Like artists, startup founders must cultivate creative habits to see the world afresh and create something new.
By Tim Leberecht
(
TheMIX)
-- Andy Warhol knew it all along: "Good business is the best art." And
lately, a number of business thinkers and leaders have begun to embrace
the arts, not as an escapist notion, a parallel world after office
hours, or a creative asset, but as an integral part of business -- from
the management team to operations to customer service.
John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and author of the book
Redesigning Leadership, predicts that
artists will emerge as the new business leaders
and cites RISD graduates Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, co-founders of
Airbnb, as prominent examples. The author William Deresiewicz heralds
reading as the most important task of any leader. John Coleman makes
a compelling case for the role of poetry in business. Intel (
INTC) named pop musician
will.i.am as director of creative innovation. The World Economic Forum has been inviting arts and cultural leaders to its events for several years and this year added the '
Role of the Arts' to its Network of Global Agenda Councils.
Indeed, the "art" of business has become more important as the
"science" grows ubiquitous. As Big Data and sophisticated analytical
tools allow us to make our processes more efficient, intuition and
creativity are fast becoming the only differentiating factors among
competitors. Like any "soft asset," these qualities cannot be exploited,
only explored. And like artists, innovators must cultivate creative
habits to see the world afresh and create something new.
How do artists think and behave? Here are 12 traits that any
individual who aspires to make his or her mark on the world should
emulate:
1. Artists are "neophiles." They are in love with novelty and
have an insatiable appetite for finding and creating new connections,
for inventing and reinventing, even themselves. Art means changing the
meaning of things or creating new meanings. That's exactly what
innovation is all about.
2. Artists are humanists. They are experts of the "human
condition" and observe human desires, needs, emotions, and behavior with
a sharp, discerning eye and a high degree of empathy. They can feel
with and for others, which should be every innovator's distinct strength
as well.
3. Artists are craftspeople. They "think by making" and unite
the "hand and the head," as sociologist Richard Sennett describes it. It
has both a physical dimension (exhibiting mastery in craftsmanship) and
a meta-physical dimension (connecting a new product, service, or
business model with the broader zeitgeist and cultural climate). Nike's (
NKE)
Fuelband, for example, integrates software and hardware, and is an
expression of our society's growing demand for self-managed, preventive
healthcare.
4. Artists are like children. "Every child is an artist. The
problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up," Pablo Picasso
famously said. Artists retain a child's unique sense of possibility and
wonder. Innovators should, too. It may sound paradoxical, but
innovations are always nostalgic.The most meaningful of them, although
seemingly all about novelty and the future, reconnect us with a basic
human quest or even our childhood dreams (think of the iPhone and our
desire to touch, or sharing sites such as Facebook (
FB) or Pinterest, which cater to our innate urge to share).
5. Artists rely on their intuition. It may seem
counter-intuitive, but intuition is ever more important in the age of
Big Data, because it is the only feature that is faster and deeper than
the massive flow of real-time information. Nothing comes close to
intuition as innovators seek to anticipate trends and make decisions
swiftly.
6. Artists are comfortable with ambiguity. By design, they
often deal with things that are not measurable and can't be easily
quantified. Innovators, too, should value what may not be easily
captured in quantitative terms. In stark contrast to more mechanistic
models of management, they must be able to tolerate uncertainty and
open-ended questions.
7. Artists are holistic, interdisciplinary thinkers. Artists
can connect dots and take things out of their original context.
Likewise, innovators contextualize and re-contextualize, mash up and
remix, and embrace new insights and ideas that lead to unexpected,
unlikely, and often serendipitous conclusions (among the most famous
examples of such "accidental innovations" are the pacemaker or 3M's (
MMM) post-it notes).
8. Artists thrive under constraints. They often have to work
within very structured formats and meet scarce resources with ingenuity.
In fact, these constraints might even stimulate their creativity.
Inspired by the phenomenon of
Jugaad in
India, innovation gurus like Navi Radjou have popularized and
globalized the concept of "frugal innovation" (e.g. the mobile SMS
disaster response platform Ushahidi or the portable "roll-on" hospital
hand-sanitizers SwipeSense). Frugal innovation has become the new
hallmark for the art of creating maximum value with minimal resources.
9. Artists are great storytellers. They tell a story with their art but also often tell the story
of their
art. The same holds true for meaningful innovations. Great innovators
design experiences that spark conversation. Just look at ideas funded on
Kickstarter: The product is also the story of the product.
10. Artists are conduits and not "masters of the universe."
Most artists – painters, sculptors, writers, filmmakers, or musicians –
will admit that they derive their inspiration from a spiritual sphere
that goes beyond their individual creativity and skills. This applies to
innovators, too. Whether they're spiritual or not, humility suits them
well as the social web and its wave of crowd-based collaborations have
rendered the myth of the lone genius obsolete.
11. Artists are passionate about their work. In fact, their
work and life are impossible to separate. That doesn't mean that
innovators need to be workaholics, but they should base their ideas on
deep beliefs. Innovation is a leap of faith, and innovators need to be
believers. Like artists, they will often face rejection, but if an idea
is not worth fighting for, it might not have been the right one in the
first place.
12. Artists are contrarians. Artists can see the "cracks
through which the light gets in," as the old adage goes. Likewise, great
innovators come up with solutions to problems because they see what is
missing. They are eccentric, which means they literally view things from
the fringes. Both artists and innovators see the world as it could be.
They look upon our world, as Proust would say, with "fresh eyes." You
might also call that vision. They are always "initially wrong" to be
"ultimately right" as
Kathryn Schultz wrote in her book, Being Wrong.
Like art, true innovation has the potential to make our lives better.
It connects and reconnects us with deeply held truths and fundamental
human desires; meets complexity with simple, elegant solutions; and
rewards risk-taking and vulnerability.
However, businesses must refrain from designing innovation as a mere
process. That is perhaps the golden rule that artists and innovators
have in common: new ideas of worth will only come to those who allow
ample space and time for those new ideas to develop in the first place.
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