The Three Faces of Leadership: Manager, Artist, Priest

184 Pages·2005·1.21 MB·English

by  Mary Jo Hatch

The Three Faces of Leadership
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The Three Faces of Leadership:
Manager, Artist, Priest
MARY JO HATCH
MONIKA KOSTERA
ANDRZEJ K. KOvMIuSKI
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© 2005 by Mary Jo Hatch, Monika Kostera, and Andrzej K. Kozminski
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
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The right of Mary Jo Hatch, Monika Kostera, and Andrzej K. Kozminski
to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance
with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright,
Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hatch, Mary Jo.
The three faces of leadership : manager, artist, priest / Mary Jo Hatch,
Monika Kostera, Andrzej K. Kozminski.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-4051-2259-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 1-4051-2260-9 (pbk. : alk.
paper) 1. Leadership. 2. Executive ability. 3. Creative ability in
business. 4. Business ethics. 5. Industrial management–Moral and ethical
aspects. I. Kostera, Monika, 1963– II. Kozminski, Andrzej K. III. Title.
HD57.7.H3886 2005
658.4′092–dc22
2004007687
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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CCoonntteennttss
Preface vii
Chapter 1 The Aesthetics of Leadership 1
Management as Art and Aesthetics 1
The Three Faces of Leadership 3
Art and Religion at the Foundation of Cultures 5
Taking an Aesthetic Approach to Leading 6
Overview of the Book 7
Chapter 2 Telling Business Stories 12
Stories and Storytelling 13
Storytelling in Organizations 15
The CEOs’ Tales 23
Reflexivity and Complexity in Organizational Storytelling 36
Developing Your Storytelling Skills 40
Chapter 3 Dramatizing Leadership 44
Theater through the Ages 46
The Theater Metaphor in Organization Studies 47
Theater in the HBR Interviews: From Morality Play to Global Show 50
Dramatic Range 64
Putting on a Show 67
Chapter 4 Leading Mythologically 71
Myths and Archetypes 74
The HBR Pantheon of Business Leaders 76
The In-crowd: Hermes, Athena and Demeter 80
Old Favorites: Zeus, Ares and Hephaestus 95
Rare and Absent Gods 108
Mythologizing Yourself and Others 111
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vi Contents
Chapter 5 Forming and Reforming the Institution of Management 114
Managerial Culture and its Institutionalizing Force 115
Our Interview with HBR 118
HBR’s Role in Managerial Culture 128
Aesthetic Influences on the Institution of Management 130
Distinguishing Manager, Artist and Priest 131
Chapter 6 The Business Leader as Artist and Priest 132
Business as Religion? 134
Using Faith to Redress Ethics in Business 134
The Vision to Change: Creation, Inspiration, and Institutionalization 135
Aligning Manager, Artist and Priest 137
Postscript 142
Appendix A: List of Stories and Their Locations in the HBR Interviews 143
Appendix B: List of CEO Interviews 153
Bibliography 155
Additional Reading and Resources 159
Index 161
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PPrreeffaaccee
Our premise for this book is the observation that business leadership is evolving
in the directions of artistry and spirituality, a trajectory that falls under the broad
headings of organizational and management aesthetics. This is because businesses
today, more than ever, need creativity to match the pace of change in their dynamic
competitive environments, and ethics to attain and maintain the legitimacy neces-
sary to attract resources and keep them flowing. As a result, the meaning of business
leadership is changing from control, in the traditional sense of supervision and
domination, to the use of powers derived from mythological consciousnessincluding
the powers of creative imagination and inspiration. We believe that this trajectory is
apparent in the series of interviews with chief executive officers (CEOs) conducted
by Harvard Business Review (HBR) between 1989 and 1998 that inspired thisbook
and that it indicates the need to make creativity and ethics more explicit founda-
tions of leadership training in the years to come.
We do not believe that successful twenty-first-century business leaders will
completely abandon the techniques and ambitions of their predecessors, but they
will need to redefine their purpose such that they do not focus all their energy on
achieving pre-ordained goals like rationality, profitability, and excellence. Instead,
we sense that the best business leaders will pursue inspiration to places where there
is no safe haven or predetermined outcome. They will seek heroic adventures that
demand even more creative courage, imagination, vision and ethical discipline than
was practiced by their counterparts in the twentieth century. Artists question old
assumptions and offer new ideas that awaken passions and motivate change by
revealing the beauty and ugliness of our humanity. Priests exercise the discipline
required to champion such a quest, to set an example of virtue, integrity, and
devotion to purpose for others to follow. While the leader who emphasizes control
is literally followed, the leader who is inspired will be emulated, which is why art
and religion are such good developmental models for training a new generation of
business leaders. Developing the potential to be worthy of the emulation accorded
to admired artists and priests is the new meaning we see being given to the old idea
of leadership and it is the meaning we explore in this book.
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viii Preface
Although no one can isolate and deliver wisdom, inspiration or creativity as if
they were technical skills or knowledge tools to be learned in an intellectual way,
we feel that we all share the obligation to train future leaders in ways that enliven
their human potential. Most would agree that it is within the remit of educational
establishments to offer all contending perspectives on a subject and we would like
to see this remit extended to the subject of business leadership. In particular we
would like to see leadership studies embrace the aesthetic approach to business
leadership we promote throughout this book.
Through the aesthetic approach we hope that concern for developing leaders
with the virtues and values that build character will be renewed. We advocate
giving attention not only to the character of admired leaders, but to the symbolic
expressions they give to the qualities we so admire, such as what they say and do
and the policies and practices they establish to lead their businesses. Furthermore,
we believe that using the interpretive methods of literary and dramatic criticism we
adopt in this book to influence and assess the policies, practices, and behavior of
business leaders will give a much-needed boost to developing imagination for and
ethics in business.
The aesthetic perspective on leadership that this book presents features clear
and accessible explanations of aesthetic philosophy applied to key aesthetic con-
cepts including creativity, imagination, courage, virtue, inspiration, faith, and
ethics. It presents techniques for developing aesthetic sensibilities and the asso-
ciated capacities of storytelling, dramatizing, and mythmaking that express these
sensibilities and communicate them to others. Finally, it links aesthetic leadership
practices to several important and perennial themes of business education and the
development of human potential: organizational culture, change, vision, values, and
identity.
Below you will find three versions of the story of how The Three Faces of Lead-
ership: Manager, Artist, Priest came into being.
Mary Jo Hatch’s Tale
When Monika Kostera and Andrzej Kozminski first contacted me and proposed
the project that became this book, they had an idea about resisting Western
managerialism. In what I have come to regard as a Polish proclivity to subversion,
they initially wanted to slow or even stay the advance of Western management
consultants whom Monika, in one of her published papers (I thought astutely), had
cast as modern crusaders. They were each responding to their mutual observation
of the rapid encroachment of Western values and practices into Polish management
territory.
As they were both affiliated with the first MBA program to be offered in Poland,
Monika and Andrzej were perhaps as conscious as anyone of the extent to
which publications from the West were having a profound influence on Polish
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Preface ix
management students (Andrzej was a founder of the Leon Kozminski Academy of
Entrepreneurship and Management (LKAEM) that offered Poland its first MBA
program, and Monika, who had been his student, was a member of the Academy’s
founding faculty). Of the management publications being widely read at the time,
HBR stood out as deserving special attention both because of its popularity in
Poland, and because of its renown in the West, which was rapidly spreading to
eastern Europe. Having already cast the “invasion” of Western management
consultants in terms of a religious crusade, it was not surprising that Monika
and Andrzej saw Harvard as the Vatican of Western management faith – their
own students were indeed reading HBR with the same religious zeal that reborn
Christians bring to the Bible.
Monika and Andrzej approached me wondering if I, as an American who had
been living long enough in Europe (nearly a decade by this time), shared their wish
to critically examine the Western management model offered by HBR in its series
of interviews with CEOs. The interviews had become especially popular among
their students and Monika and Andrzej suggested that these materials could pro-
vide us with data. A method close to my heart – text analysis – would guide our
approach. I was intrigued. They invited me to spend three days at a hunting lodge in
Wetlina (in southeast Poland just across the mountains from the Ukraine). I flew
to Warsaw and Monika and I drove to the remote hunting lodge where we were
to meet Andrzej.
When we initially agreed to work together, we decided the best way to begin was
for each of us to read all the HBR interviews we would use before arriving in
Wetlina. It was then that we decided to start with the November 1989 issue and
read all the interviews published from then right up to the current time (September
1998). We chose to begin with November 1989 because that date followed closely
upon the first free election in the post-communist world that took place in Poland
in June 1989 and the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall. These events initiated the
full opening of central and eastern European countries to business news and pub-
lications from the West (not to mention to hordes of invading consultants). We
studiously did our reading and thus we arrived in Wetlina unaware that we were in
for a big surprise.
In contrast to our critical intention to deconstruct the texts and reveal their
propagandistic wiles, we each independently reached the similar conclusion that we
had met extraordinary individuals in the pages of these interviews – true leaders
whose stories and examples taken en masse represented some of the best manage-
ment thinking available. We had expected to find much to resist; instead we were
seduced! Discovering that this had happened to each of us independently caused us
first surprise, then ironic laughter, and then commitment to discovering how these
texts had worked their magic on us. Thus was born the book you hold in your
hand. In it we have attempted to share with you what inspired us. Through it we
hope to unmask some of the magic that makes leadership work.
MJH, Jablonna, Poland
June 29, 2001
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x Preface
Andrzej K. Ko3mi1ski’s Tale
Between 1990 and 1997 I was leading a “double life” of sorts, sharing my time
between Poland and the University of California Los Angeles where I taught one
trimester a year in the Anderson Graduate School of Management. In Poland
I was busy promoting Western-style management education, teaching, and building
“the business school of my dreams.” This involved a variety of activities including
consulting, advising Polish and foreign managers, researching companiesundergoing
painful processes and dramatic change in the whole region of central and eastern
Europe. In Los Angeles I was able to reflect upon my hectic activities and to attempt
to make sense out of them. I also had an obligation to my students, who wanted me
to explain what was going on in Poland and in other “transition economies.”
To meet this expectation I wrote a book Catching Up? Organizational and
Management Change in the Ex-Socialist Bloc that was published in 1993 by SUNY
Press. In addition, I wrote two articles presenting ethnographic research on the
transformation of management in the post-communist countries of central and
eastern Europe. My UCLA students, however, and managers whom I was meeting
in the US and in other places where my travel took me, were quite inquisitive
and continued asking more and more penetrating questions, all pertaining to one
underlying issue: Why? Why did change take such an enormous variety of forms
and paths? What made managers behave so differently producing such dramatically
different results?
To answer these puzzling questions, Monika Kostera and I decided to look for
the values embraced by Polish managers. To interpret the results of our empirical
research we used a metaphor of theatrical styles (Kostera & Kozminski 1995; 2001).
We visualized managers as performing in four different types of theatrical shows
(Japanese Kabuki theater, modern European and American theater, happenings and
global shows). When using this metaphor we discovered that in performing their
roles, some managers exhibited much more than simple value-driven behavior;
they showed aesthetic feel with marked spiritual undertones. We asked ourselves if
this was in some way time and place specific. We suspected that this was not the
case, and to investigate this matter we needed to look for behavioral patterns of
archetypal Western managers.
Looking for clues I started reading the interviews with the world’s leading CEOs
published by Harvard Business Review. During my last trimester at UCLA (in 1996)
I started analyzing them using the framework of theatrical performances that
I developed with Monika. When I sent her this analysis we both came to the con-
clusion that we needed a co-author with a strong Western (preferably American)
background and skills in quantitative analysis and cultural empathy as well as
imagination and the ability and willingness to work in a multi-cultural team. “Such
people do not exist!” I said to Monika, but I had to change my mind soon after
reading Mary Jo Hatch’s book Organization Theory, and meeting her personally
at the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism (SCOS) at LKAEM in
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