Leadership as Plumbing and Poetry: Why March's Counterintuitive Insight Matters More Than Ever

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Abstract: James March distinguished between leadership as "plumbing"—the rational work of plans, structures, and controls—and leadership as "poetry"—the imaginative work of meaning-making, emotion, and beauty. Contrary to conventional leadership scholarship emphasizing measurable outcomes, March argued that leaders' poetic impact on human experience and meaning exceeds their ability to execute instrumental change. This article synthesizes March's framework with contemporary organizational research to examine why leaders' symbolic and emotional influence often proves more durable than their structural interventions. Drawing on evidence from meaning-making research, organizational symbolism studies, and practitioner accounts across healthcare, technology, and public sectors, we explore how leaders shape collective imagination, ritual, and aspiration—even when tangible outcomes remain elusive. The analysis offers three forward-looking capabilities for twenty-first-century leadership: aesthetic consciousness, symbolic stewardship, and poetic resilience. Organizations seeking sustainable impact may benefit more from cultivating leaders' capacity for beauty and meaning than from optimizing their technical execution.

Every leadership development program promises the same thing: teach people the right frameworks, give them better tools, and they will transform their organizations. Strategic planning becomes crisper. Execution becomes tighter. Change initiatives succeed. Yet James March, the polymath organizational theorist who spent decades studying how organizations actually work, arrived at a deeply counterintuitive conclusion: leaders' greatest impact may lie not in their ability to implement strategy or redesign structures, but in their capacity to infuse work with joy, meaning, and beauty.

March divided leadership into two domains. As plumbers, leaders inhabit the orderly world of organizational charts, budgets, metrics, and standard operating procedures—the rational-technical apparatus we typically associate with management effectiveness. As poets, they operate in the realm of imagination, emotion, storytelling, and symbolic action—creating narratives that give work purpose and kindle collective aspiration. Most leadership scholarship privileges plumbing: we measure leaders by their ability to hit targets, execute change programs, and deliver quantifiable results. March's provocation cuts against that grain. The evidence, he argued, suggests leaders' poetic influence—their capacity to shape how people experience and make meaning from work—proves more consequential and more enduring than their instrumental achievements (Podolny et al., 2004).

This claim arrives at a peculiar moment. Organizations face mounting pressure for measurable impact: quarterly earnings, customer satisfaction scores, employee engagement indices. Yet contemporary research reveals something March intuited decades ago: the rationalist model of leadership systematically underestimates how much organizational life turns on meaning, emotion, and collective imagination (Smircich & Morgan, 1982; Weick, 1995). When employees describe transformative leaders, they rarely cite restructuring initiatives or process improvements. They remember instead the leader who made their work feel consequential, who articulated a vision that stirred something deeper than compliance, who created moments of collective beauty in otherwise mundane organizational routines (Shamir et al., 1993).

For practitioners, March's framework surfaces uncomfortable questions. If leaders' instrumental impact proves more limited than we typically assume—if strategic plans often fail, reorganizations frequently disappoint, and change programs regularly fizzle—should we recalibrate what we ask of leaders and how we develop them? If meaning-making matters more than execution, what does excellent leadership actually look like? This article explores those questions by examining research on how leaders shape organizational experience, reviewing evidence of leaders' poetic versus plumbing impacts, and identifying practical approaches for cultivating leadership that embraces beauty, imagination, and meaning alongside conventional managerial competence.

The Leadership Landscape: Plumbing, Poetry, and the Problem of Attribution

Defining Plumbing and Poetry in Organizational Context

March's plumbing-poetry distinction maps onto a fundamental tension in organization studies between technical rationality and cultural meaning-making. Plumbing encompasses the instrumental-rational activities we conventionally associate with management: designing organizational structures, allocating resources, establishing controls, setting goals, measuring performance, and implementing change initiatives (March & Simon, 1958). Plumbing assumes organizations operate as systems that can be analyzed, optimized, and controlled through systematic intervention. It traffics in objectivity, causation, and quantifiable outcomes.

Poetry, by contrast, involves the symbolic, aesthetic, and emotional dimensions of leadership. Poetic leaders craft narratives that help people make sense of their circumstances, design rituals that create shared meaning, articulate visions that capture collective imagination, and infuse mundane work with dignity and purpose (Smircich & Morgan, 1982). Poetry treats organizations as ongoing accomplishments of collective sense-making—places where people construct shared realities through story, metaphor, and symbolic action (Weick, 1995). It operates through inspiration, resonance, and felt experience rather than through logical persuasion or formal authority.

These domains intertwine in practice. A budget allocation (plumbing) simultaneously sends signals about organizational priorities and values (poetry). An organizational chart (plumbing) creates both reporting relationships and status hierarchies that shape identity and belonging (poetry). The distinction proves analytical rather than absolute, highlighting different logics and different forms of influence rather than wholly separate activities.

Prevalence, Evidence, and the Attribution Problem

Contemporary leadership research overwhelmingly favors plumbing. A content analysis of flagship management journals reveals that instrumental outcomes—financial performance, productivity gains, implementation success—dominate leadership scholarship (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). Studies correlate leadership behaviors with measurable results, seeking to identify which actions produce superior organizational performance. This emphasis reflects both methodological convenience—quantifiable outcomes are easier to study—and deep cultural assumptions that leadership's purpose is fundamentally instrumental.

Yet accumulating evidence challenges the plumbing-centric view in two ways. First, leaders' ability to engineer predictable organizational outcomes appears more limited than commonly assumed. Strategic planning frequently fails to anticipate consequential developments, and execution rates for major change initiatives hover around 30 percent across multiple studies (Beer & Nohria, 2000). Organizations exhibit remarkable resistance to top-down transformation, absorbing or deflecting leadership interventions through informal networks, cultural inertia, and passive resistance (Pfeffer, 1977). Second, when researchers examine what actually changes when leaders change, the most robust effects appear in symbolic and cultural domains rather than structural or performance domains.

Consider the classic study by Meindl and colleagues (1985) demonstrating that attributions of leadership influence are largely socially constructed. When organizational performance improves, observers credit leaders; when performance declines, they blame leaders. Yet the relationship between leadership actions and performance outcomes proves far murkier than these attributions suggest, with environmental factors, industry dynamics, and organizational history often mattering more than leadership behavior. Leaders get disproportionate credit for success and disproportionate blame for failure, revealing less about their causal impact than about our cultural need to see organizational outcomes as products of human agency and intention.

Meanwhile, research on charismatic and transformational leadership—closest to March's poetic domain—reveals consistent effects on follower meaning-making, emotional commitment, and sense of purpose, even when instrumental outcomes remain ambiguous (Shamir et al., 1993). Followers of transformational leaders report higher intrinsic motivation, stronger organizational identification, and greater sense that their work matters. These poetic impacts appear more reliably than improvements in productivity or financial performance, suggesting that leaders' influence operates more powerfully through meaning and emotion than through technical intervention.

Organizational and Individual Consequences of Poetry Versus Plumbing

Organizational Performance Impacts: The Limits of Instrumental Leadership

The conventional assumption holds that effective leadership drives organizational performance through superior strategy, execution, and operational management. Yet evidence for this causal relationship proves surprisingly weak. Pfeffer's (1977) early analysis found that leadership succession explained less than 10 percent of variance in organizational performance across multiple industries, with environmental and industry factors dominating. Subsequent meta-analyses have found similarly modest effects, with leadership explaining 15-25 percent of variance in organizational outcomes when studied rigorously (Kaiser et al., 2008).

This doesn't mean leadership is irrelevant. Rather, leaders operate within constraints that severely limit their instrumental impact. They inherit organizations with established cultures, power structures, and operating routines that prove remarkably sticky (Hannan & Freeman, 1984). They face coordination problems, information asymmetries, and implementation challenges that frustrate even well-designed interventions. They encounter resistance from stakeholders with competing interests and different interpretations of organizational reality. The fantasy of the heroic leader who transforms organizational performance through superior plumbing—better strategies, smarter structures, tighter controls—collides with organizational realities that resist rational control.

Where leadership does demonstrably influence performance, the mechanisms often run through meaning and emotion rather than through technical optimization. Studies of organizational crisis reveal that leaders' primary contribution involves sense-making: helping people interpret ambiguous situations, maintaining composure amid uncertainty, and constructing narratives that enable coordinated action (Weick, 1993). These are poetic rather than plumbing functions. Similarly, research on organizational change finds that leaders' ability to craft compelling narratives about why change matters and what it means for organizational identity predicts change success better than the technical quality of change plans (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991).

Individual Wellbeing and Meaning Impacts: The Enduring Poetic Residue

If leaders' instrumental impact proves limited, their poetic influence appears both more substantial and more durable. Employees consistently report that meaningful work—work they experience as purposeful, dignified, and connected to something beyond narrow self-interest—matters more for wellbeing and motivation than compensation, working conditions, or career advancement (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997). Leaders play a central role in shaping whether people experience their work as meaningful or meaningless.

Research by Smircich and Morgan (1982) demonstrates how leaders function as "managers of meaning," framing organizational reality in ways that help followers make sense of their experiences. When a leader describes customer service workers as "brand ambassadors creating moments of delight," she offers a different meaning-frame than describing them as "front-line employees executing standard operating procedures." The technical work remains identical, but the symbolic framing transforms how people experience that work and construct their occupational identity.

This meaning-making influence extends beyond individual psychology to collective culture. Leaders shape organizational rituals, symbols, and narratives that become woven into how groups understand themselves and their purpose (Trice & Beyer, 1984). When Satya Nadella became Microsoft CEO, he couldn't directly control the company's deeply embedded cultural patterns. But through persistent symbolic actions—publicly reading books on empathy, replacing competitive stack-ranking with collaborative learning, articulating a vision centered on empowerment rather than domination—he gradually shifted the meaning-frames through which Microsoft employees interpreted their work and identity (Nadella, 2017). The technical changes (eliminating stack-ranking) mattered less than the poetic reframing of what kind of organization Microsoft aspired to become.

Studies of leader succession further illuminate this dynamic. When leaders depart, their structural innovations frequently unravel—reorganizations get reorganized, strategic initiatives get replaced, new priorities emerge. But the poetic residue often persists. Followers remember the leader who made them feel their work mattered, who created moments of collective accomplishment, who articulated aspirations that connected daily routines to larger purposes. These meaning-laden memories continue shaping organizational culture and individual identity long after the leader's instrumental interventions have faded (Gioia & Thomas, 1996).

Evidence-Based Organizational Responses: Cultivating Poetic Leadership

Narrative Crafting and Symbolic Consistency

Effective poetic leadership begins with skillful narrative construction. Research on organizational storytelling reveals that leaders who craft coherent, emotionally resonant narratives about organizational identity, purpose, and direction create stronger collective meaning than those who rely primarily on data and logic (Denning, 2005). These narratives need not be objectively true in any simple sense; they must be symbolically authentic—consistent with followers' lived experience and capable of organizing ambiguous events into meaningful patterns.

Several practices support narrative crafting:

• Connecting present work to transcendent purpose: Articulating how everyday tasks contribute to outcomes that matter beyond organizational self-interest (Carton, 2018)

• Using concrete imagery and metaphor: Translating abstract strategic concepts into vivid stories and pictures that followers can visualize and remember (Cornelissen, 2005)

• Acknowledging struggle and celebrating progress: Framing challenges as meaningful tests rather than arbitrary obstacles, recognizing incremental wins as steps in a larger journey (Quinn & Worline, 2008)

• Inviting collective authorship: Creating opportunities for followers to contribute to and shape organizational narratives rather than passively receiving leader-authored stories (Boje, 1991)

When Anne Mulcahy became Xerox CEO in 2001, the company faced bankruptcy. Rather than focusing exclusively on turnaround mechanics—cost-cutting, restructuring, refinancing—she invested enormous energy in narrative work. She visited facilities globally, listening to employees' stories about what Xerox meant to them and what they feared losing. She constructed a narrative about saving "a great American company" and preserving innovation that mattered to customers. She made visible symbolic choices: refusing to take a salary until the company returned to profitability, personally calling affected employees when layoffs became necessary. These poetic actions created collective meaning around sacrifice and shared purpose that sustained commitment through brutal operational changes (Mulcahy, 2011). The plumbing mattered—Xerox needed financial restructuring—but Mulcahy's poetic leadership made the plumbing endurable and connected it to something beyond mere organizational survival.

Ritual Design and Aesthetic Sensibility

March's injunction to construct administrative memoranda as poetry and organization charts as sculpture sounds whimsical until we recognize that all organizational artifacts carry symbolic weight. Leaders who treat routine management activities as aesthetic opportunities create richer organizational experience than those who view them as purely instrumental tasks.

Organizational rituals prove particularly potent sites for poetic leadership:

• Onboarding ceremonies that enact organizational values: New employee orientations designed to create emotional connection to mission rather than merely transferring information (Cable et al., 2013)

• Departure rituals that honor contribution: Exit processes that celebrate what people gave rather than merely processing their replacement (Ebaugh, 1988)

• Milestone celebrations that reinforce collective identity: Project completions, anniversaries, and achievements marked in ways that strengthen shared meaning (Trice & Beyer, 1984)

• Regular rhythms that create belonging: Weekly gatherings, annual traditions, and recurring practices that signal stability and continuity (Dacin et al., 2010)

At Patagonia, founder Yvon Chouinard designed organizational rituals around environmental values the company espouses. Employees receive time off when surf conditions are ideal, reinforcing organizational identity as a community of outdoor enthusiasts rather than conventional corporate workers. Quarterly "Tools for Grassroots Activists" conferences bring together environmental organizers using Patagonia grants, creating emotional connection between employees' daily work and environmental outcomes they care about. These rituals cost money and sacrifice productivity in narrow economic terms, but they create symbolic coherence between organizational claims and lived experience, making work feel integrated with personal identity and values (Chouinard, 2016).

Vulnerability and Authentic Presence

Poetic leadership requires emotional availability that conventional management training often discourages. Research on authentic leadership suggests that leaders who acknowledge uncertainty, admit mistakes, and express genuine emotion create stronger relational connections than those who maintain invulnerable professional facades (Gardner et al., 2011). This vulnerability enables followers to trust that leaders share their human experience rather than operating from a position of detached authority.

Practices supporting authentic presence include:

• Acknowledging what you don't know: Openly naming uncertainty rather than feigning certainty when navigating genuinely ambiguous situations (Weick, 1993)

• Sharing personal stakes and fears: Revealing what you personally care about and worry about rather than maintaining emotional neutrality (Ladkin & Taylor, 2010)

• Creating space for collective emotion: Allowing grief, joy, anger, and hope to surface rather than suppressing organizational feelings in service of professional decorum (Frost, 2003)

• Demonstrating learning and growth: Making visible how your thinking evolves rather than projecting static expertise (Edmondson, 2018)

When Jacinda Ardern served as New Zealand Prime Minister, her response to the Christchurch mosque shootings exemplified poetic leadership through authentic presence. Rather than defaulting to conventional political rhetoric about thoughts and prayers, she wore a hijab while meeting with Muslim communities, wept publicly, and expressed genuine horror. She immediately called the event terrorism and committed to gun law reform within days. Her emotional authenticity created collective space for national grief and meaning-making around New Zealand's values. While policy changes (plumbing) mattered, her poetic response—creating shared emotional experience and articulating what the tragedy meant for national identity—proved equally consequential in shaping collective healing and social cohesion (Wilson, 2020).

Beauty in Organizational Design

March's suggestion that organization charts should be "exquisite pieces of sculpture" challenges the purely functional view of organizational design. Aesthetic qualities—elegance, harmony, proportion—matter not merely for superficial appeal but because they shape organizational experience and communicate values through form.

Approaches to beautiful organizational design include:

• Simplicity and clarity in structure: Creating organizational forms simple enough to understand and remember, avoiding Byzantine complexity that serves political interests over functional logic (Ashkenas et al., 2002)

• Spatial design reflecting values: Configuring physical and virtual work environments to embody espoused organizational culture (Elsbach & Bechky, 2007)

• Visual communication as craft: Treating presentations, documents, and data visualizations as opportunities for aesthetic excellence rather than mere information transmission (Tufte, 2001)

• Proportionality and balance: Designing organizational ratios, hierarchies, and resource allocations that feel fair and harmonious rather than arbitrary or exploitative (Rousseau, 1995)

Pixar's headquarters design under Steve Jobs embodies beauty in organizational architecture. The building centers on a vast atrium containing mailboxes, cafeteria, and meeting rooms, forcing chance encounters between animators, technical staff, and executives who would otherwise remain siloed. The design isn't merely functional—it's aesthetically striking, creating daily experience of openness, transparency, and creative collision. The spatial poetry communicates organizational values about collaboration and cross-pollination more powerfully than mission statements ever could (Catmull, 2014). Similarly, the building's screening room hosts regular all-company reviews of work-in-progress, creating ritual space where vulnerability and collective creativity get enacted rather than merely espoused.

Holding Opposites and Embracing Paradox

Poetic leadership requires comfort with contradiction and ambiguity that instrumental plumbing typically tries to resolve or eliminate. Research on paradoxical leadership suggests that leaders who can simultaneously embrace competing demands—stability and change, individual autonomy and collective coordination, results and relationships—create more adaptive organizations than those who optimize for single dimensions (Smith & Lewis, 2011).

Practices for paradox navigation include:

• Reframing "either/or" as "both/and": Treating apparent contradictions as creative tensions rather than problems requiring resolution (Cameron & Quinn, 2011)

• Temporal oscillation: Shifting focus between competing demands across time rather than trying to balance them simultaneously (O'Reilly & Tushman, 2004)

• Structural separation with cultural integration: Creating differentiated units pursuing different logics while maintaining shared identity and values (Gilbert, 2006)

• Poetic language acknowledging complexity: Using metaphor and narrative that holds multiple truths rather than reducing situations to single interpretations (Eisenberg, 1984)

At Cleveland Clinic, CEO Toby Cosgrove navigated the paradox of medical excellence and cost reduction by reframing healthcare delivery through the metaphor of "patients first." This poetic framing enabled simultaneous pursuit of clinical quality and operational efficiency by connecting both to patient wellbeing. Surgeons could embrace standardized protocols (efficiency) when positioned as reducing patient risk rather than constraining physician autonomy. Cost consciousness became compatible with medical excellence when articulated as eliminating waste that didn't improve patient outcomes. The poetic reframing created space for paradox that purely technical arguments couldn't achieve (Cosgrove, 2014).

Building Long-Term Poetic Capability

Aesthetic Consciousness as Core Competence

If we take March seriously, leadership development must cultivate aesthetic sensibility alongside analytical rigor. This means training leaders to recognize beauty, create beauty, and appreciate how aesthetic choices shape organizational experience.

Organizations can build aesthetic consciousness through:

• Exposure to arts and humanities: Incorporating literature, visual arts, music, and philosophy into leadership development to expand leaders' symbolic repertoire beyond business frameworks (Darsø, 2004)

• Reflection on emotional impact: Regularly examining how organizational practices make people feel rather than focusing exclusively on operational outcomes (Dutton et al., 2014)

• Design thinking integration: Applying user-centered design methods to internal organizational experience, not merely external products (Brown, 2008)

• Language and communication craft: Developing skill in metaphor, storytelling, and symbolic expression as seriously as analytical writing or quantitative fluency (Grint, 2000)

Some organizations have begun embedding aesthetic development into leadership formation. The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity offers leadership programs pairing business executives with artists in collaborative creation, explicitly developing aesthetic sensibility as leadership capacity. Participants report that engaging with artistic practice—theatre improvisation, visual arts, music composition—fundamentally shifts how they think about organizational life, revealing the symbolic and emotional dimensions they previously overlooked (Nissley, 2010).

Symbolic Stewardship and Cultural Preservation

Poetic leaders recognize they inherit and shape organizational cultures that transcend their individual tenure. This requires stewardship consciousness—seeing themselves as temporary custodians of organizational meaning rather than heroic transformers imposing their personal vision.

Symbolic stewardship practices include:

• Cultural archaeology: Studying organizational history, rituals, and symbols to understand existing meaning-systems before attempting change (Schein, 2010)

• Selective preservation: Identifying which cultural elements warrant protection and which require transformation as contexts evolve (Kotter & Heskett, 1992)

• Ritual innovation: Creating new ceremonies and symbols that build on rather than discard cultural foundations (Trice & Beyer, 1984)

• Story collection and curation: Systematically capturing and sharing organizational narratives that embody values and identity (Denning, 2005)

When Ursula Burns became the first Black woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company at Xerox, she faced the challenge of honoring the company's innovation legacy while driving aggressive transformation. Rather than repudiating past culture, she invoked Xerox's history of invention, connecting strategic moves toward services and software to the company's founding identity as an innovation pioneer. She preserved and elevated stories about Chester Carlson and the invention of xerography, using historical narrative to make contemporary change feel continuous with organizational identity rather than a rupture from it. This symbolic stewardship enabled more profound transformation than positioning change as a break from a failed past (Bryant, 2010).

Poetic Resilience and Meaning-Making Under Pressure

Organizations increasingly face volatility, ambiguity, and crisis—precisely the conditions where poetic leadership matters most and plumbing proves least reliable. When technical solutions fail and standard operating procedures offer no guidance, leaders' capacity for meaning-making becomes critical.

Building poetic resilience requires:

• Sense-making practice under uncertainty: Developing comfort with "acting your way into understanding" rather than needing complete clarity before proceeding (Weick, 1993)

• Narrative flexibility: Maintaining multiple interpretive frames rather than committing prematurely to single explanations (Eisenberg, 1984)

• Emotional regulation: Managing personal anxiety while remaining emotionally available to others' fear and grief (George, 2009)

• Hope articulation: Constructing plausible paths forward even when outcomes remain uncertain (Ludema et al., 2001)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders in healthcare systems faced unprecedented uncertainty about disease progression, treatment protocols, and resource availability. Technical guidance frequently changed, and no amount of planning could resolve fundamental ambiguity. Leaders at Kaiser Permanente focused poetic energy on creating meaning around healthcare workers' sacrifice and courage, establishing rituals of recognition, and articulating narrative about serving community in crisis. These symbolic actions sustained commitment and cohesion when instrumental guidance proved unavailable. Daily "huddles" became spaces for collective sense-making rather than merely information transmission. Leaders shared personal fears and hopes alongside operational updates, modeling emotional honesty that enabled others to process their own experience. The poetic work—creating meaning, fostering connection, articulating shared purpose—proved more consequential than operational decisions in sustaining frontline resilience (Feeley, 2020).

Conclusion

James March's provocation challenges our most fundamental assumptions about leadership. We want leaders to transform organizational performance through superior strategy, execution, and operational management—to excel as plumbers. Yet the evidence suggests leaders' most durable impact operates through meaning, emotion, and imagination—through poetry. They shape how people experience work, what they believe their efforts contribute to, and whether organizational life feels dignified and beautiful or instrumental and hollow.

This doesn't render plumbing irrelevant. Organizations need budgets, structures, processes, and metrics. But March suggests we've inverted the hierarchy of leadership impact. We've privileged instrumental rationality while treating symbolic and emotional dimensions as soft afterthoughts. The evidence reverses that priority: leaders' poetic influence proves both more robust and more enduring than their technical interventions.

For practitioners, this reorientation carries uncomfortable implications. It suggests conventional leadership development—focused on strategy frameworks, change management models, and operational excellence—may be training the wrong capabilities. It implies that leaders succeed less by executing brilliant plans than by creating work experiences infused with meaning, dignity, and occasional beauty. It means evaluating leaders not primarily by delivered results but by whether people found their leadership ennobling or diminishing, inspiring or deadening.

The twenty-first century confronts organizations with mounting complexity, volatility, and ambiguity—precisely the conditions where technical solutions prove inadequate and meaning-making becomes central. We need leaders who can craft narratives that help people make sense of confusing circumstances, design rituals that create belonging amid fragmentation, articulate aspirations that connect individual effort to transcendent purpose, and infuse organizational life with aesthetic qualities that make work feel worthwhile beyond economic exchange. We need, in March's terms, more poets and fewer plumbers.

This doesn't mean abandoning rigor or embracing romantic fantasy. Poetic leadership requires discipline: the discipline to listen deeply rather than speaking constantly, to acknowledge complexity rather than oversimplifying, to invest in relationships rather than treating people as resources, to see beauty as essential rather than ornamental. It means recognizing that administrative memoranda can be constructed as works of poetry, organization charts can embody aesthetic principles, and relationships between leaders and followers can achieve the grace of a Balanchine ballet—if we treat those aspirations as worthy of serious effort rather than as whimsical metaphors.

Organizations that cultivate leaders' poetic capabilities alongside their technical competence may discover what March intuited: that the joy, passion, and beauty we infuse into work proves more consequential—more memorable, more motivating, more human—than the plans we execute and the metrics we achieve. Leadership's highest contribution may be making organizational life feel worthy of our finite time and singular attention.

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Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Associate Dean and Director of HR Programs (WGU); Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD/HR/Leadership Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.

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Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2025). Leadership as Plumbing and Poetry: Why March's Counterintuitive Insight Matters More Than Ever. Human Capital Leadership Review, 27(4). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.27.4.7