leaders, fables and power according to « the boss of it all »
TRANSCRIPT
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EGOS 2014 –
Sub-theme 09: (SWG) Leadership in Art, Design and Organization
Leadership, fable and power,
according to « The Boss of It All »
Philippe Mairesse (ACTE Cnrs/Art et Flux/Paris 1)
Stéphane Debenedetti (DRM, Université Paris-Dauphine)
Content Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1
The film narrative ............................................................................................................................ 4
Fables of power ................................................................................................................................... 6
The manipulative fable .................................................................................................................... 6
The artful fable ................................................................................................................................ 8
Discussion ............................................................................................................................................ 9
Emplacement ....................................................................................................................................... 9
Telling the fable of power ............................................................................................................. 10
The leader-followers relationship ................................................................................................. 13
Displacement ..................................................................................................................................... 14
Disrupted theories ......................................................................................................................... 14
Characters, not persons ................................................................................................................ 16
The seventh metaphor .................................................................................................................. 19
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 24
Introduction
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“The Boss of It All” (TBOIA), a film by Lars von Trier (2004), is an enigmatic and whacky
comedy about an incompetent, naughty and improbable leader, who builds his power by
hiding it behind stories about a fictitious and remote “boss of it all”, soon overcome by the
“boss of the boss of it all”. Such discrepancies hardly resemble any organizational reality.
Though….As say Carr and Hancock (2003, 4): “There is an enigmatic face to a work of art in
as much as it carries discrepancy between projected images and their actuality. It is in this
very act of an expression of nonidentity with itself that art was considered to induce critical
reflection". Critical reflection about the notion of narrative leadership is precisely what we
expect from studying this movie.
In line with the narrative understanding of organization and the importance of discourse
(Fairhurst 2007, Boje 2008), the narrative approach of leadership focus on how leaders
construct and transform the meaning of the organization, and impact followers’ behavior by
telling stories and narratives. The use of stories and narratives in leadership, first considered
as generating commitment and making sense of the organization, was further critically
investigated as controlling and manipulating (Sievers 1986; Bowles 1989; Boyce 1996;
Czarniawska 1998; Giroux and Marroquin 2005 ; Rhodes and Brown 2005; Fairhurst 2007 ;
Parry and Hansen 2007 ; Watson 2013; Auvinen, Aaltio & Blomquist 2011, 2013). Beside the
functionalist approach and the interpretive one, the critical trend of research focus on issues
raised by the use of stories and narratives for fostering commitment and meaning constructs.
After Sievers (1986) denounced the insistence on and construction of motivation through
stories as a « surrogate of (a disappeared) meaning », researchers have investigated how
power games underlie stories and telling in organizations (Boje, 1995, 2008 ; Lorino, 2005 ;
Sintonen and Auvinen, 2009), or how hypocrisy irrigates the discursive activity of leaders
(Brunsson 1989, 1993, 2002), resulting in paradoxes, ambiguity and contradictions. In order
to maintain meaning, followers would then develop hyper-adaptation leading to increased
involvement and productivity. The disconnection between actions and discourses, source of
psychological incoherence and ambiguity, would thus participate in a general control strategy,
not legitimately claimable as such by the organization, which would develop further
ambiguous and hypocrite narratives (Chauvey 2008).
Oscillating between construction of shared meaning and exercise of power and control,
leadership is difficult to grasp, acquire and define. Alvesson and Spicer (2011) insist on the
necessity to recognize the ambiguity and paradoxical dimension of the notion of leadership,
criticizing the heroic imagery of a charismatic, authentic and inspired leader whose grand
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vision gathers and engages enthusiastic followers. They call for a “suspicious engagement
with the concept leadership”, considering it is mainly « invoked in situations where
coordination, mutual adjustments, bureaucracy (rules), professionalism and other means of
control do not work well » (Alvesson and Spicer 2012). If leadership is fundamentally
ambiguous, then we can understand the ambiguity and paradoxes of the leaders’ narratives
and storytelling as typical of the ambiguous notion of leadership. Studying tortuous and
incoherent narratives, beyond revealing hidden power and control strategies, can help
understanding the notion of leadership and how it comes to qualify some managers more than
others. The idea that tortuous narratives is intrinsically linked to the notion of leadership,
echoes the idea of a “technology of foolishness” (March, 1976), based on unusual premises
like “goals as hypothesis, intuition as real, hypocrisy as transition, memory as enemy,
experience as theory” that could be a necessity for organizational decision making.
Our starting point is that art and its own strangeness (specificity, unexpectedness, newness,
singularity, foolishness) could be a good way to approach the reason behind wicked leaders’
narratives, in line with the trend of art-based research. Art-based research is built on the
conviction that art pieces constitute a precious source of information about organizational
issues. Becker argues, «there is no best way to tell a story [about society] » (Becker, 2007).
Arts have since long been considered in organizational science (Bakhtin, 1981; Strati, 2000,
Barry, Meiseik, 2010; Hatch, 2002; Guillet de Monthoux, 2000, 2004; Clegg, 2005), for
introducing expression, polyphony and non-verbal representations in the field. The use of
artworks for research has proved to be useful in terms of ethnographic investigation (Harris,
2008), presentational knowing (Seeley, 2011) or the value of emotions in management
(Keremane and McKay, 2011). An artwork, by nature, preserves the living side of situations:
through art as a mediating artifact, the researcher can have access to the « hot side » of
situations. Furthermore, as usually admitted (Berthoin-Antal et al., 2011; Strati, 2000), art
enables to keep tracks of invisible, subtle, ephemeral signals, giving the researcher access to
more complex and hidden dimensions of phenomena. In leadership research, artworks have
already been successfully explored, one example being the recent work by March on
leadership through Don Quixotte, resulting in a movie1.
In this perspective, the incoherence and excess of the different stories told in “The Boss of It
All”, the inconsistency of the leader it depicts, and the problematic “good” goals such
1 http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0305/leadership.shtml
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strangeness allows the characters to reach, makes this film a good candidate for exploring
leadership ambiguous narratives and their function.
The film narrative
“The Boss of It All” is a movie about a particular time in a leader’s life: the moment he sells
his company, by so doing laying off all his collaborators, including his ex-partners, whom he
fools badly by stealing from them the copyrights on the software they collectively created.
The movie adds to this already tricky situation, which can be encountered in real life, some
improbable details: The CEO hides himself and his director’s role behind a fake “boss of it
all” he invented. Deciding to sell the company he hires an actor to play the absent “boss of it
all” for the buyers. The film depicts how this idea turns back against him when the actor
decides for moral reasons to take control of the situation and invents the “boss of the boss of it
all”.
Lars von Trier himself opens the movie with his reflection on a glass building while he tells:
“Although you see my reflection, trust me: this film won’t be worth a moment’s reflection.
It’s a comedy, and harmless as such. No preaching or swaying of opinion. Just a cosy-time.
So why not poke fun at artsy-fartsy culture?” Then it starts, the film being approximately
divided in two parts.
In part one, Ravn, the boss of a small IT company, confronts a bad situation. Since the
foundation he pretends not to be the boss, but only to follow the orders given from the US by
an invented “boss of it all”. He thus can execute his own ugly decisions and still keep his
partners’ friendship. When he decides to sell the company at his own and single profit, Ravn
needs to hire an actor for playing momentarily the role of the “boss of it all”. Kristoffer is a
second-rate actor, obsessed by the (fictitious) avant-garde writer Gambini. He makes a lot of
blunders with the employees, and a classical mistaken identities comedy starts, filled with
funny situations.
In part two Kristoffer understands Ravn’s duplicity; then he tries to take him back to morality
and to make him reveal his plan. In order to gain power over him (and to avoid his own bad
reputation as the “boss of it all”), Kristoffer invents the “boss of the boss of it all”. This
invention regains him the friendship and compassion of the employees. Put under
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psychological pressure Ravn finally confesses his plan and abandons it for the sake of the
collective wellbeing. But the film ends with a last minute turnaround: Kristoffer, discovering
the buyer’s love for Gambini, signs the sale, dismantling the company, and ends by playing
Gambini for this unexpected audience. Lars von Trier’s voice-over comments in the last
seconds: “I want to apologize – to these who wanted more and those who wanted less. Those
who got what they came for … deserve it.”
The film is organized in two intertwined narratives. The first (the plot) tells the story of an
actor playing the part of a ghost director, and finally acting as the actual company’s CEO. The
second narrative is disseminated along the story. It consists in unveiling and commenting the
movie-maker decision-making process: Lars von Trier himself intervenes in the film through
his voice, and even physically when his reflection in a mirroring glass building appears
briefly. On four occasions he provides voice-over comments about the script, the characters,
the shooting and the style of the film. The film-making process is also visible in a badly
framed picture and a poor editing, apparently due to a lack of control, in fact resulting from
the director’s choice: Lars von Trier designed on purpose an electronic machine for
automatically setting the pictures’ characteristics (framing, lightning, camera movements),
called Automavision, which has been widely commented by media at the time the film was
released. Because of the arbitrary decisions the machine imposes on the shooting, the picture
is flawed by numerous jumps, bad framing with characters on the edge of the screen, over or
under exposure… The editing suffers from such discrepancies: continuity is broken, link shots
is uneasy, unnecessary repetitions occur. A permanent though discreet discomfort results for
the viewer who literally feels the editing, usually smooth and imperceptible. The impression is
that of an unidentified bizarreness, a lack of fluidity, a jerky narrative. Nevertheless,
chronology and causality are respected and following the story is easy. The result feels like a
low-tech movie, in the spirit of the “Dogma” films: it seems the director ceases to control his
mastery. Lars von Trier interventions during the film reinforce the impression of a director
striving at shaping his film perfectly but unsuccessfully revealing the sealing and
accumulating imperfections. The verbal and formal discourse about how to make a good (or
not) movie parallels the story told by the script: both speak about “directing”, deciding,
shaping events, controlling or not. They both present directors who explicitly want to master
everything but enact their desire for mastery through strange processes (a fake boss, a robotic
decision) apparently resulting paradoxically in a loss of control – but in fact in two perfect
achievements: conclusion of the sale, realization of a great movie. The two intertwined
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narratives are told and constructed by strange leaders: one hypocrite CEO, hidden-visible
behind a fake “boss of the boss of it all”, and one clumsy movie director claiming both his
control and loss of control on his film. What kinds of lessons are told on leadership by these
two stories about leaders who do not lead?
Fables of power
The manipulative fable
Inventing a faraway “boss of it all” is a way for Ravn to clear his name from unfair decisions.
The fake boss protects and discharges him from his responsibility – and provides him with the
freedom to exert his full power – undercover. But discrepancies override the process: the title
of “boss of it all” is ridiculous, he has no precise name, and several different “boss(es) of it
all” are created by Ravn, one for each partner. Each of them imagines a different boss, a
homosexual, a fiancé, or a finance-controller. These diversifications of one single boss into
several, is a powerful tool in Ravn’s hands, who then can manipulate his partners one by one.
The abstraction of this never-seen, faraway boss seems to foster the coherence of the
collective facing “his” incomprehensible decisions. Relying on Ravn’s explanations, the team
experience a strong affective relation nurtured with mutual compassion and love. In fact the
boss of it all’s decisions are Ravn’s ones. Hiding his role and faking being a simple employee
he can control from the inside how his rude decisions are understood and applied. By
claiming his powerlessness he in fact reinforces his power. Though permanently looking for
love and emotionally demonstrating his empathy with his partners, Ravn appears as a
machiavelic and perverse manager leading by hypocrisy and manipulation, excessively profit-
oriented behind a humanistic façade.
This is apparently not Kristoffer’s purpose. He denies playing the fake director for money
(what Ravn suggests), but for the sake of his art: at last he got a role – which he tries to
transform into an important one, instead of a short appearance with two lines. This quest for
importance is a key point: the actor is not in search for power over people but for recognition.
His inventing the “boss of the boss of it all” is aimed at regaining the esteem he lost by being
the unpopular simple “boss of it all”. Regaining people’s love satisfies his longing for
recognition. In the second part of the movie, Kristoffer seems to enter a new kind of
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motivation. After having successfully rebuilt his reputation by claiming his submission to a
virtual super-boss, Kristoffer uses his renewed importance for changing Ravn’s decision and
making him confess publicly his ugly plans. Inventing a super-boss gives Kristoffer back the
love of the audience; in addition it gives him psychological power on Ravn, who is also in
search of his partners’ affection: being supplanted in their heart by a simple actor is for him
unbearable. Kristoffer plays on it for increasing pressure on Ravn’s moral feelings.
Kristoffer’s motivation at this stage of the story seems to turn to ethics: he criticizes Ravn’s
machiavelic plan and strives at saving the company and its employee.
But if their objectives differ, Ravn’s and Kristoffer are similarly playing on the hypothetical
remoteness of the source of power. Both ground their leadership on their withdrawal from any
apparent power, putting off the “boss” in a faraway and inaccessible somewhere else. This
manoeuvre has two effects: first, discharged from official responsibilities, they can exert their
actual power secretly and better control others’ reactions. Secondly, they gain others’
affection and recognition, which reinforce both their power and ego. The film thus shows how
a leader reinforces his power by discharging himself from any direct responsibility and
claiming acting under a higher authority. What is more, it suggests such a postponing of
official power does not need careful and sophisticated constructions. Kristoffer is not more
precise or realistic when inventing suddenly from scratch the “boss of the boss of it all” than
Ravn was when inventing the “boss of it all”. Their inventions are roughly made up, full with
discrepancies and approximations or mistakes: the title “the boss of the boss of it all” sounds
like nonsense, the “boss” has no defined name, they lie overtly with evidence of their lies,
they invent different incompatible lives and profiles depending on each partner. Kristoffer is
not convincing as a boss, he cannot elaborate on the “decisions” he is supposed to have made
long ago. How would followers believe such a poor scenario? The film largely shows Ravn’s
partners discomfort. Overreactions, aggressiveness, tears, wicked hypothesis, conflictual
meetings, reveal how this group is under pressure and stress. They look for protection by first
maintaining an exaggerated empathy, and second by persistently focusing on coherence
despite obvious discrepancies. Driven by their sentimentalism and their fear of conflicts, they
rebuild the absurd story as if it was logic (e.g. the scene where Kristoffer’s obvious lack of
competency is interpreted as a dissimulation of his actual skills). They seem ready to accept
any artificial and fake explanations which will preserve the group. Given that fusional
aspiration, inventing a fake boss covering Ravn was a clever idea: it is easier for his partners
to believe him blindly than to accept his perversity. They cannot or do not want to face his
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real strategy, what would threaten the cohesion of the group. Only Kristoffer’s overstated
fable will in the end provide the group with sufficient affective strength as to confront – and
forgive – Ravn’s manipulation. Until that moment they accept incoherencies and
contradictions as if they believed them – though some lines make us wonder if they really
believe him (eg Mette who claims in the end having known it from the start). The
manipulative fable tells: who invents a big boss over him gets the followers on his side.
The artful fable
What gives strength to these ideas about leadership and the source of power is the fact that we
as viewers are submitted to the same situation of listening to and believing in an unbelievable
fable. The manipulative fable of power is enacted toward us (the viewers) by a director
pretending a lack of control while we as the audience experience precisely the opposite. The
supposedly minor comedy reveals a great piece of cinema, the approximations of the
Automavision process turns out to be a sophisticated reflection on the art of filming and
directing. Like the film characters we are facing obvious discontinuities, flawed pictures and
severed editing: we interpret them as proofs of Lars von Trier’s mastery and leadership in the
art of doing films – and in the art of captivating us. His voice-over seemingly criticizes
overtly the weakness of his own film: the plot, the characters, the filming itself, when in fact it
indicates his almighty “author-ity” as an innovative, disruptive and seductive director. These
extra diegetic interventions are done according to the cinema codes and history, they are
subtly introduced at crucial moments in the plot, with humor and double-meaning. These
disruptive and deceiving irruptions of the director himself, first double the plot in a funny and
clever manner, then offer us a critical stance from where to look at the movie differently: not
as a simple comedy but as a profoundly meaningful metaphorical avant-garde film of the best
kind, popular and elitist at the same time, both a philosophical masterpiece and a light
entertainment. We do not “believe” the fable of a minor and flawed movie. Like the film
characters we accept the poor picture quality and its disruptive aesthetics because we came for
that: “Those who got what they came for … deserve it”, as says Lars von trier in his last
intervention closing the film. We receive and appreciate each strange jump, discontinuity and
exaggeration as clues for a hidden meaning mastered by the author (this text itself is a tribute
to his authority). Like the employees, at once we believe in the story and we more or less
know it is just fake. We perceive the discrepancies in the telling, the incongruity and
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grotesque of such a caricatured picture of a firm and its leader: but the subject pleases us, and
we demand being conducted by a powerful master in the art of cinema. The artful fable tells:
who drops his mastery is the greater master, if only he drops it artfully.
The parallel between the artful fable told to viewers by a movie master and the manipulative
fable invented by an immoral leader leads to questioning the motivation behind these fables of
power. The different characters-leaders seem to focus on artistic objectives: Lars von Trier
aims at making movies; people appreciate and reward him with the consideration due to a
great artist. Ravn is apparently driven by a more greedy goal, but – there is a strong
probability he values his creation so much as to grant him with the admiration of his “public”
– at the same time looking for the love and recognition of his fellows-partners and fooling
them. Kristoffer who takes over him searches first for recognition, then for moral, at last for
art: in the end his ultimate decision is driven by the perspective of acting for a tasteful
audience. If any meaning is to be drawn from the film concerning real organizations, would it
be about a motivation of an artistic kind in leadership? We examine this issue in the following
discussion.
Discussion
Beyes (2009) suggest two approaches when analyzing artworks: emplacement, where we
question existing theories in the light of the artwork, and displacement, where we consider
how the artwork does not fit the theories, operating displacements and opening new
perspectives.
Emplacement
In terms of existing theories on leaders and leadership, the film can first be read as illustrating
the classical discourse-based approach in leadership studies (Fairhurst 2007; Boje, 2008). The
two leaders staged in the story, as well as the director of the movie, make a sophisticated use
of discourse and storytelling to manage their organizing towards the goals they choose. The
film more precisely sticks to the critical trend in narrative leadership, where leaders lead by
creating or transforming meaning. Ravn’s, Kristoffer’s and Lars’ leadership is effectively
based on their manipulation of the meaning given by followers to the action. The plot, with
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imaginative stories told by the protagonists in order to nurture their fighting and manipulating
strategies for taking control, perfectly illustrates the researches on stories as power instrument
(Boje, 1995, 2008 ; Lorino, 2005 ; Sintonen and Auvinen, 2009).
Telling the fable of power
But the film goes further: rather than management of meaning, leadership here seems to
consist in management by nonsense. The characters’ leadership and author-ity directly result
from their ability at creating fiction stories of the most absurd kind. Irony and parody bias the
relations between leaders and followers, and shape it into a relation between tellers, characters
and listeners, in a way that perfectly fits Alvesson and Spicer’s insistence on considering the
ambiguity and paradoxical dimension of leadership. In the movie leaders appears egoistic,
manipulator, ordinary, clumsy and inconsistent. In some ways, Ravn and Kristoffer would be
closer to a “leader-buddy” (Svenigsson and Blom, 2011), the sensible leader who gains
recognition by providing protection, warmness and care… except that here we attend a
particularly cynical version of the “leader-buddy”, providing consolation against the pain he
himself inflicted. The heroic figure of the inspired, charismatic leader creating a shared
meaning is replaced here with a true-fake leader, manipulating others, selfish, banal, clumsy
and incoherent: a true profanation of the sacred figure of the leader (Sliwa et al., 2012).
The movie emphasizes the narrative dimension of leadership at its extreme: the sacred is here
replaced by the fiction. Leaders appear in the movie as narrators: more than managing
discourses and building the meaning of organizational facts and events, here leaders are the
ones who manage the meaning to be attributed to fictitious events and characters. They build
their leadership on the invented story of a distant, inaccessible and absent director. Telling
such a story grants Ravn with a discreet and total power, avoiding crisis and contestation.
When Kristoffer retells the story at a bigger scale, he becomes on his turn the great leader. It
is similarly by denying his control on the movie that Lars capture his audience attention. What
the movie suggests is that the authority of the leader is not natural and not related to a priori
hierarchical positioning: it is the outcome of telling a story and get it accepted by the
audience, through manipulation (Ravn, Kristoffer) or fiction games (Lars). The most
noticeable is that the three tell the same story: I am not leading, the director is absent. It
amounts to the idea that leadership resides in the told story more than in the one telling the
story (Parry et Hansen, 2007 ; Sintonen et Auvinen, 2009). It also suggests the story about an
absent and faraway director could be the universal fable of power, granting the ones who tell
it with author-ity. The film leads us to the curious hypothesis that, for an actor in position to
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exert power (a manager, a movie director), telling the “fable of power” (the story of a super-
director above him) could give him a true leadership on his public – “true” in that it is not
grounded only on a vertical authoritarian exercise of power but on a capacity to captivate his
audience to the extent that they become his consenting followers.
What characterize such a magic fable? Firstly, it is built on a paradox: leadership is not given
to the one with a discourse about his leadership, but on the contrary to the one who, from the
power position he occupies, knows how to tell he is not the leader but only the follower of a
distant, invisible and absent leader on a superior level. The fable of power is a fable of
submission and delegation. It constructs its followers rather than control them. By telling in
their own way they do not control the action, our three “direktørs” win their leadership on
their respective audiences: for Ravn and Kristoffer the quiet acceptance of their authority by
the fooled partners, for Lars his recognition as a great author and a genuine artist by the
viewers. It happens in the movie what happen in Gambini’s theatre: the fake writer invented
by Lars-Kristoffer states that “it is what a character is not, that characterizes him the best”. In
a distant manner this strange story of a faraway leader echoes the phenomenon of
downplaying leadership noted by French and Simpson (2006), when they observe some
leaders tend to minimize their own role in the organization. Ravn, Kristoffer and Lars
minimize their position as leaders as much as to simply denying being one. We face here an
extreme form of minimization tending at erasing the figure of the leader in favor of a kind of
“leadership without leader”. Far from a “shared leadership”, it stays in the hand of a single
one, the one who precisely pretend not to be a leader. Such a downplaying behavior can be
seen as a modest one (Alvesson and Spicer 2011). In the movie it rather seems like what
suggest French and Simpson (2006), a manipulative purpose: « there may be cases where an
apparent downplaying of the leader role is being used to manipulate others into behaving in a
particular way, while appearing to do the opposite » (French et Simpson, 2006, 477). The
cinematographic experience of “The boss-of-it-all” invite us to formulate a more precise
hypothesis: it would be easier for a manager to impose his leadership by appearing as the
irresponsible and powerless teller of the “fable of power”. This is the lesson Kristoffer learns
at his own expenses. Despised, humiliated, hit down during his career as the “boss-of-it-all”
(that he didn’t choose), he gains authority and affection as soon as he invokes a “boss-of-the-
boss-of-it-all”. The film illustrates a funny and almost grotesque situation, one which
resonates vaguely but surely with our real experience: the one with power always wins from
placing himself under the shadow of a superior power, even an imaginary one. This remind us
of the notion of “distant control” (Brunsson 1989) according to which the leader has a better
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grasp on things when controlling the conditions of the action rather than trying to directly
control the action itself. Lars doesn’t control directly the image (he let the Automavision do it
for him), but he designs himself the conditions (the machine). Ravn doesn’t control directly
(overtly) the firm, but he hires an actor for doing so. Direct control paradoxically deprives the
director from his freedom of action. Total control would for example deprive Lars von Trier
of the liberty of experimenting blurred and confuse images (he would have to create artificial
flaws instead of real flaws). If Ravn and Kristoffer were controlling directly, they would lose
the partners participation and their image of sensitive and friendly manager, thus destroying
the family feeling in the group. A distant control, indirect and hidden, reducing purposively
the manager’s responsibility toward action, provides him with the necessary distance and
smoothness for an invisible and painless controlling, and allows dominating without the
negative consequences of a too present domination.
But the movie goes further. The real leaders go beyond denying their own leadership. They at
the same time drop and disseminate discreet clues indicating indirectly the probable
manipulation behind the story. Those clues particularly consist in that the story lacks of all
what is ordinarily considered as making an efficient narrative (Parry and Hansen, 2007; Barry
and Elmes, 1997; Philips, 1995). The fable is not told in a way that makes it plausible,
believable or coherent. It doesn’t construct any shared meaning (there are as many boss-of-it-
all as partners), but on the contrary blurs the tracks and makes the situation more and more
difficult to understand. Such an improbable and absurd manner of telling a story, in itself
hardly believable, gives a clue for its fictional and manipulative dimension, and at the same
time demands strongly to be believed without restriction. The multiplication of real and
imaginary bosses on above the other acts like a cobweb where the followers remain captured
and fascinated by the strangeness and paradoxes of the telling. The fable of power, like artistic
fables, draws it power from its capacity to develop contradictory dimensions (Vygotski 1925-
2005). Leadership would be the more efficient when authority is felt but not clearly
designated, instituted as such. In an interesting way we meet again Brunsson for whom, if the
leader advantage is to control indirectly, he also must claim indirectly influence on events in
order to preserve his responsibility. As explains Koenig (2009, 251): “As it is difficult to
claim a direct influence on things, it is wise to claim an indirect influence”. Letting smell the
fiction by revealing the cogs of the fable could constitute an effective way of claiming some
influence behind the visible absence of power. In summary, the fable of power proposed in
the movie thus stands out as a paradoxical fable containing at the same time the denial of the
control and the indications of the same control. Caught in the dizziness of the undecidable,
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Ravn’s partners can only "believe in it without believing in it " (Costas 2007), just like we the
spectators enjoy the delicious perversity of the movie, hesitating between a masterwork and a
tall tale... The strange hypothesis pulled by the movie becomes clearer: the fable of power not
only tells that we must abandon control in order to better control (what, incidentally, is the
opposite of the usual organizational fact: controlling nothing but claiming to have things in
hands), but it also tells this is not enough for building a leadership relation. To become a
leader, a director must at the same time claim for responsibility, by indicating his presence
behind the absent, far-away and superior leader “of-it-all”.
The leader-followers relationship
The leadership relation is not only built through visible or absent control, or through a
calculated absence-presence. Another connection between the film and the theory concerns
the role of the followers, their recognition of the leader and the co-construction of the figure
of the leader in the followers’ mind: “…the romance of leadership is about the thoughts of
followers: how leaders are constructed and represented in their thought systems” (Meindl,
cited by Hansen, Ropo and Sauer 2007). The “followers-centric” approach states the power of
the leader is inscribed in cooperation and deliberation about who is the leader (Alvesson and
Spicer, 2011). But the film proposes a co-construction of leadership in a totally different way
than in “deliberated leadership”. The leader’s recognition by the followers, which feeds and
legitimate his power, is realized in the movie through telling an unbelievable story, and over
all through the acceptance of his fable by the public (the employees, the spectators). The co-
construction thus consist in the listening and accepting a silly story, elevating the author to the
dignity of a leader followed by the listeners. More than a totalitarian domination it is about a
mutual and active consent. The power of the leader is more a matter of hegemony in the sense
of Gramsci, involving the active consent of the public, than of totalitarian domination.
Consent and activeness are connected by the fact that the listeners consent to something
difficult to admit (the story about the boss-of-it-all). If the public “believes in it without
believing in it”, it is because they are not passively submitted to the fable. The audience (the
partners, the spectators), do not have to accept without protesting the grotesque and absurd
stories told by Ravn, Kristoffer or Lars. The reason why they do so remains mysterious, and
we will focus on this question. The first key could be that the fable is accepted by the
followers, simply because they like it. In spite of its wobblyness the tale “pleases” the public:
it answers their desires, their expectations and their concerns. For a high-tech company with a
friendly culture, weakly hierarchical, what could be more relevant for the leader than to tell
14
nobody detains power? To intrigue his fans, what could be better for an experimental and
control-freak film-maker than to tell to his public he does not control his “small harmless
comedy”? By appreciating the fable the public co-builds the situation of leadership (Meindl
1995). The told story thus serves as a mediator between the leader and the followers and
builds the leadership relation. The desire for love, identified by Costa (2007) as a drive for
leaders, is here extended to the followers: leaders and followers do their best to protect their
love relationship from any suspicion of manipulation, and for this collectively build, accept
and propagate a fiction story about remote power: “the fable of power”. Followers accept the
fable meanders in as much as the verticality of power, threatening horizontal empathy, is for
them a crucial issue (what is a reality, to a variable degree, in any organization).
As a (temporary) conclusion: directors and their followers co-construct leadership, attributing
authority to the one who hides behind the fable of a pseudo-superior power, and at the same
time ambiguously indicates his own mastery and control over the whole process. This
provocative and humorous vision offered by the film as the “fable of power”, somehow
strange and sometimes close to nonsense, resonates with some notions fostered by critical
leadership research: the story as leader, downplaying leadership, ugly leadership, remote
control, … But in the end, we as researchers are left facing the movie like its viewers:
captured by the impossibility of a clear interpretation of what we see, intrigued and stimulated
by an artwork whose tortuous and paradoxical dimension we feel closer to real organizational
life than numerous “scientific” theories.
Displacement
Disrupted theories
The reasons why the fable is accepted remains uncertain. If it answers the audience’s desires,
what kind of desire? We supposed it has to do with the protection of the group and its
empathy. But what is the price to pay? Meaning seems to disappear radically in this story of
nonsense and excessive credulity. According to the charisma attribution theory (Hansen, Ropo
and Sauer, 2007), the interactions between leaders and followers should result from the
interferences between many interpretive cross-processes – implying understated common
goals, openness and consideration of everyone. But in the film the many characters’
15
interpretations interfere in an overstated manner, culminating in whacky ideas about the
identity of an absent almighty leader. Followers follow the worst of them, accept to be ill-
treated, love the one who humiliate them, all of this happening apparently without hatred or
resentment. Leaders are improbable, ungraspable, invisible, sort of absence-presences with
incomprehensible motivations. Following them seems a quite irrational attitude. Their strange
leadership is confusedly felt rather than designated, implicit and embodied rather than explicit
and hierarchical. Because it escapes any conceivable meaning, and is experienced through
sensation, emotions and embodiment, it could resonate with the notion of “aesthetic
leadership”. The notion, centered on the importance of the relationship between followers and
leaders and on the involvement of subjectivities, comprises sensations, embodiment, intuition,
emotions, immersion, and lived experience (Shroeder and Fillis 2010, Hansen Ropo and Sauer
2007). Aesthetic leadership is supposedly relying on the capacity to formulate a judgment or
elaborate a knowledge of specific kinds (Strati 1999), a “sensory knowledge and a felt
meaning” (Hansen Ropo and Sauer 2007) close to a “not-knowing” (Berthoin Antal 2013) and
a way of living in awareness and presence to the world (Taylor 2013). It is mainly focused on
replacing the “logico-rational-Anglo-Saxon” perspective by a more intuitive and
phenomenological one (Schroeder and Fillis 2010). The aesthetic leader develops a renewed
look upon things, like the artist who is the one who “sees” differently (Barry and Meiseik
2010). It can lead to see management or leadership as an art (Taylor; Biel-Missal 2010), re-
opening new perspectives on the moral and aesthetic dimensions rather than solely the
instrumental one (Taylor and Hansen 2005). The leaders in the film illustrate these theories:
they create art (imaginary stories, acting) as a mean for leading, and art results of their action.
Like actors, they all three develop with their public a “challenging and confrontational
relation” giving the audience a central role in co-creating the meaning (Biehl-Missal 2010).
But the movie disrupts ironically and provocatively the theory. Our three leaders could easily
be qualified as aesthetic, but they promote immoral motivations, voluntary incoherence, and
manipulation, far from an aesthetic which fosters leadership as a “phenomena we find
magically creative, inspirational, and life-full” (Hansen Ropo and Sauer 2007). A positive
aura of inspiration, ethics, and care surrounds the figure of the aesthetic leader, who uses arts
to become more conscious and efficient in their regulation activity of meaning, self and
organization. Arts and aesthetics are supposed to foster mindfulness (Barry and Meiseik
2010); aesthetics in organizing aims at drawing on what artists call being open to their art and
elevates it to being open to others (Taylor 2013); it should help leaders to “act coherently and
consistently, showing sensitivity to followers’ needs, values and expectations” (Gardner et al.,
16
2005; Yukl, 2006, quoted by Biehl-Missal 2010). “Beautiful leadership” (Ladkin 2008) is
based on mastery, coherence and ethic; aesthetic leadership should be a call for making the
world more beautiful and for showing our human profound compassion by daring to care
(Adler 2012): but here we encounter leaders as clumsy, incoherent and immoral anti-heroes,
as often in art and theatre (Biehl-Missal 2010). In an ambivalent relation to their audience, at
the same time empathetic and irritating, respectful and despising, caring and killing, the
leaders in the movie act with the same ambiguity as the followers. When the latter adore and
follow who treats them badly, the firsts ambiguously unveils their deceitful stratagems at the
same time they secretly operate. What do they want, what do they follow? How to understand
this “harmless comedy” which we confusedly feel says something true about leaders (that is
why we laugh at it)?
The ambiguity of the story, of the film making and of the characters results in ambiguity in
our own understanding: disrupted and unstable, we hesitate between irritation, amusement and
reflection. Such ambiguity in the story, in the characters and in our reception, perfectly
answers Alvesson’s and Spicer’s call (2011) to consider leadership from its ambiguous side,
and resonates with the “fundamental disrespect for tenability and positive affirmation” by
which aesthetic might introduce a serious critique of ideals (Biehl-Missal 2010). It also
resonates with the difference noticed by Boje (2008) between narratives aspiring to
abstraction and ordering, and stories “constituting a decentering force of diversity and
disorder”. Now what to say about an ambiguity so artistically stated by imaginary bosses-of-
bosses-of-it-all? What could this decentering force tell about real ‘aesthetic” leaders?
Characters, not persons
The two successful leaders in the film are Kristoffer the actor and Lars the movie-maker.
Ravn is the artist-apprentice, inventing a story and staging a theatre play (which Kristoffer in
the first scene of the movie qualifies as “really good”), but in the end renouncing his creativity
for moral consideration. They act like actors on stage; in the case of Kristoffer the leader is a
real actor playing the role of the boss, and the organization is its stage. The ambiguity of these
characters lies in their double role as leaders of a company on one hand, and as artists creating
their work on the other hand. When Kristoffer choses in the end to sign and sell the company,
firing all the staff, he suddenly drops dawn his moral motivation for the sake of art. His
passion for theatre and acting overcomes his leading “beautifully” with coherence and ethic.
The ambiguity appears when we consider the wholeness of “Kristoffer”, as if he was a real
manager facing us in the average IT Company. His multiples identities (actor, fake boss, real
17
negotiator, husband, friend) do not stick to the unique single person we strive at read when we
look at him as a leader. He is not: he is a character in a movie. At the end, when he “decides”
to sell, in a revealing scene the character of the actor, who wields at this moment enormous
power, has to consult his 'character' (the boss-of-it-all he is playing) on how things should
proceed: is the actor driven by his character? Is a leader driven by its fantasy? Are we driven
by fiction? A dizziness abyss of role-playing opens up, where decision-making is not
ascribable to anyone, because there is no decision. There is a mirroring game questioning
what could be a right decision and who could make it – but no answer. The point of the movie
is not to rise a provocative moral dilemmas about how a boss can use fictions to mistreat
workers, though it triggers debates on the issue. We do not meet here a “boss” and his
“workers”: we only attribute (give) life to characters playing the roles of imaginary
representations of bosses and workers. Like in cubism, the representation does not have to be
faithful to the subject or to mimicry it slavishly. Fiction, like poetry or painting, does not have
to stick to realities: it just has to hold together, in its own logic. Interpreting characters as if
they were persons lacks a fundamental aspect of fictional entities: they have no identity of
their own. Their only specificity is to incarnate some aspects of the story they belong
(Vygotski 1925-2005). They are but fragmented impossible beings. They fascinate us
precisely because they are not living like us in a material world, but in an imaginary one with
no rules like ours. Nevertheless they can tell us a lot about ourselves….indirectly.
The arts related to organizations have been mainly investigated in a twofold research:
organizations as art (e.g. as theatre), and art (e.g. theatre) in organizations. The first stream
focuses on arts as a metaphorical means to study the aesthetic side of organizations,
organizations as theatre stages for example; or study the aesthetic, senses-based, intuitive and
embodied perception of organizational life (Ewenstein and Whyte 2007). The second focuses
on how introducing art (theatre) into organizations for training, teaching, and interventions
(Nissley, Taylor and Houden 2004). We suggest here a third approach where arts are taken as
metaphorical representations (imaginary depictions, symbolic descriptions) of organizations:
considering arts (cinema, theatre) as a stage where hidden or complex aspects of organizations
are played out in metaphorical ways.
Far from figuring real leaders, the film characters, both leaders and artists, are to be
understood as images and signs in fables. Rather than considering the film and the leaders it
describes as a source for a better knowledge of real leadership, we propose to consider it as a
fable, and the leader-characters as metaphors. Fables are commonly considered as stylized
stories teaching us a moral meaning about real situations metaphorically represented by
18
animals, plants, speaking trees or objects. But famous and renown fables crossing times and
civilizations, like Aesop’s, La Fontaine’s or Krylov’s reach another level of “meaning”. Such
fables develop their narrative independently from the moral apparent purpose (which children
understand by drawing from such fables the most immoral conclusions: Vygotski 1925-2005,
159). Poetic and artistic rather moral and realistic, they give birth to contradictory feelings in
the reader, who through the fable can experience a complex cognition similar to life
experience, where contradictions and incoherencies are fully lived and overcome in a
catharsis moment, to which the artist (fable teller) takes us at his pace and rhythm (Vygotski
1925-2005). Considering the movie as a fable, and the story about the “boss-of-it-all” as the
“fable of power”, is to consider the leaders as speaking animals or animated objects:
metaphors. A metaphor cannot be directly applied to reality. It works like a sign, with
absolutely nothing in common with the thing it indicates, although closely related to it in a
pseudo-similarity that we feel rather we know. The metaphor is both very different from and
very similar to the target it comments and describes. Considering the leaders in the film as
metaphors deliver us from a too realistic (scandalized, amused, analytical) interpretation and
at the same time reinforce and consolidate the meaning they carry. Their nonsense behavior as
leaders or followers could mean something if, instead of to interpreting their actions literally,
we take them as qualities of the narrative. Fiction narratives follow an indirect line filled with
digressions that constitute in their apparent un-necessity the essence and the real meaning of
the story (Vygotski 1925-2005, 208-209). The artificial linking it operates between
disconnected elements, like in the cinematographic art of editing, creates a meaning of a
special kind, teleologically oriented by the author’s intention. Incoherencies, disruptions,
strange associations, play a role in the coherence of the narrative in and for itself. Totally
justified and necessary for the sake of the fiction, they mean nothing for the “realities” they
seem to relate to. The ambiguity of the story and its meaning is the ambiguity felt by the
audience: “The spectator is deceived. All what he thought of as digressions and gaps have
driven him precisely where he wanted to go, but when he reaches the final point, he does not
recognize it as the goal of his journey” (Vygotski 269). Drawing on fiction in order to apply it
to realities needs an interpretation effort similar to the use of metaphors and fables: they give
access to a complex and contradictory cognition that is inherent to real life but often repressed
or simplistically reduced to rationalities.
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The seventh metaphor
What we suggest here as an opening conclusion, is that the movie adds a metaphor to the six
already identified by Alvesson and Spicer as metaphors for leaders (leaders as saints, as
gardeners, as buddies, as commanders, as bullies and as cyborgs). Here we would come with
the seventh: leaders as artists.
Far from the artist as a “model” for managers (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), or from the art
of management, the leader as a metaphor is a fable. It cannot tell real things on real leaders,
but it can help thinking our understanding and our concepts of leadership. Taking the artist as
a metaphor for leaders, and not as a model or a teacher, is a manner to think in an “ambiguity-
centered approach” (Alvesson and Spicer 2010). According to Vygoski (227), fables have the
power to lead us to a complex cognition, based on a deep contradiction between form and
content. Considering the leaders-artists in the “fable of power” could help us thinking a
complex area of (aesthetic) leadership we already started to investigate.
This complex dimension is the troubled area where leaders and followers meet under premises
that they collectively construct. It is named the “co-construction of leadership”. Given that the
relationship between actors and the audience is more confrontational than the usual
understanding of the leader-follower relationship, a promising way of exploring this quite
ignored and difficult zone could be to consider leaders as actors on a stage (Biehl-Missal
2010). The film “The Boss-of-it-all” literally does so. We furthered the approach by trying to
understand how the viewers of the film or the characters in the story accept incredible fables
as captivating and valuable. What did followers and leaders, actors and audience, co-construct
through their oppositional-captivated relationship? Our study shows co-construction does not
concern meaning essentially. This is the most difficult part of the story: if the meaning of
Ravn and Kristoffer’s stories is to destroy the company or the people, why co-constructing it?
If the meaning of Lars’ comedy is as he tells, only to spent some time and forget it But the
partners (or the viewers) do not co-construct this kind of rational meaning – firstly because
they do not act in real life where people are who they are, but on a stage where characters are
what the author needs them to be. The ambiguity we resent in the end, resulting from the
ambiguities of a narrative which permanently sets new purposes and goals, and finally ends in
an unexpected way that we nevertheless experience as the true purpose of the whole work,
warn us against interpreting events and characters as they are (in which inexistent world?),
instead of taking them for what they seem. We have not investigated the use of storytelling by
an immoral boss; we have seen a movie telling a story about actors and fictions. What we
have all co-constructed during the movie by listening to wacky stories and accepting their
20
incoherencies with pleasure is the story itself and its aesthetic pleasure, is the artwork itself.
This is also true of the “employees” (the characters of the employees): they have cooperated
and deliberated about the making of a good movie, not about the decision-making in an IT
Company. Beautiful pieces of telling, incredible stories, strange events, never-seen kind of
pictures or strange editing, unique temporalities and rhythms, have captured the viewers of
‘the Boss-of-it-all” as well as the employees-listeners-participants in Ravn’s story. More than
simply captured, we were actively participating to the construction of the stories: as Duchamp
says (1952) “every painting is made not by the painter but by those who look at it and gratify
it with their favours2”. Becker (1984) explained how art is collectively made by all those
whose more or less contributes to it, as much as to speak of “art worlds”. Co-constructing art
is establishing the leadership relation at its best, where the leader creates what the followers
love. In that co-construction, the quality criteria depend on artistic values rather than
instrumental or moral ones. Parallelizing the co-construction of an artwork (a story) with the
co-construction of the relationship leaders-followers can only be done at the level of the
making and the criteria for making. What shows the film is that the co-construction linking
followers to leaders (viewers to movie-maker. listeners to story tellers.), is not necessarily
beautiful in the sense of harmonic nor moral or caring. The making (poïesis) has its own rules
where contradiction, digression, opposition and “nonsense” is the norm. It builds on the
aesthetic similarity between the opposites, between ugly and beauty, moral and greed, care
and selfishness. Not literally similar, the opposites need one another, in order, through their
coming close to one another, to make feel the reality of life and “knowledge”. What is
produced does not have to be beauty or harmony or pleasure (event it can be so); what has to
be built, in order to captivate, is art. This is how Kristoffer wins his leadership in the end: he
just creates his own piece of art, re-telling the story in his own way. That he sells the company
and consequently fires all the employees only comes as the spectacular manifestation of the
collision between two worlds with two different logics. The logic of the leader as artist exists
in a parallel world to the organization logic. What the metaphor tells is that what the leader as
artist pursues is art, not organizing. The organizing ability of the leader as artist is not the
point, for the leader as artist is just a metaphor. The point for the leader as artist is, how could
my organizing ability be turned into art-making?
2 « Je ne crois pas à la peinture en soi. Tout tableau est fait non pas par le peintre mais par ceux qui
le regardent et lui accordent leurs faveurs. ». Marcel Duchamp, Lettre à son beau-frère Jean Crotti, 17 août 1952, publiée dans le catalogue de l'exposition Jean Crotti (Musée Galleria, Paris, 11 décembre 1959-11 janvier 1960).
21
Artificially producing a fiction that everyone will accept and enter is in itself a great artwork,
which suffices to provide leadership. Its organizational efficiency is not at stake. What is at
stake is its artistic efficiency: its ability to mobilize people into its making. Mobilizing people
in the making of things is in itself art. Aesthetic organizing is where the “make” dimension of
organizing turns into art. But art is not coherent or pure. Vygotski shows how the artistic skill
consist in driving the audience into contradictory feelings at the same time, re-ordering what
they thought was aimed at, and finally offer them a place where to live the contradictions fully
– like in real life, but “harmlessly”: here we understand Lars ‘ warning in the beginning of the
movie. It’s harmless, though the same story in real life should be destructive and inacceptable.
The film insists on the fact that the efficiency of the aesthetic co-construction mobilizing
people does not need beauty or moral (an old issue in arts). The story is not believed because
it’s moral, but because it is “beautifully” told. The story invented by Ravn (then Kristoffer)
pleases the audience with its excellence – not its moral, and “The Boss-of-it-all” is one of the
best movies in contemporary cinema. This is what tells the metaphor. How to interpret it in
the real world of organizing? If not justice, moral or other responsible and sustainable
objectives, what means “beautifully building a story that followers will accept”? What means
beautiful if not “mastery, coherence and ethic”?
Beautifully dis-organizing
Aristotle’s Poetics pointed the importance of “muthos” (plot, fable): the plausible arrangement
and ordering of events and actions giving sense to humane activity. But here the “muthos”, the
fable, is activated in a perverted way, where plausibility is dropped off. Inconsistency,
discontinuities, discrepancies are central in this way of telling stories. It is not coherence,
plausibility and aesthetic mastery of the telling which seduce (Hansen, Ropo, Sauer, 2007 ;
Parry et Hansen, 2007 ; Rhodes and Brown, 2005), but reversal. What seduce us in this film
(and in any masterpiece) is an art free from rationality, from logic, from likelihood, from
mimesis and representation; an art free from the greek muthos, in the same way Ravn’s
employees are captured by their leader’s extraordinary fables. What art, which leader-artist,
are at work here, which consists in disrupting the expected, reversing the conventional,
escaping the rational? Beauty here becomes the freedom of re-organizing, and it is essentially
the old “poetic” quality, pushed by the contemporary arts to its limits. The “tension between
the rational and the artistic as a source of creative potential in organizations” (Guillet de
Monthoux 2004) is at work here, but not really as a source for involvement and motivation.
”Leader” sounds more as an “empty signifier” (Kelly, 2013), personified by Ravn and
22
Kristoffer, aimed at opening a “space of productive fantasy through which hopes for a better
future or a better world can be expressed, but perhaps never realized” (Kelly, 2013).
Aristotle’s muthos is changed into another kind of narrative centered on the unbelievable and
the excessive. The extra-ordinary comes as the unexpected which turns things upside down,
questions norms and redefines conventions by conceiving alternative orders. Rationalizing,
searching for causality in events, logically re-telling the past, and all types of accounts have
been pointed out as “the madness of the day” (Letiche and Moriceau 2013). Always re-
installing the pre-established order, re-confirming that the succession of events was planned,
necessary and purposeful, is the great obsession and madness of leaders and stories. Art
doesn’t care. The unexpected, the abnormal, the mad and the ugly, all are art, as much as (if
not much more than) beauty and harmony. The film pushes to its end the leitmotiv of
aesthetics in organization: “see different”. Think different, put things and values upside down:
it will not always result in nice things. But it is art.
Reconfiguring the established order is typical of what Rancière (2000) calls the “aesthetic
regime” of the arts. In this regime, arts are able to reconsider and reorganize matter, forms,
shapes, ideas, spaces and times in a totally unexpected manner, with no respect to any pre-
established order. In this regime, the “identity of the opposites” reigns.
In this regime, each artwork, each creative action, each story is told in its uniqueness,
perfectness, its own internal and un-sharable logic, its unacceptable values, and it is fully
received, accepted and loved as such, if only it is well told. It sounds incoherent only if the
listener keeps sticking to old certitudes he should left aside. Even the notion of author shifts; it
transforms into the idea of co-authoring, or re-ordering what others have ordered (Bourriaud
2004). Writers hiding behind a pseudo, or pretending having found the text they give to read,
were typical of the XVIII century (the time when the aesthetic regime of the arts fully
emerged). In the aesthetic regime, art (and meaning) consist in re-assembling facts and events
in a new order and where authoring means mainly re-organizing. If re-assembling in a new
order is the contemporary creative activity, any slight deviation signals another author, and
the work of one can be re-appropriated by the next, postponing the “real” initial author behind
a curtain of successive co-authors and distances. The same is true for leaders: they always
come one after the other, in a world of multiples realities where “predecessors have laid down
the foundations of sensemaking, consociates and associates help to sustain, transform and
perpetuate realities, and there are successors who will continue the evolutionary development
and growth of the knowledge signs and symbols of our socially shared reality” (Pitsis 2011).
Stories about who is the real author, about who is hidden behind, probably represent the
23
paradigm of the aesthetic regime of the arts. Such is the “fable of power”: a story about a
distant, absent and inaccessible leader-author, behind whom actual leaders at the same time
hide and affirm their own presence and power. Paradoxically, telling the mythical story of the
aesthetic regime of the arts is to deny one’s authoring (one’s authority), and at the same time
appearing as the one telling the story, as a real “artist”, or leader. When creativity consist in
being able to reconfigure any situation, authority and leadership come to those who, by telling
a story about their not-being the author, reconfigures arbitrary the orderly social into another
(dis)ordered one.
What tells in conclusion the metaphor of leader as artist is that leadership, not so surprisingly,
is that the leadership power resides in the ability to re-order and re-organize things in a
totally new way, creating new words, shaping new values, firstly by displacing one’s apparent
authority towards a distant virtual leader. This ability automatically provides recognition by
the ones who need the story of re-ordering to be told: everyone. All of us look for re-ordering
stories that we can admire, each of us tries at creating some and each of us follows the stories
he or she listens : the story leads – and a the same time the teller. This is how the encounter
happens between leaders as artists and followers as audience: together they construct the
ability to re-order things, events and people in a newly unexpected way.
This other kind of beauty (still difficult to appreciate in a world where art remains strongly
connected to harmony and beauty as pleasant) refers to how the author is able to re-organize
and re-tell things in his own unexpected way. Beautiful is the manner to tell, not the story
told. No moral judgment or pleasure of the senses in this kind of beauty. What matters is to
create a new order and let it be. This is where the metaphor meets its (less expected) dark side
(Alvesson and Spicer 2010) pointing to the dark side of leadership: the metaphor culminates
in the ultimate story of art for art’ sake. Story for itself. Destruction as creation, immorality if
it’s access to art: Kristoffer sells the company and fires everyone, only for the sake of art.
What the metaphor suggests is: when leadership is aesthetically experienced as the power of
creating freely, it ends in art, not in organizing. The ability to re-ordering, typical of the
aesthetic regime, is characterized by its arbitrary autonomy. If I want to re-order things freely,
and so be a leader in its full acceptance, I can accept no pre-defined new order. The moral
limitations introduced with deliberation, cooperation, or morality, escape the domain of the
artistic leader and take him back to other metaphors. What Lars von Trier and ‘The Boss-of-
it-all” tells is that: the leader as artist is a metaphor out of control. This could be the dark side
24
of the metaphor of leader as artist: rather than organizing, the leader as artist might wield the
power of disorganizing everything – for art’ sake.
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