Charles Spinosa

Haridimos Tsoukas

Matthew Hancocks

How leaders can take the moral risks necessary to create “masterpieces”—admirable, distinctive, and high-achieving businesses that create meaningful lives for customers, employees, and themselves. In Leadership as Masterpiece Creation, Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, and Haridimos Tsoukas show how the humanities can help leaders create profitable, masterpiece organizations. Such organizations, they assert, are ones that possess the emotional and moral sensibilities of an artist, the wisdom of a statesperson, and the technical know-how of commerce. The authors draw on the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bernard Williams, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli to conceptualize moral risk-taking, and then on the actions of Churchill, Madam C. J. Walker, Anita Roddick, Jeff Bezos, and others to show how the humanities can help create admirable businesses today. As management consultants and educators steeped in the humanities themselves, the authors discuss their experiences helping business leaders achieve successful masterpieces that bring good lives to many. After describing our contemporary business environment and examples of leaders who have created masterpiece organizations, the book turns to the basic skills of masterpiece creation: managing moods, building trust, listening for difference, and speaking truth to power. Then come the senior skills: moral risk-taking and creating a masterpiece organizational culture, strategy, and leadership style. Last, the authors explain why their leaders build an economy of gratitude. A culturally ambitious and refreshing read, Leadership as Masterpiece Creation is an invaluable volume for leaders of every stripe who wish to act daily with moral imagination.

What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities about Moral Risk-Taking

Leadership as Masterpiece Creation

Robert Chia

What is the relationship between philosophy and organization theory (OT)? This title includes the papers that explore connections between several streams in philosophy and OT. It explores the question: What does a particular philosophy contribute to OT?

Philosophy and Organization Theory

Raghu Garud

Barbara Simpson

Ann Langley

Creativity, innovation and change are vital to the development and sustainability of all organizations. Yet, questions remain about exactly how novelty comes about, and what dynamic processes are involved in its emergence? Ideas of emergence and process, drawn from a variety of different philosophic traditions, have been the focus of increasing attention in management and organization studies. These issues are brought to bear on novelty and innovation in this volume by examining new organizational and product development processes, whether planned or unplanned. The contributions in this volume offer both theoretical insights and empirical studies on, inter alia, innovation, music technology, haute cuisine, pharmaceuticals and theatre improvisation. In doing so, they throw light on the importance of emergence, improvisation and learning in organizations, and how both practitioners and scholars alike can best understand their own assumptions about process. In addition, the volume includes general essays on process perspectives in organization studies.

The Emergence of Novelty in Organizations

Christian Knudsen

This handbook provides a forum for leading researchers in organization theory to reflect on their own discipline: how it has developed and why; what sorts of knowledge claims it regards as acceptable and why; and where it may be, or should be, going.

The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies provides a comprehensive and timely overview of the field. This volume offers a compendium of perspectives on process thinking, process organizational theory, process research methodology and empirical applications. The emphasis is on a combination of pedagogical contributions and in-depth reviews of current thinking and research in each of the selected areas, combined with the development of agendas for future research. The Handbook is divided into five sections: Part One: Process Philosophy Part Two: Process Theory Part Three: Process Methodology Part Four: Process Applications Part Five: Process Perspectives

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies

The authors focus on language and communication at work, and examine language and communication as an inherent part of ongoing organisational processes. The chapters explore the question of language and communication as constitutive of work; analyse how language and communication work in the context of organising and managing; and examine the role of language and communication as part of strategic and institutional work in and around organisational phenomena.

Haridimos Tsoukas

Books

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