-Hi Colleagues;
This is a request for information.
I have a Masters student who is interested in researching Free events like the Brooklyn Museum's Target First Saturday Series. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/visit/first_saturdays.php
This is not something that I know much about. But I am sure that relevant expertise exists within AAcorn.
If you can point me in the right direction, I should be grateful
Thanks
David
---- Start Original Message -----
Sent: Tue, 6 Feb 2007 12:40:53 -0000
From: Daved Barry <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: leader and artship
> A neat example Jürgen. I really love this group--all these fine points. If I
> understand Steve's, Mary Jo's, Ian's, Lee's, David's, and now Jürgen's
> points correctly, the whole idea of a manager as artist is perhaps
> impossible afterall? That when one is managing, that's a certain role with
> its particular functions (planning, organizing, directing, and
> controlling--had to really struggle to remember these), and that when one is
> being an artist, that's a different role with different aims and tools? Much
> like Mary Jo's book "Leaders, Artists, and Priests"? Or deBono's six hats?
> So if an employee, who happens to be a manager, wants to use organizational
> materials from an arts perspective, she must temporarily put aside her
> manager's hat, drop her management tools, take up her artist's smock
> (actor's robes, conductor's baton, poet's pen) and say that now she's an
> artist? If this is so, can managers be artful in a fine art sense, as in
> Rob's and Lee's book? Or is managerial artfulness also impossible (thus
> leaving it in the 'artful dodger category')? D
>
> PS. Jo, I think you should just send the paper to the list--it won't 'break
> the bank' and I think it could be helpful for these discussions. Along these
> lines, is anyone besides Ken Friedman using the AACORN listserv in 'digest'
> fashion? If not, then I think we should ease up on the 'attachments
> restriction'--being able to attach small documents to our mails (though I'd
> still ask that we don't attach big files, given that some of us are using
> modems and slow internet connections).
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aesthetics, Creativity, and Organisations Research Network
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Juergen Bergmann
> Sent: Monday, February 05, 2007 11:09 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: leader and artship
>
> Dear All,
> thanks to all for that animated discussion.
> Through my work as artist in companys I would never make an analogie between
> a manager and an artist. Even - see the example - if the result is the same,
> the way of doing is quite different.
>
> Example
>
> Contract/Order: Analysis of the company structure and development of a
> concept to improve the performance.
> Situation of the company: very traditional, older than 250 years, 28.000
> employees, declining EBIT (less than 3%), low bench-mark results, perturbing
> conflicts between the three divisions of the company: A = electronics
> (quoted), B = mechanics (quoted), C = applications (Ltd.)
>
> Throughout an extensive data collection about the company and its actual
> situation emerged a unique and company specific performance concept in which
> each division was symbolised by an artist whose self-perception as
> professional artist could stand for an abstract description of the according
> division so that the interaction of the divisions could be simulated: A =
> progressive saxophonist, B = conservative actress and C = expressive
> painter. At a early state of the development of the performance, supported
> by continuous visits from top-executives, a very heavy conflict arises
> between A, B and C resulting from the fact, as we understood successively by
> our incessant quarrelling, wrangling, brawling, arguing, disputing and
> fighting, that the language used to develop the performance was at the same
> time B's artistic instrument. Whereas A and C, while speaking, put away
> their instruments: saxophone and brush. This would not have been a problem
> if B would have been a very creative actress, but the choice of a
> conservative actress, nevertheless with excellent dramatic capabilities, was
> induced by the intuitive perception of the soul of division B. Later, as B
> proposes, having had almost a nervous breakdown, a division neutral text
> recitation from her existing repertoire that we introduce as her artistic
> instrument, the language of the working process became clearly separated
> from the language of the performance itself and the conflict disappeared
> instantly. The consequence of that insight led us directly to the structure
> of the performance: A, the saxophonist, and B, the actress, support each
> other by playing alternately while C, the painter, expresses continually his
> interpretation of their interaction in parallel on the canvas in the
> background.
> The differentiation of that findings of the process of creation had its
> equation in the following concept as consequence for the company:
> 1. The conflict between the three divisions must be due to the fact that the
> corporate identity is moulded only by B's history. That was true! But so
> evident to everybody that nobody saw it. Therefore an actively and neutrally
> articulated corporate identity including all divisions should rapidly be
> established and implemented.
> 2. The actual structure is hostile to share resources between the divisions
> and maintains knowledge as the fundament of power. Instead of the three
> divisions a matrix like structure would be appropriate: A and B approaching
> each other under common corporate departments while C will be integrated as
> business frame. Thus allowing project specific platforms where members of A,
> B and C cooperate, so that the processes and not the affiliation to a
> division determine workflow and disposition of resources and by consequence
> the whole performance of the company.
> The communication of the concept triggers a heated debate. Nevertheless, a
> project group is initiated with the objective to formulate a neutral
> corporate identity. Another project group checks and confirms the concept.
> The Head of Division B, still sticking to the "old" identity, leaves the
> organisation. Some parts of division C are alienated. About six months later
> the restructuring of the company is accomplished. The result is clearly
> improving the bench-mark and EBIT rises up to 9%.
> Right from the start a painting of 140cm x 180cm issues of the process of
> creating the performance. Completely detached of the objectives of the
> company the painter expresses on the canvas her personal emotions during the
> process. The neutral text recitation as artistic instrument for B was the
> monologue of Meroe in Penthesilea from Heinrich von Kleist. The presentation
> of the performance during an initial corporate conference was only the
> pretext to speak about the process of its creation. After his speech the CEO
> announced the performance with the following remarks: "We have commissioned
> an artist to think up ways of coping with this situation. I would like to
> discuss the result with all of you."
> The objectives of the contract were met by developing a company specific
> artistic artwork which is not functional itself in its final result, the
> performance and the painting, but in its process of creation.
>
> I hope to contribute with that to the discussion.
>
> Best
> Jürgen
>
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: "David Weir" <[log in to unmask]>
> An: <[log in to unmask]>
> Gesendet: Montag, 5. Februar 2007 18:48
> Betreff: Re: leader and artship
>
>
> -Dear All;
> Ian's reflections seem to me to be very close to the mark. On the whole we
> as scholars are not necessarily good at understanding what is to be the
> objects of our study. but paradoxically, once we can approximately DO other
> things we are quite good reporters of what that experience might be like for
> those who can DO these performances more expertly.
> I tried to have a go at discussing this in a paper I gave to the Paris
> Conference on Art and Organisation, through trying to explicate how actually
> footballers "do" offside.
> My hunch is that some top players actually do see things that ordinary
> practitioners do not even though these ordinary practitioners undoubtedly
> can understand in a second order way what it is that is being done.
> These performances seemed to me to approximate to what really good business
> people DO when they perceive market opportunities. They see space and feel
> rhythm.
> Thus I said in my Paris paper:
> " Sporting encounters are often met with in anthropological field reports:
> usually analysed as clues to or signifiers of other levels of meaning. Thus
> it is tribalism, social class, youth culture and the like that function as
> sources of the deep constructs which frame these analyses . But they have
> little to do with " football" as it is known to footballers themselves.
>
> But as the philosopher G. E Moore noted , "a thing is what it is and no
> other thing" and a sense-making activity that denies the sense of what is
> performed and celebrated in its own right ,is limited and demeaning.
> Football is a realm of activity. It is a "life-world" in Schutz's sense,
> that is worthy of more than this and it is unusual also in that it is a
> nearly universal form of activity across many cultures and within many
> contexts. But most of the analysis of the scholarly community has come from
> the outside rather than from inside the game itself so its special character
> and unique rewards have not been specified.
>
> There are strong reasons to consider it as a basis for framing the analysis
> of certain significant aspects of management performance also; most
> particularly those connected with the activities of decision-making and
> leadership that are held to be central to the strategic dimensions of
> management.
>
> This must be a rewarding exercise not merely at the level of metaphor but in
> terms of the interpretation of significant patterns of behaviour,
> competences and skilled performance. The internal integration of this field
> of knowledge is only usually available to its practitioners who
> characteristically note their judgements by short-hands, codes and
> subterranean jargon from which the uninitiated are excluded.
>
> So it is in business and in the business of senior management and its
> decision-making performances. Those who have worked with great
> organizational managers in the day to day creation of strategy and its
> implementation throughout a period of changing events, hostile attacks, and
> unpredictably alternating periods of adversity and propition which mark the
> onward progress of innovation and corporate growth, know that it is the
> mastery of Space and Time that lies at the heart of the contribution of
> these exceptionally skilled practitioners. It is what marks them out from
> the crowd of the merely competent.
>
>
>
> I wish to finish with an anecdote which hints at where I believe some of
> this attention must be directed .
> In the late 1970's and early 1980's I was privileged to work for a time in
> close proximity to one of the creators of the new shape of retailing in
> Britain, the Scottish entrepreneur James Gulliver. He was an intellectually
> able man with a first class honours degree in Civil Engineering from Glasgow
> University, competent and experienced at the skills and routines of
> professional management, and James Gulliver also possessed great vision and
> sense of timing particularly in the sometimes rough trade of corporate
> acquisition . I had worked closely with him in the late '70s and early '80s
>
> He bought well, often surprising the markets with his judgement of space
> and timing. With his team, he built a business empire. He foresaw the future
> shape of supermarket retailing and did much to create it. He was a worldly
> man and catholic in his interests. We got on well and found each other
> amusing and stimulating. But I knew that I could never equal his easy
> mastery of the business world in which he was a king, a Platini or Zidane,
> controlling events from the centre of things, among many who were merely
> good or superior operators.
>
> After I left his team and returned to Glasgow University as Head of the
> Department of Management Studies, he joined us as a Visiting Professor and
> we continued our relationship on different terms. One day he summoned me to
> a Saturday morning meeting at his Georgian house in Edinburgh's New Town to
> discuss a possible venture.
>
> He greeted me and we climbed up the curving stairs to the great drawing room
> which stretched the entire front of the house. As I entered, with a sweep of
> the arm he announced a room, sophisticated, restrained but vibrant, the very
> epitome of sur-excellent coordinated domestic design. It could have come
> out of any magazine article of the very top of the designer's trade.
> Furniture, fabrics, the play of light and shadow, the balance of subdued
> antiquity and brash modernity ..all was just right and fit for its purpose.
> It lived and breathed taste and enjoyment. It was visually breathtaking.
>
> I asked "who did this for you, James ?.. David Hicks ..or who ? "
> He was momentarily, but only momentarily, quiet. Then "I did it myself . I
> enjoy this you know. Its what I like to do ..Its very creative", he
> responded .
>
> I should have guessed!
>
> My speculation and it is no more than this, is that as scholars of
> management we need to discard much of the apparatus of explanation based on
> the rational and in particular the economic models of behaviour in favour of
> more reliance on the analysis of performance. My own experience of business
> and management and of its skilled practitioners is that in many cases their
> style is of more interest than their overt substance, their intangible
> abilities and expressive behaviours of more significance than their
> post-event rationalizations. Some managers are better than others in being
> in the right place at the right time and in knowing when to run hard and
> when to stay put. Perhaps we should spend less time asking the skilled
> practitioners why they think they did such and such, rather than observing
> what they actually do and in developing a rhetoric of performance rather
> than of motivation and economic theory.
>
> Then we would discover what it is in the dip of the shoulders that leaves
> the defender grasping at thin air and in the sudden unseen intervention into
> the penalty-box to "get on the end of a speculative through-ball" that makes
> soccer the beautiful game. Some of these visual and spatial acuities may be
> learnable and transferable: some may mirror what it is that makes business
> management such a fascinating, if at times bloody, sport."
> But then football is perhaps more important than business management, or
> the scholarship of business. But things are best studied from the inside. I
> am not a Visual artist, so I don't know what that is all about.
> Best
> David
>
>
>
> --- Start Original Message -----
> Sent: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 17:13:36 -0000
> From: "King, Ian W" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: leader and artship
>
> > Dear All,
> >
> > I have really enjoyed this discussion and look forward to reading Jo's
> paper [hint - would love a copy]. For me the distinction between how a
> beholder [and thus us as observers] engages with say a Caravaggio in
> comparison to say a later Klee [or Rothko, Bacon etc] is entirely about the
> manner of our engagement. With the former our relationship is one
> conditioned by distance and therefore collusion between the lines of
> perspective of the image and the understanding gained by the
> observer/beholder - whereas with Klee such collusion is not apparent and not
> always expected. In the first instance the observer is passive whereas in
> the second the observer is active. In the second instance the
> observer/beholder may employ a form of 'contact' - a form of engagement that
> is characterised by being almost part of the painting. Thus understanding
> is not closed and final rather it is one built from the beholder's own
> intepretative understanding and therefore is generative. Here I could point
> to many examples - from Klee, to Rothko, also to Pollock and others that
> seek to fulfil this aim. It is this latter form of engagement that offers
> much potential in our examination and development of understanding in and of
> Organization life.
> >
> > regards
> >
> > Ian King
> >
> >
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > From: Aesthetics, Creativity, and Organisations Research Network on behalf
> of Hatch, Mary Jo
> > Sent: Mon 2/5/2007 16:39
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: leader and artship
> >
> >
> >
> > Steve makes an important point that, in many ways we become the methods
> that we use to perform our art/discipline/organization. If we drop our
> tools, as Weick suggests, then what have we got? Mainly room to try some new
> ones I suppose, though most of us find this as difficult as Weick's
> firefighters did with similar results, though perhaps not so deadly (unless
> you consider stultification of life). It may seem that artists use different
> methods (and take on the methodologies that these imply) than do managers
> trained in B-schools. But do they?
> >
> > The rationality that is associated with objectivist-realist-naturalist
> approaches to management can be found in the work of artists such as
> Caravaggio. Wanting to paint from life something that is representative is
> as much present in art as it is in the practical ambitions of managers
> "painting" thier companies with valuations and cash flows. If that is how
> they experience reality, then that is how they will paint it. But the deeper
> question is how many other ways of painting can be found? And what are we to
> do with them once we locate their analogs in business? For me, the
> interesting thing is to look for ways in which different sorts of art reveal
> different aspects of life in organizations and in academics. How does
> Jackson Pollack's work speak to a different way of theorizing organizations
> than does Caravaggio's? If anyone is interested in this particular question,
> Dvora Yanow and I are now 95% done revising our paper for Organization
> Studies (Methodology By Metaphor: Ways of Seeing in Painting and Research)
> which examines methodological differences by metaphorical comparison with
> Caravaggio, Goya, Picasso, Duchamp and Pollock. It is mostly about using art
> to give visual access to the presuppositions of realist versus
> interpretivist research, but also speaks to the issue of different methods
> that artists use (in this case only a few of them who were all painters
> during the last half of the last millenium). anyway, It is ready to read
> now, if anyone wants to see it just send me an email.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Jo Hatch
> >
> >
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > From: Aesthetics, Creativity, and Organisations Research Network on behalf
> of Steve Taylor
> > Sent: Mon 2/5/2007 11:20 AM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: leader and artship
> >
> >
> >
> > Hi Daved (and others),
> >
> > I've been enjoying this conversation, but I think I have a somewhat
> > different take on it. In the post that kicked off this recent flurry,
> > Garrick said, "I completely agree that the Artist is in the world in a way
> > that is somehow different, and adopts a vantage point, or exists in
> > relationship to the world in a particular way," and that is where I find
> > myself starting. How is this way of being in the world different from the
> > way of being in the world that we generally think of as management or
> > leadership? I tend to think that our way of being in the world comes from
> > the disciplines we have learned and practice. As academics, we have a
> > discipline of theorizing and intellectualizing. I think that we teach
> > managers in traditional MBA programs disciplines like quantitative
> analysis,
> > net present value calculations, market segmentation, managerial
> accounting,
> > Porter's five forces, and so on. It seems to me that the political
> leaders
> > in my country (USA) have all learned the discipline of constant
> > sensegiving/spinning of events to match their ideology. When I talk to
> > artists they seem to be working from very different disciplines, such as
> > actor friends who draw upon "yes and" disciplines, or the disciplines of
> > actually listening to what others are saying (something that is stressed
> in
> > a lot of improv exercises). When I use the term discipline, I mean a
> > practice that has been internalized through training and working with that
> > practice.
> >
> > For me these disciplines or embodied/internalized practices are the tools
> of
> > management and leadership. And let me end with a quote from Karl Weick's
> > recent article in the Journal of Management Education ("Drop Your Tools:
> On
> > Reconfiguring Management Education", Vol. 31, no. 1).
> >
> > "Consider the tools of traditional logic and rationality. Those tools
> > presume the world is stable, knowable, and predictable. To set aside
> those
> > tools is not to give up on finding a workable way way to keep moving. It
> is
> > only to give up one means of direction finding that is ill-suited to the
> > unstable, the unknowable, and the unpredictable. To drop the tools of
> > rationality is to gain access to lightness in the form of intuitions,
> > feelings, stories, improvisation, experience, imagination, active
> listening,
> > awareness in the moment, novel words, and empathy. All of these
> nonlogical
> > activities enable people to solve problems and enact their potential."
> (pg.
> > 15)
> >
> > - Steve
> >
> >
> > Steven S. Taylor, PhD
> > Assistant Professor
> > Worcester Polytechnic Institute
> > Department of Management
> > 100 Institute Rd
> > Worcester, MA 01609
> > USA
> > +1 508-831-5557
> > [log in to unmask]
> >
>
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