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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Bernard of Chartres was a twelfth-century French Neo-Platonist monk, philosopher, scholar, and administrator. It was he — not Isaac Newton — who observed, “We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.” Obviously, you and your co-authors of Leadership as Masterpiece Creation learned a great deal of value from a wide range of thought leaders. In your opinion, what is the single lesson of greatest value learned from each of these?
First, from Martin Heidegger:
Philosophers for ages and certainly since Aristotle have thought of us as thinking animals. Our cognitions were fundamental and drove our actions to fulfill our desires. Heidegger argued that we were fundamentally skillfully coping animals. We learn how to get around in the world and our cognitions flow from that. By hammering, we come to understand hammers. However, Heidegger argued that our coping was not like the coping of animals. In our coping, we coped with doors as doors, hammers as hammers, not just something that afforded getting through an entrance or afforded pounding. We coped with a sense of using the right thing in the right way. That rightness is the source of truth and morality. Heidegger’s sense of rightness in our skillful, coping practices is an important source of the understanding of truth and of morality in the book.
Heidegger’s second ground-breaking idea is that if you change the coping practices of a people, you change the world; you change what counts as real; you change what counts as right. That thinking stands behind the understanding of history in the book. The ancient classical world with heroes and slaves was fundamentally different from the Medieval world of Christendom with saints and sinners, which was again fundamentally different from modernity with autonomous individuals and their attempts at encyclopedic knowledge, which is fundamentally different from us post-moderns with our moral, biological, emotional, and conceptual flexibility. The book’s plural moral realism and understanding of organizational culture come from Heidegger’s understanding of cultural history. It is fair to say that Heidegger’s thinking sits in the background of virtually every page of Leadership as Masterpiece Creation.
From Frederich Nietzsche
I take Nietzsche as the philosopher who shows us how we can have lives worth living in a world where a sense of history-making and of embeddedness in tradition is weakening. My first book Disclosing New Worlds (written with Fernando Flores and Bert Dreyfus) focused on reviving the cultural good of history-making. With history-making, people see themselves in tightly embedded communities, which are the sources of their identities, and they renew these communities by rearticulating what they are about, by exchanging practices with other communities or other parts of the community (and thereby making the community tighter), or by reconfiguring the practices in a community around a marginal practice.
For example, Martin Luther King, Jr., rearticulated our Christian practices to make racism an embarrassment; Mothers Against Drunk Driving connected the care of mothers to our driving practices to make us hyper-vigilant drivers, and King Gillette made the marginal practice of disposability a basic part of our lives. Heidegger’s thinking inspired Disclosing. Since 1997, my co-authors and I have come to think that such history-making practices have gotten weaker. We live in increasingly fragmented communities.
Nietzsche calls for us to have lives where we replace communal strong connections in our communities and history-making with living beyond the good and evil of particular communities and creating wonder for ourselves and others. For Nietzsche and for us in Leadership as Masterpiece Creation, wonder involves changing moral norms, our sense of what is right. Such change shows us a better way to live a life. For instance, we reinvent caring for our bodies, as Anita Roddick did. We fall in love with hyper-convenience, as Bezos solicits us to do. We transform digital and social transparency into an idea meritocracy, as Ray Dalio does at Bridgewater. These are wonders with moral content.
Our world today has those, and Leadership as Masterpiece Creation lauds them. Wonder has gone so far in replacing embedded, rich, resonant, community meaning that we are captivated by wonder without a moral sense too. Consider TikTok.
In Leadership as Masterpiece Creation, we also explain what Nietzsche means by saying God is dead, what it means to say, following Nietzsche, that truth is perspectival, and what are the four kinds of good lives available to us now. If Heidegger is on the back stage of every page, Nietzsche is very much on the front stage of Leadership as Masterpiece Creation.
From Jef Bezos
Jeff Bezos saw that the internet was growing at a huge rate and spawning numerous boards for buying and selling. Remember Craigslist and the others. Bezos saw that the proliferation of such boards would make retail into a confusing bazaar filled with a mixture of trustworthy and untrustworthy goods, vendors, options on goods, and so forth. The old world of retailers knowing their customers, offering reliable goods and prices, and interacting with basic trust would die with the convenience of shopping online and the lower prices and costs that came from an absence of physical structures. Bezos considered it a moral anomaly that we loved the trust and stability of retail but were willing to give it up for convenience and the security of a bazaar. He set out to resolve the anomaly with an online everything store. He succeeded. He kept the basic stabilities of retail buying and selling and replaced customer communities with relentlessly pursued hyper-convenient transactions. Thus, he shifted the normative order of retail while saving its trustworthiness.
From William Shakespeare
Shakespeare changed the world. With the help of other writers and philosophers he influenced, Shakespeare made us modern, highly self-conscious subjects. He did it primarily through his famous tragedies—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra—which displayed a new way of being a self. In previous tragedies, different normative orders embodied in particular characters collided with tragic consequences. Roman comedies and Medieval literary works were about calculating people trying to take advantage of each other and getting just punishments, about the disorder and depth of romantic love founded, as it was, on pious love, and on pious love bringing order to the world. Shakespearean tragic figures sought to have a life worth living by creating and living out a story of their lives. They wanted the story to be so worth living that they would be willing to die for it. Thus, a tragic death was a noble death.
For instance, Hamlet does not want to be a revenge hero, which he sees as tied up in misrepresentation and trickery and wants his story to be one of open disclosure of truths. He wants to bring out the truth in others: ghosts, his mother, his uncle, Ophelia, Laertes, and so forth. He thinks his death does that and instructs Horatio to tell his story: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity awhile / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story (5.2. 381-384). Even Macbeth asserts, “Lay on, Macduff / And damned be him that first cries ‘Hold! Enough!’” (5.8.38-39). Dying for one’s story showed that the story and hence the life was worth living. It made life noble. It enabled us to say about people in their death that they completed their lives. It now seems quaint. It was, however, the source of our modern high evaluation of personal autonomy and nobility. We in post-modernity still hold the memory of our modernity dear.
From Bernard Williams
The late 20th century, analytic, Anglo-American philosopher brought us a thought that is nearly unthinkable but deeply important for understanding morality. It represents a revolution or brings home the revolution that Nietzsche started when he claimed that we live or should live beyond good and evil. Bernard Williams asks us to imagine saying that someone is good or evil by luck. It cuts us to the core. We can think that someone is rich or poor by luck. We can think that a scientist hit on a cure to a disease by luck. We can think that a warrior or an army has won a battle by luck. But being good or evil is supposed to be so much a matter of our intentions and character that luck has nothing to do with it.
We think that if we have good intentions and a good character, and an action goes wrong, it is a matter of bad luck but that luck cannot make us evil. Likewise, if we have bad intentions, but things go well, that lucky outcome cannot make us good. Williams showed that we do not really practice morality that way. We have those views about good and evil. But we do not live that way. If we have two drivers who don’t maintain their brakes; both have their brakes fail at an intersection; one sails through; the other hits a pedestrian. In our heart of hearts, we believe that the one who hit the pedestrian is morally more culpable than the one who sails through.
It’s not just a practical matter of assigning someone to clean up a mess; it is moral blame. Likewise, Williams gives us his famous story of the artist Gauguin, who abandoned his family in Paris on the basis of his intuition that he could paint great, world-changing art. He could only paint that art if he abandoned the bourgeois trappings of his life. Gauguin fled to Tahiti and painted the great art that we know and that changed our sentiments toward bourgeois life. If we feel grateful to Gauguin and his art, we have to say he did the right thing. But it was a matter of luck. He did not know that he could produce the great art. He was lucky. Had he not produced it, Williams says and I agree, we would condemn him.
Many still cannot get over what Williams showed us about our moral intuitions. But Williams saw these moral intuitions as showing that we are morally connected to each other by communal bonds that we ignore. We are not just connected as one individual, autonomous subject with character and intentions to another individual, autonomous subject. We live in a community where the effects of our actions matter as much as our intentions. Thus, Williams brings back part of the ancient normative order and separates us from our Shakespearean sense of self. You can see that in Leadership as Masterpiece Creation, we are giving up modern, Shakespearean parts of our heritage that Disclosing New Worlds hoped to save. However, for Shakespeare lovers, Shakespeare did have a period after his tragedies of writing Romances, and those may become an important part of our post-modern heritage. They are works that celebrate and generate wonder.
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Link to Part 1
Link to Part 2
Charles invites you to check out the resources at these two websites:
His Amazon link
His LinkedIn link