Leadership Craft, Leadership Art

Leadership is a creative process in the same way that painting, acting, drawing or other arts are a creative process and the essence of that creative process is in the craft practice, rather than the flash of creative insight. Taylor leads us through creativity as it relates to leadership and the five stages of theory behind the idea: 1) preparation, 2) time-off (or incubation), 3) the spark, 4) selection, and 5) elaboration. Although that sounds like a nice linear progression, it is generally acknowledged to be more of a repeating pattern in an ongoing spiral with elaboration feeding into the next round of preparation. Although this set of stages is useful for analytically thinking about the creative process, it doesn't really capture the essence of creativity as a practice and in some ways fundamentally misleads us into thinking that the creative process can be understood and perhaps learned as a series of distinct stages that consist of different tasks. Nonetheless, with those caveats in mind, he explores the stages in more detail in an effort to offer some insight into the different things that are going on within the creative/leadership. Looking at the creative process in terms of these five stages helps us move away from the romantic notion of creativity as an act of divine inspiration and focus on the hard work of creativity as a process. He then takes the reader through the practical application of the theory and Leadership Craft, Leadership Artexamines art and craft as analogies, metaphors and literal guides to developing leadership practice as well as knowledge of the processes through which leading occurs, from one-to-one to one-to-many.

Steven S. Taylor is an associate professor in the School of Business at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. His research is focused in two areas: Organizational Aesthetics and Reflective Practice. Organizational Aesthetics takes seriously the idea that management is as much an art as it is a science, and applies art-based scholarship and practice to management and organizations. Reflective Practice is the ability to analyze our own actions and learn from that how to be more effective, ethical, and artful as managers and leaders. At the heart of his work as a researcher and teacher is his own practice as a playwright His plays have been performed in England, France, Poland, Canada, New Zealand. Italy, and the US. From his work in the theater he has come to realize that learning is a whole body sport and this belief influences both his research and teaching.