What Can Business Learn from Art?

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What Can Business Learn from Art?

By Scott Berinato | Harvard Business Review Magazine | May–June 2024 Issue

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Understanding how art gets made, and why, is a path to accomplishment and mastery—yes, even in the corporate world.  Art is basically 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—may seem miraculous, but its creation is not. It 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 moving stories from realms as varied as baking, dancing, boxing, and driving. In an engaging set piece, 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.

In delving into how hard it is to do the real work in any pursuit or profession, he exposes why mastery is elusive. “A seven-person creative team of equals is called war.” And 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 tiny, 60-page companion tome, All That Happiness Is, in which he explains that achievement is merely completing a task, the reward for which is often another task, whereas accomplishment is “the engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.” He notes, too, that accomplishment is egalitarian. “Every enterprise, every job, every short-order recipe—everything we do can be done more or less beautifully.” Whether it’s plumbing or building rockets or leading a team, the real work involves some artistry.

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

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Understanding how art gets made, and why, is a path to accomplishment and mastery—yes, even in the corporate world.  Art is basically 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—may seem miraculous, but its creation is not. It was born from the same effort you might put in to find mastery in your own work.
2. It’s not hard to apply his description of mastery to any business contex but it is elusive: “A seven-person creative team of equals is called war.  And 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.   It’s shorthand…for the difference between accomplishment and mere achievement.”
3. Achievement is merely completing a task, the reward for which is often another task, whereas accomplishment is “the engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.

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Topics:  Personal Development, Skills, Innovation, Artistic