Blending Art with Commerce to Expand Aesthetic Leadership: Insights from Steve Jobs and Jerry Garcia

Abstract

This paper aims to help expand and contribute to the understanding of the nascent Aesthetic Leadership theory, which recognizes the importance of both art and science in the practice of effective leadership. This paper also posits that in addition to drawing on both art and science to be effective, aesthetic leaders blend art with commerce in the products and services they create. Additionally the paper proposes that Aesthetic Leadership theory can be expanded with four antecedents from Shared Leadership: shared purpose, social support, voice and transparency. The paper achieves this by drawing from the experience of two nearly mythical Bay Area leaders-Steve Jobs at Apple, and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. After overcoming business struggles, both leaders and their businesses ultimately thrived in two dramatically different industries. They left behind one business that continues to be a driving force in changing the world-Apple; and another business-the Grateful Dead and Grateful Dead Productions, which mostly dissolved on the passing of Garcia, yet continues to provide a model for others in the still turbulent music industry.This paper begins with a brief biographical look at the surprising similarities in the backgrounds of Jobs and Garcia as well as their differences. Following this is a brief discussion of Shared Leadership theory with an emphasis on four of its elements that may be useful in expanding Aesthetic Leadership theory. Next is a discussion of the emerging Aesthetic Leadership theory, its characteristics and outcomes, followed by examples of those characteristics for both Jobs and Garcia. The paper concludes with implications of the insights gained from the examination of Jobs and Garcia as both Shared and Aesthetic leaders.A short history of Jerry GarciaJerry Garcia was born in San Francisco in 1942 and died there in 1995 of a heart attack shortly after his 53rd birthday. His childhood presented him with a number of challenges including the death by drowning of his father, and the loss of part of his right middle finger in a family accident. Garcia was raised primarily by his grandmother while his mother ran a local bar that catered to sailors. During his life he was married three times and fathered four daughters (Jackson, 1999).Garcia began his love affair with the guitar when he got his first one for his 15th birthday. He didn't finish high school but did attend classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, and this cemented his love of the visual arts in addition to his passion for music. His artwork has become highly valued, and interestingly, he used an Apple Macintosh for his early visual artistic pursuits (McNally, 2002).Garcia was strongly influenced by the Beat Generation writers, artists, and poets in the Bay Area, and he hung around local book and music stores in Palo Alto where the Beat scene was giving way to the folk scene and what would become the Hippie scene in the late 1960s. It was here that he began a lifetime relationship with poet Robert Hunter who became Garcia's lyricist (and who was also part of the federal government's LSD experiments in the early 1960s). Garcia was self-educated through voracious reading, and he was a seeker of higher consciousness, which was aided by the use of LSD while it was still legal (and even after) (McNally, 2002).Although Garcia resisted the label of leader, everyone else around him knew he was. Bass player Phil Lesh said that Garcia was "the undeclared leader" of the band (Lesh, 2005, p. 135). Another insider said, "Jerry's vote was greater than the sum of everybody else's" (in Jackson, 1999, p. 274). Garcia understood the charismatic power he had with others in the band and the Grateful Dead organization. He knew that as soon as he said anything, then that's the way it would be. So he often held back and avoided speaking up in order to encourage others to voice their views and to lead. Some who knew him suggest that he could shrug off his leadership role as mentioned above because he had absolute authority whenever he chose to exercise it (Barnes, 2011). …