Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn About Moral-Risk Taking
Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, and Haridimos Tsoukas
MIT Press (March 2024)

How leaders can decide which moral personality they want their organization to have

In the Inferno section in his classic work Divine Comedy,  Dante assigns the last and worst ring in hell to those who, in a moral crisis, preserve their neutrality. I was again reminded of that as I worked my way through Leadership as Masterpiece Creation. In it, Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, and Haridimos Tsoukas share their thoughts about what “business leaders can learn about moral risk-taking.” In fact, there is a great deal of value to be learned.

They pose and then respond to this question: “What do you want stakeholders inside and outside your company to admire most about it?” to which I presume to add another, “To what extent — if any — is that true now?”

As other reviews have correctly noted, Spinosa, Hancocks, and Tsoukas offer a wide and deep range of perspectives on moral risk-taking in the humanities throughout Western civilization. These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also included to indicate the nature and scope of Spinosa, Hancocks, and Tsoukas’s coverage:

o Introduction (Pages 1-22)
o Leadership (Pages 3-4,31-33, 58-59,119-124,183-185, 214-215, and 216-218)
o Focusing on moral order and norms (4-7 And 28-30)
o Winston Churchill (15-16 and 117-118)
o Madame C.J.Walker (22-24 and 25-26)

o Niccolo Machiavelli (38-40)
o What Is Commerce About? (41-42, 46-47, and 51-52)
o Wonder in commerce (48-51)
o Habits and good lives (44-48, and 51-52)
o Admiration (63-64 and 141-142)

o Emotions and individual lives (68-73 and 71-7 (89-103)
o Jeff Bezos and Apple (102-103 and 181-182)
o Moral Risk Taking (105-124)
o William Shakespeare (121-123 and 126-127)
o Moral risk-taking (125-124)

o Designing an Organizational Culture Masterpiece (125-150)
o Typical Styles of Organizational Culture (135-136 and 141-142)
o Julia Robertson (169-171, 164-166, and 173-174)
o Anita Roddick (180-182)
o Have We Re-created Authoritarian, Charismatic, Top-down Leadership? (214-222)

When formulating the organization of the material provided in this brief commentary, I thought that perhaps you would appreciate having a few “samples” from Spinosa, Hancocks, and Tsoukas’s lively and eloquent narrative in Leadership as Masterpiece Creation. Here are three brief excerpts:

“Masterpiece-building leaders must not, in the face of their own audacious insights, lose track of what the moral risk-taking is for and how members of the old moral order would judge the action taken in the face of the anomaly.” (Page 180)

“Beyond luck, successful moral risk-taking requires exercising moral imagination and listening for difference. It requires intervening directly in people’s emotional lives. It requires the capacity to build trust. And finally, it requires disciplined truth seeking and saying. But simply accepting the necessity of moral risk-taking for in creating a masterpiece is the hardest step a masterpiece-creating leader must take. It requires going  against the grain in a deeply uncomfortable way even when the moral risk is not anywhere as large as [the moral risk of other leaders such as Jeff Bezos’s, Anita Roddick’s, or Julia Robertson’s].” (204)

Here is the co-authors’ concluding exhortation: “Manage moods; manifest your virtues; listen for difference; seek and speak truth; find anomalies and take moral risks to resolve them; build a culture with a positive mood and a clear style; organize your moral risk-taking to change your company’s and industry’s moral order; and continuously work on the masterpiece that is your style of leadership. May you create and maintain your masterpiece as a beautiful city-state and dwell in admiration steeped in gratitude, and may people sing your song forever.” (219)

Keep in mind this observation by Theodore Roosevelt: “People will not care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

My own observation is that, however different they may be in most respects, all of the healthiest organizations have a workplace culture within which everyone thinks and behaves in terms of first-person PLURAL pronouns.

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Given the nature and extent of information, insights, and analysis that Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, and Haridimos Tsoukas provide in abundance, you may wish to take an approach to the material that I found helpful: think of the material as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that — over time — will fit together. Eventually,  a colorful,  multi-dimensional picture will emerge, one comparable with great Flemish paintings such as those created by Pieter Breughel the Elder.

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Here are two other suggestions while you are reading Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the annotated “Notes” (Pages 223-260). They alone are worth far more than the cost of the hardbound edition of Leadership as Masterpiece Creation.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.