Just as the poet Percy Byssche Shelley claimed in 1821 that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” we are claiming that today business leaders are the unacknowledged moral artists of our world. They create businesses like The Body Shop that displace the normative order of their industries. They create organizations like Amazon or Google that are communities with their own distinctive normative orders. They create organizational cultures like Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater that accept moral drift happening and transform it into something admirable, from, in Dalio’s case, the loss of privacy to meritocracy. In so doing they also, as Nietzsche describes in 1882, become “the poets of [their lives]—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.”

We will explore this moral artistry in its large-scale courageous risk-taking, in the ongoing personal revision of one’s own style, and then in how it leads to a world of narrow moral pluralism. We will also examine the pitfalls of psychological safety, vulnerability, and of leading by mere influence. We will draw on the basic lesson of the humanities that the rose comes with thorns and consider the moral imagination that leads to new, thorny, good lives.

Our book Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities about Moral Risk-Taking is only a starting place for our discussion or moral artistry in business.

By attending this webinar, participants will

• Rethink business leadership as an imaginative moral challenge.
• Identify the incipient moral artistry in leaders in their and other organizations.
• Ask what always goes wrong in their organization, what they would love to happen instead,
  and what moral risks they would need to take to achieve what they would love.