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Dr. Brett Bourbon
Leadership in a Nutshell
Dr. Brett Bourbon is an author, professor, consultant, and a single father with an eye for art and a heart for his students. He received his B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, where he studied medieval philosophy and theology. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he studied mod- ern philosophy and literature. Dr. Bourbon has been a professor at Stanford University and is now an English professor at the University of Dallas and a visiting Asso- ciate Professor in The Program of Literary Theory at the University of Lisbon. Provoke Magazine interviewed Dr. Bourbon about leadership, consulting, and art.
Professor Bourbon, you are the co-founder of the Masters of Leadership program at the University of Dallas. The program is now finishing its second year. What were you hoping to offer by developing the pro- gram?
Leadership is not simply a set of skills you can learn and then apply. It is a complex practice of judgment and discernment, tied to particular situations and activities. There are general principles, or rather heuristics, but there are still many different ways of leading, different ways of being successful. Leadership is really about the whole person. So, at the University of Dallas, we attempt to think about the whole person in our teaching. But we are concerned with fundamentals—the fundamentals of thinking well and incisively, of evaluating situations, of leading and helping others. We bring the wisdom of
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the humanities, centuries of experience and thinking about leadership and strategy, to bear upon the realities of modern business and life. When I was doing some consulting work in Silicon Valley a number of years ago, I found that what I was doing—analysis, problem-solving, and conceptualization, as well as the dialogue, communication, and writing—were the very same practices I was teaching my students in ad- vanced humanities courses. My colleague J. Lee Whittington and I began to talk about strategy and leadership and found we had a similar vision of how to teach leadership—and so we began to develop our program. It has worked very well.
Is there a key to leadership?
I had a great professor at Harvard, the philosopher Hilary Putnam, who commented that a philosophy that can fit in a nutshell belongs there. That is true of many things besides philosophy. I will say, however, that central to leading well, or just leading at all, are two things—responsibility and good judgment.
You work as a strategy and leadership consultant, but you also write about art, literature, and philosophy; that might seem to many an odd combination.
Art is about seeing with understanding; literature is about human relationships, and philosophy is about thinking well. All of these fuels and inform my under- standing of leadership and strategy. Life is varied and so are people; so am I. People don’t realize that you can learn more about leading people by reading Shakespeare and Jane Austen than you can from a book entitled ‘The 7 Important Qualities of a Leader,’ in which number 1 is ‘Be brave.’ No kidding. Thanks.
A lot of people don’t think of art and business as having much to do with each other.
That is true but unfortunate. Business involves people, working together, competing, struggling, making de- cisions, building structures, taking actions—the whole panoply of human living that is the focus of much art. But art is also a place where we question and consid- er how our lives make sense or do not, fit together or do not. More specifically, though, the problems of life and business often require that we think beyond our as- sumptions, to think laterally and outside expected cat- egories. Categories and silos, as business people like to call them, separate and isolate us.
Doesn’t higher education encourage specialization?
Yes, it does. One needs to specialize in some way. You want your neurosurgeon to be highly specialized—but she is still a doctor. The brain is not fully separable from the rest of the body. In many areas of life, specialization is deadening, factiously restrictive. A bureaucratic cul- ture, concerned with policing borders, has become too