Herbert Seifter is known for his experiences with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, as a proof of management and leadership excellence of being the world first conductor-less Orchestra.
Here I would like to refer to a recent TED talk , where he extends the idea:.
… so I learned a ton of things during my time with Orpheus.
One is maybe the most important is just what it means to have an ensemble collaboration where work moves forward through a steady flow of trust, mutual respect, transparency, real-time feedback, a really passionate commitment to what it was that was being created, and then bringing that to the audience.
I learned in working with this or this organization which was really kind of a model of a flat organization where the the power and the responsibility was in the hands of the people making the music, doing the work that leads to some remarkable results. So it leads to really high performance teams that can do amazing things it leads to remarkable degrees of innovation. It becomes a different altogether, different model of leadership that emerges as the roles change and rotate and everybody is involved in doing that you know. I used to think of leadership as a process of making a bunch of decisions and choices that would be really key to benefit the the organization and all the people in it and so forth, and what I learned through my experience at Orpheus is that it’s not really so much about making decisions. I was the “decision maker of Last Resort” but I could judge my effectiveness as a CEO in inverse proportion to the number of decisions I actually made.
… I began to realize that there was more going on here than a remarkable Orchestra working in a very unusual way that there was something happening which we came to call Arts based learning what I meant was that the artistic skills and processes and experiences could be used to help teach and transform individuals and organizations across a really wide range of activity and endeavor
“we help people to leave behind their own self-limiting beliefs, to suspend their disbelief in themselves and just to go with what they saw.”
“the Arts represent a kind of a universal connector we’re talking about connecting the dots the Arts creativity they come from a spark within us that we all as humans have every one of us has the ability to do this, but we can take it in any direction and the arts will allow us, they’ll empower us, they’ll suggest and enable us to connect all over the place …”
“what I’ve learned is that you can teach just about anybody just about anything with just about any art form which is kind of amazing if you think about it ….”
Surtil : 