JEAN PHILIP DE TENDER

Can one manage creativity ?

According to authors Stan Davis and David McIntosh The Art of Business is about seeing both the economic flow and the artistic flow in business. They say enormous benefits result from applying and blending insights from two worlds – the aesthetic and emotional richness of the arts and the strategic and operational perspective of business. You can see textures where everybody else is seeing shapes. You can see colors where others see grays. You can see not just what is, but what could be.

In business strategy, the four cardinal elements are always you, your offer, your customers, and your competitors. If you’ve got a clear, differentiated view about how those four pieces fit together, you’ve got strategy. But now, if you are managing both the economic flow and the artistic flow of your business, you will slighty change how you see the four elements.

• See yourself as an artist.
• See your work as a work of art.
• See your customers as an audience.
• See your competitors as teachers.

Land, labor and capital are the classical factors of production, the inputs or resources of any economic flow. Make good use of them, and they give you a comparitative advantage over other firms working with them. But when everybody is working with those same inputs, the differences are likely to be small and short-live.

Add imagination, emotion, intelligence and experience to the creative process and you will connect with your clients (or audience) and deliver beauty, excitement, enjoyment and meaning.

This book is very interesting reading and adds a new flavour to what Rolf Jensen wrote in The Dream Society and Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in The Experience Economy.