Professor Nancy Adler visited New Zealand from Canada as our seventh Creative Fellow in November 2017, to share her expertise on global leadership and cross-cultural management. Professor Adler is a longstanding advocate for creative thinking as a necessary tool for leadership, and has guided business leaders through reflective and creative processes. Her experience as an artist, management professor and consultant puts her in a unique position to bring management and the arts together. Her teaching is rooted in her appreciation that the best leadership is ultimately a highly creative, artistic practice.
Professor Adler presented a free public lecture at the University of Auckland on 14 November 2017. Here is the abstract for her presentation.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LEADERSHIP: A RETURN TO BEAUTY
Creativity in Contemporary Leadership
“Twenty-first century society yearns for a leadership of possibility, a leadership based more on hope, aspiration, innovation, and beauty than on the replication of historical patterns of constrained pragmatism. Yet a glance at the nightly news confronts us with a fractured, ugly world, fraught with disruption and unwelcome change. However, for the first time in history leaders can work backward from their aspirations and imagination, rather than forward from the past. The gap between what leaders can imagine and what they can accomplish has never been smaller. Designing options worthy of implementation calls for levels of inspiration, creativity, and a passionate commitment to beauty that, until recently, have been more the province of artists and artistic processes than the domain of most managers. The time is right for the artistic imagination of each of us to co-create the leadership that the world needs and deserves.”
About Professor Nancy Adler
Professor Nancy Adler holds the S. Bronfman Chair in Management at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She consults and conducts research on global leadership, cross-cultural management, and the arts and leadership. She has authored more than 150 articles, written and edited ten books, and produced several films. Her book International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior has more than a half million copies in print in multiple languages. Dr. Adler consults with major global companies and government organizations on projects worldwide. She is a Fellow of the Academies of Management and International Business and has received numerous international awards. Canada honored Professor Adler as one of the country’s top university professors and inducted her into the Royal Society of Canada. Adler is also a visual artist and has been an artist in residence at The Banff Centre. Her art exhibition, “Reality in Translation: Going Beyond the Dehydrated Language of Management” received worldwide press attention. Her paintings are held in private collections in Asia, the Americas, and Europe.
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