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2011-02-22 07:52:18
Business has much to learn from the arts
Schumpeter
Feb 17th 2011 | from the print edition
ARTISTS routinely deride businesspeople as money-obsessed bores. Or worse.
Every time Hollywood depicts an industry, it depicts a conspiracy of knaves.
Think of Wall Street (which damned finance), The Constant Gardener (drug
firms), Super Size Me (fast food), The Social Network (Facebook) or The
Player (Hollywood itself). Artistic critiques of business are sometimes
precise and well-targeted, as in Lucy Prebble s play Enron . But often they
are not, as those who endured Michael Moore s Capitalism: A Love Story can
attest.
Many businesspeople, for their part, assume that artists are a bunch of
pretentious wastrels. Bosses may stick a few modernist daubs on their boardroom
walls. They may go on corporate jollies to the opera. They may even write the
odd cheque to support their wives bearded friends. But they seldom take the
arts seriously as a source of inspiration.
The bias starts at business school, where hard things such as numbers and
case studies rule. It is reinforced by everyday experience. Bosses constantly
remind their underlings that if you can t count it, it doesn t count. Quarterly
results impress the stockmarket; little else does.
Managers reading habits often reflect this no-nonsense attitude. Few read
deeply about art. The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump does not count; nor
does Sun Tzu s The Art of War . Some popular business books rejoice in their
barbarism: consider Wess Robert s Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun ( The
principles are timeless, says Ross Perot) or Rob Adams s A Good Hard Kick in
the Ass: the Real Rules for Business .
But lately there are welcome signs of a thaw on the business side of the great
cultural divide. Business presses are publishing a series of luvvie-hugging
books such as The Fine Art of Success , by Jamie Anderson, J rg Reckhenrich
and Martin Kupp, and Artistry Unleashed by Hilary Austen. Business schools
such as the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto are trying
to learn from the arts. New consultancies teach businesses how to profit from
the arts. Ms Austen, for example, runs one named after her book.
All this unleashing naturally produces some nonsense. Madonna has already
received too much attention without being hailed as a prophet of
organisational renewal . Bosses have enough on their plates without being told
that they need to unleash their inner Laurence Oliviers. But businesspeople
nevertheless have a lot to learn by taking the arts more seriously.
Mr Anderson & co point out that many artists have also been superb
entrepreneurs. Tintoretto upended a Venetian arts establishment that was
completely controlled by Titian. He did this by identifying a new set of
customers (people who were less grand than the grandees who supported Titian)
and by changing the way that art was produced (working much faster than other
artists and painting frescoes and furniture as well as portraits). Damien Hirst
was even more audacious. He not only realised that nouveau-riche collectors
would pay extraordinary sums for dead cows and jewel-encrusted skulls. He
upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby s, an
auction house. Whatever they think of his work, businesspeople cannot help
admiring a man who parted art-lovers from 70.5m ($126.5m) on the day that
Lehman Brothers collapsed.
Studying the arts can help businesspeople communicate more eloquently. Most
bosses spend a huge amount of time messaging and reaching out , yet few are
much good at it. Their prose is larded with clich s and garbled with
gobbledegook. Half an hour with George Orwell s Why I Write would work
wonders. Many of the world s most successful businesses are triumphs of
story-telling more than anything else. Marlboro and Jack Daniels have tapped
into the myth of the frontier. Ben & Jerry s, an ice-cream maker, wraps itself
in the tie-dyed robes of the counter-culture. But business schools devote far
more energy to teaching people how to produce and position their products
rather than how to infuse them with meaning.
Studying the arts can also help companies learn how to manage bright people.
Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones of the London Business School point out that today
s most productive companies are dominated by what they call clevers , who are
the devil to manage. They hate being told what to do by managers, whom they
regard as dullards. They refuse to submit to performance reviews. In short,
they are prima donnas. The arts world has centuries of experience in managing
such difficult people. Publishers coax books out of tardy authors. Directors
persuade actresses to lock lips with actors they hate. Their tips might be
worth hearing.
Corporations chasing inspiration
Studying the art world might even hold out the biggest prize of all helping
business become more innovative. Companies are scouring the world for new ideas
(Procter and Gamble, for example, uses crowdsourcing to collect ideas from
the general public). They are also trying to encourage their workers to become
less risk averse (unless they are banks, of course). In their quest for
creativity, they surely have something to learn from the creative industries.
Look at how modern artists adapted to the arrival of photography, a technology
that could have made them redundant, or how William Golding (the author of
Lord of the Flies ) and J.K. Rowling (the creator of Harry Potter) kept trying
even when publishers rejected their novels.
If businesspeople should take art more seriously, artists too should take
business more seriously. Commerce is a central part of the human experience.
More prosaically, it is what billions of people do all day. As such, it
deserves a more subtle examination on the page and the screen than it currently
receives.
Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter