Gilbert Probst, the managing director and dean of academic affairs at the World Economic Forum, took a seat at Columbia’s Miller Theatre the other day and began observing what appeared to be a warmup exercise for an international improv troupe. “This is completely new,” he whispered. “Art and leadership.” On the stage, Kristin Linklater, a professor in Columbia’s theatre program, and a former voice coach to Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray, was asking a couple of dozen young men and women to impersonate their diaphragms and breathe deeply. “It seems simple and almost stupid,” Probst continued. “I mean, these guys, they talk to people like Medvedev and have to run after C.E.O.s.”
The deep breathers were what are known, at the W.E.F., as Global Leadership Fellows, ranging in age from twenty-six to thirty-six. They are training, literally, to be world leaders, and so spend five weeks each year, for three years, away from their day jobs—at places like McKinsey and the World Bank and the Open Society Institute—participating in seminars orchestrated by Probst. A year and a half ago, in Davos, Switzerland, Probst met Carol Becker, the dean of Columbia’s School of the Arts, and an unlikely addition to the curriculum was conceived: a weeklong immersion in the art of stage presence. Probst held a packet with capsule biographies of each of the fellows onstage, who were dressed as though at summer camp, in T-shirts and shorts. They were now arranged in a circle. Most of them, according to their bios, spoke several languages fluently, but Linklater was busy demonstrating that what they excelled at, really, was mumbling and swallowing words. “This Korean, he’s fantastic,” Probst said of one future leader, a short, stocky man with glasses who stood in the middle of the circle. Linklater instructed him to maintain eye contact while relaxing his belly. Of another, Probst said, “He comes from a Chinese diplomatic school, where all the high politicians come from. He was, like, so introverted. He’s completely changed.”
“Long before you were born, there was a man called Marshall McLuhan, who worked out of M.I.T.,” Linklater said to the fellows, and set about explaining the theory of the medium and the message. “And we’ve realized that the crucial medium is the human being who is delivering the message,” she went on. “Remember, voice is capitalism. The more you invest, the more you get in return.”
Across campus, at the School of International and Public Affairs, another class of global fellows was listening to a lecture called “Lessons from the Bard: Insights Into Leadership.” The instructor, Andrea Haring, was setting up passages from Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part I,” for dramatic reënactment: “So Henry IV comes in and says, ‘Of course, when Henry V was a prince he was drinking and whoring, he was a big party boy, right?’ “She went on, “Richard was pandering for popularity. I would say this is like us following the polls.”
During a break, Arturo Franco, a developmental economist from Mexico, raised his hand. “I get the parallel, basically,” he said. “Shakespeare got a lot of things with leadership, showing the bright side, or the honor, of these moments. But I think that he was quite good in showing the other side, the dark side of leadership.” Franco asked permission to perform a soliloquy from “Macbeth,” from memory, apologizing in advance for his distinctly non-Elizabethan delivery. He stood and set the scene, as Haring and the others looked on, amazed. “He’s kind of alone at the end,” Franco said. “He’s sitting against the wall at the end of the day, and he says, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . . ’ “Soon, it was lunchtime, and the fellows assembled in the dining hall for a discussion with Dean Becker. “You’re practicing process,” Becker told them. “It may be successful for some of you and not others. But it’s sure as hell interesting to try to live like artists for a few days.”
Franco, the Mexican Macbeth, raised his hand again, and began quoting from Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” about the differences between science and the arts. “If you want to build a bridge as a civil engineer, or do physics, you can’t question all of the assumptions at the same time,” Franco said. “It’s not that there’s not creativity in the hard sciences. It’s that you can’t afford the consequences of getting the bridge wrong, because it falls.” A pair of European engineers on the far side of the room seconded his opinion. Becker was briefly flummoxed, and then asked, “You’re talking about real bridges, right?”