Aesthetic Leadership

Leaders in business and art stand to gain a great deal by listening to each other. In this book thirteen research-based cases demonstrate how software programmers and art curators, financial analysts and orchestra conductors, construction engineers and chefs, share aesthetic leadership talents that hold the key to transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Each chapter explores aesthetic leadership in a different setting and profession illuminating its universal capacity to create an economy mindful of human needs and desires. By focusing passion, playfulness, improvisation, intuitive judgement, beauty, and sensuality beyond deadlocking dualisms, this new type of leadership opens up a third aesthetic way contributing quality, meaning and value to projects and enterprises.

PIERRE GUILLET DE MONTHOUX is Professor of General Management at Stockholm University, Sweden and adjunct professor at the Centre for Art and Leadership at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. CLAES GUSTATSSON is Professor of Industrial Management and Organization at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. SVEN-ERIK SJOSTRAND is Matts Carlgren Professor of Management at the Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden.

Introduction * Leadership on Fields of Flow–P.G.Monthoux, C.Gustafsson & S.E.Sjostrand * Conditions for New Leadership: Art–A.S.Koping * Aesthetic Institutions: Three Centuries of Judgement and Management in the Royal Swedish Opera–J.Wetterstrom * Gendered Textbook Filmmakers–J.Lantz * Can Art be a Leader? Beyond Heroic Fi lm Directing–M.S.Wadman * Body Business: Projects for Weight Watchers; E.Stenstrom * Aesthetics at the Heart of Logic: On the Role of Beauty in Computing–E.Pinero * Aesthetics of Financial Judgements on Risk Capitalists’ Confidence–B.G.Guve * Stengel’s Roller Coasters: Engineering Thrills into Projects–H.Csarmann * Engineering Improvisation: The Case of Wartsila; M.Lindhal * Dissonances, Awareness, and Aesthetization: Theatre in a Home Care Organization; S.Meisiek * Eros and Apollo: The Curator as Pas-de deux Leader–K.Lindqvist * Management: The Business Sense of Antonin Careme–A.Rehn * Aesthetic Leadership and its Triadic Philosophy–P.G.Monthoux