Performing Arts and Post-Industrial Leadership

Victorian novelist George Eliot once said: "Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life." I think there is some real truth to that. Performance art in many ways can help us illustrate our thoughts and experiences in a way that normal words often fall short, making it easier for us to process our own lives and connect with each other's. So, let's go with that...

Over the past two weeks, your class readings have covered a variety of post-industrial/modern approaches, theories, and concepts of leadership, including:

• Transactional and Transformational Leadership
• Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership
• Neo-Charismatic Leadership
• Spiritual and Values-Based Leadership
• Authentic Leadership
• Reciprocal or Relational Leadership
• Servant Leadership

This doesn't cover all of them, but you get the point. So, in the spirit of exploring a bit more about the performing arts and what they have to do with humanizing leadership, your blog tasks for this week are as follows:

1. Choose at least three of the approaches/theories/concepts above. 
2. Find clips from movies or TV shows, songs, scenes from a play... some sort of example of performance art that illustrates leadership as described by your chosen approaches/theories/concepts.
3. Please share each example on your blog and explain for the rest of us how each relates to the selected approach/theory/concept. (This is also a good chance to further your blogging skills by figuring out how to embed videos, songs, and other media directly into your posts.)

You very well may have many leadership examples within one clip - that's totally okay. You can talk about more than one leadership example with each clip, but I'd still like you to have at least three clips. Also, if there is a particular clip you want to use, but can't find, please at least add some sort of photo or link, and then explain the scene in your narrative.

To give you a kick-start, please enjoy the movie trailer for one of my all-time favorite movies-with-leadership-lessons, (yes, I have a list,) Cool Runnings:

I look forward to your creativity and cleverness. I have no doubt you all are more than capable of providing a good level of sass on this one, too. :)

Happy hunting! See you Thursday.


- Mel