Research

A research programme connected with art and leadership, on the one hand, studies art and leadership as types of social practise, and, on the other hand, analyses art as a special type of activity using aesthetics to generate knowledge. Still, its point of departure has to be critical. “Critical” here means to be conscious of the aesthetic preconditions and ethical consequences of knowledge. This is why art has to be moulded into and understood within a philosophical frame (in the light of theoretical, practical and aesthetic philosophy). But, beyond all judgements of taste, “critical” also means to be particularly discriminating in choosing works of art - suitable for this purpose.

Neither science nor technology, nor entrepreneurship, is able to give sufficient counsel here. Only beauty can. Beauty combines all the contradictions in the object of our greatest fears — the indeterminable. That is why art is of such enormous importance to us just now. Art is the only practise that gathers experience and courage in sufficient quantities to relate itself, to relate ourselves, to the indefinable. Art seizes upon the enigma.

Art is a way, in which hyper-modern man might protect himself from himself.
Through all the untameable and terrifying shapes of beauty, art makes it possible to recapture the brave new world of our own creation every day, and by preserving the enigma to recapture it in the name of humanity.

”Beauty is a terrible and dreadful thing. It is terrible, because it is almost impossible to identify. All the things that God gave us are enigmas. In the concept of beauty all contradictions meet – here everything merges into one.”
Fjodor Dostojevski: The Brothers Karamassov, I.

• Beauty reveals whether a decision was the right one. Because beauty is the overcoat of the Good
• Improvisation is to give chance a chance, in the light of a richly developed practical sensibility
• The real leader possesses a sense of reality, challenging reality through a creative gesture that transforms its very foundation
• The leader is the artist whose instrument is his own experience
• The leader is conductor, author, director, actor and audience, at the very same time
• The good leader knows that writ
• ten or verbal commands can only be used at a time and at a place where there is no room for dancing
• The real organisation has always been waiting as a finished form inside the social and material relations of the company. It is the leader alone who is able to urge us to remove the superfluous matter, through which we were hindered in seeing the beauty of the sculptural form.

All serious ethical research must be normative. A normative-ethical attitude towards art consists in perceiving it as a mode of practice, providing aesthetic knowledge that in turn contributes to the ethical edification of social and historical consciousness. Today, more than ever, man is an enigma to himself. Our ability to create, to shape, to construct, to stage, and to design, is growing day by day. But the more we try to find ourselves in this realm of possibilities, in this vortex of virtuality, the more we lose ourselves. In these tensions we no longer possess the old tranquilizers, values and grand narratives. We have been given the task of combining what cannot be combined, of uniting the totality of contradictions accumulated by man through a grandiose programme in search of a vita nuova.

The reality of today’s leadership practices is post-strategic. The classical instruments of management, with their emphasis on planning and control wielded with technical skill, are no longer crucial to overall performance. A set of reflective competencies therefore come into focus serving as resources, through which the leader is able to cope with the event in its particular, and through which she/he is able to promote the self-awareness and confidence of the employees. Intuition and imagination are central to this end as a basis for creative improvisation in situations characterised by the ambiguities of operations and logistics.

Good leaders and good organisations draw on a reservoir of unarticulated experiences that are in place, but are not in any conventional sense “available”. They exist in the form of the core-competences of an organisation, and reside in its “ethos”, its spirit, its atmosphere. But viewed through the spectacles of traditional management they remain invisible. It is therefore no mean feat to develop new methods, through which leaders and organisations are given immediate access to their accumulated experiences, to their living ideals, and to their slumbering values.

This is the main task of a leadership philosophy guided by art. But only in the light of the critical and reflective practice of philosophy is art able to form an important educational paradigm and to play an essential role in dialogue, because it sustains itself by activating non-discursive experiences and tacit spiritual capacities, releasing them through “normative potencies”. Today a serious attitude towards ethics has to be shaped and enriched by the semantics of aesthetics, the ultimate aim being an at once individual and collective process of autopoiesis. Art is distinct and varied in its interrelations with “the body” in a broad corporate sense; it bears upon “fingerspitzgefühl” and passion.

Purpose

• The Centre for Art & Leadership at Copenhagen Business School has as its goal the fusion of philosophy and art in order to capture and stimulate the creative practices of management (business economics), primarily in regard to leadership and organisation, through the totality of its inner contradictions, in order to develop a sensitivity for the unity, the core, through which the secret of its force is kept alive
• The Centre for Art & Leadership will provide new artistic forms, through which its findings are able to influence leaders and their organisations. It aims at the development of products and performances presented by means of inter-media art. Its products and performances will be developed in cooperation with collaborating philosophers and artists, aiming at a stimulation of the development of leadership competences revealed by the perspective of CAL. Through our research activities, in conjunction with the work of artists, our goal is to develop art-education for business leaders and their organisations on the basis of sound knowledge. Our method consists in doing philosophy in interaction with art and artists. Our criterion of success is to make results that enable leadership development processes. We will not only communicate this knowledge through educational programmes, but also by symposiums, art events and regular counselling.

The Centre aims to develop a unique theoretical approach to the relationship between art and leadership. This approach construes art and leadership as different types of social practice that share a common core. It is presupposed that the relation will not be a purely external one, established through a strategic application of analogies alone, but that art and leadership are essentially connected. The theories that the Centre is interested in must be developed under specific empirical conditions. This work can be set in relation to current attempts at ‘Art in Business’, and it can be grounded in the systematic integration of leaders and artists in events of an experimental kind. Given a sufficiently intense and structured setting, where theoretical conclusions can be anticipated and articulated through concrete artistic practices, a wholly distinct, proactive set of research materials can be exploited. Within a clearly defined conceptual framework, a mini-laboratory for the investigation of the relations that are obtained between art and leadership can be established, and thereby offer proof of the theoretical and practical, actual and potential relevance of art to the business community. This framework promises a unique contribution to the rejuvenation of the artistic field and to international, trans-disciplinary research.

The Centre situates the relation between art and leadership within a rigorously philosophical context, such that its theoretical substance, which is to say, its reflexive, empirically sensitive and critical content, is central to its research. It is about the transformation theory into practice and practice into theory. It is about the integration of aesthetics in a normative context, so that it can serve as a foundation for genuine leadership.

Philosophy is fundamental to our approach.