The Oscars and Engineering

The Oscars are Sunday and my money is on The King's Speech.  I bring this up because my favorite column - - Schumpeter/The Art of Management (The Economist) has a great article in the February 19th issue - - Business has much to learn from the arts.  I would expand this and add engineering.  I don't expect many of you to think about Madonna as a prophet of organizational renewal and some of you are more comfortable with Rob Adam's A Good Hard Kick in the Ass: the Real Rules for Business - - but consider several of the points from the article outlined below:

Studying the arts can help business people 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 clinches and garbled with gobbledygook.  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 Danels 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.  Bob 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.

The bottom line for the engineering communities - - the prize of innovation.  If studying the arts helps with creativity and innovation in addition to managing the ones with the creativity and innovate ideas - - one probably needs to look at the creative industries for pointers.