An Economy of Dignity

Exploring the Origins of Gianpiero Petriglieri's Search for Humanistic Leadership

Rosemary Morrison

Motoko Kamada

Ulf Marhenke

, and 2 others

Aug 14, 2024

Gianpiero Petriglieri, at work. Credit: Wojtek Materka.

A Paradigmatic Shift in the Definition of Leadership

When a doctor bent on healing and trained as a psychiatrist enters the world of business, one would anticipate at least some degree of dissonance.

But at a moment in history when uncertainty, disruption and alienation permeate the business landscape, that entrance and the insights offered by such a person could well prove to resonate with the zeitgeist in unexpected and profound ways.

So it has been for Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organisational behaviour at INSEAD and an expert on leadership and learning in the workplace.

Petriglieri has long been chiseling away at the conventional edifice of business and working to re-envision and restructure it in humane ways.

His research can best be described as a sustained effort to forward a paradigmatic shift in the definition of leadership and leadership development—moving away from the instrumental, functional definition of the leader to one that places the leader and the act of leadership in an existential and relational context.

In describing his approach, he has provocatively asserted that

• the effective leader is both engineer and novelist, that is, a mode of being in which there is an ongoing “play” between measuring and calculating on the one hand, and imagining and story-giving on the other;

• that leadership is ultimately an art and the leader, an artisan; in short, leadership is about “becoming” and it requires learning new skills and honing your craft, while building your capacity for reflection and resiliency; and lastly

• that leadership is nothing short of a kind of love, that is, leadership is not about dominance—making others do what you want them to do—but rather about embodying in actions, words, and deeds the collective values and goals of a people. And having the courage to act on them, and even more, to be devoted to them.

Leadership, he contends, is ultimately a matter of being—an embodied being—and a “being” that inevitably exists within the dynamic context of community.

From where then, we might ask, does this impulse toward a more complex and humane understanding of leadership come?

A Different Conversation

In a recent conversation with Petriglieri1, we sought to explore the origins of his approach to leadership. To that end, we posed a question imbued with psychodynamic colours:

Is there a distinctive memory or memories from your childhood that you sense may have influenced the trajectory of your intellectual development?

The memory that came forward for him was a simple yet profoundly metaphorical incident from his childhood, a story told to him by his father about work, caring, and standing up—sometimes against the pressures of society—for the humanity of others.

This is the story he shared.2

The Twelve Pizzas

I grew up an only child in Sicily—my father, a doctor and a researcher of anatomy and the nervous system, and my mother, a school teacher. I recall going to my father’s department at the university—this was in the 70’s—and seeing all those big jars of specimens and body parts in formaldehyde. To my young eyes, they were of a different world—elemental, graphic and a bit scary.

My father’s devotion to his profession made him noticeably absent during a regular window of my early life—the evening. He would come back home for family lunches, but then work until after my dinner and bed times, and I developed quite a curiosity about what he did. I recall the many times I forced myself to stay up late—so I could be up when he finally returned, typically around 10:00. As often happens for kids, my father’s absences were some of the most present features of his existence in my mind, a part of him longed for, though somehow out of reach.

You asked about a distinct memory. There is one that stays with me to this day and it is of one such evening.

Abolishing Asylums and the First Meal

Abandoned Italian Asylum. Courtesy of Thomas Windisch

Before I share my story, I must first explain something. In the late 70s, Italy was one of most radical countries in a Europe-wide movement to reform asylums—it outlawed them outright. The people who had been committed to these institutions, often for years, were gradually released into residential treatment facilities, where they received psychiatric care and other support. It was in such a facility that my dad had a side gig as its medical director, after his day job.

I guess it goes without saying that the people he cared for there had been locked up in the most bleak, dehumanizing of environments, often for decades. Some were severely mentally ill, others less so, but all had been forced to live in isolation from society, from the normal things of life. They were suffering and stigmatized. Ravaged from within and from without.

This memory which still lives vividly in me today is related to my father’s work caring for these people and about this one evening, when he returned home much later than usual.

It was well past 11:00, I remember. I sensed immediately that something had happened, and he seemed happy to see me. So I asked him, “Why are you so late?” And he explained.

That night he had accompanied some of the residents he cared for to their very first meal outside the facility. They had gone to an ordinary pizzeria. As they gathered there—an unlikely group—the waiter approached the table, then turned to one of the men and asked the usual question:

“What do you want to order?”

The man, now in a restaurant for the first time, replied—without pause or much thought:

“12 pizzas.”

The waiter, dumbfounded, gave my father a sideways glance, expecting to confirm what he thought to be the sheer ridiculousness of the order.

But my dad didn’t falter. And without skipping a beat, he said emphatically:

“This man is your customer. And he ordered 12 pizzas. So please bring him 12 pizzas.”

Then he turned to the man in his care, and asked “Would you like 12 small ones, so they won’t make you sick?” The man nodded, and as soon as the waiter left, he told my dad, “I haven’t had a pizza in so long, I need to catch up. I am glad you get it.” And then he smiled. It was the first time he had seen this man smile, my dad told me, and he would probably never forget it.

A solitary wheelchair in the middle of Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra, a former psychiatric hospital in Tuscany, Italy, Courtesy of Daily Mail

That was the story my father shared with me that night. While he did not say much more, I’m assuming that the 12 pizzas arrived in some form or another. And that the other residents also placed their first order, but I don’t recall those details.

But what I do recall—what does linger so strongly with me to this day and which I’m sure I sensed intuitively even as a little boy—is the realization that, in that moment, my father stood his ground for the dignity of those people. His patients. Those he cared for. He felt the weight of the stigma they had to carry. And he knew that the placing of a simple order of food, at an ordinary pizzeria—even if it were 12 pizzas for just one man—was an act that reinstated their humanity. And it was an act that had to be defended.

I know that, in the end, this story is a simple one. It could easily be interpreted sociologically or psychodynamically—in other ways too. I think it has become so deeply imprinted in my own psyche because it was somehow a lesson from father to son. When I was younger, I understood it as a reminder to value the little things I so easily took for granted, like being able to order pizza. And as a lesson on how to be, what we must stand for and how to care for others. A lesson on how to protect the inherent dignity of every person and that person’s right to be a part of society.

When I look back on it now, I think the story stayed with me because it was also a lesson about the power of work to be more than just a way to make ends meet. My dad’s work, the waiter’s work, could be ways to foster freedom and choice, to protect one’s own and other’s right to claim their selves.

Reinstating an Economy of Dignity

It is not surprising that, after all these years, such a memory remains with Petriglieri, someone who has doggedly explored the idea that leadership must be about more than power or charisma, knowledge or skills. Recently he has written:

Leadership is not a position or a set of skills.

It is a kind of love that makes us feel safe and free at once.

We cannot help but wonder if, in that pizzeria long ago, feelings of safety and freedom were also what those men and women—former residents of an asylum—experienced.

Under the charge of Petriglieri’s father, they, as well as the reluctant waiter, were engaging in what could be referred to as an economy of dignity.3 An exchange, yes, in the world of business, but one that affirmed the shared humanity of all involved.

At a moment in history when disruption, alienation and a strange fatalism permeate our business landscape, the reinstating of an economy of dignity—for all involved—feels both foreign and like the very nectar we long for. What remains for us to consider is how we might replicate, in some form or another, that moment in the pizzeria.