Performing Leadership
How do orchestra conductors create great performance in three days with people they have never met before? In 2012, Bernhard Kerres put that question to three of the world's most demanding conductors for Business Strategy Review. Fourteen years later, the thesis has become a program in which executives conduct members of the Vienna Philharmonic. With reflections on Marc Minkowski and the late Michael Tilson Thomas.
Published 2026-01-11 by Bernhard Kerres
A senior executive raises their arms. In front of them, members of the Vienna Philharmonic sit with their instruments ready, watching. The four opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth are about to begin — the most famous notes in classical music. Everyone in the room knows them. The whole question is whether this executive can bring them in.
The notes don't come.
The musicians wait — patient, professional, but waiting. The executive realizes that nothing they prepared in PowerPoint, no agenda, no assistant, no team behind them is going to help. The room is silent. The music will start when, and only when, they lead it to start.
This is Performing Leadership.
We have run this program — most recently in 2025 at the Wiener Staatsoper, with members of the Vienna Philharmonic, for the senior leadership of the Austrian National Bank (OeNB) — for over a decade. Every time, the executive in front of the orchestra goes through some version of the same realization. They came prepared to deliver. They discover, in real time, what it takes to lead.
The roots of the program go back to a piece I published in 2012 in Business Strategy Review, the magazine of London Business School. The article was called Performing Leadership: Conducting Business, and the question it asked was simple: how do orchestra conductors create great performance, in three or four days, with people they have often never met before? And what should business leaders be learning from them?
Fourteen years later, the thesis still holds. What follows is a recap, with what I have learned since.
The puzzle
Orchestras have something most businesses do not. They have absolute deadlines. The concert is Friday at 8:00 pm. The hall is sold. The audience is real. There is no pushing the launch by a quarter. There is no "let's regroup next week." On Friday at 8:00 pm, ninety musicians will be on stage, and a great performance — or not — will happen.
Sports teams operate under similar pressure. So do surgical teams, and emergency response teams. Across all of them, four things show up.
A clear common goal and deadline. A defined process. A shared understanding of each individual's role. Mutual trust.
Most leadership teams, when I describe these four to them, nod immediately. Then they realize that their own teams meet maybe two of the four — and only on a good day.
What makes orchestras different
Orchestras and business teams share something that sports teams and surgical teams do not: the musicians are not exclusively focused on the concert they are rehearsing. They are preparing for next week's program at the same time. They are teaching. They are practicing solo repertoire. They are managing their own careers. The rehearsal in front of them is one of many things in their week.
This sounds familiar. Senior executives are juggling six things at once. The strategy review competes with the board call competes with the customer escalation competes with the talent issue. The question is the same as the orchestral one: how do you create the conditions in which, when the rehearsal starts, people actually rehearse? How do you make the meeting in your hands the meeting that matters, without claiming exclusive attention you do not have?
The answer lives in how the conductor works.
The conductors I asked
For the 2012 article, I interviewed three conductors with distinctive philosophies of rehearsal and leadership.
Marc Minkowski — founder and artistic director of Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble — described the first ten minutes of any rehearsal as critical. He would let the orchestra play through the opening without interrupting, so that both sides could begin to know each other. "You then need to build up this delicate balance of trusting the orchestra," he told me, "practicing and letting an orchestra get away with things, which they should not get away with. It is a balance between trust and irresponsibility."
The insight is exact. As a leader, you can over-correct or under-correct. Both are failure modes. Rehearsal is where you discover how much you can trust this particular team with this particular piece — which is also the question every senior executive has to answer about their team in their first weeks in role.
Michael Tilson Thomas said something I have returned to many times. "The people who are actually giving the performance are the musicians who are playing different parts," he told me. "My job is to create a situation in which they can give and will want to give the greatest performance."
That is the entire job. Not to play the music. Not to add value at every bar. To create the conditions in which the people doing the work want to do it well.
Michael Tilson Thomas died at his home in San Francisco on 22 April 2026, at the age of 81, after four years of treatment for glioblastoma. During my time as Intendant of the Wiener Konzerthaus, he brought the San Francisco Symphony — the orchestra he shaped over twenty-five years as Music Director — to our hall many times. Each of those concerts is something I remember with gratitude. The thoughts he shared with me are part of what he leaves behind.
Valery Gergiev, the third conductor I interviewed in 2011, spoke about the most uncomfortable question in conducting: how much to rehearse. "Not to rehearse enough is dangerous, because if something goes wrong the musicians will say that he did not even rehearse properly. But if you rehearse all the time and it does not go well they will say he was torturing us." The principle is universal: under-prepare and you fail; over-prepare and you exhaust the people you are leading.
After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Gergiev refused to denounce the war and was removed from positions at the Munich Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, and other major Western institutions. His political position does not have my support. The 2011 insight on rehearsal stands on its own.
The Rehearsal Gap
What strikes me, looking back at the 2012 piece, is what it did not yet say out loud. The conductors I interviewed all rehearse. They rehearse intensely, methodically, every single time. Surgeons rehearse. Pilots rehearse. Athletes rehearse. Astronauts rehearse. Musicians rehearse so much that the verb "to practice" in their world is not metaphorical.
Senior executives, almost without exception, do not rehearse.
The board meeting where you have to deliver bad news. The investor call where the questions are going to be sharp. The conversation with your team about a strategic pivot they are not ready for. The leadership team retreat where you have to surface something everyone has been avoiding. These are the highest-stakes performances of your professional life. You walk into them cold.
This is the Rehearsal Gap. Leadership is the only high-stakes profession in which the people doing the most consequential work practice the least.
When we run Performing Leadership, the executive in front of the ensemble has thirty seconds to bring in Beethoven's Fifth. They have never conducted before. The orchestra has played it hundreds of times. What the executive discovers in those thirty seconds is what the gap actually feels like. They cannot improvise the authority. They cannot fake the preparation. The musicians will simply wait.
That waiting is the lesson.
Performing Leadership today
The program runs at two scales. A single-day session with a string quartet works for individual executives, small leadership teams, and focused interventions. A multi-day program with a larger ensemble — up to a full orchestra — works for senior leadership groups undertaking a deeper development arc, where rehearsal, performance, and reflection unfold across several days.
The piece is always the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, because everyone knows it. Four notes. Almost no one has tried to lead anyone else through them.
In 2025 we led a program at the Wiener Staatsoper, with members of the Vienna Philharmonic, for the senior leadership of the Austrian National Bank (OeNB). The setting matters. When the room is the Wiener Staatsoper and the musicians are the people who normally play there, the executive cannot improvise authority. They have to find it.
What participants take away is rarely what they expected. They arrive thinking the program is about communication, or stage presence, or executive bearing. They leave understanding something about preparation, trust, and the muscle of leading under pressure that conventional executive development does not teach.
A closing detail
To return to Marc Minkowski once more: when he conducts, he is most of the time smiling. "Smiling creates a certain stability for the orchestra and especially singers," he explained. "It does not change the character of the music. When I look unhappy, the music might quickly sound like that."
Peter Drucker once wrote that performing organizations enjoy what they are doing. I have rarely seen the reverse — a leadership team in obvious quiet misery — produce extraordinary performance. Inspiration and the joy of working together are building blocks. They can be cultivated. They can be practiced. They can be rehearsed.
That, in the end, is what Performing Leadership is.
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Read the original
The full 2012 article — Performing Leadership: Conducting Business, Business Strategy Review, Issue 1, 2012, London Business School — is available here (/l5e/assets-v1/10836296-9e58-4f2b-9c1b-98fefc91ea23/performing-leadership.pdf) as a PDF.
To explore whether the Performing Leadership program fits your organization, reach me at bernhardkerres.com (https://book.bernhardkerres.com/meetings/).
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About the author
Bernhard Kerres trained as an opera singer before joining Booz Allen Hamilton as a strategy consultant, then moved into CFO and CEO roles at two listed European technology companies, and served from 2007 to 2013 as CEO and Artistic Director (Intendant) of the Wiener Konzerthaus. Today he works as a leadership coach, executive advisor, and keynote speaker. He is a PCC-certified ICF coach, holds an MBA from London Business School, and was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. He is the founder of RolePlays.ai, an AI platform for practicing high-stakes leadership conversations.