Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, and Haridimos Tsoukas tell us that today's business leaders are the misunderstood moral artists of our time. When these leaders follow their instincts, they create morally distinctive organizations that shift moral orders in their industries and communities. Anita Roddick did that with The Body Shop where she created an organization devoted to fun, compassion, and drawing on women's traditional care for their bodies. The Body Shop displaced the moral order of the beauty business focused on creating anxiety in women over looking young. Jeff Bezos did something similar in creating a relentless, everything store that saved the traditional trust of bricks-and-mortar retail buyers and sellers and brought us the new moral norm of hyper-convenience. (We now consider it right to expect hyper-convenience.)

Such leaders take moral risks to achieve such morally distinctive masterpieces. The book uses as examples Winston Churchill in 1940, Madam C. J. Walker, Anita Roddick, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Julia Robertson (of Impellam), and, as a negative case, Andrew Fastow of Enron. To explain the moral imagination behind moral risk-taking, the authors draw illuminatingly on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bernard Williams, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli.

The book gives both conceptual and practical frameworks for creating business masterpieces. Based on more than 28 years of management consulting and business education (as well as teaching in the humanities), the authors turn on its head the notion that business leaders live lives dedicated only to higher growth, higher profits, and popular social purposes.

Business leaders seek to create, instead, an economy of gratitude with distinctive masterpieces. Leadership as Masterpiece Creation is an invaluable guide for leaders of every stripe who wish to live and act with moral imagination. Chris Walsh beautifully narrates the book. Thanks go to Ruth Davis for managing its production.