The funky professors
A few years ago, when two senior executives at Northrop Grumman turned to each other while discussing a fierce competitor and said, in unison, "Agincourt," Katie Gray was baffled. Today, she's likely to say the same thing herself when faced with daunting odds. She might even quote a line or two from Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day speech, delivered by Henry V to his outnumbered troops on the field of Agincourt. "We few, we happy few ... . "
If Gray did break into iambic pentameter, some 600 of her peers might join her. Since 1999, Gray, vice president of procurement and material management for Northrop Grumman's electronic systems sector, and other senior managers have completed a series of leadership workshops based on the Bard's plays. Presented by a Washington, D.C.-area group called Movers and Shakespeares, the sessions include movie clips, discussions of leadership dilemmas, and a finale in which willing executives don tights, doublets, and codpieces as they perform a Shakespeare-based skit. "More traditional leadership courses are helpful, but I don't retain the lessons the same way I do from these," says Gray.
It's not just Shakespeare who's teaching leadership these days. Executives from corporations as diverse as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Citibank, and Verizon are finding themselves sitting amid chamber orchestras, waving a conductor's baton, or even choreographing a few modern dance steps as part of leadership development programs. Dance, music, and drama give an artsy new twist to experiential learning, the same movement that has sent squads of managers hurtling through white water and rappelling down mountainsides in search of management wisdom. "The showing, not telling, is pretty powerful," says J. Richard Hackman, professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard University. "Especially when you see something discrepant from your view of how the world actually works." Hackman has written about the unconventional leadership methods demonstrated by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which does leadership forums with Morgan Stanley.
Speaking of unconventional methods, the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's Leadership Ventures, which organizes the school's learning programs for students and alumni, recently added a workshop with the Connecticut-based modern dance group Pilobolus to its roster. Historically, the workshops have focused on excursions to Mount Everest, Antarctica, and other rugged locales. In one exercise with Pilobolus, the 30 or so participants were asked to take one step forward. The result: ragged, uncoordinated chaos. But after a few repetitions, with no further instruction or conversation, the line began to step forward in perfect unison. Exercises like these, says Itamar Kubovy, executive director of Pilobolus, show that leadership isn't just about giving orders. "Decisions that could never be attributed to one person are made collectively by the group, and suddenly the group has a purpose and structure and form."
With their innate emotional power and focus on creativity, the arts can bring management lessons to life in a way that escapes even the best keynote speakers. "Sure, I could bring in Bill Cosby or Bill Clinton to talk about leadership," says Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill's higher education group, who has used an orchestra in management training sessions. "This provoked a very different experience than any kind of speech does. Partly, that's because the music makes it more dramatic."
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