Nancy Adler, a leading authority on global leadership and cross-cultural management, recently visited Whittier College to discuss how to create leadership that is highly creative and artistic.
In front of a packed Club 88, Adler presented her talk Leadership Artistry: Finding Beauty in a Fractured World where she explained the relationship between leadership skills and the arts to Whittier students and faculty members. Adler draws on her passion for painting to explore new approaches to management and leadership. She believes that leaders and managers can achieve their aspirations and begin to address corporate and global issues through reflection and artistry. She also explained that art offers a rich vocabulary that helps people move beyond the limiting conventional language of management.
Adler, who currently serves as the S. Bronfman Chair in Management at McGill University argued that, like artists, effective leaders must have the ability to see subtle possibilities and be courageous enough to see the world for how it truly is while also being able to inspire peers.
“Reflect on your leadership skills and consider to what extent do you want to be an effective leader,” asked Adler to the audience. “Good leadership skills include critical thinking because as a leader, a crucial element is the ability to be sufficiently innovative to figure out the best and efficient way to solve problems,” she added. Adler also stated that great leaders are like artists; they both maintain a mindset that “good is not good enough” and that as a good leader, one must know what their virtuoso qualities are because those specialized virtues are what makes a leader great.
Adler brought innovative thinking from a liberal arts education into the world of business and argues that the world’s issues will be best solved by methods that have not been used before. At the forefront of global solutions must be great leaders who are able to find reason in overlooked options.
Adler received her B.A. in economics, M.B.A. and Ph.D. in management from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA.) She's the author of 10 books and more than 125 articles and received McGill's first Distinguished Teaching Award in Management -- and was one of only a few professors to receive it twice.
by Jonathan Dominguez '17
