Lessons from artists can teach business to achieve mastery

Artists are involved in ‘arduous, dishevelled, iterative work – as messy as building a business case’.

The creative endeavours of business are not so different from those of artists.

Understanding how art gets made, and why, is a path to accomplishment and mastery – even in the corporate world.

I’ve considered this in my own work of writing, editing and advising on information design and data visualisation, but a few new books and a television show have helped me crystallise why those of us in business need to learn from the arts instead of being allergic to the idea.

The allergy stems from a misunderstanding of the artistic process. Most of us think of it in divine terms: mythic and miraculous, thus neither instructive nor useful. The artist ponders until lightning strikes and out comes Gatsby or Guernica. In The Work of Art, former New York magazine editor Adam Moss acknowledges the power of that notion but then deletes it. His book mixes interviews of more than three dozen artists (writers, painters, composers, comedians, designers) with images of their work and work in progress.

We see sketches that inform Frank Gehry’s whirly architecture; pages of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics, well worked over; and even a text message thread in which music producer Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) solicits collaborators.

This is arduous, dishevelled, iterative work, as messy as building a business case. The creatives also talk about problem solving, communication, and collaboration – skills I’m told are helpful in workplaces, too. So you start to see that you can learn from art and artists.

What they’re doing isn’t so different from what you’re trying to do. Hell, artist Kara Walker even shares part of the PowerPoint she presented to the group that commissioned a sculpture from her. Art is product development. Or, as one composer says, it’s “more like being a carpenter than like being God … What we do is a craft.” The product – whether it’s a mural, a song, a dance or a joke – was born from the same effort you might put in to find mastery in your own work.

Mastery is the obsession of The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik in The Real Work. He excavates seven traits that define the highest achievement, from performance to intention to action and more, and tells stories from realms as varied as baking, dancing, boxing, and driving. Gopnik explains what magicians mean when they talk about “the real work”: the “accumulated craft, savvy, and technical mastery that makes a magic trick great”. It’s not who does the trick first, or who does it best, necessarily, but who did the work to master it.

When he describes the dizzying complexity of putting on a Broadway musical, it’s not hard to apply his description to any business context: “A seven-person creative team of equals is called war.” Yet that’s what it takes to launch a show and people do it because when they nail it the thrill is unparalleled – and what they’ve put into the world matters.

“We all know the real work in whatever field it is we’ve mastered,” Gopnik writes. “It’s shorthand … for the difference between accomplishment and mere achievement.”

He carries this sentiment into a 60-page companion tome, All That Happiness Is, in which he explains that achievement is merely completing a task, whereas accomplishment is “the engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the rush of fulfilment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves”. Accomplishment is egalitarian: “Every enterprise, every job, every short-order recipe – everything we do can be done more or less beautifully.”

Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud hails the nobility of pulling off a feat of architecture, however it turns out.

Is your work about artful accomplishment? Probably not. Gop­nik notes that “our social world conspires to denigrate … accomplishments in favour of the rote work of achievement”. This is in part why mastery (and happiness) feels out of reach for many.

I thought of this while binge-watching the long-running British TV series Grand Designs. The show follows people over several years as they attempt to build bespoke homes. Host Kevin McCloud, trained in design and architecture, gets the homeowners to lay out their vision, strategy, budget and timeline early on (and sometimes can barely hold back a laugh at their confidence).

Much goes wrong and viewers get to revel in those travails, while anyone who sees the world through a management lens recognises all the tropes: poor process, conflicting visions, bad compromises, sunk costs and so on. Then, about two-thirds through, you recognise that these people aren’t just trying to achieve the task of building a house; they are trying to accomplish a feat of architecture. McCloud hails the nobility of the pursuit, however it turns out, and as an observer you acquire a grudging fondness for the enterprise.

Businesses and businesspeople could be more like the Grand Designs homeowners, or the teams behind Broadway musicals, or Gehry, or magicians. But first they’d have to turn away from the maniacal focus on achievement: Hit the numbers. Grow the bottom line. Get the promotion. The whole idea of stakeholder capitalism is that companies ought to have grander designs, and I suspect we all know this. Our favourite case studies are about leaders and organisations real­ly trying to accomplish something. Sometimes, as with Steve Jobs or Oprah Winfrey, we might even suggest they’re artists in their own way. But in our minds they’re outliers, possibly myths.

The process of creating art may look like your plans for an innovative new offering or your attempt to devise a growth strategy. But those are just achievements. Artists, craftspeople, are striving for accomplishment. I suspect you want to, too. After all, you didn’t flip past this essay. And in that small act you’ve done a bit of the real work.

Harvard Business Review