Elsevier

Organizational Dynamics

Volume 29, Issue 2, November 2000, Pages 108-122
Organizational Dynamics

There is business like show business:: Leadership lessons from the theater

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0090-2616(00)00018-8Get rights and content

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The business leader: current thinking

It is a recurring theme among management theorists and practitioners that business leaders today face a radically different and more difficult environment than that faced by preceding generations. Not only must today’s leaders respond to intensified, global competition and discontinuous change, they must guide their organizations to become better at competing in such conditions, to become more agile, more creative, more adept at learning. Much has been made of the need for business leaders to

Why examine the craft of the theater director?

Freeman has argued that we must begin seeing business as a humanity, and we must add learnings and teaching techniques from the humanities into the business school curriculum. He and Donaldson write, “The humanities are relevant to business precisely because … they force us to consider the depth and complexity of the people who are responsible for the success of businesses. They ask not to see people as motivated solely by economic goals but to view the problem of motivation as a complex

The business leader and the director—similar roles and responsibilities

Although they may seem poles apart, the theater director and business leader, in fact, share many similarities regarding roles and responsibilities. Yet the techniques they employ diverge sharply.

Each is responsible for leading a cadre of people in a dynamic, goal-oriented activity occurring under budget, and deadline pressures. Both shape and communicate their group’s mission and overarching goals, select their teams, allocate resources, monitor performance, and adjust the various elements to

Lessons from pre-production—crafting vision and building a team

Preproduction is the point at which the director is most intensely involved with analysis, interpretation and planning. It is at this stage that the director forms his ideas about the play, develops a vision and begins selecting the team that will bring that vision to life.

Consider this period analogous to those times when a business leader is facing a new challenge—entering a new market, launching a new product, starting a new business—or simply attempting to reevaluate the current situation

Summary

In the rapidly changing, increasingly complex world in which the business professional operates, it is becoming less and less difficult to see where the worlds of business and theater, as traditionally conceived, collide. When competitive advantage depends upon the uniquely human ability to sense and adapt to changing environments, it becomes critical to see the corporation as far more than the sum of its economic activities and to embrace a view of the corporation as something more complex,

Laura Dunham is a doctoral candidate in management at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, concentrating on entrepreneurship and ethics. Previously, she worked as a management consultant in the strategy division of Renaissance Worldwide, working with such clients as Oracle, IBM, Nortel, and GTE. She is also a former actress and cofounder of Studio Theater of Richmond.

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Laura Dunham is a doctoral candidate in management at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, concentrating on entrepreneurship and ethics. Previously, she worked as a management consultant in the strategy division of Renaissance Worldwide, working with such clients as Oracle, IBM, Nortel, and GTE. She is also a former actress and cofounder of Studio Theater of Richmond.

R. Edward Freeman joined the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration in 1987 as Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration and director of the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics. Freeman is also Professor of Religious Studies. Before coming to The Darden School, he taught at the University of Minnesota and the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Freeman’s areas of interest are business ethics, strategy and leadership, and organizational studies. His most recent books are Environmentalism and the New Logic of Business: How Firms Can be Profitable and Leave Our Children a Living Plant (with J. Pearce and R. Dodd), an attempt to show how environmental values can be used to craft sustainable competitive advantage; and Ethics and Agency Theory (with N. Bowie), among others. He has written more than fifty articles and is on the editorial boards of Business Ethics Quarterly, Business and Society, and Research in Corporate Social Performance and Policy. He is the editor of the Ruffin Series in Business Ethics published by Oxford University Press. He has a Ph.D. from Washington University and a B.A. from Duke University. In 1993, he was chosen for the Outstanding Faculty Award by the Darden student body.

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