A Cast of Leaders

The curtain goes up, and ... A crazed gypsy hag throws a baby into the fire. A Greek princess, reunited with her long-lost brother, asks him to hack up their adulterous mother and her new lover. An East German's sex-change operation has not gone well, leaving behind an abbreviated appendage that is . . . a wee bit "angry."

Class, please take your seats. Today's topic is "Leadership."

These incongruous moments from, respectively, an opera ("Il Trovatore"), a Greek tragedy ("Electra"), and a rock musical ("Hedwig and the Angry Inch") are all part of a visionary Duke University program that uses the theater to teach students how to assume that most amorphous of all job titles: leader.

"Leadership and the Arts" is the brainchild of Bruce Payne. A member of Duke's faculty since 1971, Payne has been teaching leadership, ethics, and public policy for almost three decades. In 1983, Payne received Duke's Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. It was his idea to teach leadership through the arts. "Traditional academia teaches individual excellence," says Payne. "But the business world is moving toward teamwork. What kinds of skills will students need to work in a highly competitive world with teams of creative, exciting people?" Payne's answer is to hold his class in the world's most competitive, creative city -- in a classroom that changes its location every night and that comes with ushers and programs.

Each January, Payne brings a group of up to 15 Duke undergraduates to New York City, where they spend four months -- an entire semester -- seeing more than 50 Broadway shows, operas, and ballets. They tramp through acres of gallery and museum space. They meet with actors, directors, producers, dancers, writers, painters, sculptors, curators, entertainment lawyers, business leaders, philanthropists, and, for good measure, one rocket scientist.

They talk. And talk. It is a perpetual Socratic dialogue about leadership and life, fueled by lots of pizza, a few beers, and the adrenaline that comes from immersion in the cultural capital of the world. This is a program that treats the actor Kevin Spacey -- whom the students will meet as part of the semester's grand finale -- less as a star of stage and screen than as a Peter Drucker with head shots.

"In the new world of corporate America, everybody is worried about how to achieve excellence in smaller and flatter organizations," says Payne. "That means finding styles of leadership that work well with smart, self-respecting professionals. Since everybody knows that hierarchy never worked well -- and these days, it works less well than ever -- what styles of leadership really make the most sense? The people who succeed in the arts these days are people who have solved that problem. They know how to coach, they know how to encourage, they know how to praise, they know how to love. And they know how to express a vision that excites rather than intimidates."

In a play, the dramatist's job is to place all of the characters' motivations in competition. Every play can be described in eight words: Someone comes out on stage and wants something. That something may be as specific as a throne ("Macbeth") or as intensely personal as the desire to meet one's own death with grace ("Wit"). Either way, values are at stake, and the action of the play proceeds until those values are either reversed or reclaimed. In the audience, those who are followers root for an outcome; the leaders take notes.

Ask any 10 people what leaders do, and you'll hear all the old favorites: They take risks, they innovate, they inspire. The romantic view of leadership sees it as a kind of ectoplasmic magnetism, in which followers in variously sized groups -- from teams to cults to companies to countries -- are drawn mystically and irrevocably toward a central source of inspiration. A more practical view of leadership suggests that real leaders have identified and mastered a secret tool: emotional observation. If you can watch people -- and, by watching them, figure out what makes them do what they do -- you might be able to get them to do something else, something better. That leadership principle, Payne believes, makes the theater a perfect laboratory for anyone who wants to brush up on what makes people tick.

The theater also has much to teach a business world that worships at the entrepreneurial altar. According to Payne, arts organizations, especially small repertory companies and dance troupes, serve as useful models for a world that reveres the startup. "The performing arts have always had to do more with less," says Payne. "All arts are essentially entrepreneurial."

Business books and seminars have picked clean any number of occupational metaphors to teach management and leadership skills -- sports, the military, wilderness survival, religion. Yet, perhaps more than people in any of these other fields, people in the arts have learned to deal effectively with impossible deadlines, tight budgets, temperamental employees, and the perpetual challenge of selling a product with a short shelf life to a fickle, demanding consumer base.

For inspiration on creative ways to lead a company -- or to chart a meaningful career -- there's no business like show business.