Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership: May 2, 2025

Scott Taylor and his Babson College colleagues differentiate entrepreneurial leadership from traditional leadership by revealing its psychophysiological foundations. Their research shows that entrepreneurial leaders efficiently shift between cognitive states (empathetic and analytical), emotional states (positive and negative), and hormonal states (parasympathetic and sympathetic), enabling relational effectiveness that motivates followers. The result is a valuable conceptual model of entrepreneurial leadership (EL) that moves beyond the ‘leader-as-hero’ narrative to emphasize leader-follower relationships and become the ‘leader-as-host’ of entrepreneurial energy. Drawing on self-determination theory, the authors propose that entrepreneurial leaders demonstrate emotional and social competence while cultivating followers’ autonomy, competence, and relatedness – and supporting independent, counter-dependent action within uncertainty. The model integrates neuroscience findings showing how cognitive flexibility between empathetic and analytical networks affects entrepreneurial behavior. For creative leaders, this means understanding that EL isn’t merely about individual traits but about creating conditions where followers become intrinsically motivated to recognize and take action on entrepreneurial opportunities. Effective entrepreneurial leadership requires balancing paradoxical forces and fostering relationships that embrace uncertainty rather than conformity.

Scott N. Taylor, Andrew Corbett, Danna Greenberg, Wendy Murphy, Keith Rollag, and Jeffrey Shay (2025) “A Conceptual Model of Entrepreneurial Leadership: How Entrepreneurial Leaders Enable Entrepreneurial Opportunity,” International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (2025) 21:58; published online, January 31, 2025.

Gallup’s 2025 Global Workplace Report establishes a powerful link between workplace experience and broader life satisfaction. Only 33% of global employees are thriving in life evaluations, with standout regions including Australia/New Zealand (56%) and Latin America (54%). Notably, 50% of engaged employees report thriving in overall life compared to just 33% of disengaged workers. The data reveals stark regional disparities: 13% engagement in Europe versus 31% in North America and Latin America. With $9.6 trillion in potential productivity at stake, the report identifies three critical actions: provide basic training to reduce disengagement, teach coaching techniques to boost performance by 20-28%, and increase manager wellbeing through ongoing development. As Gallup CEO Jon Clifton notes, we’re witnessing ‘a pivotal moment’ where AI transformation meets declining engagement. For creative leaders, this presents compelling evidence that investing in engagement directly impacts employee wellbeing and productivity and organizational resilience, as well. The most promising approach in the midst of today’s technological transformation? Developing managers through training and mentoring, which improves manager thriving from 28% to 50% when combined with active encouragement of development, creating a ripple effect throughout teams.

Gallup (2025) State of the Global Workplace: Understanding Employees, Informing Leaders – 2025 Report, www.gallup.com,   

Generative AI dazzles with its speed and sprawl, but what does it say about us? In MIT Technology Review’s creativity issue (May/June 2025), contributing architects, designers, and artists argue that tools like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT are less about producing novelty than reflecting our prompts back at us. As researcher Chris Martens writes, ‘the goal isn’t automation – it’s augmentation.’ The best artists aren’t using AI to bypass the creative process, but to deepen and extend it. Whether remixing musical loops in real time or crafting speculative fiction with AI-generated plot twists, shared control drives co-creation. This shouldn’t be surprising: since creativity requires tension, iteration, and ultimately meaningful exchange, adopting AI as a partner expands possibilities rather than replacing human intuition and imagining. For creative leaders, the imperatives should be clear: choose tools that challenge rather than just accelerate, design with resistance, and start with questions rather than prompts. This means rethinking AI as a diagnostic tool for human imagination – one that surfaces blind spots, invites bolder experimentation, and serves not as a renderer of visions, but as a catalyst for reimagining them. 

“Muse or Machine? Defining Creativity in the Age of AI” (2025) MIT Technology Review, Vol. 128, No. 3, May/June 2025.

Princeton philosopher D. Graham Burnett explores how AI is revolutionizing academia even as universities resist acknowledging the shift. Recounting his students’ transformative encounters with AI, Burnett observed students matching wits with ‘something part sibling, part rival, part careless child-god.’ Examples included a music major testing AI’s capacity for beauty, a student guiding it through Ignatius of Loyola’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’; and another creating a Socratic dialogue on being versus becoming. The implication is clear: as AI masters knowledge production, our value shifts to meaning-making and existential questions that machines cannot resolve: ‘How to live? What to do? How to face death?’ Far from simply replacing humanistic inquiry, in other words, human interactions with AI can provoke deeper self-knowledge. For creative leaders, this represents a field of opportunity: as knowledge production becomes automated, humanity can return to the essential purpose of exploring ‘being itself’ rather than fact accumulation. The challenge now is curating environments and designing meaningful work where people genuinely want to ask big questions rather than seek after minor connections or incremental changes. In this way, AI can support the best leadership, which, like the best education, isn’t about answers, but is about awakening.

D. Graham Burnett (2025) “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” The New Yorker, April 2025.

Southeast Asia’s strongest companies possess a quiet superpower: personal ownership. As detailed in this McKinsey ‘Future of Asia’ report, the region’s corporate champions differentiate through proactive reinvention and talent development, fostering innovation across all levels while building employee belonging and connection. Their foundation supports often-overlooked strengths like customer focus and social responsibility. For creative leaders, the lesson is clear: make culture the hero, not a supporting player. This means aligning organizational reality with aspirational goals, embedding culture at the core of business strategy, and evolving rapidly to maintain competitive advantage. Practically, leaders must enable meaningful feedback conversations and build employee capacity to interpret data and inspire innovation. Double down on what works – ownership, inclusion, external focus – while adding structure, feedback, and digital savvy. Lead consultatively but decisively, connecting culture’s ‘why’ to performance’s ‘how.’ Reinvention in the region isn’t an initiative; it’s a leadership philosophy and mode that energizes culture, sharpens execution, and anchors growth in people’s creative potential.

Ben Fletcher, Drew Goldstein, Phillia Wibowo, with Gaurava Sahi and Priyanjali Arora (2025) “Unlocking Southeast Asia’s Secret to Thriving Organizations,” McKinsey & Company, April 2025.