty. You would have to be incredibly arrogant or foolish to think that. That’s why Churchill and anyone who changes moral norms constantly asks, “Are we beasts?” When we change norms, we do so with fear and trembling. That’s what protects us from arrogance.

When I coach someone to take a bold action that breaks the norms of her or his organization, I cannot be sure that we are coaching her or him to do what will be morally right. We follow our moral intuitions, speak courageously, and hope. I think that one of the greatest lines in the Bible speaks to this sense of rightness. I am viewing the Bible as literature here, not as scripture. (I advise everyone — atheist, follower or any non-Abrahamic religion, and especially followers of Abrahamic religions —  to read the Bible at least once as literature.)

Before his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus prays on the Mount of Olives. He says, “Father, if it be thy will, take this cup away from me. Yet not my will but thine own will be done.” (Luke, 22:42). Reading the Bible as literature, Jesus is appealing to a good higher than his own conscience, intelligence, and heart to guide him to do what is right according to that good, to guide him to do what is right even against his instincts which would have been grounded in the current normativen order. You do not have to believe in God and divine law to understand this plea or the sense of rightness implicit in it. You do need, however, to believe that there is a higher good than you or your community understands. Of course, it can be God or gods. It can also be a higher  consciousness, the law of the cosmos, natural law, human reason shorn of our foolish prejudices, or the poetry of the human heart. To make sense of the moral stand of Leadership as Masterpiece Creation, you have to believe in some higher good.

We pitched the book at the minimal level of believing in the poetry of the human heart (words spoken that seem so true, so illuminating that you feel compelled to live by them). That means that the masterpiece leader breaks norms (1) on the basis of a higher norm that they do not fully know and (2) that the norm-breaking goes against some of their cherished moral intuitions. So, it absolutely takes moral luck — some might say guidance of a holy spirit — to succeed. No amount of talent, wisdom, courage, imagination, empathy, compassion, candor, truth-seeking, inclusion, or any other virtue will be sufficient. You are dealing with a poetic power you do not understand. The virtues might keep you from becoming a beast. You still need guidance or luck beyond your powers.

Second, “What are you writing now?” Because I’m trying to develop the thought that today’s business leaders are our moral artists, I am writing two academic papers. With Hari Tsoukas, I’m writing “Beyond Forgiveness: Moral Restoration in Polarized Workplaces,” which is about how CEOs are beginning to restore the moral identities of those who have morally mis-stepped. I’m also writing, again with some help from Hari, “Managing a Post-Truth (Plural-Truth) Organization.”

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Thank you, Charles, for completing this substantial interview, and for countless other invaluable contributions to thought leadership.

Bravo!

Charles cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:

Link to Part 1

Link to Part 2

Link to Part 3

Charles invites you to check out the resources at these two websites:

His Amazon link

His LinkedIn link