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Michael Jones
Imagine a leader who doesn't have answers. Imagine a leader who encourages people to live in to questions without answers. Imagine a place where art has a place next to business, a place where action is balanced with reflection.
It's that kind of a workplace, that kind of society that Michael Jones, an organizational consultant and teacher for almost thirty years, not only imagines himself but leads others to imagine. Jones, who has played the piano since he was two, came to his original ideas about leadership through music. In fact it was a sort of musical encounter that led him to the question that has guided him ever since. While working with a group of financial managers in Toronto for a week, he noticed a piano one evening at his hotel and sat down to play some music. Though he mostly played popular tunes, he switched to some of his own compositions when he noticed that no one else was around.
An older gentleman with a glass of red wine wove his way toward the piano and, after listening a while, asked Jones about the music. When Jones finally admitted that he had been playing his own music, the man told him that he was wasting his time playing anything else. The older man went on to ask about his work and how many others did what Jones did. And then, Jones says, "he looked at me, and at that moment what I most recall about that meeting was how clear and sober his eyes appeared, from how he seemed a few minutes before. He said, 'Who's going to play that music if you don't play it yourself?'"
It turned out to be the question that led Jones not to a less traveled road but to a road he has made himself by walking it. And, in fact, a large part of what he does is to encourage others to do the same. As he reflected that evening and later on the question the gentleman had posed, Jones found an opening for his life and a new means of teaching others as well. While he has gone to create 12 recordings, he knows that his primary calling is that of teacher.
Jones has integrated what he has learned and continues to learn through music into what he brings to groups through organizations such as The Academy of Management, The Minneapolis Masters Forum, The Greenleaf Center for Steward Leadership, The Milwaukee Business Performance Network, and The University of Texas, College of Business.
What he suggests to these groups is a theory of leadership that applies across not only all disciplines but our personal lives as well. "In these perilous and turbulent times, we need to rely on the aesthetic in a way we have not done in this modern age." By aesthetic, Jones refers to the concept of using all of our senses for listening, seeing, improvising, intuiting, experimenting, and inquiring to engage the world around us.
"When people learn to fully engage with their senses, it provides them with a way to see clearly what is essential in another, a way of seeing beyond the surface. The aesthetic experience is the breath of wonder or amazement. It literally means 'to breathe in the world.'" It's the difference, he says, between a power walk and a saunter.
As American society in particular has embraced the power walk, the power lunch, in fact, the power life, Jones believes the time has come to practice a new way living our professional and personal lives, a way that centers itself on attunement with the world and those around us.
What he suggests to the leaders he talks with is that they learn how to use an aesthetic approach to life in their leadership. Leaders can do this, he says, "through embracing such practices as listening for the restorative power of the story and the living word, of learning to recognize what is emerging naturally and acting without a script, of making a home for others through the appreciation of beauty and place; of developing the sense of seeing gifts in others through first being committed to calling up and living out the gifts that are in themselves."
To do this, leaders must engage with themselves as well, to walk their own road and discover what their gifts are. When leaders do this within an organization, Jones explains, it broadens the horizon beyond the bottom line. "It enables leaders to look beyond the quantitative, to the qualitative." And what they find when they do this, when they call out and encourage the gifts of those working with them is that people become more fully engaged in what they are doing and bring a sense of excitement, adventure, and satisfaction to their work lives.
There is no doubt that living your life this way, let alone leading this way, is a scary thing. "It heightens the sense that we're on the precipice of the unknown. In the life of the imagination, this doesn't change. The question is, 'how do you handle that moment? Will you keep going?'" He goes on to say that it is on this threshold that people discover the true dimensions of the songlines of their own hearts and continue on the road they are making as they walk.
What Jones says next may be the most frightening to a leader, "If we can see the road winding far ahead, it is very likely that we have stumbled on someone else's road and need to find our way back to our own. In the aesthetic life, we learn to travel with a candle rather than a flashlight," he explains. "If we follow [our road], we will recognize that we are in the right place, but we will do so only after we have arrived."
Paradoxically, leading by fully engaging the senses, "instills the leader with an elevated perception for seeing not only the far hill but also what lies behind." Leaders can then, Jones explains, "intuitively make the right moves that keep the larger interests of the world in view."
Ultimately, what Jones is calling the people he talks with to is a return to a Renaissance sensibility recognizing that the need for the aesthetic sensitizes us to the promise that life holds for us in whatever field of work we've chosen.
Past Profiles
Dr. Joseph O'Rourke