Leadership, Art, and Responsibility

Can leadership be measured in blood?Leadership, Art, and Responsibility begins where strategies and tools fall silent: when leaders are drawn into a demanding encounter with poetry and music, where vulnerability, tragedy and moral ambiguity unsettle how responsibility is felt and power is exercised. Building on insights from neuroscience, philosophy and psychology, Julia Romanowska reveals how the shock and beauty of art can unsettle leaders’ judgement — and their very sense of who they are.At the centre of the book is the Shibboleth leadership programme, evaluated in a randomised study showing measurable changes in leaders, with effects extending to stress-related hormone levels among their employees.Uniting aesthetics, emotion and ethics, the book argues for leadership grounded in exposure rather than control, and in responsibility rather than technique. Romanowska terms this integration aestemethics and challenges reductive models of leadership training, opening another horizon for leadership.The book will interest scholars and students of leadership, management, organisational health psychology, philosophy and cultural studies, as well as practitioners concerned with ethically serious leadership and the human consequences of organisational life. It insists on responsibility when the dignity of human life is at stake — and consequences cannot be undone.