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.
* * *
Now let’s discuss Leadership as Masterpiece Creation. For those who have not as yet read it, I hope your responses to these questions will stimulate their interest and, better yet, encourage them to purchase a copy and read the book ASAP.
First, when and why did you decide to write it?
Sometime in 2020, Matt, Hari, and I decided to write a book extending the thinking of our article “Beyond Rational Persuasion: How Leaders Change Moral Norms.” The article made a rather radical moral argument based on the philosopher Bernard Williams’s notion of moral luck. (Williams actually developed it with Thomas Nagel, but Williams’s conception of it is the more pointed one.) The article argued that organizational leaders change the moral norms of their organizations and larger communities frequently by taking actions that go against the then-current normative order. Leaders lead through action, not simply by persuasive speaking. And when a normative order stands in the way of people leading good lives, it creates an anomaly that cries out for resolution through actions that create a new moral normative order.
The act to resolve the anomaly will necessarily go against the current normative order. The article focused on Winston Churchill’s actions in 1940 and on Anita Roddick’s establishment of The Body Shop. Churchill’s sacrifice of British troops and his attack on allied French sailors manifested the new norms of brutal realism and ruthlessness it would take to defeat Nazi Germany. Anita Roddick’s financial deception of her husband-CFO showed the lengths she considered justified for instituting the norm of growth at the Body Shop. So, in answer to the question, do good leaders break moral norms and even sometimes laws, our answer is yes, under certain conditions. It is highly risky in that it requires moral luck to succeed. We wanted to write a book to elaborate on this argument by showing the wide range of business leaders who broke norms to resolve moral anomalies and then to show that that activity is at the core of both the commercial and ethical nature of our world.
Once we felt sure that the Journal of Business Ethics would publish our paper, we started writing. But two other circumstances drove the composition.
First, the pandemic raised safety into a moral norm. Being safe was no longer an act of prudence required in especially risky situations. Employees and students were demanding psychological safety before speaking up and indeed often curtailing the speech of others whose speech might include micro-aggressions. We observed leaders and others in businesses walking on eggshells to avoid making identity threats. Thus, when safety became a general moral norm, no leader could justify the risk of breaking a moral norm to resolve a moral anomaly. We saw that safety would hamstring leaders from one of their greatest, most noble, deeply ethical tools.
Second, since 1997 and the publication of Disclosing New Worlds, people have come to feel less attached to historical communities with a destiny that their people were pursuing. We see that sense of destiny — the Great Commission to preach and Jesus’ Second Coming — remaining in evangelical churches today. But nations and neighborhoods, professional associations and performance groups, even families and fraternal orders had it before. Disclosing New Worlds had tried to reinvigorate the cultural good of history-making so that people would live to bring their communities’ histories to life, in short, to renew their heritage in one way or another. In such a world one lived to heighten resonance with the past, as the future seemed a fulfillment of its promise. Some such resonance remains, but we saw that people now lived much more for lives of wonder, for surprising breakthroughs of small or large scale.
Consider the love of disruptive innovation. Consider TikTok. Both are about producing wonder with little resonance. We saw that when leaders make moral shifts in their organizations, they create wonder lightly grounded in resonance with the historical community. The Body Shop created that wonder. Madame C. J. Walker created that wonder. Ray Dalio did the same for Bridgewater. We believe that Jeff Bezos as well as Larry Page and Sergey Brin have done that. We admired the wonder (attached to light resonance) they created in their masterpiece organizations which changed the moral norms of their organizations and communities more widely. We wanted to write about such masterpiece creation which we had been involved in for the last fifteen years of our careers (though without our full awareness). We wanted to give leaders and aspiring leaders conceptual and practical tools to create masterpieces.
Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it? Please explain.
Most of the book is about lessons we authors learned over the past 27 years, but the lesson of the last chapter came as a revelation. In that chapter, we stood back and asked what kind of world we were really arguing for. The revelation was more of the Wittgensteinian sort where the sun gradually rises to illuminate a wonderful whole and less a head-snapping Paul on the Road to Damascus one, but a revelation nevertheless.
We realized that we were proposing what we called a narrow moral pluralism. For example, we were claiming that we could admire companies as morally diverse as The Body Shop (which stood for fun, compassion,
experimentation, and knowledgeable care for one’s body), Google (which stood for psychological safety and following one’s dreams), and Amazon (which stood for relentlessness, customer fanaticism, raising the bar on every new hire, and hyper-convenience). Among the three authors, each of us could embrace one of those and only admire the others. But we could certainly admire them all. People asked if our moral pluralism extended to companies that were breaking laws. Our answer was mostly no. But when a company broke a law the way Rosa Parks did, we could endorse it. The point, however, is that companies take moral risks. That is the moral work they do. And they need moral luck to succeed. Such moral risk-taking is quite different from the financial risk-taking a so-called purpose-driven company takes to attach itself to a popular new norm already in place.
Our account of companies facing moral anomalies and of multiple moral normative orders arising in industries and communities left many members of the audiences we spoke to nervous. Amazon was an especially sore point. In today’s world, people acknowledge that there are different normative orders among cultures, nations, and business organizations. But that acknowledgment comes with either sullen toleration or fiery condemnation…or both. With sullen tolerance, members of our audiences felt pain that they had to use Amazon and were powerless against it. We also saw in their fiery condemnation of Amazon and others’ moral orders real joy in detailing the wrongs. We sought admiration for diverse orders to replace these sentiments of sullen toleration and fiery condemnation. Reserve fiery condemnation for graver wrongs. Let’s admire those institutions that give us wonder… or at least most of them.
On reflection, we came to see that many or most of the people we spoke to about our book understood moral norms as universal obligations, ones that we were obliged to hold whether they contributed to a good life or not. The twentieth-century philosopher Bernard Williams offers us a moral breakthrough in rejecting those claims about morality. Most importantly, it does matter whether the moral norms contribute to a good life or not. Our moral practices already include the sense that the need of a good life can offset supposedly universal claims of moral norms, though we do not feel comfortable admitting it. Consider this: Driver A and Driver B both neglect to maintain their breaks. Driver A and Driver B try to stop at a red light, but their brakes fail. Driver A sails through harming no one. Driver B hits a pedestrian. In terms of intentional wrongdoing, both have committed the same wrong. But we (or many of us) do feel in our moral hearts that Driver B is morally–not just practically–responsible for the injury to the pedestrian and should be blamed accordingly. Bernard Williams says that this intuition (and practice) holds because we are connected through bonds of community not just through individual intention. We feel we in the community live better lives if we simply penalize Driver A for running a red light and penalize Driver B for both running a red light and for harming the pedestrian. It leaves Driver A, Driver B, the pedestrian, and other members of the community able to live more buoyant, responsible, connected, good lives.
Williams argues likewise for Gauguin. In Williams’s slightly fictional example, the failing artist Gauguin abandons his bourgeois family in Paris, flees to Tahiti, and paints wonderful art that makes us change our strict middle-class norms. Do we give him a pass for abandoning his family? Yes, it makes for better lives in the community. We want our artists and leaders to take risks. Would we have given him a pass had he not created the great art? No; it makes for better lives in our community. We want moral risks to be genuine risks that determine whether we are morally good or bad. There have to be consequences for failure; otherwise, arrogance rules community life. (“I’m an artist, so I can do what I please.”) Do we have lines that aesthetically great art or politically successful leadership cannot cross? Yes.
Had Gauguin painted his paintings with the blood of his murdered family or murdered Tahitians, he’d get no pass, and the artworks would be removed from museums. It’s harder to draw clear lines with successful political leadership. I don’t think we can give Mao Zedong a pass. But I concede that over 1 billion people disagree. Can we make those lines clear? No, we can point out extremes. But it is part of the buoyancy of the community and the good lives we want that we have to judge the circumstances in their contexts. What counts as a good life has never been fully determined and keeps changing.
We authors of Leadership as Masterpiece Creation go along with Williams in claiming that our moral norms depend on maintaining communal bonds that order how we treat each other and promote living good lives. Further, we believe as part of our moral constitution we admire those who, like Gauguin, Churchill, and Roddick, take moral risks, have the moral luck of practical success, and establish new normative orders. We admire them and their normative orders. (Of course, we do not admire all such normative orders. I don’t admire Mao Zedong’s.) But, even more importantly in daily living and judging, we do not feel obliged to embrace any normative order we admire. Where does that leave us?
It leaves us with what we call a narrow moral pluralism and—here’s the big leap and big revelation—without obligation as the currency of morality. Our revelation was that in admiring (not embracing) plural normative orders the currency of morality shifts to gratitude. We feel gratitude for the number of good lives that different moral communities support. We feel gratitude for the inventiveness of moral artists who invent and establish normative orders. We feel gratitude for the wonder. Our book, therefore, is trying to turn a moral economy of obligation into a moral economy of gratitude. The sun of this revelation rose slowly over the whole of the book and our thinking.
To what extent (if any) does the book in final form differ significantly from what you and your co-authors originally envisioned?
We discovered gratitude as the currency of morality as described in the previous question.
In your opinion, what are the defining characteristics of leadership when viewed as “a work of art”?
For clarity’s sake, let me distinguish leaders who make their organizations into masterpieces and change normative orders from leaders who make their style of leadership itself into a masterpiece. In most cases the two go together, but not always, and in the interest of giving a full answer to the question, I’ll divide them into two. Organizational masterpiece-creating leaders create morally distinctive and admirable organizations that change the normative orders of their organization and industry. They do not necessarily replace the industry’s normative order. They can, like Anita Roddick, displace it by establishing an alternative normative order within the industry. Three questions (and their answers) drive the thinking and actions of these leaders: (1) What always goes wrong here? (What is the moral anomaly in my midst?) (2) How would I love things to go to resolve the anomaly? (3) What moral risks do I have to take to establish an organization that can resolve the anomaly? Generally, leaders see no more than two moral risks in the future. But they commit to taking the moral risks necessary.
Top leaders and those who run divisions where they are responsible for determining how to treat customers, employees, or suppliers are prime candidates for these questions and driving the answers through their company or their division.
However, any leader who has autonomy in managing employees can look for smaller anomalies and resolve them. The resolution might spread to other areas. But developing the moral imagination to spot and work on an anomaly is valuable wherever a leader has autonomy regarding customers, employees, or suppliers. (Moral imagination is the capacity to look at situations from the perspective of different moral norms, ones where the person or organization observed receives more moral condemnation and more moral praise. Moral imagination is not empathy.) In my experience, managers tend to have more autonomy than they think. But to exercise it, they have first to learn to take on the footing (the ownership) of a leader, which we describe in the book.
I’ve never met or discovered in research a masterpiece-creating leader who did not also make her or his leadership a work of art. But I have helped some and found some leaders who made their leadership a work of art and who did not create masterpieces. (They tried, but creating a masterpiece is extremely hard, and you do not have to succeed at that to receive admiration for a leadership style that is a work of art.) We can work to turn a leader’s style into a work of art so long as the leader’s team has been with her or him long enough to be familiar with the leader’s virtues. Four years is usually sufficient.
What does leadership as a work of art look like?
Followers feel complicit in all of the leader’s bold, imaginative, energetic, actions. Followers seek to go the extra mile in performing even the run-of-the-mill tasks. They instill that complicity and ambition in their teams. They help the leader maintain a mood of hope, admiration, zeal, or joy. Organizations are always at war in maintaining a positive mood. Downturns, media reports, and all the natural barriers to doing
what goes against averageness will pull the moods of some down, and as negative moods are more contagious than positive ones, leadership is in daily combat. Leaders frequently feel alone keeping the mood of the company high. When the leader is well supported by her or his team in managing the organizational moods by keeping the company’s distinctive (signature) practices crisp, renewing them as needed, and inspiring in one-on-one coaching, the company maintains a beautiful flow in hand-offs, decision-making, evaluation, and celebration.
Leadership as a work of art is also highly self-aware and hence, as in the case of Lorenzo Zambrano, strategies are more robust and resilient.
What does such leadership achieve? The short answer is that the leader must constantly work at and refine the story of who she or he is. Such work goes against much of what is currently fashionable to say about good leaders: that they exhibit authenticity, empathy, compassion, inclusiveness, learn from 360º reviews, and so forth.
I advise leaders to develop their foundational story, the story of the event that made them who they are. I ask, What was the challenge they overcame, usually in their youth, that made them who they are and gave them their way of being that is still discernable now? They structure the story by working with basic plot elements. They say who they were before facing the challenge, the challenge, how they tried and failed to overcome the challenge, and how they finally overcame it. Once we have the story stated with drama and boldness, we examine it to see which are the top one or two virtues the leader exhibited in overcoming the challenge. We then test the story by checking to see if those virtues came out in other successes in the leader’s life including work, family, hobbies, and associations.
Then we make the first counterintuitive move. We ask how those foundational virtues are behind the leader’s current problems. Many coaches work on weaknesses and blockers. That is all fine, but it will not make one’s leadership into a work of art. To make leadership a masterpiece, we need to see how virtues need to be reformed. Periodically they do. Why?
Typically, if we have an extremely persistent leader and a bit of a perfectionist—I worked with one just before the pandemic and described her in the book—then her team will pass to her rough sketches of what they think should be done and take off Friday. I’m working with another leader today who is enormously fearless. She can tell customers hard news and does it with flair. Guess what? Her senior team hands off to her almost all the difficult truth-telling and then heads for the hills. They blame her for being too provocative if the customer ends the account. I work with another leader who is a genius. His senior team loves to give him both the hardest and not-so-hard conceptual problems they face. They don’t even start trying to work out the problem. Even one’s most trusted and loyal team members will adjust to let their leaders work according to their virtues and relax. Leaders get overloaded. Things move slowly. Team members start leading “balanced” instead of passionately committed lives, complicit with the leader.
So, we look at the challenges the leader currently faces: work piling up, increasingly difficult decisions with customers, more conceptually tough problems arising. It almost always looks to the leader as though the market is changing. Her or his team is smart enough to encourage that thought, and competition might well also be getting tougher. But the leader will be able to see that she or he is the one stepping up to face the market (if it is such) pretty much alone. The leader is taking on the burdens. At that point, my colleagues and I normally have to name the character the leader is making herself or himself into. Leaders need a stark image of who they have become, and who it is that they are distancing themselves from. The key is that they are distancing themselves from a version of themselves that is in many circumstances attractive. I try to take characters from movies or Broadway shows. (Only popular fiction seems to work.) The persistent, good-hearted CEO I worked with before the pandemic was Marion the librarian from The Music Man. The courageous leader I named Natasha Romanoff (the Black Widow) always has to go off on one courageous feat after another. She cannot even spend time with her family after she saves them. She has no direction other than exercising courage. The brainiac leader was Sheldon from the famous sitcom, Big Bang Theory.
Once when working with a leader, we have the version of themselves that they are distancing themselves from, we observe the steps they take in the distancing. For instance, they ask team members to take a crack at finishing the work on Friday, to take on a not-so-tough customer, or to do the first attack at a conceptual problem. The aspect to observe is how they make these requests. What previously unacknowledged virtues appear? (We always have more virtues than the ones that made us who we are.) Together we work on identifying the previously hidden virtues and identifying the new fictional character that could bring them into focus and crystallize them. The persistent perfectionist started hosting Friday meetings where she made her team members feel brilliant and powerful. They would leave the meeting reconnected to the company and willing to go the extra mile in doing the work. She became an extraordinary hostess: Babette from Babette’s Feast. Natasha Romanoff is learning how to make people love and admire her so much that they want to do some of her demanding work. She still maintains her courage. Is she Demi Moore in A Few Good Men or another Demi Moore character? It is a work in progress. Sheldon is becoming a coach instead of a brainiac, and problem solver. Think Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday.
With the new character comes a new story that replaces the foundational story. We call it one’s legendary story. It’s the story of how one truly became a leader with an admirable, masterpiece style. Foundational stories alone seldom support leadership as a work of art. The key to leadership as a work of art is its attentiveness to the need for a rewrite. Leaders become script doctors of their own stories. It is the constant artistic rewriting in the face of people taking your virtues for granted that makes leadership into a work of art.
***
Here is a direct link to Part 1 of this interview.
Charles invites you to check out the resources at these websites::
His Amazon link
His LinkedIn link