Artful Leadership

"As an accomplished musician and composer, Michael Jones brings a unique sensibility to the subject of leadership. While other writers address style, process ands leadership issues, Michael illuminates the deep parallels between leadership and the creative process." Peter M Senge author of The 5th Discipline Founding Chair, SoL (The Society for Organizational Learning) Senior Lecturer, and MIT Sloan School of Management. In the future we need to envision a new leadership story - one that involves a transformation in awareness from performance to presence, from uniformity to uniqueness, from abstraction to beauty, from efficiency to improvisation and from instrumentality to the expressive power of story and voice. Together they awaken a commons of the imagination - a collective field of possibility that transforms our mechanistic view of the world to a more sustainable and transcendent vision that is creative, organic and whole. The primary purpose of Artful Leadership is to explore these fundamental shifts in awareness in the context of cultivating a mind that is more subtle, refined, undefinable, and free flowing - a mind that can perceive underlying patterns of meaning and therefore offer a portal for creating new understandings in an interconnected world. Michael Jones explores this journey of awakening in the form of a series of conversations with John, a successful senior leader who is searching for greater meaning and purpose in his work. As the conversation unfolds it becomes clear that this journey cannot be achieved alone. Instead leaders will need to come together to reclaim the commons - a space of wholeness and possibility in the personal and public imagination - in order to explore the less tangible dimensions of leadership as preparation for engaging a more complex and changeable world. In this original and thought - provoking book, Michael Jones foresees a renaissance in leadership practice, one based upon mindful attention, authentic inquiry, an aliveness to the artistic creation and an abundant curiosity for exploring whatever is fresh and new.