Darren [00:00:02]:

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of One of One. I’m your host, Darren Gold, CEO of the Trium Group. My guests today are Charles Spinoza and Chris Davis, a co-author and contributor, respectively, to one of the most impactful books I’ve read in the past five years, Leadership as Masterpiece Creation. The book invites leaders to think about themselves and the companies they are building as masterpieces. Works of art worthy of admiration. The book boldly and courageously advocates for a contrarian model of leadership and business building. This is a very different conversation. How often do you hear St. Augustine, Milton, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Heidegger referenced as guidance for how to lead more effectively? I invite you to be patient, listen closely, and ask yourself, what would it look like if I were building a true masterpiece? Enjoy this unique and powerful conversation with Charles Spinoza and Chris Davis. Charles, Chris, it’s wonderful to see you both. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for some time now, so I just want to thank you for both coming out of the show and spending some time.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:01:21]:

Thank you, Darren.

 

Chris Davis [00:01:22]:

Thank you, Darren.

 

Darren [00:01:23]:

Yeah. And that for listeners. That was Charles speaking first and Chris speaking second. And I’ll try to do my best to make sure that’s clear. I’ve been looking forward to the show in part because you’ve both contributed and written a what I would consider a once in a five or ten year book. You know, every five or ten years I read a book and it literally has me sitting up straight and wanting to reread it. And that was definitely the case with the book that you both wrote last year, Leadership is Masterpiece Creation. And I’d love to use our time this morning to talk about it, particularly as it relates to CEOs and the businesses that they’re leading. So let’s start with just the basic thesis or basic premise of the book. Charles, if I could have you speak to the argument that you’re making in the book itself.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:02:11]:

Absolutely, I’d love to do it. And if I go on too long, just tell me to stop because this is something I do love. You’re quite right about that. Okay. The basic argument of the book is that leaders, by and large, leaders are trying to create morally distinctive organizations. We know that at the bottom of the food scale, more or less, you just walk down your street and you look at the stores, the restaurants, and they all portray the leader’s vision. I won’t go into detail over that, but the differences are clear and it’s because of leaders. Leader believes there’s a right way to treat customers A right way to treat employees, a right way to treat owners, and is acting out of that. And we know too, at the top, when you take Jeff Bezos or Paige or Brin, Bezos believes the right way to run a company is relentlessly. And everything in Amazon is relentless. And that’s how employees have to engage. At Google, it’s living your dream. You get some time to pursue your dream, and you lead a psychologically safe life. Completely different visions, and those are based upon a moral view of what the right way to treat employees is the right way to treat customers. So at the top and the bottom, it’s not news. It’s everybody in the middle. And my experience in consulting and Chris’s experience in consulting is that people in the middle, by and large, not 100%, but not far off, 100%, want to, to create a moral vision, create a distinctive company. And why don’t they? It’s consultants like me, it’s business school professors, and it’s the fact that work is so demanding. And so what do we offer? We business school professors or we consultants? We offer recipes, frameworks. Follow this framework, follow that framework. That’ll make it easier, and you can get your profits, you can get your market share, and everything’s okay. Well, everything is okay, except for one thing. You’re not really fulfilling your heart’s desire. And so the premise of the book is to give people the tools, both conceptual and practical tools, to turn their business into a masterpiece.

 

Darren [00:04:19]:

So I want to pause on this word masterpiece, because it’s a very evocative and intentional word you’ve chosen. What are you trying to convey with that word?

 

Charles Spinosa [00:04:27]:

Well, when I think about the word, there’s a whole lot that I’m conveying. The first is, you know, I started out as a Shakespeare scholar and Shakespeare professor. And for me, when I think of leaders, and when I first started thinking of leaders, I started thinking of them in terms of tragic figures. For Shakespeare’s tragic figures, who tried to live the story of their lives, who tried to make the story of their lives come to life. And as Shakespeare showed them doing that, he created masterpieces. And when I do leadership coaching, that’s one of the things I do. I want to get clear about the leader’s story and actually how the leader needs to change his or her story as she evolves. So I was thinking, first of all, let’s think about individuals as works of art, as masterpieces, and their styles as masterpieces. And so that’s me 28 years ago, as I consulted more and more, I realized you can’t have a masterpiece style. You can’t make yourself into a work of art if you’re a leader without doing it to your organization. And so that evolved that way. Now I’m also, in addition to a Shakespeare scholar. I’ll only apologize once for this, a philosopher. And Heidegger wrote, I think one of his best essays is on the Origin of the Work of Art. It’s really about cultures, and it’s really about cultures have to have figures in them, exemplary figures in them. They can be works of art. They can be leaders that show the culture what it’s about. In his essay, when he writes about it, he writes about it as a work of art which shows the Greek culture what it’s about. Turns out it’s a temple that shows the culture what it’s about. But that was what I was thinking about, how the leader becomes a masterpiece and creates an organization or a culture that’s a masterpiece. And then as I read Burkhardt, because again, Renaissance scholar I read about. I read Burkhardt on Renaissance Italy, I discovered that he was the one who made the first claim that organizations, in his case, Italian Renaissance city states, were considered masterpieces by the people that were doing that. I was convinced that he was right, that that is what the princes of the day were trying to do with their city states. And that is really exactly what I want to enable the leaders today to do. So. The references are all perhaps a bit obscure and a bit personal. I would like to think that everybody has on his or her bookshelf Burkhardt’s book about Italian Renaissance cities. I’m told that it’s not the case. It’s deplorable circumstance, but it’s not the case. So I’m inviting everybody to think as.

 

Darren [00:07:15]:

Though they did this invitation, while it can sound a bit esoteric, deeply philosophical, evoked in me at least, I’m an n of 1. A massive resonance as the leader of my own business and as somebody who helps others create enduring businesses at scale. This idea of building something evocative of a Renaissance painting, something that’s worthy of admiration, it deeply resonated. And I’m wondering maybe, Chris, I could turn to you and have you speak to. What is it in this concept of offering an invitation to business leaders to create a masterpiece? Not just think they’re running a business, but thinking they’re bringing something worthy of admiration into the world?

 

Chris Davis [00:08:00]:

Well, you’ve probably experienced it as a leader of a consulting firm. There are leaders we meet occasionally. Luckily not too often whose sole concern is to flip. A company makes money quickly on it, and that’s great, and that’s their purpose and what they’re up to. But the leaders that we normally work with, I suspect you work with, they truly do want to create something distinctive in the world. It’s not simply enough to return a good return to their shareholders or even to treat their employees nicely. They actually want to bring something into the world that is distinct. And I find whenever I speak about creating a masterpiece, it does resonate. They may have never thought of it in those terms, but suddenly they do say, yes, that is what I want to do. That is what this is about more than anything else that what it’s about. Then the question starts to be, where have they not done that? Where have they compromised? Where have they sold out as opposed to stayed focused on this masterpiece they want to create?

 

Darren [00:09:09]:

Yeah. So let’s push the definition a little bit more. And what’s required for building a masterpiece? I think in your book, you talk about having a vision for a new moral order and the courage and clarity to take real moral risks. But when we’re talking about building a masterpiece, what are we actually talking about here? Beyond the evocation of something bigger than what we might be thinking of as business leaders.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:09:35]:

Would you like me to take that, Charles?

 

Darren [00:09:37]:

Great.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:09:37]:

Yeah, okay. I’d be happy to take that. I can sort of. People have asked me on podcasts and webinars to summarize the book in three bullet points. And so I said, well, yes, if audiences want that, I better take that as a responsibility. So I’ve done it. The first thing is I ask leaders, what is it that always goes wrong in your organization or in your industry? That’s them discovering a moral anomaly. Something that always goes wrong that’s not repaired, that they sort of would like to have go right. To my surprise, leaders answer that question quite easily. You know, I always thought that that would be the hard question. It’s because nobody’s ever looking at it. But, you know, I can give you some. We always take advantage of loyal customers. We only do what’s safe. We sell by making women feel anxious. That was Anita Roddick’s Anomaly. Trust in online retail is getting lost, and trust in retail is getting lost. That was Bezos Anomaly Ray Dalio. In the face of the digital form of transparency, people are cultivating fake images of themselves rather than speaking truthfully. His anomaly, we run into them all the time. Chris and I ran into one recently. Video games are only for macho men. We can make gender neutral or gender appealing video games, but we don’t. We just do macho men. Another one. There are no real advocates for patients to get covered by their insurance. Their doctors try a little, but don’t have time. They’re no advocates for that. That’s something that always goes wrong in our industry. So leaders are able to answer that question, which is. Which is the thing that makes me feel good. The book is on firm ground. They do want to create masterpieces. The next question, which the book is about, is a much harder question. It turns out I thought the next question would be the easy question, what would you love to do instead? And that’s where leaders have a harder time. I’ve told myself the following story. They’re having a harder time because leaders just don’t pop out of the sky. They start out as managers, and managers become brilliant about managing around things that are hard to change. And so they’ve been expert at managing around the thing that always goes wrong in their industry or organization. So what would you love? That’s the next question. And then the following question, which is really the heart of the book. What risks do you have to take to change it? To change what you do? And that is really important because what grows up in any industry and any organization is what I call a moral order. There are right ways to do things. Some are very clear, some are instinctive. Some are just bridging the difference between the clear and instinctive. But there’s a right way to do things. And that right way of doing things in that industry says it’s right, for instance, to take advantage of your loyal customers. It’s right to make women feel anxious and so forth. To break with that, you’re going to have to do something that seems wrong.

 

Darren [00:12:37]:

And what is it that you think gets in the way of leaders answering the second question and then engaging in the kind of courageous moral risk taking that’s required to produce something really worthy.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:12:50]:

The first thing is they’re, as I said, they’re expert managers. It’s so easy to manage well. And when people evaluate them, they evaluate them on whether they’re producing a profit. They evaluate them on whether they’re maintaining or growing market share. These are the common sense ways to evaluate leaders. We evaluate leaders in ways that sort of violate the leaders in that way. I mean, people who like the book tell me the most important thing that you did in the book, Charles, was give me the permission to create a masterpiece. I would love to have them say the most important Thing you did in the book, Charles, was give me the steps and show me about moral risk taking and help me think philosophically that way. But no, they said, you gave me the permission to go do what I wanted to do all along. Well, fair enough. If I just do that, that’s. To me, that’s a great thing. I will be happy with that. I can go on my tombstone. He gave us permission to create masterpieces and showed us how. So the first thing is the way in which managers are evaluated, the way in which they’re trained, the way in which consultants deal with them. We help them solve simple or sometimes complex problems, but not moral problems. The third, moral risk taking. That’s something that people are taught to avoid. We actually take moral risks in our lives all the time. We take moral risks with friends when we give them advice that we know will be hard for them to follow. Where if they follow it and it goes poorly, they’ll be harmed. People will look at them poorly. I do it in my coaching very frequently we do it, but we tend to look away from it. And in that way, I think we have a cramped view of morality. One of the things I love saying about the book is this book shows that leaders are really today’s moral artists. And our moral orders are, I believe, like aesthetic creations. They’re created by people. They go on, and then they slowly change and people create new ones. And so what’s right and wrong today is quite different from what was right and wrong even when I was. Was a young man, and I assume will be quite different in another 20, 30 years. And that’s because people are changing what counts as right and wrong. And that’s something business leaders are doing in their own organizations. And people are not taught to do it. They don’t think about it.

 

Darren [00:15:09]:

Yeah, it’s occurring to me that to build a masterpiece organization, you have to treat your own leadership as a masterpiece. And you write about that in your book. But can you connect the two here? I can’t imagine that somebody that’s not taking themselves on as a work of art is going to be able to be able to see with clarity the risks that need to be taken or what they really, really want to happen and then have the courage and discipline and fortitude to make really, I think, in your words, shocking decisions in some cases that shock a moral order out of its slumber and awaken it to something that’s new.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:15:49]:

That’s right. I think the decisions are always shocking when they take place. Jeff Bezos threatened to fire his Logistics genius. Think about how important logistics is to Amazon. But when his logistic genius refused to work relentlessly, Jeff Bezos threatened to fire him and almost did likewise with his first employee, who created the website. You can think how important the. The website is to Amazon, but when he couldn’t produce the next version of it, or couldn’t produce it quickly enough, Jeff Bezos forcibly retired him. And that way showed that raising the bar all the time on employee requirements is essential to that company. Now he created himself to work relentlessly. He created himself always to get up and be a better version of Jeff Bezos every morning. And guess what? That very good. That renewing yourself every day, that relentlessness that gave us what I call the hyperconvenience of Amazon. You know, it’s funny, when we first asked people what’s good about Amazon? Well, it’s got lower prices. It’s an everything store, has virtually everything you’d ever want. Who would want more? And the technical people who developed it thought that would be what everybody loved about Amazon. And the inconvenience of having to have things mailed to you and having them send the. Send them back, that would be trivial. Bezos took that inconvenience and said, that’s where I’m going to triumph. And so every day, delivery of the Amazon goods to you gets easier and simpler. And that’s the relentlessness, that’s the raising the bar right inside the business model, inside Bezos. And that we as customers then come to experience and appreciate. And I have to confess, I go to my favorite restaurant, if I ask for the bill, and they don’t deliver it with the speed of Amazon, I’m disappointed. So hyper convenience has taken me over. Bezos did that. And now it’s an expectation of a customer. It’s the right thing, the right way for them to treat me. So, yeah, the three come together always. If you look at Anita Roddick, and.

 

Darren [00:17:57]:

That was founder of the Body Shop or CEO of the Body Shop.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:18:00]:

Yes, founder of the Body Shop.

 

Darren [00:18:02]:

Yeah.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:18:02]:

She, she created the Body Shop in Brighton, one little town in the south of England, a seaside town in the south of England. It was successful. She took all of her family’s money. Her husband was the cfo. Everything depended on that. And it was a success, successful little company. And it was ignored by the beauty business. Essentially, the beauty business said, okay, she’s going to siphon off the hippie women. We were never much good with the hippie women anyway, let her have them. And she realized she had to create a growing Business. And what was her first big moral risk? Well, she asked the family if they would go and get another loan. They said no. And so when her husband, her CFO, left town, she sold half the shares of the business to get money for the next business. He came back, he saw the next business, he saw the next door, he saw it doing well. He forgave her, and the rest is history. But that showed how important growth was to her. She was willing to sacrifice basically the whole thing and the family for growth. Now, what was she doing herself? Well, the beauty business was all based upon looking young. She knew she could make it fun. If people went to the stores, they could try on different things, they could do lots of sampling. And she did that. She knew she could put it in containers where they didn’t have to spend a lot of money for everything. But she herself was getting older, obviously. And so what she did was she went and explored the world to find out how women in what are called traditional cultures take care of their skin and take care of themselves. And that became a big part of her life and that became the ground of the Body Shop. So she developed herself in response to trying to look young. She was able to bring that into the Body Shop and bring that into this intensely growing organization. And that’s how we came to know the Body Shop. So, yes, you’re right so far as I can see. I leave it an open question in the book whether there’s another way to be a leader. Maybe you can do it by being a high risk person. I’m not sure. Maybe you can do it by being an improviser. I’m not sure. And there are some people that claim that you can. But for me, the most obvious way to make your life into a masterpiece is to make it a single work of art that’s constantly evolving. Take the virtues that you’re developing and make them core of your business. And then once they’re core of your business, which becomes a masterpiece, see how you can offer another product, a better product, better service to your customers. And that’s the old consultant in me. You hear it, it’s three steps, very schematic. I’m not sure that it really is three steps, all that schematic. I think it actually happens most of the time altogether at the same time.

 

Darren [00:20:46]:

Yeah. I think you’re also making an argument in the book, if I’m reading it properly, for a very contrarian form of leadership. In part of your book, you take on what I would call the existing or prevailing paradigm of leadership. And these sort of five myths, maybe, and you, I think, one by one, dismantle them and replace it with something very different. And I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about the new paradigm of leadership or contrarian paradigm of leadership that you’re offering. It sounds like it’s absolutely essential to building a masterpiece, one that definitely resonated with me. And either Charles or Chris, you can speak to that question, what is the existing prevailing paradigm and what’s the new one you’re offering?

 

Charles Spinosa [00:21:31]:

We took time to present it in a nice way, order. And so you’re right, we are absolutely changing the paradigm of leadership. I can just begin. I’m actually going to turn to the page in the book. The first thing is people have come to believe that leadership is influence. And there are lots of people that have lots of influence in your lives, in our lives. And they’re not all, by far organizational leaders. I want to say the key attribute for. Of a leader who creates a masterpiece business as being the kind of moral artist I’ve been describing. And that means being willing to take a moral risk to resolve a moral anomaly. And so that’s the first big difference.

 

Darren [00:22:19]:

That’s, I think, an essential point here. And for those that are listening and for. Maybe this conversation is resonating for you. The way I took that in was a strong argument for a more directive form of leadership that may be a little countercultural today. The idea that I have to. Or that my leadership is dependent upon building consensus or listening deeply, making sure that I’m pleasing others, including others, which there are aspects of all of that that I think are essential to good leadership. But you’re arguing for something very, very different. And I want to make sure that distinction lands here for listeners the way I would describe it. And maybe I’ll articulate it to get a reaction from the two of you. This is a leader who has something much, much bigger in mind that they’re creating and is willing to displease people not for the sport of it, but because they’re so morally distinctive and so clear about what they’re bringing into the world and so unapologetic and uncompromising about their vision that they know that a byproduct of that vision will be distasteful, it will be unpleasing, it will be alienating. And that point, I want to make sure. Do you agree with it? And make sure that it lands for people, because it’s a very key distinction.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:23:47]:

At least the way I read it, it’s Absolutely right. In fact, I would. Only if I were to say it a little bit differently, I’d make it more emphatic.

 

Darren [00:23:55]:

Okay.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:23:56]:

You can count if you’re a leader of this sort that you are going to be breaking with a moral order and some one of your close followers. Close followers, not a distant follower. Your husband, who’s cfo, your founding employee who was there right from the start with you. We’ll believe that these are nice words, that this is public relations, that you are not in it all the way. The one thing you cannot delegate is your moral risk taking and the virtues or the stand that you’re taking those moral risks for. So what’s the favorite thing? Leadership can be distributed. Anybody can lead. The book says no. No. You see the moral anomaly. You come up with what you would love to do and you are the one who’s going to take the risk. And virtually nobody else is going to take that risk for you. And it’s only once they see that you’ve taken the risk and succeeded that you then have true followers. And so you’re right. This is not about consensus building. This is not about what people call transformational leadership, which is where you’re taking care of and nurturing all of your employees in their ambitions. That’s the second thing. This is not about something that doesn’t have to do with formal authority. It’s because you have the formal authority to do this that you can do it and make it stick. And what’s the other thing? Oh, it’s not about you expressing your vulnerability. In fact, if you feel your vulnerability, you’re not going to take the moral risk. I can give you a little story in the background that I thought about when I was thinking about vulnerability. Yeah. And you can’t share taking the moral risk taking with your team, which is what leaders are advised to do. So. Yeah. The basic five or six things aspects of leadership that you’ll be taught if you go to Harvard Business School. The book is saying that’s not for Masterpiece Leadership.

 

Chris Davis [00:25:58]:

Chris, you want to add it here? Yeah. That you can see even Charles saying that that is a moral risk against the dominant paradigm of what leadership’s supposed to be and what leaders are supposed to do today to focus on producing a safe space, seek consensus, be the servant leader to your employees. For him to be saying those things by itself is a moral risk. And operating in any of those ways is already a moral risk.

 

Darren [00:26:27]:

Many of these principles we bring for in our work and in so doing we’re, I think, creating A new moral order in terms of how we think about building enduring organizations. And we’re taking moral risk. I mean, maybe this podcast episode itself is a beautiful moral risk to disrupt prevailing ways of thinking. And I would say that there. And this isn’t to soften the point at all, but maybe just to appreciate the complexity of the conversation that we’re in, there are elements of all of the conventional ways of leading that don’t have to be discarded completely. It’s what actually is the essence of leadership that we’re really talking about. And it’s a much stronger, unapologetic, singular form of leadership that can be delivered with a lot of care and kindness and respect. I don’t see you arguing for the opposite of that. I just see you not arguing that that is essential. And in so doing, I think what you get is a plurality of leadership styles. Some that people would find completely distasteful, some that people would really love. And there’s something about the concept you’ve used, which is a plurality of morally distinct organizations, and I would add morally distinct leaders, that is in and of itself a social good. So I wanted to maybe bridge to that point, because it’s one of the things that really stuck out for me in the book, which is that it is not just okay, but it’s actually a desirable social good to have a marketplace of free and distinctive cultures. I call them black licorice cultures. You’ll either love them or you hate them, but you’ll know when you whether you want to work for one of these organizations, and that there should be, within some bounds, a wide range of those. Talk a little bit more about this point that you make in the book.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:28:31]:

Yeah, I call it the narrow moral pluralism. And the simplest way to see it is to look at Google and look at Amazon. Those are two different cultures provide two very different goods for people in their lives, two different moral goods for people in their lives. And I value them both. And if, you know a lot of people can’t value Amazon, they find Amazon too hard to swallow. Well, substitute the body shop. Substitute Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater, the hedge fund. Substitute something else that you can get behind. You still will see that there’s a pretty big difference there between these. Now, it used to be that our response to moral difference was tolerance. When I say used to be, I’m going back a few hundred years to 1700s when tolerance became fashionable and it was considered a moral good and an important moral good. I think we’re beyond tolerance now, and I Feel grateful for the diversity of moral goods. I mean, right in my own, just blocks from my home, there are two different hardware stores. One plays classical jazz music, the other pop tunes. One has soaps when you walk in. The other smells like three in one oil. One is full of customer service people helping you with all the smallest kinds of hardware questions you’d have. The other one just has somebody restocking shelves and expects you to know it, to be a do it yourselfer and get what you want. I love both of those hardware stores. I embrace one more because I’m not very good at hardware, but I love them both. I want them both to be there. And that is my narrow moral pluralism. And I think that’s what businesses can give us. More than governments, more than nonprofits, businesses, because they can be successful by virtue of their distinctiveness. They can fill our lives with a kind of moral diversity that we can appreciate. And for me, that then is bringing us into an economy of gratitude where we look at that diversity and feel grateful for it. And that’s the note on which the book ends, Promoting an economy of gratitude. That’s like that. And that’s ultimately why I think it’s sort of a public good for all these business leaders to do what they want to do anyway and create a distinctive masterpiece.

 

Darren [00:31:05]:

Okay, so I think we’re touching on a really important point here also, maybe in the ground of moral risk taking the word inclusivity. It’s very topical, it’s very well intentioned. I think there’s some beauty to this notion of creating spaces, workspaces, where people feel included. And yet I think the downside of this, the shadow of it, is that you run the risk of creating an organization that tries to work for everyone and works for no one, that does not have distinctiveness. And what it lacks is, I think, the stepping back and seeing the Marketplace. Right. There’s two hardware stores, there’s 1,000 hardware stores. Right. That each have not only a right, but really an obligation. And so I’m saying this as a way to get your perspective, but an obligation to create something not bland but truly distinct, that brings something new into the world, that produces a good for its stakeholders in a very distinctive way that, again, will be really liked by some and really disliked by others. Is that really what you’re getting at here? I mean, is there. What does that add to what you’re trying to say here?

 

Charles Spinosa [00:32:24]:

Yeah, I think there’s also a middle ground.

 

Darren [00:32:26]:

Okay.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:32:27]:

I think there are things that we can embrace and things we can’t embrace. I think there’s a middle ground of wider things that we can admire. So I can admire both of those hardware stores I go to, the one that plays classical jazz. I’m sorry, that’s the one I embrace. I don’t have anything against 3 in 1 oil, but I just love classical jazz and being helped with my hardware problems. But do I dislike do it yourselfers? No, they should have that. And so I can admire both. There are some that obviously I’m not going to support any business that’s breaking laws in really terrible ways, obviously. So that’s beyond the pale for me. I don’t support drug dealing, for instance. Now there’s illegal business. I don’t support that. But I do have a broad range of things that I can admire. What I’m finding with the book is that’s an unusual view. Or even people that have it don’t want to live up to it. They want to say, well, I have the things I love. There are things I can hold my nose and tolerate, and there are things that are just outside the bounds that we should close down. And it’s changing toleration to gratitude and admiration. That’s partly the mission of the book.

 

Darren [00:33:47]:

Let’s talk a little bit about culture, because I think you have a chapter, I think, Chris, that you contributed significantly to chapter seven on culture. And I think masterpiece organizations are ones that create very distinctive cultures. And you have a very unique way of talking about culture, about moods and styles. And I’m wondering if you could offer a perspective to listeners as they think about, again, whether it’s building a masterpiece or recognizing that they’re already building a masterpiece, but now having the language and distinctions to understand what they’ve been doing? How do you think about culture in a way that’s conducive to creating something really distinctive and worthy of being called a masterpiece.

 

Chris Davis [00:34:33]:

So let’s start with every organization has a culture, whether they’re a masterpiece or not. And part of what Charles, I looked at first, if you’re going to look at culture, is how to make it visible and evident to those in it, because it does become as water to the fish. And for that, we use two different distinctions to pay attention to one is what’s the organizational mood that a culture has? For instance, we might identify it as a fear mood, meaning that how things matter to people in that culture is in terms of whether they are threatening or not to them. So a meeting in a fear culture is something you approach with a certain caution and dread because you know, you might get wounded in it, you might get put on the spot and it could be really bad for you if you are in a different mood. Let’s say a joy culture, which is a, like an improv troupe, kind of let us work together to put the play on. You know, there is no mistake. You know, you drop it, I’ll pick it up. A meeting is this creative experience where we come to participate together and make something happen. Similarly, against these background moods, there’s different styles that organizations adopt which is, what’s the. You could say the highest or organizing value. And for example, here there are cultures, Apple’s a famous one, where perfection seeking perfection is the right way to be. If you take time to make it absolutely perfect, you’ll be appreciated. If you turn it in and it’s not, you could be fired. Other cultures would not value that. They want to see that you are good at getting something workable out quickly, balancing the trade offs. A pragmatic style. Some cultures value collegiality above everything else. So when we look at cultures, we’re looking at what’s there. And then a masterpiece leader, because they are bringing their own challenge to the existing dominant paradigm, is going to shape that culture in a certain way now. And there’s no one right. Masterpiece culture. Just as Charles was saying, the relentlessness of Amazon under Bezos was very different than the almost academic culture that Google had under Brin. And we don’t point to there’s only one right one. This marketplace of various cultures is a great virtue. Well, one of the things the leader’s up against, and this goes back to why it’s so challenging to bring forth a masterpiece, is there is a dominant business paradigm that is telling him or her over and over, this is the way to do it. That’s the wrong way to do it. Don’t you know that Amazon is evil? Don’t you know the most important thing is creating safe spaces, which in the end is almost an attempt to eliminate pluralism and get into a single kind of current appropriation, business culture. So very much in working with leaders, part of bringing forth the masterpiece is what’s going to be the distinctive culture that causes this masterpiece to come into the world.

 

Darren [00:37:54]:

Yeah, you talked about moods. I know in the book you talk about, I don’t know whether you’d call them positive and negative, like the positive moods of joy and zeal and so forth and the negative moods of fear and resignation and so forth. And can you build a masterpiece from a negative culture? An organization that has A negative mood or do you really need to have a mood of positivity within an organization?

 

Chris Davis [00:38:22]:

Boy, that’s an interesting question. With our clients, we have never advocated them keeping or building a culture with a negative mood. We discover them there sometimes and then we work with them to get to one of the positive moods. You can certainly run an organization successfully with a negative mood. Fewer cultures can drive results, no question. There are some very successful arrogance cultures which would be another negative mood. So you can certainly have a successful organization in that. Would it be a morally distinctive masterpiece? All I can say is it’s not one that I would ever help design. But Charles, if you have a different answer than I’d be interesting what you’d say there.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:39:05]:

Yeah, I think, I mean, look, this is asking us to play the role of philosophers. The simple answer is no. Don’t go out and try to create a masterpiece where you’ve got a negative mood. You’ve got a huge amount of headwind going for you, number one. Number two, it’s the cultural design which gives you the greatest leeway to be an artist. It’s the one where you’re actually taking the lowest risks. And when you get a good culture where working, you’re satisfying the business concerns, you’re going to raise your productivity and profitability by roughly 20% or more. So this is, this is the thing that we, Chris and I do to get people appreciating building masterpieces. It’s our entryway. Well, if I’ve created 20% more value for the company, now you give me room to make it morally distinctive. So the non philosopher’s answer is no, you’re not going to create a masterpiece on a negative mood. Now, if you ask me to sort of search through history and see if I can come up with something where they had a mood of fear or a mood of anger, that was a masterpiece. I bet there was an Italian city state that I could find, and it might even be Florence that had a mood of anger that created was this sight of all these artists and scholars and it was a beautiful city. I’m trying to think was, you know, Barclays is a famous place for having had a mood of fear for the longest time. You could argue back and forth. I don’t think it was ever a masterpiece, to tell you the truth. But Barclays Banks certainly survived for years that way.

 

Darren [00:40:47]:

Well, I think there’s something about in your book that maybe speaks to this. You speak a lot about Nietzsche and the idea of a good life and that masterpieces are really Ones that create a good life for the people that are in the company as employees, are customers of the company, stakeholders of the companies. And I can’t imagine creating a good life out of a mood of fear or resentment or anger or arrogance. And maybe just to not get too stuck on that particular question, talk about this concept of a good life, because I know it’s one that really resonated for me at the end of the day, can put aside all of the philosophy and all of the distinctions that we’ve talked about. That’s a really motivating, animating idea, which is, what would it look like to build a company where people’s lives are flourishing? Why did you bring that part into the book? It feels like an essential component that probably we need to discuss.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:41:44]:

It is. I should just say, we argue in the book that you just need to create a good life for most of your stakeholders. You don’t need to create a good life for all of your stakeholders. So we’re not absolutists. So that’s where that’s the fringe elements. Is there. Is it possible to create a culture of anger that creates a good life for enough stakeholders? I want to say not likely, but nobody’s going to give you money to go out and find them. I think, however, good life, right from the very beginning when I started consulting, leaving the academic world, I said businesses are about creating good lives. That’s the intersection of the humanities and businesses, not about providing just goods. The old story was businesses are all about necessity and they just provide goods for people, basically goods for people’s stomachs. And you can see if you’re creating an organizational culture for people that’s not just a good for one’s stomach. So for years I’ve been saying businesses are to create good lives. Now, it used to be it was far easier to understand what a good life would be and a good life. In fact, when I wrote my first book, I was writing in favor of this. A good life means being connected in a community, being strongly connected to a community that you care about and that likely cares about you. And if you had that kind of community connection, you would feel that your life was a good life worth living. I think most of our sense of community has gotten far, far weaker since even 1997 when I wrote the first book. And that’s the job of this book was to say, what’s a good life today? And that’s where the philosopher Nietzsche came to help me. And you can get it. We’ve gone from stories that connected us, to our community, to TikTok. What’s the good of TikTok? It’s not that you get absorbed into a story like a novel on TikTok. It produces a sense of wonder. And that today is, I believe, the source of a good life. You have to get up in the morning and feel a sense of wonder. And if you do, you’re leading a good life. And if you don’t, most mornings, you’re not. And so businesses, I believe, today, have to give their employees, have to give their customers a sense of wonder. And Nietzsche is really helpful because he gives us sort of four ways in which you can get wonder in your life. And the first is the one that we were discussing at the beginning of our conversation. And that is where you’re constantly refining your life. You’re rediscovering yourself anew and making yourself different. The second is where what Chris was describing in his Joy Company, where you’re improvising with people and you’re turning every mistake into. Into a thing of beauty. And you really love that challenge. And each one of those moments is a moment of wonder. The third is a good life that maybe consultants and other gig workers feel. It’s where you lead a life of short stories. You’ve got one gig, you solve a problem, it comes to an end, you move on to the next. You find the next waiting at the door when the previous one closes. It’s one short story after another short story after another short story. Again, you get a sense of wonder with each story. And the last that Nietzsche talked about was a life of risk, where it’s a life of struggle, and you feel that you are living much more deeply and richly because of the struggles you endure and survive and overcome. And I think Nietzsche was right. I think if we look around and we see the various kinds of good lives before us, they tend to fall into those categories. There’s some where people switch, move from one to another, but that’s right. And those are the kinds of good lives in the book. We focus on the one evolving story mostly, but the others are there in the background. And every time you take a moral risk, you’re certainly living a life of risk. You get the wonder from that.

 

Darren [00:45:55]:

Chris, anything you want to add to that?

 

Chris Davis [00:45:59]:

Just more generally, we use examples in the book, in the conversation of great famous companies and great leaders, because that’s what most people recognize. But the opportunity of creating a masterpiece exists for a very small business owner. The good life of creating a masterpiece is available to anyone, really, if you are serious about creating an organization that’s going to be distinctive. You can be a masterpiece creator. I think it’s important that be emphasized here.

 

Darren [00:46:33]:

I imagine even outside of business, family can be considered a masterpiece. Or is that too much of a stretch?

 

Chris Davis [00:46:40]:

You better take that one. Because I never thought those terms.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:46:45]:

Certainly if you think in terms of a dynasty, a family dynasty, there’s no question but that it can be a masterpiece. And I always used to think about family dynasties. One of the things I studied and wrote about that I didn’t tell your listenings earlier about is I used to do legal history. And basically the 13th century through the 18th century. The whole law, the whole property law and contract law was about how do you create a dynasty. So, yeah, I mean, when you do that, you’re creating a kind of community. And if you think of your family as creating a kind of community, then you can make it into a masterpiece. It’s hard for us to do that today. But yes, you can do that. And I will confess, at moments in my life, that’s what I was trying to do with my family.

 

Darren [00:47:32]:

So I’m thinking about the listener who’s a leader of an organization or a. A business team and how they’re listening to this conversation. And I’m wondering what you would offer as we sort of round the corner here and come to a close of this phenomenal conversation. What’s the big bold invitation that you’re extending to them? What is the promise? What gets them out of the default way of seeing themselves and the business that they’re creating and catalyzes something, something new? And either of you can answer that.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:48:11]:

Answer the question, what always goes wrong in your business? Yeah, you answer that, you’ve hit your moral anomaly. I’m willing to bet that your listeners already know the answer. If you’ve got that answer, then you can call us or ask yourself the next question, what would I love to do? And that’s the hard one. Talk to people. If you have a hard time answering that. And then what are the moral risks that you need to take? Don’t take the hardest moral risk first, by the way, you can be calculative about your moral risks. Generally, we find that in order to really institute a new company, make a change in a culture, it takes three moral risks. Not one of them feels good. When you take it. You’re all up against lots of opposition and people telling you you’re wrong. Take the easiest one first and move successively to the hardest. And the book will help with that. But that to Me is sort of the practical lesson. The big deal lesson is if you are a leader, you are a moral artist. That’s a very cool thing to be. So be a moral artist, create a moral order.

 

Darren [00:49:22]:

Chris what would you say?

 

Chris Davis [00:49:25]:

Everything Charles had underlined, but I’d just add, beware of the dominant paradigm of thinking if you’re doing it because everybody knows that’s the right way to do it, that should be a yellow flashing light to you that is probably not looking at taking a moral risk or challenging the moral order. And I think that takes a lot of strength and courage to stand against that current.

 

Darren [00:49:49]:

Is there anything in particular, as you say that that you would point to? One of the things you alluded to a few minutes ago was the idea of safety, even psychological safety. Is there an element of the prevailing paradigm that comes up most for leaders that you work with?

 

Chris Davis [00:50:08]:

Psychological safety has certainly been a big one the last few years, and it has led to people not requiring people to be responsible for what they see. They don’t have to speak up because the story can be it wasn’t safe to speak up, and that’s extraordinarily destructive to a team and to a company. And yet it got such currency. It was a moral risk to speak against it. I do think some people are getting wiser on this count now, but that has been one that I think blinded a lot of people.

 

Darren [00:50:41]:

So I can’t help but ask us to get into that conversation just for a few minutes before we do actually wrap, because it’s such a great example of a notion that very few people would even think to challenge and let alone have the courage to do it. But let’s do that, because I think it deserves a much more complex appreciation than the subject has gotten. You write about it brilliantly in the book. So for those of you listening and want to learn more, read the book and particularly read that section. But let’s take it on. Where have we gotten it wrong and what’s the replacement for it? What would you offer CEOs that are struggling with this question?

 

Chris Davis [00:51:29]:

You want to take it?

 

Charles Spinosa [00:51:30]:

CHARLES sure, I’ll take it. Well, first of all, there’s the example of the CEO who has gone most strongly against psychological safety, Ray Dalio at Bridgewater. And he has a culture where people are expected, indeed required to speak if they disagree. And in fact, they’re rated by each other on whether they speak when they disagree. And it’s not because they feel safe. It’s amazing. It’s Amy Edinson, one of the Great exponents of psychological safety. She’s the one that’s written the books on it, actually went to Ray Dalio’s culture, examined it and said they must feel psychologically safe. Well, why? Because they’re speaking. It was totally nutty. It’s because I have courage. It’s because it’s a moral requirement. I can’t imagine living in a place for long or working in a place for long where if I see something that’s going wrong, I don’t feel the moral obligation to speak and then speak. What’s been lost? What makes it so hard for people to do it? We’ve stopped teaching people rhetoric. We’ve stopped teaching people how to speak. When you have an uncomfortable truth to speak, we have things like radical candor. There’s another one just like it, and it’s basically blurt out what you see. And if you blurt out what you see, obviously people are going to slap you down. So how do you speak courageously? Well, first of all, you have to compose what you’re going to say, and that requires what’s the background? How do you get the person to. First of all, how much do you believe what you’re going to say? Is it something that you think is likely right, or is it something you’re certain is right? Get clear about that. Secondly, how is the person likely to respond? What has the person been listening to? How do you include disabling those stories in what you’re going to say? Most importantly, how do you get the person to know that you thought about this hard? How do you get the person to know that you care about the person? If somebody doesn’t care about you and tells you an uncomfortable truth, the likelihood of you listening is very, very low. And so you need to set the stage by showing that you’re speaking out of care, that you’re speaking out of having studied this and thought about it. And finally, you have to put all those elements together with a beginning, middle and end in the story so you’re not blurting anything out. So on the one hand you have to have courage. On the other hand, you have to have compositional skill in order to speak truth to power. And those are the two things that I think are lost. And when you read some of the stories that Amy Edmondson tells about psychological safety, she tells a story about a nurse. She begins her book with a story about a nurse who’s just been to a training session. They say if you have premature babies, it’s best to give them this kind of injection. And she sees a doctor that’s not giving them the injection and she’s afraid to say anything. And that’s okay because the doctor had been nasty to a nurse the day before. Well, it’s not okay. You’re in the life saving business. You have to say something. But if no one taught you how to politely say, I was just at this thing yesterday, this workshop, and they were talking, you know, the sky’s the limit about this drug. What do you think about it? And open a conversation that way you’re likely to get an answer. You’re likely to get people thinking, we don’t do those things right now. We don’t cultivate courage, we don’t reward it, and we don’t cultivate careful composition.

 

Darren [00:55:03]:

Yeah. So what I’m hearing you say is this sort of lost art of skillful truth telling and that what we’ve lost is the moral responsibility of the individual to harness and build that capacity and then to engage courageously in it. Which I think I can certainly agree with and hopefully others can. In hearing you, I’m curious about the reciprocal responsibility. Is there one on the part of a company in terms of the part of the leader or part of the culture that’s creating conditions for people to assume that responsibility that you’re pointing out and inviting people into?

 

Charles Spinosa [00:55:39]:

Yes, but I don’t like to talk about it that way. I like to talk about it as a responsibility for a leader and a leadership team. Their responsibility is to be seeking truth. Now, in our agile cultures, in our agile way of thinking, we just try various things out. Whatever works, we follow that until it doesn’t work and then we try something else. I believe if you’re going to create a masterpiece, you need to be trying to understand what what’s true about your core customers. You need to be thinking about what’s true about your employees. You need to be thinking about what’s true about the products and services you deliver. What does it offer lives. If you are in that discourse, if that’s your mindset, if you’re waking up at 4 in the morning, as I hope every leader is, thinking, what’s true about the service for my customers, what’s true about my customers and what their lives are about, what’s true about my employees, then you are going to be ready to hear something that’s uncomfortable because you already are trying to put all those pieces in, some that don’t fit, some that do fit into the story. And you can tell a leader who’s doing that. You tell the leader Something that’s uncomfortable for the leader to hear. Our customers don’t want to be appealed to anymore on the basis of being sexually attractive. Well, I’ve noticed the leader’s going to say, well, I’ve noticed this and I’ve noticed this, I’ve noticed this. But I also am telling myself the story about. There are these three other things that say they really want that. And suddenly you’re engaging in a story and a real conversation. It’s when people get defensive, when they don’t know how to incorporate what they’re saying. So my prime responsibility for a leader beyond risk taking is to be truth seeking. And if you’re truth seeking, you’re ready. If you’re not truth seeking, you’re not going to be ready to hear the uncomfortable truth. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re never going to have somebody say something that’s so uncomfortable the leader’s not going to be prepared for it. There’s always a risk in that, telling them something they don’t want to hear. But if they are engaging in truth seeking, they have the background to know how to accept it.

 

Darren [00:57:43]:

Chris, anything you’d add to that?

 

Chris Davis [00:57:45]:

Two things. Notice that the what is true question, there’s never a final end to it. You wake up the next morning still in the question and continuing to go. And if you are in that question, you are naturally going to be listening to people, seeking out people and listening to them, because that way is orienting you, is discover what’s true.

 

Darren [00:58:09]:

All right, lot to unpack here. What else would you add as we wrap up our conversation that maybe we haven’t touched on or that we’ve touched on, but you want to put a finer finishing point on.

 

Charles Spinosa [00:58:22]:

Well, first of all, let me thank you for asking that question, and let me pause for a moment to answer it. I find that we have touched on this. People find it hard to accept this book because they find it hard to accept easily that morality shifts. You can convince them of that by just having them look at history. And it’s fairly easy to get them to believe that it will shift again, that we’re not done, we haven’t hit the end of history. We will see new things as wrong, new things as right. And some of the things we think are currently right, we’ll see as wrong. And some of the things we think are currently wrong, we’ll see is right. And that frequently is a message of despair for people. But I want to pull it all back, and that’s because people want to believe that they’re good and that they’ve got what they need to be good. And somehow the humanities have not gotten through to people. We’ve stopped teaching it. And there’s one simple thought. I say simple, one very well expressed thought that’s not so simple. That’s at the heart of the book for me, and it comes from John Milton and it’s we only know good by knowing evil. I think it’s extremely profound. It says two things. One, we’re constantly in this tug of war between doing good and doing evil. Our habits are not just going to lead us all to do good. And I think if we examine our lives, we won’t see that we’ve just been spectacularly good all our lives, every day that there is a moral drama in our lives. But the more interesting thing when Milton says Milton, by the way, is this 17th century poet who wrote Paradise Lost. When Milton says we only know good by knowing evil, it doesn’t mean conceptually it’s really we can only do good by having done evil. It’s only when we can see certain things that we’ve done that were evil. We can see what it is, number one, to change our lives and to make that change stick and to accept that that change is a really. Is a great thing to do. And if you think back, or I don’t know that everybody’s read Augustine’s confessions, but St. Augustine, great saint, famously good when he tells the story of how he came to become that saint. An important part of him telling the story is when he was a child, he and his friends went and stole the pears from the neighbor’s tree. They stole them not because they were hungry, but because. Not because they wanted to eat them. Not because they disliked the neighbor and wanted to get back at the neighbor. They stole them out of the pure appeal of doing something mean and nasty and doing evil. And it was that that Guston realized we’re all always there. There is that appeal just because it’s a possibility. And he did it with pairs. He was thankful it was only pears. But when you realize that your life has a depth every day, you could do something totally nasty. Or on the other hand, you can do something that you want to make totally great. And if you live that range, I think you’re constantly exploring how to make your life better. And I believe you’re going to want to make a masterpiece. You’re going to want to make up for all those pairs that you stole by creating a masterpiece. And that’s one of the stories that’s deep down deep in me and I think deep down, deep in the book. So that’s one thing I don’t want to say. The other thing that we passed on, I think the place where you feel most like an artist in doing what we do in the book is in creating a very cool culture for your company. The other place is you’re overcoming so many interior barriers, it feels more like a war. But in creating the culture for your company, it really feels like being an artist.

 

Darren [01:02:23]:

Wonderful. Chris, anything you want to add in parting here?

 

Chris Davis [01:02:28]:

We’ll try to top that. But I just add that if you’re a leader, you’re an aspiring leader, you’re an ally to a leader. This book invites you into the question of creating a masterpiece and what it would take. And in my decades of consulting, I find nothing richer, more powerful than when leaders engage in the real question of creating a masterpiece. That be it.

 

Darren [01:02:56]:

Well, I think you’ve both, along with your co authors, created a masterpiece in this book. I can’t recommend it enough and you mentioned an economy of gratitude, so maybe I’ll end with deep gratitude for this conversation, the contribution that I think this conversation will have, the book that you’ve contributed to the world and the impact it will have. So thank you again for a really rich conversation, for your time, for your friendship and for your contributions. It’s been a pleasure.

 

Charles Spinosa [01:03:25]:

Thank you very much, Darren. Thank you. You’ve been a wonderful questioner. I love the questions and I love the space you gave me to answer the questions too. Thank you. Thank you.

 

Darren [01:03:34]:

You’re very welcome. There are few books that have made me re examine how I think about leadership and the role of business in the world. Leadership as masterpiece. Creation is one of them. It’s hard to convey the full nuance and richness of a book like this in an hour long conversation. But at a minimum, I hope and trust that it has stirred something inside of you that will have you rethink your own role as a leader and what it means to build a business. I look forward to being with you on the next episode of one of one. And until then, I hope you live and lead your life as a masterpiece with courage, wisdom and above all, with love.