Creative economy and beyond

Leadership is a rather fuzzy, impressionistic part of the field of management studies. There are those who would like to see more scientific approaches to the study of leadership – and those who would like to reduce it to a simple recipe. But there's another view that leadership is simply a complex social phenomenon – perhaps not even a skill, since skills can be taught and learned. Nancy Adler, a leadership scholar at McGill University, thinks even that approach falls short of describing what phenomenon she has studied. In the context of a global financial crisis, a steep recession in most of the western world, and geo-political and politico-economic strife, not to mentioned climate change, she argues that leadership needs to look to the arts for inspiration. In a video, she explains – among other examples – how medical students at Yale University undertook an experiment where some took art classes and others stayed narrowly focused on learning medicine. The "artists" proved better at diagnosis, they were less likely to jump to conclusions, and once they had decided they were more willing to change their minds than the "pure" medical students when new evidence emerged. Why? Because they learned to look at the whole picture. They took in more data. They saw what was there rather than using a pre-existing mental model. In short, they thought differently. So stunning were the results that a number of medical schools in the US have followed this prescription.

Artists as leaders: Artists may produce a lot of rubbish along the way, but Adler's convinced that they lead insights. Business leaders, and the business schools that hope to teach them, could stand to learn from that. The Journal of Management Inquiry, an academic journal of considerable standing, despite (or perhaps because of) its often eccentric stance, has published a paper drawn from Adler's speech. In it she writes:

Embracing creative solutions is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity. What would a creative economy look like? It would require an economy in which people combine an aspiration for "the beautiful" and the use of extreme creativity, with huge market potential, to solve problems worth solving; solutions worthy of our humanity. The question we need to ask ourselves is what would it take for the world to operate as a creative economy. What would it take to embrace beauty and artistry, in addition to analysis, to sustainably solve the planet's most challenging problems?

It is a stunning insight, and one worth some contemplation. Why do we like art so much? Why do we admire the artist? Is that virtue not similar to what we see in the business people we admire, too? Adler quotes Warren Buffett, the "sage of Omaha", the world's most famous investor, and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett, she recalls, says he's not a businessman but an artist. Artists look at things differently, they question pre-set models, they challenge assumptions. That's not the same thing as leadership, but it has something to do with vision. Leadership may be a fuzzy, impressionistic part of management studies. But the Impressionists, with their fuzzy pictures, were certainly interested in new ways of seeing. That's why we admire them, as well as their work.

Source documents: The film version of Leading Beautifully plays in Windows Media format and runs for about an hour. The article is available as an "Online First" version at the Journal of Management Inquiry. When Adler isn't teaching leadership at McGill, she is – you guessed it – an artist.