Leadership, Art, and Responsibility

The Shibboleth Effect
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. Roman