Maestro with a talent for inspiring millions

Gabrielle Monaghanon one of the hottest properties on the global speaking circuit

While some of the world's rarest flowers grow within the many crevices and cracks that mark the craggy limestone in the Burren, the lunar-like landscape has scarcely seen such wonders as the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra giving leadership tips to Irish business people at €600 a pop.

Benjamin Zander has been leading the orchestra for 28 years, yet he has carved out a parallel career using music and the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra as a metaphor for leadership. He is now one of the hottest properties on the global speaking circuit and has the distinction of being the keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos three years in a row.

Mr Zander and his wife Rosamund, a psychotherapist who co-wrote the bestseller The Art of Possibility - Transforming Professional and Personal Life, agreed to come to north Clare after Limerick-based management consultant Pádraig Cleary wrote to him to let him know the difference one of the conductor's lectures had made to his life.

Mr Cleary is part of a group of senior business figures that set up the Burren Leadership Forum last year to stimulate debate on leadership in Irish organisations.

Mr Zander this week gave a presentation to a select group of Irish leaders from the world of business, the public sector, the arts and politics in Ballyvaughan, before travelling to Belfast to give a series of talks on leadership and conduct a concert at the Waterfront Hall.

The lectures are based on The Art of Possibility, which pinpoints 12 practices that can help readers expand the possibilities in their life and shed their limitations.

Mr Zander believes that people have to change their assumptions about what is real to change their own reality. All too often, people's assumptions limit what they believe they can do. They form ideas about what is true in childhood that shape their attitudes and actions forever.

When people observe that everything they try leads to certain results, they conclude that the results are inevitable and may not notice that they are walking the same path and simply reinforcing an outdated narrative.

The book finds that changing even a negative and self-destructive narrative often feels uncomfortable, because it means letting go of the narrative that keeps people safe and allowing a new and unexplored one to grow. Letting go of "who you think you are" opens people up to possibility in all its variety.

One of the 12 practices recommended in The Art of Possibility is entitled "It's All Invented".

The authors give the example of a friend of Pablo Picasso, who handed a photograph of his wife to the artist. Picasso responded by saying: "Isn't she rather small and flat?"

Picasso had trained himself to question the conventions of artistic representation, including perspective. His joking response to the picture was a new way of seeing a photograph - not as a symbol, but as an object in its own right.

The assumption that a photograph is a representation is unconscious, almost instinctive, according to the book. People can find it difficult to see it any other way and can easily forget that the nature and purpose of photographs are socially constructed, not inherent. The Zanders' book shows that the world you perceive is a world shaped by your own experiences, culture and sensory capacities. Other people look at and understand the world differently and so live in a different world.

People can enlarge their perspectives by recognising the assumptions that trap them and limit other possibilities. The book, which has been published in 16 different languages since it was written in 2000, is "a distillation of a development of an idea that Roz and I have been working on for 20 years," Mr Zander says.

"It's being used in an amazing number of different contexts, such as in businesses, business schools, universities and individuals. There's even a programme based on this for firefighters in Seattle." The model of possibility is "a brilliant technology that can give people a perfect life, which is what I have".

Mr Zander, who has been on the teaching faculty at the New England Conservatory since 1967, shares this model with his students. For one assignment, he asks his students to respond to the concept "everything that happens to you this week is a gift".

"It's not that this is true but you can live your life that way," he says.

The English-born conductor may well include speaker, music teacher and author to his repertoire of professions, but he is loathe to accept the label of management guru.

"Management gurus put themselves up as management experts, but I don't know about business," he says. "I wouldn't know the first thing about how to run a bank but I can bring in the model of possibility, through music, through being, through stories and anecdotes. The people I speak to, whether they be the head of Bank of Ireland or a 14-year-old boy, go away and translate it into their own world."

Mr Zander, who admires the leadership skills of Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, was himself shaped by leadership from an early age. After he began composing music at the age of nine, his compositions came to the attention of Benjamin Britten.

The composer invited the Zander family to spend three summers at his home in the English seaside village of Aldeburgh and became a mentor to the aspiring cellist. At the age of 15, he became a student of Spanish cello virtuoso Gaspar Cassado and lived in Florence and Sienna for the next three years.

His cello-playing came to an abrupt end after it became too painful to play the instrument because he could not develop the necessary calluses on his fingers.

With the wealth of achievement Mr Zander has racked up over the years, it doesn't come as any surprise that he is sanguine about his childhood experiences.

"I had great mentors, I was privileged," he says. His parents, who escaped from Germany in 1937, "didn't have money or a car. They had four children and they made sure they all had the best education.

"Now I am making sure the students I am responsible for - there have been tens of thousands over the years - get the best education that is available."