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There is a chair on the stage. Two competitors circle it. When the music stops, only one of them sits. That person gets to be Major -- the power, the leader, the force. The loser becomes Minor and slinks away. It's a child's game -- musical chairs -- but this time, it's teaching a lesson in leadership.

In this game, when the music stops, the person who grabs the chair doesn't just sit in it -- he possesses it. Major swells to fill the chair. He revels in his new seat, declaring himself born to that perch, destined for that role. He is not gracious, not for a moment. He is loving every minute of sitting in that chair. And watching him, so are we. There's something so right about his sitting there. It's perfect! We enjoy seeing him in that chair even more than we would enjoy sitting our own precious ass down in that winning seat. And Minor? What of Minor? Minor is off to the side -- and cleverly drawing us to him. He's full of entrancing second-banana movements, from that droopy grin that he wears on his face like a wilting flower in his lapel to the abject crawling that has become his new way of getting around. His version of losing is actually quite winning: It's touching, charming -- and just as perfect as Major's boastfulness. Minor, too, has touched us. He, too, could convince us of anything -- even that crawling around on a dusty floor is fun. So completely have Major and Minor connected with an inner chord of emotion and energy that we would follow either of them.

Major and Minor are, in fact, learning to be leaders. But they're studying a type of leadership that goes beyond the traditional requirements of being clear, motivational, and inspirational: The leadership that they're learning teaches people to go for the jugular. Major and Minor are among the 26 students in this class who are learning to tap into the very core of leadership by drilling past their rational minds into the depths of their emotional responses. It's at this core level that people commit their deepest loyalties to strangers. Think of the way that music takes possession of you: truly, madly, and deeply. Now imagine leadership that touches you as powerfully, as primitively, and as completely. That is the essence of leadership.

The class is taught at L'école Philippe Gaulier -- a nontraditional school in North London that rearranges everything that we thought we knew about the art of leadership. It is a school for leaders, though it is not a leadership school. The principal -- the master -- is a clown. Philippe Gaulier, 57, makes sure that his school focuses on one essential objective: how not to be boring. Without knowing it, most of us are deeply boring. Deeply. And leaders are the most boring of all. What they don't understand is that being boring limits their power and undermines their effectiveness. Whenever Gaulier catches even a hint of " boring" in his class, he looks the offender in the eye and growls, " You are boooorrriinng! Adios immediately!" Whether you are onstage in a theatrical production or onstage in the real world -- the " theater with consequences" -- when the spotlight shines on you, you must become larger than life.