EVERYONE IS AN ARTIST, AND A BUSINESSPERSON. RABINDRA NATH TAGORE AND LEONARDO DA VINCI SHOULD BE BROUGHT IN BUSINESS THINKING -sudhanshu

GOOD EVENING FOLKS -

REFLECTED ON A VERY UNIQUE AND DIFFERENT ASPECT OF LIFE AND BUSINESS THIS EVENING -

BUSINESS ACADEMICIANS & PRACTITIONERS SHOULD ADOPT ART THINKING IN BUSINESS STRATEGY

FOR

EVERYONE IS AN ARTIST, AND A BUSINESSPERSON

RABINDRA NATH TAGORE AND LEONARDO DA VINCI SHOULD BE BROUGHT IN BUSINESS THINKING

What is true for everyone -for artists and for business- people-is that there is no such thing as space outside the market, only the possibility of space within it.

For all of us, the market economy is the fabric of our lives. It is almost impossible for anyone to avoid participating in it. People work, get a paycheck, run businesses, pay taxes, buy things, invest, raise money, and sometimes secretly hope to become rich. Doctors master insurance claim forms, Teachers manage book budgets. Artists hold day jobs. Students hold debt. Anti-market activists own iPhones.

Every day people try to make things, to start things, to navigate the formless beginnings of putting anything new into the world. The traditional ideas of the economy map a single-vector system around making a profit. But the market is a broader and more flexible tool. It can still hold space for the early days of making things, putting them out there, and moving step by step into a future of your own design.

WHAT IS ART THINKING

Art thinking is a framework and set of habits to protect space for inquiry—to dream big in ways that are completely lifted above yet still tethered to reality. It is about how to structure and set aside space for open-ended, failure-is-possible exploration and to move forward by asking the big, messy, important questions, whether you know they are possible to answer or not. It is a form of optimism in the face of uncertainty. ( Amy Whitaker 2016)

ART, DESIGN, AND CREATIVITY

Art thinking shares some similarities with design thinking, the framework for generalizing the process of designing a product into a creative problem-solving tool. The differences between art and design are somewhat academic, especially as Fields of conceptual and speculative design flourish. But whereas a framework originating in product design starts with an external brief-“What is the best way to do this?"-art thinking emanates from the core of the individual and asks, “Is this even possible?"

( Amy Whitaker 2016)

Design thinking values empathy with users and rapid pro-to types so that you can build a better airplane. Art thinking is there with the Wright brothers as they crash-land and still believe that flight is possible. ( Amy Whitaker 2016 )

Writers and thinkers like me, and parents, teachers, entrepreneurs, scientists, filmmakers, and even working artists-have found ways to design creative lives and whole organizations in the market economy Relative to the myth of artistic genius, their lives show patches of failure, talent in other fields, and years spent starting small. Their business models show the resourcefulness of starving artists and the belief that everyone has something to offer that is of value.

“Business” is a term I use to mean organizational form in the economy, whether a household or a nonprofit, a small company or a multinational. “Art” is a term I use to mean the human capacity for exploration and originality, for thinking and making in ways that are uniquely your own. I use the term “art” willfully instead of relying solely on some- thing more general like “creativity” because I want to borrow it back from the art world as an old-fashioned part of all of our humanity. And I use the term “work” broadly to describe anyone engaged in labor of any kind, paid or unpaid, publicly or privately.

In my own life, I have written books while working full- time, mostly as a professor teaching business to people, and then Dean, Director and Vice Chancellor - I have worked in environments that are no more immune to politics and people complexities than anyone else’s office. I have experienced love and loss, been unwell and then well, tried to install an air conditioner in a window, paid bills, binge-watched television on the Internet, and otherwise been a person in the world, I hope all of that makes me a more honest guide. The questions in my mind aren’t ones you necessarily answer so much as revisit as a practice.

The gift of art thinking is, paradoxically, in the idea that you cannot control the outcome of any endeavor and you might fail, That may sound like cold encouragement, but in so many situations, that permission to try and fail frees you to ask questions that really matter. It allows you, in the words of the designer Dror Benshetrit, “to discover your own integrity." What I end most heartening is that, at its best, creative work-the kind that merits the Latin phrase ars longa, vita brevis, or “art is long, life is short”-comes from a core that is human and particular. The more you are yourself, the better chance you have to make your own contribution and to create your own life and work. The simple reality is that most of us need a paycheck, have a boss, and feel some weeks : that Monday is like Tuesday and Tuesday is like Wednesday, and Friday is only different because Saturday comes next. Even in that world of routine and duty, the tools of artistic process are available to everyone, and we can use them to build anything from inventive business models and management structures to well-spent afternoons and meaningful lives. What starts with an everyday feeling of "Hey, I made this!"-whether that’s dinner or a deal structure or a set of bookends-can expand into the largest of canvases. We create our lives, we build our workplaces, we design our society, we make our world. Art thinking is the process and business is the medium.

WHAT WOULD TAGORE OR LEONARDO DO?

Tagore the noble laureate and art and literary genius of India through his works and paintings has demonstrated and shown the genius of ART THINKING which could be adapted beautifully by business academician and practitioners of today. Leonardo da Vinci is considered one of the greatest artists of all time, someone for whom the label “genius” is not hyperbole. He was an artist but he was also a botanist, a defense engineer, an architect, and a scientist. He was a polymath. His brain was a university with all the departments. I have often wondered what Leonardo da Vinci would be doing if he were alive today. Would he have been standing outside an art school smoking a cigarette ?

The most satisfying answer I have heard lately came from a videographer and professor at the School of Visual Arts, who simply said that Leonardo would just be trying to figure something out. Being an artist is that process of exploring ideas, sometimes by means of producing objects, sometimes not. In that sense, being an artist is a part of all of us.

Yet it is especially difficult to imagine Leonardo in contemporary life for two main reasons, which have to do with education and economics.

It is harder to be a generalist now. Educational paths have become more specialized at the same time that information has proliferated. In his time, Leonardo could attempt to learn everything and wear his unique combination of botanist-defense- engineer hats.

Leonardo also had patrons. Now, you often have to invest in something yourself ahead of time to prove the concept. Countless organizations we now take for granted were self-invested in that way at the outset.

What Leonardo’s story points out is that we now need to design into the creative process systems for coordinating across many fields of knowledge and new ways of managing the financial risks of creative work ahead of time, Leonardo had advantages that few of us have but that we can all try to replicate: Instead of knowing everything, we can imagine being able to ask anything and to own our curiosity toward everything. We can pose questions and have conversations in any field.

We don’t need to mimic creative genius. We need to find our own authenticity. Instead of slotting into preexisting categories and labels, we can describe ourselves in our own terms and fully own our particular cross sections of knowledge. We can be custom generalists, and design our own metaphors. Instead of going hat in hand to the patron families of Italy or the king of France as Leonardo did, we can design more alternate funding arrangements like licenses, royalties, and equity stakes, to better support exploratory work before its full value is known.

We do not have to project the veneer of genius onto other people. Rather, we need to be honest and transparent about where we are. When you admire a finished project - a film, a song, or even a PowerPoint presentation-it is easy to feel distanced from the messiness of how it came to be. The finished work airbrushes out the realities of the perseverance and accident that brought it into being. That distancing does a disservice. It makes it so much harder to start.

No doubt, the world contains a few modern Leonardos who stand on that perch of genius with ease and elegance. But, just as often, the world moves forward propelled by the inelegant, the sincere, the awkward, the slow, the quiet, the local, the unexpected, the inefficient, and the downright surprising. As a body politic, that motley collective effort does more to push society forward and to create meaning for individual people and value for organizations than any one miraculous Leonardo ever could. Finding space for that process allows amazing projects or whole enterprises to appear in the world the way most of us do, slightly gangly or shy or adolescently a working progress.

The British writer G. K. Chesterton once observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” Leonard Read quotes Chesterton early on in his story of the market, “I, Pencil.” The world is full of wonders within the market and far outside. That sense of possibility does not yield to focusing just on work, but on the vast ecosystem of your whole life-and then defining the questions that will propel you forward.

MUCH LOVE

SUDHANSHU