Business and Art
If you’ve been paying close attention, you will know that in my early background I was involved in the live theater; and later I was employed in the non-profit arts world for many years. It’s natural to me, as a result of all that training, to think more like an artist than a business person.
Though this is mostly to my detriment, it’s also a comfort.
Thinking like an artist is a liability in that vulnerability, that tender essence that makes an artist powerful, is more crippling than anything else in business. So finding a convergence between the heart of art and the steel armor of business is no easy task.
But knowing the artist in me has huge influence over my decisions is also a comfort because it justifies doing things my way, no matter what the critics claim. An artist answers to a higher power.
Dedication to my way is no easy slide, though. Though you’re determined to be independent, you are by no means excused from discipline. For that matter, the demands on your continual education are enormous, compared to anyone who is simply ‘working for the man.’ If the lone wolf is not wiley, he’ll never survive.
The main distinction in having an artist’s perspective in business is that the process is far more important than the product.
Now certainly, any merchant worth his cash drawer knows the product is what counts. Who cares what it took to get there? If I’m making the sale, I’ve hit a home run.
But if you suffer from artist’s syndrome, you see the sale as just one part of a larger experience, and it’s the larger experience that you value above all.
Oh my, is this starting to sound like all the preaching you see everywhere about social media customs and protocols? About how the sales process is continual, how life is one launch after another? Are you hearing John Lennon: “Life is what happens while you’re busy doing something else…”
Could it be that the ‘new marketing’ and the marketing theories based on relationships, on marketing/communications, result from the intermarriage of business and art?
You could put it that way. I ask, study, listen, analyze, network, publish, measure: and then I use mind and body to discover and describe my gifts, or offerings, to others. I synthesize business organization with personal skills and predilections. It’s an unending mind-body balancing act.
Nonetheless, I have never felt more productive – despite all the focus on process!
