Taking the Lead


Last Wednesday, January 18, I visited the Edward Saïd Business School at Oxford University with one of my regular collaborators, Dr Toby Young. We were appearing as guests speakers in the School’s lunchtime series entitled Engaging with the Humanities. Among other speakers this term are Dr Ben Morgan (on how Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate the form, survival and collapse of all kinds of communities – national, political and domestic) and Pegram Harrison (on synchronicity as a key to high performance in teams).

We were encouraged to talk about leadership in general terms, but soon focussed on the unusual fluidity of the system that has developed to produce such a complex art-form as opera. The range and number of skills and contributors to the finished product requires a strongly-defined but flexible system in which different functions can take the lead at different moments.

We chose to illustrate the issue of leadership at a micro-level by performing Schubert’s An die Musik, Toby accompanying me on a piano suitably graffitti-d with inspiring quotes. Musicians often speak of the negotiations that go on between players or singers in rehearsal or performance. While many audience members understand the principle, it is always interesting for them to see and hear this in action. It is also a pleasure for us to find sympathetic listeners in a business world that sometimes appears exclusively concerned with tangible assets at the expense of the intangibles in which we deal. How appropriate, then, to find on the side of the piano, these words of Winston Churchill’s.