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]
>

----- End Original Message -----

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