Aesthetics at the heart of leadership

State of the art leadership and management theory is still dominated by rationality, logic and metrics as the primary source for cognition. Increasingly sophisticated and complex business and human societies require better leadership, a problem that has been identified in some intellectual publications. Practical aspects of this problem have been seen in the failing leadership in safety sensitive industries in the Netherlands. In the Rotterdam portindustrial area a problem has been identified in 2011 with the performance of a safety sensitive company, Odfjell Terminals (Rotterdam) B.V., storing large amounts of oilderivates and other flammable liquids for which the necessary careful management and treatment was neglected. This lead to a full stop of operations temporarily in 2012, under pressure of the DCMR Environmental Protection Agency amongst others.