Boooorrriinng!!!

The School of Humanity and the Theater of Complicity

Gaulier was not born not boring. For half his life, at least, he was quite dull. Growing up in Paris's 11th arrondissement, Gaulier lived in a part of town that was bordered by both a prison and the cemetery that houses the bones of Simonie-Gabrielle Colette and Alexandre Dumas. To a sensitive soul, the neighborhood was a spiritual Three Mile Island. The atmosphere was seriously polluted, emotionally radioactive, and full of way too much seriousness for young Philippe.

" When I was 26, I was faced with a crisis," recalls Gaulier. " As an actor, I no longer got any pleasure from my job. When you don't get pleasure from your work, you don't have any chance of working at a more expert level or of feeling freer. I wanted to be a tragic actor, and every time I tried, I flopped. A friend of mine, an absolutely gorgeous tragic actor, said to me, 'I must have a horrible destiny. I have been a bastard, and I have eaten with the dogs.' That didn't happen to me. I didn't have such a dramatic life, but I did want to live more fully. I was blocked. I didn't know what to do, so I decided to go to the Lecoq school. I stayed there as a student for two years and then as a teacher for nine more. At Lecoq, I discovered the pleasures of work and life."

Under legendary acting teacher Jacques Lecoq, founder of École Jacques Lecoq, Gaulier learned a secret: You can achieve any great vision that you have of yourself -- if your work gives you pleasure. That is how an actor or a leader inspires followers, attracts believers, wins contracts, and builds visions that become real. Gaulier heard the primitive music of leadership at the Lecoq school.

Lecoq founded his school in December 1956. When Gaulier joined Lecoq as a student 12 years later, a revolution was sweeping across Paris. " The gods of the establishment were falling; they were in hell," Gaulier says of 1968, a year that saw students take to the streets in cities all over the world. Now, 32 years later, in cities all over the world, the establishment is once again falling -- this time in business. The old-economy-establishment companies are struggling. The new clowns, mavericks, and disrupters are on top. The scripts are being rewritten, and the roles are being reversed.

Lecoq, who died in 1999, ran his acting school as a sort of school of humanity. " The first students were not only actors but also psychologists, ministers, doctors, architects, and writers," says Anderson. In 1991, Gaulier moved to London, where he set up his own school. Among his former students are Roberto Benigni, Helena Bonham Carter, and Emma Thompson.

The most subversive thing about this kind of teaching, says Gaulier, is its emphasis on pleasure. Work has many parallels to method acting. Actors such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino dwell on pain, loneliness, and fear. They use those qualities to boost their art -- much in the same way that most overworked businesspeople sacrifice their lives to have more powerful careers. The problem is that under this philosophy of work, actors tend to live tormented lives. Gaulier saw no future in this route. He took the opposite route: complicity and clowning. Not only is this route more powerful, he believes, but it also translates into a happier, less stressful life. Leadership -- command of the stage -- comes from one thing: pleasure. And you can't communicate pleasure unless you feel it.

The Primitive Script in which Business Is Written

Remember how your best professors took command of you? They did it by following the laws of melodrama. Forget information. Professor Wonderful would lean forward and then speak in a hushed, conspiratorial voice. She wouldn't talk numbers; she'd talk big issues: life, death, love, misery. If lecturing on changes in life expectancies, for example, she'd dramatize how only since World War II have women's life expectancies come to exceed those of men. She would physically place herself in a story, acting out the role of an observer at a Civil War graveyard, walking to the front of her classroom as if over burial grounds. Once there, she would point out a family plot, reading the gravestones of a succession of three wives: " Hezekiah, who died at 23 during childbirth, is over here; Rebecca, mother of two, lies beside her, dead at 28; Emily is a few feet away, dead at 18; and at the summit lies the husband to all of them, Thomas, dead at 48." She wouldn't just tell you a story; she'd bring you inside a story. That's melodrama.

Melodrama is not the damsel tied to the railroad tracks but the big issues -- the good, the true, the beautiful, and the evil that must be conquered. It's the basic, primitive script in which business is written. Think of most advertisements: You're dead if you don't buy an Armani suit. You're selling your child up the river if you don't invest in John Nuveen securities. You're declaring your love if you give your mate a diamond from DeBeers. Melodrama is the script of anyone who persuades you to buy or do anything.