I Hear A Symphony

New York, NY

Antonio Pappano is an interesting guy with no shortage of useful opinions. He's music director of London's Royal Opera House and Rome's Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. When asked by The Financial Times recently for his views on Italian culture and politics, his answer was instructive.

He claimed that Italy needs a new style of cultural leadership, capable of nurturing and coalescing talent, “because one of the difficulties in Italy is how to create teams”. (The Financial Times, May 15-16, Page C3) Pappano has no franchise on wisdom on this subject, for too many of us have seen the consequences of failing to develop teams, organizations, and even nations so that the whole feels greater than the sum of their disparate pieces. Politics in the United States these days comes to mind.

Pappano leads teams for a living. His job in two global capitals is to develop the whole so that it exceeds the sum of its parts, literally marking the difference between symphony and cacophony. Too many teams today are a muddle of conflicting visions and competing agendas, too often because they lack the connecting, synthesizing, and unifying qualities of an Antonio Pappano.

Unlike so many conductors, especially bygone greats such as Bernstein and Solti who were dictatorial and put their ego needs ahead of their players, Pappano is in FT's view "the opposite of dictatorial. Colleagues talk of a hands-on, hard-working boss, more approachable than many other top-flight conductors who can be charismatic but aloof."

This is what is missing in so many leadership contexts now, where entities big and small seem atomized by the selfish needs of their loudest constituents. Well, why not take Italy for example? Under a photo caption of Italy's ridiculous President Silvio Berlusconi and two coalition partner-rivals dubbed, "The three stooges running Italy," The Economist reports that far too many Italians think the unification of their country (150 years ago) was a mistake.

The truth is when leaders fail to understand their essential role in helping those they lead see beyond narrow, selfish interests, they fail generally. Berlusconi is clueless on this subject, since he's been focused solely on his own ambitions.

I saw Judy Collins perform the other night at the Cafe Carlyle here. To paraphrase her, isn't it time to stop sending in the clowns? Indeed, maybe the wrong guy is running Italy.