in the Jesuit Tradition - Rockhurst University

Portraits ofLEADERSHIPWhat art revealsabout leadersof the pastOur view of leadership today has been fashionedover several millennia of recordedhistory. In a single trip to an art museum — andtoday we will take a quick tour through KansasCity’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art — we canwitness the changing face of leadership throughthese centuries. Why? Because art of the pastcenturies once had the role that the media andthe Internet today have — it communicatedbetween leaders and their followers. In our tripthrough the art gallery today, we’ll discover thatleadership, like art, no longer plays the same rolethat it once did.Historically, communities needed a leaderto protect them. Often such protection meantleading the community into battle against othercommunities. A leader had to find some way toappeal to the community to follow into battleand, possibly, to death. But what cause couldmotivate anyone to follow a leader to death? Inour Executive Fellows Program, when we askedthe students, who themselves are leaders in theirorganizations, what might motivate people togive up their lives, they listed religion (or a placein the afterlife), the family, the community, thenation, independence, various ideologies, theirimage (or legacy), land and possessions.Figure 1: Roman, The Emperor Hadrian, ca. 130, Carrara marbleThrough art, leaders would legitimize theirroles by showing they understood and couldprotect these core values. In works of art, leaderswould have themselves represented with thesymbols and style embodying the core valueswith which a community identified.As we begin our tour of the gallery, weenter a corridor with Egyptian statuary.As we walk, there seems to be no change in thesymbols or style over 2,000 years in the officialart of Egypt. Why such little change? Thepharaoh was a god and the artists made thework the same for thousands of years to ensurethe continuation of his leadership for all eternity.The Egyptian leaders legitimized themselves bypaying strict homage to their ancestors by usingthe same symbols and styles that their ancestorshad used. By respecting their ancestors in theCourtesy of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo.(Purchase: Nelson Trust) 31-96By Michael Tansey, Ph.D.*Professor of Economics21 FALL 2001