Dear Aacorners,
it was already october 27 when I asked:
"What I'm interested in is to know if you perceive
this crisis as a chance for art/aesthetics in
business/organisation/management?"
Some Aacroners answered and then suddenly, the discussion stopped. (See
below) It's already half a year ago. The economic crisis is still a matter of
fact. What do you think now?
And I will ask another
existential
question:
Who are the artists within the aacorn network
(who are not already in contact with me) making a living exclusively by artprojects in companies?
What are the consequences of the financial and
economic crisis for you and how do you deal with that collapsing situation
where all efforts of the past seem to be in vain.
Thanks for any comment.
Best
Jügen
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 5:43 PM
Subject: Re: actualisation
What a silence suddenly....It
looks as if Aacorn had been turned off since
these promissing exchanges on
finance and art....Paul, David, Daved, Jürgen,
Matt, Steve Michael, and
others aacorners, where are you ? I miss your words
I hope "I" didn't reduced
the list to mute
;-))
philippe
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 6:29 PM
Subject: Re: actualisation
Dear Philippe;
this is most interesting. Many great
insights to which I add some small ones.
One thing that I try to do
and am doing it now with a group of Executive MBA people is to get them to work
on conceptualising aspects of the verbal world in terms of group presentations
that have to have a strong visual or poetic element to get these ideas
over.
Sometimes I can challenge them by asking dumb questions like
"Bottom Line? where is the bottom?... What is it the bottom of?.... I am not an
accountant so I don't see what is the "top" either... "and so on until I ask
again in rather a dumb way "Well can you draw it?" Or "It sounds as though
balance is important in that, so can you balance that in another way, maybe is
there a poem in that?"
Sometimes we can take a concept like "Best
practice" or "Benchmark" and ask them to draw these concepts so that they can
attempt to limit the range of the possible in a visual way and realise that
there can be no "Best" if you cannot visualise infinity.
I always allow a
choice of how they present. Usually some groups try to do very conventional
presentations with run of the mill charts, diagrams, tables etc... but then some
of the other groups who have been more adventurous will shout out "Draw it!!" or
"If you can't see it, you can't say it!"
I have an advantage in that as
I am old and wear a pinstripe business suit for these sessions they figure that
I cannot possibly be as dumb as I sound but as I am clearly an old Professor and
must know something, they may as well go along with it and humour
me.
Afterwards they often say somethng like "Well, that was very
different! I see things in a different way!"
Best
regards
David
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: actualisation - Opportunity in the Global Financial
crisis
Jurgen, David, Matt, Phillipe thanks for priming the pump on this
discussion. As a student of technological and industrial crises I find this
a very fruitful line of inquiry. And Matt's referenced article is exactly
the kind of work that is needed.
I agree this financial crisis is a huge game-changing opportunity for
considering wholesale redesign of the global economy. I am attaching a
commentary that I did for the Economic and Political Weekly of
India. In that I argue that the global economy needs to be weened away
from credit and leverage, over consumption, towards sustainability. My vision of
sustainability simultaneously seeks to protect/improve Nature (external
environment) and Passion (internal environment). This means paying
attention to the emotional and somatic understanding of and in organizations.
This has implications for consumers, employees, the public, design of
product/services and production systems, and suppliers - in other words -
the whole corporation.
Art and aesthetic is a deep source of human satisfaction and can be a guide
to designing products, production and consumption. Our challenge
in AACORN is to develop the the intellectual and emotional tools and seize
the opportunity to make aesthetics relevant to the global financial crisis.
We need a vision, theory, and practical tools for creating aesthetic
sustainable enterprises and economies.
A modest proposal would be to gather a group of
researchers/practitioners/artists to address key implications of the global
financial crisis for organizational aesthetics and vice versa. This could
be the basis of a book. I am on the Editorial board of Stanford University
Press Series on High Reliability and Crisis Management. The series is
interested in a volume on this topic. If you have interest in this,
please drop me a note on what aspect you would be willing to address
Paul
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: actualisation
Hi Matt, nice to talk "to" you again (remember
Berlin?)
Hi Jürgen, what a fertile input you made !
Thanks.
I second Matt's post totally, and wish to focus on
his line "advance alternative modes of engagement as scholars and practitioners,
even as we remain sensitive to the potential for our efforts to become
instrumentalized in the process".
I wish to rapidly describe two cases we recently
dealt with here, together with Patrick Mathieu
:
1) we produced an long term analysis for
a big international assert mangement and private bank. We demonstrated
that both the stakeholders, the top managers and the clients shared a common
vision and "ambition" about a step-by-step progression towards learning how to
better spend money, in a respopnsible and unselfish way.
We also showed (to the extend that the company is
now examining how to implement practical processes and methods), how this
ambition is realised through a very specific management method, similar to some
we observed within artistic cooperations. We discovered how their most complex
financial hedge fund product was in fact based on a specific collaborating
management process, that could appear paradoxical but which in fact attract
people and money on a highly "creative community building" untold
stake.
We also discovered, and shared with them, how the
process of "better spending out money" is linked to the feeling of living
under a "Big Above All" , and to the wish of asymptotically stepping upward
to an unreachable level of life, represented (and valuated!) through
financial assets and their management. We had to detect and describe where lies
this "Big Above" (in that case mainly represented by the Name... sounds
familiar??), and how it manifests to stakeholders, managers, clients
and employees ( it also showed the accuracy of the contemporary question :
how to deal with an absence of such a feeling, and it showed how this apparent
absence may often be a hidden presence under such garments as financial
materialistic and immoral interests).
2) On another opportunity, working for a big
international money transfer company, we showed the actual outcome and
unconscious need of the company and their clients was linked to enabling a
double-cultural belonging feeling, and that their should develop by
creating a renewed conception of the symbolic debt, leading to a renewed
conception of money sending as lending (sharing the debt rather than
paying it back, as there is now noone to receive the payment and credit you
for it), leading to a renewed conception of credit considered as a "potlatch"
(mutual gifting process), thus enabling re-setting the landscape of responsible
development and financing developpeing cutures... and a promising business
opportunity for the company.
In both cases, the question of high finance
processes was not analysed through financial, mathematical, or game / risk
analysis tools, which are only smoke produced by the fire. We focused on
people and their words, in order to discover the deep underlying
socio-psychological drives, and make the connection between financial tools
/ products / outcomes and individual / society concerns. This revealed how
the creation (of products, of feelings, of cultural settings) is entangled with
financial processes (who would doubt that ?). And most interesting, we showed
how we, not at all financial experts nor big money-makers, were able to deepen
the understandings of main actors in the field. Our analysis and
advices were not only listened to, but practically followed by them, thus
installing among the companies and people a more humane relationnal model : a
meaning.
Though the results we got were highly metaphysical
in a way, we didn't tried to introduce thoses finance people directly into
philosopical or metaphysical issues - even if we had succeeded and had been
listened to, the link with action would have been left to the managers' will and
ability to translate philosophy into acts... what even Plato
failed.
We neither did use arty tools or
forms.
We instead started from the strong belief that a
form is only culturally active when it embodies a relation, and that
financial products (as any good or service) is such a form.
As an artist I feel involved into the world, its
understanding and its shaping, more directly than I ever felt in any show I was
part of.... and it raises really hot questions on aesthetics and economy, forms
and meaning, producing and showing.
I drop off here, to let you reacting and
taking my poor inputs a bit further
Philippe
