Leadership Craft, Leadership Art

Leadership is a creative process in the same way that painting, acting, drawing or other arts are a creative process and the essence of that creative process is in the craft practice, rather than the flash of creative insight. Taylor leads us through creativity as it relates to leadership and the five stages of theory behind the idea: 1) preparation, 2) time-off (or incubation), 3) the spark, 4) selection, and 5) elaboration. Although that sounds like a nice linear progression, it is generally acknowledged to be more of a repeating pattern in an ongoing spiral with elaboration feeding into the next round of preparation. Although this set of stages is useful for analytically thinking about the creative process, it doesn't really capture the essence of creativity as a practice and in some ways fundamentally misleads us into thinking that the creative process can be understood and perhaps learned as a series of distinct stages that consist of different tasks. Nonetheless, with those caveats in mind, he explores the stages in more detail in an effort to offer some insight into the different things that are going on within the creative/leadership. Looking at the creative process in terms of these five stages helps us move away from the romantic notion of creativity as an act of divine inspiration and focus on the hard work of creativity as a process. He then takes the reader through the practical application of the theory and Leadership Craft, Leadership Art examines art and craft as analogies, metaphors and literal guides to developing leadership practice as well as knowledge of the processes through which leading occurs, from one-to-one to one-to-many.