Leading Leaders Toward Masterpiece Creation
Translating Your Moral Vision into Business Reality Through Masterpiece Leadership
What if the critics and naysayers aren't a problem—but proof you're finally changing something that matters?
Charles Spinosa spent decades as both a Shakespeare professor and management consultant, giving him a unique lens on what separates true leadership from good management. His approach isn't about influence or operational excellence—it's about moral artistry. It’s about the courage to ask "what always goes wrong?" and then take the risks necessary to create something beautiful instead.
If you've ever felt like the person pointing out what's broken, if you have strong convictions about what's right even when it's unpopular, or if you're tired of managing around problems instead of solving them, this conversation will resonate deeply. Charles reveals why justice-sensitive and neurodivergent people often have a natural advantage in seeing what others miss—and how to turn that insight into transformational leadership. This episode will help you with leading leaders, and with seeing your own leadership development and career as a journey in masterpiece leadership.
Episode Highlights:
The two questions that define “masterpiece leadership:” What always goes wrong in your industry, and what would you love to do instead?
How to distinguish between dissenters (who sharpen your vision) and betrayers (who undermine it).
Why naysayers are often a sign that you’re taking the right kinds of risks.
The neurodivergent advantage: spotting injustices and anomalies others overlook.
Practical strategies for pushing through despair when moral risks don’t pay off right away.
Justice sensitivity as a leadership strength—and how it positions you to create businesses worth falling in love with.
Key Concepts Explored:
Passion as a defining force that fuels resilience and long-term transformation
The Two-Question Framework that separates masterpiece creators from managers
Moral risk-taking: why changing norms will always feel “wrong” at first
Betrayers vs. dissenters—and why dissent is essential for progress
Truth-seeking platforms that go beyond psychological safety to real intellectual conflict
Post-truth business culture and the limits of data without human truth
Justice sensitivity as a leadership advantage for transformational change
The neurodivergent edge in spotting anomalies and injustices others miss
Moral artistry: making solutions not just right, but beautiful
Fighting through despair and returning to core beliefs during setbacks
Awe and wonder as signals you’re on the right path
A systemic change strategy for moving from easy wins to bold transformations
Common Questions Answered:
How can you take moral risks without putting your career in jeopardy?
What separates managers from masterpiece creators?
How should leaders handle team resistance to moral change?
Notable Quotes:
"What do people say leadership is these days? They say leadership is influence. I'm saying no. Leadership is taking moral risks to establish morally distinctive masterpieces. So I'm overturning a lot of norms. Of course there are gonna people who hate that." – Charles Spinosa [00:34:19]
"So if I'm not hearing from naysayers, I might not be taking as much risk as I think I am, or as much risk as I could in pursuing a defining passion. That hearing from critics and naysayers says you're doing something different enough for people to have naysaying to do about it." – Sara Lobkovich [00:33:18]
"Always be sensitive to what's going wrong in your organization. And don't forget to ask what you would love instead. And try to make the solutions you offer beautiful." – Charles Spinosa [00:32:57]
"So if you're a leader, you are trying to make a moral vision come true. You want to make it profitable. You wanted people to see that what you see is the right way to do business in your industry, in your organization. And those hits are hits to your heart. They're not just hits to the bottom line. And you take three hits to the heart — bam, bam, bam — in a row. My experience is that's very hard." – Charles Spinosa [00:09:56]
"The thing to do is to ask yourself, What do I believe to be true? What do I believe to be true about my customers? Most importantly, what do I believe to be true about my employees? What do I believe to be true about me?" – Charles Spinosa [00:10:22]
"Hearing from critics and naysayers says you're doing something different enough for people to have naysaying to do about it." – Sara Lobkovich [00:33:40]
Chapters:
[00:00:00] Introduction to Masterpiece Leadership and Moral Vision
[00:02:00] Defining Leading Leaders
[00:03:00] The Masterpiece Creation Framework: What Always Goes Wrong?
[00:04:00] Moral Risk-Taking: Building Systematic Change
[00:05:00] The Importance of Leading Leaders in Organizations
[00:07:00] Anita Roddick and The Body Shop: When Events Force Bigger Risks
[00:09:00] Fighting Through Despair: When Moral Visions Take Hits
[00:10:00] Masterpiece Leadership Principles for Moral Risk-Taking
[00:14:00] Real-World Examples of Masterpiece Leadership
[00:16:00] The Problem with Post-Truth Business Culture
[00:17:00] Betrayers vs. Dissenters: Building Truth-Seeking Teams
[00:19:00] Strategies for Leading Leaders Effectively
[00:21:00] Justice Sensitivity as Leadership Strength
[00:23:00] Overcoming Challenges in Masterpiece Leadership
[00:25:00] Defining Passion and the Power of Awe and Wonder
[00:26:00] The Story That Made You: Finding Your Core Virtue
[00:28:00] Building a Culture of Masterpiece Leadership
[00:29:00] The Neurodivergent Advantage: Seeing Anomalies Others Miss
[00:30:00] Charles's Personal Story: From Dyslexia to Philosophy Professor
[00:32:00] Avoiding Neurodivergent Snobbery While Leveraging Differences
[00:33:00] Next Steps for Aspiring Leading Leaders in Business Reality
[00:34:00] Why Critics Mean You're Changing Something Important
[00:35:00] Closing Thoughts on Masterpiece Leadership and Leading Leaders
Guest Information:
Charles Spinosa is a management consultant with 28 years of experience working with Fortune 100 companies and startups across North America, Europe, and Latin America. He brings a unique philosophical perspective to business leadership, having started his career as a Shakespeare professor at UC Berkeley studying "defining passions" in literature before transitioning into consulting work focused on leadership development, culture change, and innovation.
Charles is the author of "Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities about Moral Risk-Taking," which challenges conventional wisdom about influence-based leadership. As someone who is neurodivergent and dyslexic, he advocates for leaders who see anomalies and injustices that others miss, helping them transform moral vision into business reality through systematic risk-taking and what he calls "moral artistry."
His work centers on helping leaders move beyond managing around problems to creating something genuinely beautiful and transformative, even when facing resistance from teams, boards, and entire industries.
Connect with Zeph:
LinkedIn: Charles Spinosa
Book: "Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities about Moral Risk-Taking" available wherever books are sold
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Upcoming Events:
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Find full show notes and the episode transcript via https://findrc.co/thinkydoers.
Full Episode Transcript:
Sara: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Thinkydoers. I'm your host, Sara Lobkovich. I'm a strategy coach and an OKR expert, and I'm here for the strategic thinkers, the behind-the-scenes force multipliers, and anyone else who has ever felt like a square peg in mainstream business culture. If you're wired for change, but struggle with organizational friction, moving goalposts, or feeling like you're wired a little differently than your leaders, colleagues, and clients — this show is for you. Here, we explore how to move from insight to impact, turning your strategic vision into undeniable outcomes that actually really matter. Today, I'm having a conversation with someone whose work immediately grabbed my attention because of how he thinks about leadership as moral courage: charles Spinosa, author of Leadership as [00:01:00] Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn From the Humanities About Moral Risk Taking. When Charles and I first connected, what struck me was his approach. He helps leaders identify what always goes wrong in their industry and then asks hard questions about how it might be done differently. As someone who's spent my career advocating for the right thing in rooms full of people who didn't believe there was a right thing, his approach to leadership and this work resonated very deeply with me. In this episode, we explore a concept of defining passion. We discuss betrayers versus dissenters and different ways of seeing the world that contribute to meaningful change. Alright, now let's get into the conversation with Charles Spinosa.
Sara: Charles, welcome to Thinkydoers. I'm so excited to have you here today. I'd love to have you just [00:02:00] introduce yourself. Tell me who you are and what you do.
Charles: Thank you. I'm Charles Spinosa.
My first book, which I wrote back in 1997, was on innovation and how you can innovate in business, in politics, and in culture,I've worked with Fortune 100 companies and with startups, and I've worked a lot in Europe, in the UK, Ireland, in US, Canada, and Latin America.
Sara: My listeners are gonna know exactly why — why I had to have you on the episode after that introduction.
Charles: The central idea of this book is Leadership as masterpiece creation, which resonated immediately with me as someone who ultimately opted out of being an employee, in part because of my own defining passion and the strength of it, and feeling a lack of defining passion in not only myself in earlier career, but also in a lot of the leaders that I worked for and with. But let's break that down a [00:03:00] little bit. For folks who are hearing that for the first time, how would you explain what makes a business decision or leadership choice masterpiece creation versus just good management?
When people ask me about the book on, podcasts like this, they frequently say, "Give me the book in three or four questions." And I've developed the answer for that. And the first question that I pose is the answer to your question: a leader who wants to create a masterpiece asks, or has someone like me ask, " What always goes wrong in your business, or what always goes wrong in your industry?" And leaders who are already thinking about creating masterpieces, and that I would say is about 90% of the leaders I have run into.
Number one, I try to help the leader see that she or he is an artist and is indeed creating something new and is making [00:04:00] better world. That's generally not so hard. So then it becomes a matter of getting your moral risks lined up, and you line them up essentially so you can find out who the people are who are gonna betray you. And if you can neutralize the betrayers, that's essentially what the road is of successful moral change. So the first thing that most of them do is announce the change they wanna make in the business, in the industry. And right there, they're gonna get a bunch of naysayers, and they're gonna be among their senior team. And you're also gonna get some people that are very positive, but just think it's a matter of window dressing thing. It's a matter of public relations. You don't really mean it; you mean you're gonna make it look that way. The leader that we write about most extensively in the book is Julia Robertson. And she ran a recruitment company for temporary [00:05:00] workers. And she wanted to make it sort of high road. That is, they were gonna get temporary workers where the places that they put the workers wanted to develop the workers, and workers, therefore, who wanted to go the extra mile, for, the places they worked for. Frequently in the recruitment industry in the 2010s and earlier, the idea was if you were getting temp workers, you'd assume that 30% of them were not gonna do work for you. And you were not gonna treat them well, and you just wanted to get them out. The ones that you were lucky with, you just considered lucky. You weren't gonna try to develop them. Julie Robertson believed that was wrong. The first thing she did was announce that she wanted to do that, and she wanted to have people making keep promises inside her organization. And everybody thought it was window dressing. Nobody thought that if, you know, if they made a bold promise and didn't keep it, she was gonna fire them. But they [00:06:00] thought it was great, and they talked about it, and they got out in the press and everything. Well, the person that turned out she was thinking of and grooming as the person that would succeed her broke the promise, broke it rather dramatically, and she had to terminate that person rather dramatically and make it real. And that's the first thing. You need to announce what you're about and do something to make it real. Now, I say you choose the easiest thing, so making and keeping promises was the easiest thing for Julia Robertson to bring about. The next thing was not continuing to work with clients who were not gonna develop people. Nobody believed that she was gonna do that. That was the next biggest risk. She had to do that, and she had to go through the same thing of being betrayed by somebody. The third thing was getting rid of great financing in her industry. I won't describe that, but you take your smallest risk first, and you move to the next largest, then you move to your largest. Now, it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes events conspire to force you to take a larger [00:07:00] risk earlier on. The Anita Roddick story is a great story that way. You know, you can't always choose when your risks are. Anita Roddick created her first store — This is the woman who created the Body Shop. And the whole point of the Body Shop was to make buying skincare products and cosmetics enjoyable and fun, and learn at the same time how to take care of your body, as opposed to cosmetic industry where buying cosmetics was out of anxiety that you don't look good, and hoping that some product is gonna make you look better. She wanted to turn that around. She started the store in Brighton. And it was successful, and it was a family business. Her husband was also her CFO. He was the one that got the loans to start the business. He was really happy when they started making a profit, but the industry just looked down on and said, "You know, well, it's just selling to hippie women. We can write that off. It doesn't really have anything to do with anybody who actually cares about beauty." And she was desperate to change that, and [00:08:00] that was when her first big moral risk came. She'd beenvery vocal against the industry. That was her first moral risk. Her second moral risk was asking her husband and family if she could go get the money to start growing the business. And they said, "Absolutely not, let's try to grow organically." He left town on a business trip and she sold half the shares from the company to get the money to start the second store. It's, you know, breathtaking moral risk. She could have destroyed the family, let alone the business. He came back, he saw how much she loved growing the business, how much she was making the second store successful, and he joined up. And so it worked. And the Body Shop became one of the largest international retailers out of the UK ever. But we can't always choose the timing of our moral risks. But I always advise: small one first, find out who's gonna betray you, manage that betrayal; next one, find out who's gonna betray you, manage the betrayal, and so on. And that is how you can do this even though it goes and gets [00:09:00] incentives. I find, quite frankly, in dealing with clients this week, I find it easy for them to bite the bullet on incentives and actually easy for them because they're doing the right thing to inspire a team to forego incentives for a while. They call it "purpose-driven." Usually the purposes are not so clear as the off-the-shelf purposes people choose. This is a deeply felt purpose. We should do it this way. This is the right thing. Not everybody has to do it. However, you're able to get people inspired, it's the smaller hits, as you say, "We didn't make the amount of money we made." These are passionate leaders who do this, and they can fall into despair. And so I have to say for the past two weeks, my masterpiece leaders that I've been working with, I've been helping them fight through the despair, and that's the harder thing. And how do you fight through despair?
So if you're a leader, you are trying to make a moral vision [00:10:00] come true. You want to make it profitable. You wanted people to see that what you see is the right way to do business in your industry, in your organization. And those hits are hits to your heart. They're not just hits to the bottom line. And you take three hits to the heart — bam, bam, bam — in a row. My experience is that's very hard. The thing to do is to ask yourself, What do I believe to be true? What do I believe to be true about my customers? Most importantly, what do I believe to be true about my employees? What do I believe to be true about me? And in answering those questions, you're gonna find out that what you believe to be true when you saw this thing that was done that was wrong, still is wrong. It still is wrong to be exploiting your loyal customers for the sake of getting new customers, even if the first twist or turn that you made didn't work. It still is [00:11:00] wrong to be recruiting people and setting them out on jobs where they're gonna be abused. It still is, even though you didn't find the right way to make the adjustment. So once you have that, once you say, "It still is wrong, I just didn't come up with the ingenious way to do it,” well, you're already on the track. And the second thing is give yourself a chance to come up with your own idea of what to do it. We're taught all the time by people like me, get the team together, get the team brainstorming together. And if you're that kind of leader, that's fine. But for me, for your heart's sake, come up with at least the rough idea of a solution yourself. Why that? Because you want to get yourself feeling like you can do it. You wanna get yourself out of the despair. Because the worst thing that you can do, and this is what I've seen, is you gather your team to brainstorm, but you're [00:12:00] still sort of having despair, and that gets communicated to them immediately. And then you have not only yourself in despair, you have your senior team in despair. And then pulling them out is that much harder. So the pitfall, once you're able to gear yourself up to face the fact, we're not gonna be able to earn the profits right away that we wanted to earn. We'll take a couple of hits on bonuses, you announced ahead of time that you're gonna do it. You don't let this happen by surprise. Just the way people are right now investing in AI like crazy. They're telling their investors, "We're investing in AI like crazy right now. You're not gonna see the payoff tomorrow.” And investors are pretty much able to handle that. You tell them you'll have some hits. Despair is the main thing to worry about.
Sara: One of the things that I love in your answer to despair is that the place that you go to heal hits to the heart is. What do I believe to be true about humans?
I really love that all of the examples that [00:13:00] you gave of "what do I believe to be true" were about humans.
Charles: I love what you're saying. You're bringing out the philosopher in me. Chapter five of the book is all about, what you're speaking about. And how shall I put it? We today look for data. We don't ask what's true about employees. We don't ask what's true about customers. We ask instead, what's the data showing? And it's an aggregate — a data from all these customers. I mean, we can segment it a little bit here, here, here, but so long as you're asking what does the data show, you're almost always asking what does my favorite interpretation of the data show. Data doesn't talk back. That's a real problem. Whereas customers do. Employees do. And what happens is, philosophically, when you ask what does the data show, you're almost always caught inside your head. You think you're getting outta your head because you're talking the data. But data is nothing without the [00:14:00] interpretation. And you live inside your own interpretations and you never get outside them. And that's where I see business today. That is post-truth Inside the business world. One of my favorite things is to take senior teams and have them speak, first of all, to their raving fan customers. Because their raving fan customers are gonna tell them things that are surprising. Now, why do I take them to raving fan customers? Because, believe it or not, it's usually pretty scary for senior leaders to go talk to customers. They're mostly worried about board members, and board members give them a hard time. There's good reason for them to be worried about board members. But then to go and face this with my customers. It's like double duty. Take them to the raving paying customers. They'll learn something new from their raving paying customers. But the point is that the raving paying customers have an inner truth, and that's what they're trying to find out. They're not just trying to get some more data. Because the data ends up to be changing. Unless you can anchor the data in what [00:15:00] you believe is the inner truth of your customer's, inner truth of your employees. It's constantly switching around. And it switches with one fad, another fad, and another fad, and you can race to keep up with the fads. And there's some businesses that actually do that. They're breathless. They're amazing to me that they can just keep up and keep going, but they never create masterpieces. They never are businesses that the leaders can actually fall in love with themselves. This is how to get back from a post-truth world to a truth world, where you're asking about the inner truth of people. And that's where truth lies. It doesn't lie so much in the data.
Sara: The point of view I have on data is that the role that doing data work plays in the organization is primarily to identify the small number of facts that we actually have to share to be able to work together. So the work that I do in objective quantification and data-driving is not about the data. It's about the [00:16:00] alignment on a small number of what's most important things that help us discuss what we're learning and whether we are learning toward our shared purpose. So that just gives me goosebumps. That's so cool.
Charles: I have a son who loves being data-driven, and I keep on telling him, "Go talk to at least two or three customers. See if what you're finding makes sense to them, or if you can make sense of them on the basis of what you're finding.” I love people who talk back. that's important here.
Sara: There's one thing I wanna loop back to quick and then I wanna move on. You mentioned betrayers or the role of betrayers. A lot of the folks in my audience might be characterized as likely dissenters. So can you tell me a little bit, for leaders, about the difference between betrayers and dissenters?
Charles: Dissenters are not betrayers. Dissenters of people trying to speak truth to power. And if you show them that you care about the truth that they're speaking and you wanna [00:17:00] learn with them, they'll come along even if you don't convince them you're right. If you show them that you are a truth seeker and that you've been working hard, and you believe what you believe, you're both then in the same business. You're both then in the truth-seeking business and you're in the same truth-seeking about this particular industry, these particular customers. Those are people that you can disagree with. Betrayers are the ones who tell you that you're genius, who tell you that everything you say is God's truth and beautiful. And who think that's the way you talk about things that are window dressing, that are just marketing, that are things for external audiences that we don't really believe in our hearts. And those are the people who are gonna seem like they're strong backers and then they're not gonna go the extra mile that you need them to go to change the moral norms inside your company. They're not gonna believe you really mean it. And in fact, virtually every CEO or leader I know that's created a distinctive [00:18:00] masterpiece has had at least one who seemed like a very strong backer, who's who then said, "You didn't really mean this. You didn't really mean we were gonna take this. You didn't really mean we were gonna fight the insurance company that actually pays us tooth and nail over this patient. You didn't mean that." Yeah, I did. And not only are we gonna do it, you're gonna do it. And if you're not gonna do it, you have to find the exit.
Sara: Mm-hmm.
Charles: I suspect your listeners run into a number of things. First of all, they're testing. When they say, "That doesn't sound right," it's not because they want to do the normal thing over and over again. It's because it doesn't sound right. They wanna talk about the reasons. They wanna find out that you're a truth seeker and truths sayer. That's why I say don't go into brainstorming sessions right away without having given it some thought. What do I think the right answer is? You don't have to be certain you've got the right answer. You have given it thought. They need to hear: this is what I've been thinking, this is what I'm seeing. What are you thinking? What are you seeing? That's a fun conversation. [00:19:00] The second thing is people who do have new insights. You know what's really hard? We live in a world where people say we should create psychological safety so everybody can share their beliefs. I run into all sorts of people who actually work hard to generate new beliefs and are looking for a platform where they can speak their beliefs. If you're a truth seeker, if you're a creative, you are looking for that platform. And you don't have to find someone that's gonna go along with you all the time. You don't have to go along with somebody that's gonna agree with you all the time. You don't have to go along with somebody that thanks you all the time. So long as you have that platform where you are listened to, even if your views are rejected, then you know you've got a platform where you can speak again and again and again and again. And that is the kind of platform that creates a masterpiece business. That's the kind of platform I look for. That's the kind of platform I advise people to go into. I coach some people who are on senior teams who are told over and over and over [00:20:00] again that they are wrong, that the CEO's not gonna go along. I'm coaching with a CFO regularly. She loves the fact that she has the platform and she can speak, and even if they get into a fight, she can speak again and again and again. We want a truth-seeking platform. Doesn't have to be agreement. Doesn't have to be all nice words. They're not nice words that are uttered back and forth. But it has to be one where the whole ethos of the senior team, and the company, if possible, is speak what you believe. Let's, argue over it. Then we make a decision.
Sara: one of the things that I keep thinking about while you're talking and while we're talking about moral risk and just moral decision-making — my audience probably skews high on the trait of justice sensitivity or on that wiring. So folks who have a really strong personal sense of right and wrong [00:21:00] and who maintain that sense even when it's unpopular. What would you tell people who struggle with justice sensitivity at work, who may have had career setbacks because of their wiring for justice and what's right and wrong, which isn't always welcome in a workplace setting?
Charles: You know, our sense of right and wrong has changed quite a bit over history. Our sense of right and wrong is constantly changing, constantly evolving, and we're not there yet. We're not done. Human history is not done. So the first thing is, it's wise not to be too certain about it, to realize that we're history makers. And that what we consider right and wrong today might not be. And to see it as something that we should lose the certainty. That doesn't mean we give up our sense of what's right and wrong. We try to fight for what we believe is right and wrong, but we don't believe that our enemies are just simply evil.
Sara: Mm-hmm.
Charles: That's the first thing. The second thing is I [00:22:00] consider fairness and justice, one of the most important virtues, but that doesn't mean I should forget the others. Faith, courage, wisdom, friendship, those are important too. And we have to put our sense of justice in terms of those.I find the people who care a lot about fairness and justice, for me, a lot of them care also about friendship. If you care about that, cultivate that one too. It'll make you stronger. It'll make you more powerful. Some of them care about wisdom. Take the historical position. Ask yourself: what is a good life? Is a good life simply a life where everybody's treated fairly? Is that really a good life? Or is that something that doesn't have the kind of greatness you want, it doesn't have the kind of love you want? So those are the concerns I bring to this. And I think when you start bringing those concerns in, there's a space where you can try to do the right thing. But [00:23:00] ultimately, this is what I want. I talk about business leaders and the choices we make in business — choices for artistry. I consider this book the — look at the painting on the cover of it — It's about moral artistry. The question then is, how can you make the just thing that ought to be done beautiful? And that's the question that when I ask people what would they love to do instead I ask what they would love to do instead. I don't ask what would be the right thing to do instead. The right thing to do, if we're exploiting. Loyal customers and offering gimmicky deals to new customers, would be to simply stop doing it. The right thing to do, if we're starting to appeal to the nastiest desires of young men to create a viable video game would be just to stop doing it. But that causes so much else loss in life. What would be the right thing to do that's also beautiful, and how do we make it beautiful? That's ultimately where I [00:24:00] tried to move people. I think if you start asking that and you lose the certainty that we've got this thing that is absolutely right, that we have to change tomorrow, we then have a richer platform on which to make our case and succeed.
Sara: this was part of the conversation we had in our initial screening call, that made me so excited to speak with you. In our first call you mentioned that you look for awe and wonder as signals that you're onto something. The thing that the circles around with for me, as someone who also coaches people, is I see, an epidemic of people who are out of touch with their intrinsic motivation, or who aren't operating right now with a defining purpose. I really like your concept. Of the defining passion is accessible. it doesn't have to be some big, huge, enormous kind of passion [00:25:00] or world changing thing, I just really think that it's that concept of the defining passion and looking for awe and wonder as signals that you're onto something, right? Let's us take stock and say, have I been experiencing awe and wonder? If not, where might I increase that or where might I find that? And what does that tell me about my defining passion?
Charles: I love what you're saying for a couple of reasons. First of all, the notion of defining passion, philosophically, comes from a certain reading of Kierkegaard. I remember I was taught Kierkegaard by one of the best scholars in the world. He would argue in class that your defining passion could be your love of your pet.
Sara: Hmm.
Charles: I always rebelled against that. He and I would go back and forth. I always wanted it to be thicker than that. I don't know that I ever developed a knockdown argument. It was Bert Dreyfus, the professor. He was a Berkeley professor, very [00:26:00] famous. However, I'm convinced that I don't necessarily know better, but I can tell you where I start with people in coaching. I asked them to tell me the story that made them who they are.
Sara: Hmm.
Charles: For most people, it's a story that took place as they were growing up in their childhood. They tell the story and I ask them: what is the most important virtue that you've developed in saying who you are? Now, if you have a lot of listeners who really care about justice, they probably had a story from their past where doing the just thing, doing the right thing and standing for it fiercely enabled them to succeed, enabled them to get a sense of themselves. And now they're fairness doers. you can probably look at me and say his story in his past was something where he became an explainer, a fierce explainer. That's me. The interesting thing is, when you're coaching people, those stories sort of have a life. They hit a plateau. People take [00:27:00] advantage of us because of our virtue. So if you're somebody that's known to do the right thing in business or the fair thing in business, anytime there's an inequity, you're gonna be thrown into, "Go fix this. Go fix that. Go fix the other thing." And you become narrow. And people think they're actually giving you something that appeals to your unique ability and giving you exactly what you want. Whereas we wanna grow in life. We don't want to just get inside of a narrow thing. I try to help people see how their story is not joined up to the world they're living in. And it's because of [00:32:00] their virtues, not their vices. It's because of what they've done right. What they've done right is narrowing them. And then ask them to look for other virtues that they have. That's what I was doing with your listeners over that justice issue. You have friends, I'm sure if you care about justice. Or if you don't have friends, you have moments where you seek wisdom, express wisdom. If not that, certainly in justice there are moments where you've cultivated courage courage and could [00:28:00] cultivate that in others. And I think most of us are susceptible to moments of beauty and would like to enlarge on those. And that those are calling on other virtues and enriching ourselves that way. And that's what happens when I think when you get stuck in your coaching. That's what I advise people to do. And how do you find your other virtues? Well, stop doing what you currently are doing and look around. When people throw you into, "Go solve this one, go solve that one, go solve that one," ask people to solve it themselves and ask where you go to advise them that you don't just step in and do it yourself, and you'll discover you have other virtues. And those are the things to build the second round of who you are out of.
Sara: Yeah,
Charles: And you'll make yourself more beautiful in the process.
Sara: One of the other things I come back to is a lot of my listeners are neurodivergent or wired differently. A lot of us may have had adverse career experiences as a result, but [00:29:00] when I read your work, I think about the potential that neurodivergent people and people from different cultural backgrounds, people who you know aren't from mainstream business culture, the potential that we all have in terms of creating the kind of masterpieces that you're talking about, because of the way that we see the world. Is there anything that you would, do or say to encourage. Especially neurodivergent people who have had adverse career experiences to reconsider their potential as masterpiece creators?
Charles: Oh, I was gonna say the opposite. Obviously I'm neurodivergent. I just don't want us to become snobs. Look, if you're neurodivergent, you are probably can see far more easily than other people what always goes wrong someplace. You see it in your own life. You know what always goes wrong? I'm [00:30:00] incredibly dyslexic. My foundational story was being, you know, back in dinosaur days in the sixties. I was put in the classes for people that were mentally retarded. That's how we called it then. And it took me three years to fight my way out of it for people to realize that, in the end, I could actually do algebra. So yeah, it's terribly scarring, but it's out of that that you get to see. You have a much clearer vision of where things don't add up in the world. You see, you were mistreated for reasons that were irrelevant. That's an anomaly. You've got that experience of anomaly. We just have to be careful. My view is we have to become careful of not being snobs because we are better at seeing anomalies than other people who just fit in with all the norms and think that all the norms lead to a beautiful life. They're the ones who are suffering more than I think most of us are. I can [00:31:00] remember one boy who was treated the same way I did and didn't climb out. As I think about it back in the past, that was horrific. But if you're there listening now, got an incredible advantage. The professor I mentioned who was my mentor, Hubert Dreyfus, very famous philosopher at UC Berkeley, he was as dyslexic as I was. Now you think: here we are dyslexic, reading's our problem, we're university professors. We can fight back, we can compensate, we can find ways. We see things that other people don't see, and that becomes the basis of our success. And that's what I mean. You find a platform where people are gonna listen to what's different and you might not get all the normal goods of that platform, but so long as you get your voice, that's what you need. And don't become a neurodivergent snob.
It doesn't help anyone.
[00:32:00] Well, I honestly don't know. I just think what you're not gonna be able to do if you do that is you're not gonna be able to gather the people around you to create a masterpiece. And we have to gather the people around us to create masterpieces. So if your readers are looking at me and thinking, was he in his life ever a neurodivergent snob? Well, you all know the answer to that. And don't be. You don't get to gather the people around you need. I think that if we focus on ourselves the right way, we can turn our neurodivergence into an advantage. Some of you are probably thinking, "You don't see how deep a problem it is." I might not for some of you. But boy, I was hammered. I was hammered very, very hard. And I might not see how deep a problem it is, but I can see that it is a problem that we can recover from and make into a huge advantage.
Sara: if people remember nothing else from this conversation, what would you like people to take away from our conversation today?
Charles: Always be sensitive to what's going wrong in your [00:33:00] organization. And don't forget to ask what you would love instead. And try to make the solutions you offer beautiful.
Sara: I love it. The one big takeaway that I drew a bunch of circles around in my notes is — seeing naysayers as a sign of progress. So if I'm not hearing from naysayers, I might not be taking as much risk as I think I am, or as much risk as I could in pursuing a, defining passion. That hearing from critics and naysayers says you're doing something different enough for people to have naysaying to do about it.
Charles: Do you wanna put that even more strongly?
Sara: I'm all ears.
Charles: Well, I try not to do this, but you're absolutely right. I mean, the fact of the matter is, it's more than naysayers. You're changing norms, you're changing what people consider the right. You're gonna have some haters.
Sara: Mm-hmm.
Charles: The first two Amazon reviews of [00:34:00] my book that came out just days after the book came out. Nobody could read the book that fast. They were two people that rated it number one. They are my two haters. If you're trying to overturn norms — I'm over trying to overturn a lot of the norms of consulting.
Sara: Mm-hmm.
Charles: And of leadership. What do people say leadership is these days? They say leadership is influence. I'm saying no. Leadership is taking moral risks to establish morally distinctive masterpieces. So I'm overturning a lot of norms. Of course there are gonna people who hate that. There are virtually haters. You've managed to handle them. That's one of your advantages.
Sara: All right. If people want to hear more about your work, obviously the book, wherever books are sold, Leadership is Masterpiece Creation: What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities About Moral Risk Taking. Where else can people find you if they have questions or wanna connect?
Charles: I would say the [00:35:00] easiest place to find me is LinkedIn. It's Charles Spinosa. . I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedInand I do respond. So please write me and let me know any comments you have about this.
Sara: Awesome. Well. Thank you so much, Charles. This has been a wonderful conversation. I'm so delighted you were able to make time and I look forward to keeping in touch.
Charles: Thank you. I am very, very grateful. Gratitude is one of the things the book is about, and this has been really, really wonderful. Thank you for tuning in so well to the book and really the heart behind the book, which is what I think you've gotten beautifully. Thank you and I,thank your listeners for their attention.
Sara: Charles' point about naysayers being a side of progress really stayed with me. Another thing he said in the prep call we had was that the first thing readers tell him isn't just that they love his framework or they enjoy the philosophy, but that "Reading your book [00:36:00] gave me permission to change my company the way I always wanted to." Those inner voices of wisdom are there and I feel really grateful to intersect with folks like Charles who fan that flame. And don't forget my key takeaway: if you're not getting pushback, you might not be taking the moral risks that actually create real change. You can find Charles Spinosa on LinkedIn — just search for him there. He also mentioned that he responds to messages, so if this conversation sparked questions for you, reach out to him directly. If you have questions, suggestions, or would like to connect, you can always find me at saralobkovich.com or on any social media platform as Sara Lobkovich. And if you're interested in exploring your own strategic leadership journey, check out my resources at findrc.co. If you haven't already, please subscribe to Thinkydoers wherever you listen to podcasts. Leave us a review and share [00:37:00] this episode with your network. These conversations really matter, and they reach more people when you help spread and amplify them. Until next time.
Podcast promotional graphic for Thinkydoers Episode 48. Title text reads: “Leadership as Masterpiece Creation: Translating Your Moral Vision into Business Reality.” On the left is host Sara Lobkovich, smiling with curled shoulder-length hair, wearing a dark blazer and teal blouse, seated in front of a brick wall. Her name is labeled “Sara Lobkovich, Host.” On the right is guest Charles Spinosa, smiling in a light purple plaid blazer and white shirt, standing in front of a bookshelf. His name is labeled “With Charles Spinosa.” The Thinkydoers logo and “Episode 48” appear at the top.
