Like skillful theatrical directors, good business leaders know how to set the right constraints and allow their performers to create on the edge of those limits.
There’s a defining anecdote in the mold-breaking business book, The Illusion of Leadership, in which author Piers Ibbotson describes how a group of managers with their eyes shut figures out how to count from 1 to 30 one voice at a time. The scene comes straight from a business workshop run by Ibbotson, a former Royal Shakespeare Company director who stresses the importance of “ensemble” culture in business. Like skillful theatrical directors, good business leaders know how to set the right constraints and allow their performers to create on the edge of those limits.
Ibbotson, who runs the consultancy Directing Creativity and is a fellow at Kingston University London, says companies should shun hierarchical practices that stress individual status. Instead, they must develop centers of creativity that draw inspiration from the lead character through the bit players. Like the “potboys, the ostlers, and foot soldiers” given their due by Shakespeare, “creative organizations tend to revere those closest to the action, however humble their position in the organization,” Ibbotson says.
Ibbotson also draws insights from Sony, BP, Picasso, Cezanne, medieval guilds, Stone Age weaponry, and subatomic physics. He occasionally rambles as he weaves in Hobbes, Darwin, Dawkins, Ruskin, sleeping lions, gawky giraffes, his wife’s shampoo, men in tights, and even Donald Rumsfeld. By book’s end, Ibbotson is moonlighting as a philosopher, waxing about life, death, and business. But his dalliances are stimulating. This provocative book has an intellectual vigor that should push manufacturing leaders to the creative zone. At the least, it will open their eyes.
