Steve Jobs Isn't The Only Kind Of Artist Leader

Gianpiero Petriglieri, a psychiatrist and professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, wrote this after Steve Jobs passed away:

He may have been a genius and a charmer, but he was far from the person the leadership books tell you to be. And even the authors of those books are chiming into the global choir singing his praise. How did that happen? Why did his daily behavior not taint our admiration? Is the shock of his untimely death clouding our judgment, or should we cynically conclude that if you’re extremely successful you can get away with it? Not quite. The reason for much untainted admiration, I suspect, is that we are not mourning a leader or an innovator. Steve may have led and innovated his whole life but he was, ultimately, an artist. Those behaviors, which we may not condone in a leader, we forgive and even expect of an artist.

We need creative leaders in business. The lifespan of large companies will continue to shrink unless they learn to reinvent themselves. The lack of creativity is a problem — a 2010 IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number one leadership competency of the future – but what are we doing to address it? Unlike the Flynn effect, in which IQ rises with each successive generation, creativity scores among U.S. children have been falling since 1990. We need to develop a new generation of entrepreneurial leaders capable of combatting this challenge.
Just last week, Fortune observed the trend of more artist leaders:

John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and author of the book  Redesigning Leadership, predicts that artists will emerge as the new business leaders and cites RISD graduates Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, co-founders of Airbnb, as prominent examples. The author William Deresiewicz heralds reading as the most important task of any leader. John Coleman makes a compelling case for the role of poetry in business. Intel (INTC) named pop musician will.i.am as director of creative innovation. The World Economic Forum has been inviting arts and cultural leaders to its events for several years and this year added the ‘Role of the Arts’ to its Network of Global Agenda Councils.

But imitating Steve Jobs isn’t the answer. He was an outlier — a genius — and not the only type of artist.
We tend to glorify young prodigies, such as Jobs, who have a conceptual approach to creativity, and overlook those who take a different approach. A few weeks ago I wrote:

Experimental innovators create in a different manner. It takes time for them to hone their craft. They return to familiar ideas, trying to perfect them. While conceptual innovators are more deductive in their approach, experimental innovators are inductive and use their observational powers to infer and concoct hypothesize. They use trial-and-error, and it’s this process, not the final product, that fascinates them the most. They devote their life to learning, seeking answers to their unsolved questions.

Few people will be able to emulate Jobs successfully. To develop more artist leaders for the 21st century economy, we need to recognize the contribution of experimental innovation and encourage it — and failure — in our schools and workplaces.