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Introduction |
The reality of today’s
leadership practices is post-strategic. The
classical instruments of management, with their
emphasis on planning and control wielded with
technical skill, are no longer crucial to overall
performance. A set of reflective competencies
therefore come into focus serving as resources
through which the leader is able to cope with the
event in its particular, and through which she is
able to promote the self-awareness and confidence of
the employees. Intuition and imagination are central
to this end as a basis for creative improvisation in
situations characterised by the ambiguities of
operations and logistics.
Good leaders and good organizations draw on a
reservoir of unarticulated experiences that are in
place but are not in any conventional sense “available”.
They exist in the form of the core-competencies of
an organisation, and reside in its “ethos”, its
spirit, its atmosphere. But viewed through the
spectacles of traditional management they remain
invisible. It is therefore no mean feat to develop
new methods through which leaders and organisations
are given immediate access to their accumulated
experiences, to their living ideals, and to their
slumbering values.
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This is the main task of a leadership philosophy
guided by art. But only in the light of the critical
and reflective practice of philosophy is art able to
form an important educational paradigm and to play
an essential role in dialogue, because it sustains
itself by activating non-discursive experiences and
tacit spiritual capacities, releasing them through
“normative potencies”. Today a serious attitude
towards ethics has to be shaped and enriched by the
semantics of aesthetics, the ultimate aim being an
at once individual and collective process of
autopoiesis. Art is distinct and varied in its
interrelations with “the body” in a broad corporate
sense; it bears upon “fingerspitzgefühl” and
passion.
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