CHAPTER 5
The Artist
Tom never did anything according to plan. He grew up in a factory town in the middle of Wisconsin dairy country but found small-town America suffocating, even odious. A champion wrestler and the lead player in the high school musical, Tom was at once a jock and a joker. For a young man in his position, the options for the future were anything but limitless: choose between two paths—working on the assembly line or managing the local burger joint, where he frequently hung out. If he were lucky, he might play guitar in a local band or relive his teenage passion by getting involved in the civic theater.
So it was quite a surprise when the guidance counselor called Tom down to his office for a discussion about his prospects. A mediocre student at best, Tom had apparently taken a college admissions test and scored in the top one percent of all Wisconsin high school graduates. After double checking that there wasn’t a mix-up or some diabolical deceit at play, the counselor suggested that Tom enroll in the regional campus of the state university because he didn’t want to encourage the young man to fly too high too soon.
Tom had other plans. He defiantly announced that, contrary to his apparently auspicious performance on some silly exam, he was going to Broadway to be an actor, director, and playwright. He’d rejected the assembly line and burger joint route, but in a wildly—indeed, too wildly—different way than everyone else encouraged.
It took the clear words of his level-headed brother to get Tom to step foot on campus. Once his brother convinced him that, just in case he didn’t make it to the top of the theatre world right away, it would be wise to have a degree, Tom visited the university. When the school offered to waive his tuition because of his top test scores, Tom could no longer resist. He enrolled the following semester.
In college, Tom joined the oratorical society and majored in film and theater. Sitting through lectures about the history of the art forms he was fascinated by and having conversations with professors who studied them rigorously made him see that there were many different ways to engage with his passions that didn’t only involve creation.
It was in these alternate modes of engagement where Tom actually found himself at his most creative space. His study habits were bizarre. He made giant storyboards to make sense of complex subjects and to see how they connected—not unlike the way a director or novelist might conceptualize a multi-arc narrative. Despite, or more likely because, of these quirks, he graduated with honors a year early.
Degree in hand and eager to make the move to New York, Tom once again faced an unlikely alternative option. He was offered a scholarship to attend graduate school and teach public speaking at a top university in California. Unexpectedly intrigued by the prospect of this totally different plan, Tom moved almost 3,000 miles away from the Broadway of his dreams. In less than seven years, Tom had gone from blue-collar trouper to whizz-kid professor. His peculiar way of doing things hadn’t changed since high school, but these new places and new people around him embraced his unorthodox approaches. The further up he moved, the more his clever ways of solving problems and presenting ideas were encouraged and valued.
Tom went on to be a leading professor and helped develop an important school of thought along with some other irregulars he had met along the way. At his twenty-fifth high school reunion, a classmate remarked that she always thought that he would go on to be a performer. Tom thought about it for a moment and responded that in fact that’s exactly what he had become. Theater became teaching, music became writing, and creativity became new methodology. Every time he delivered a speech, he was the star and director of his own show. In the end, Broadway became the stages of the ivory tower. The iconoclast had found a home he’d seen in none of his former visions of the future.
Artistic Expression
Beyond Artistry
Tom embodies all of the hallmarks of the Artist. His resistance to conformity, outside-of-the-box thinking, tendency to challenge norms, and constant search for something new are the fundamental qualities that make Artists who they are.
The name might sound misleading: Artists are not necessarily actual artists or people who make a living with their creative works, but they do have an elemental creative impulse that drives the way they see and experience their worlds. In many ways, the visionary talent of the Artist is the kind of thinking that people associate most with innovation.
Artists are people who pursue revolutionary breaks from the past and breakthrough ideas. They thrive in situations riddled with uncertainty and doubt—contexts that their peers might avoid—because they are great experimenters. They strive to orient their products, services, and ideas to the future.
What Artists seek is radical innovation. They want organic growth—things not acquired but built. These people are revolutionaries. They are dreamers—expressive, clever, optimistic, charismatic, and quick on their feet.
At the organizational level, the Artistic organization is a company with few rules and many voices. A prophetic vision is what carries an Artistic workplace: stimulating projects, flexible hours, new initiatives, and independent work streams. This is an environment driven by frenetic energy. Think Pixar. Think early Apple and late Apple. Think Vera Wang and Gianni Versace. Think Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. These are game changers. This is the high-risk, high-reward innovation approach.
Don’t Leave an
Artist Alone
For everyone who makes it, there are hundreds more who fail. Therein lies the Artist’s greatest weakness: the inability to see the concerns of reality. Left alone, the Artist lives a life of total chaos.
Just look at the alternate life of Tom had he not been advised by pragmatic mentors and peers: suddenly, the could’ve-been whizz-kid professor rejects the education he never knew he needed and becomes the starving Broadway actor with no plan to fall back on. On the one hand, Tom’s instincts were always right. He was right to want to leave rural Wisconsin, to see a bigger future for himself. On the other hand, Tom’s visions were too wild. His true creative talents weren’t in theater acting or filmmaking. Rather, his gifts of speech and narrative were meant for the academic stage. Every Artist needs someone else to help them to first channel their intensely creative energies to the right productive outlets and then to rein in those creative energies according to the relevant task and context.
The key to mastering the art of being and befriending an Artist is to know when you need to be revolutionary and when you need to be conventional.
In the life cycle of a company, it makes sense to embrace Artists at the earliest stage of development—and then again, much later on, when you need to breathe new life into your organization.
Example:
Apple
Take, for example, a company we all know: Apple. In its first stage, Apple was a completely Artistic endeavor, founded in a garage by a group of revolutionary thinkers who wanted to make computers easy enough for everyone to use. It became the darling of the stock exchange. Like-minded free thinkers supported the company and its universal, chic accessibility. Here, it was at the peak of its Artistic sensibility.
As the computer business grew and established industry-wide standards, Apple could no longer retain its Artistic identity. In its second stage, it became an outsider in the very segment that it helped spawn. The PC market has grown by leaps and bounds and overtook Apple’s market share. Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple, was kicked out of the company over constant disagreement with John Sculley, the CEO at the time, on Apple’s future. Sculley wanted to move to open architecture and focus on schools and small businesses. Jobs wanted to continue to use the closed architecture model, differentiate the brand, and compete head-to-head with IBM. Without Jobs, Apple became a turnkey operation that produced software and computers that were relatively similar to the rest of the industry.
On the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, Apple returned to its revolutionaries-in-a-garage spirit. Jobs came back and revitalized Apple by reintroducing the radical, visionary thinking it depended on in its infancy. In one of his most controversial moves ever, Jobs turned to the enemy and collaborated with Microsoft to bring Office to Apple users in return for a sizeable investment. With room and time afforded by Microsoft’s lifeline, Jobs was able to transform Apple and develop an entire ecosystem of products and software that went beyond the computer—including a music-downloading site and handheld devices.
In this last stage, Apple looks a lot like it did when it was a startup. The reason is this: at both of these moments, the risk of trying something radical and the reward of staying the same were reversed. The only significant difference between the two situations is that now, in this later stage, in addition to being the Artistic company it was at its start, there is also a secondary component to its identity that encourages it to produce replicable and reliable earnings. The best Artist is the one who can turn on and off his or her gifts at the appropriate moments. There is a time and a place for revolutionary thinking.
Exercise:
Scenario Making
Not everyone is an Artist, but there are ways that anyone can become more creative when the moment demands a new way of seeing things. You don’t have to wait for an Artist to join your team—or wait for inspiration to miraculously strike—in order to gain the benefits or insights of an Artist. Consider this exercise of scenario-making to see the future first like an Artist.
Artists try to see the future first because they aspire to create new things in new ways. Because there is no data on the future, we can only look for those forces that drive the future in a particular way: money, relationships, employment, health, and so on. It’s important that we look only at those drivers that relate to our plans and aspirations. Otherwise, it’s easy to get lost in all the complexity.
Scenario making simply means developing a collection of stories about what could happen in the future. This will give us some clues as to what we will see along the way so that we can navigate our way through potential barriers toward our vision. We make scenarios routinely when we consider the best and worst case of a decision. What we are assessing is the relative probability that something will actually happen and the relative impact of it. Follow these steps to see the future:
1. First, list a dozen things that could make or break your vision. Consider the list from the perspectives of all four dominant worldviews.
• Artist: fashion trends and breakthrough inventions
• Engineer: government regulations and industry standards
• Athlete: probable competitors and potential investors
• Sage: customer requirements and community needs
Look for blind spots—the areas typically overlooked by your dominant worldview. From each point of view, look for opportunities, challenges, what is truly known, and what we need to find out.
2. Now create a table like the one below (Table 4). The Y-axis represents the impact of the event from low to high, and the X-axis the probability of the event happening from low to high. Assess each item in your list in terms of its relative probability and impact on your vision. Does it have a high impact, and is it highly probable that it will happen? Or is it of low impact, but highly probable? Put each item in the list in the appropriate places in the table. Be careful not to overestimate or underestimate. Try to be as objective and realistic as possible. Once you are done with the list, highlight only those high-probability and/or high-impact forces that drive the future of your vision. There should only be a few of these. Ignore the other forces.
3. Make sense of these items. How can they really change your vision?
4. Integrating these few high-impact and high-probability drivers of your future, create three stories: a best-case story where most things go your way, a worst-case story were most things don’t go your way, and the middle story where some things go your way and some things don’t.
5. Finally, for each story, identify a few things that will tell you if you are on course or off course as you go along—find the red flags. For example, if you need a loan to start a new small business but leading financial experts have identified that the economy may be heading for recession, you might want to postpone your plans until capital is available or seek an alternative way of funding your vision.
As time goes on, revisit the scenarios and adjust them. Pay close attention to where you are getting the future right and where you are missing things. If you find you are overly optimistic, enlist a friend who’s a bit of a pessimist, or vice versa. The future is fluid and ever-changing, so be prepared to adapt to it in real time as appropriate.
The Artist Is Not a
Lone Genius
It’s time to reimagine the Artist not as a lone genius who works deep into the night on a riotously ambitious project, but as an ordinary man or woman with the tools and colleagues to make something happen. This is the insight Tom learned along the way while adapting to the world around him: you can be an Artist anywhere as long as you adjust your vision to the needs of others. In modifying your own vision, you’ll be able to see everyone else’s even better. Don’t be the Tom who goes to Broadway—be the Tom who creates his own Broadway.
Summary
Artists are radical visionaries who constantly want to try new things. They tend to work on several projects at the same time and can easily get distracted, but they ultimately incite meaningful change and take risks others would shy away from. They can grow by adding more structure to their projects, making priorities, and finding ways to work within the system.