Introduction: Principles

When I graduated from college I believed that it would only be a matter of time before I became recognized for the quality and inspiration of my artistic works. I believed that the rest of the world was waiting for a glimpse of something new and challenging, and that once a few key people were exposed to the heat, the paper of the world would ignite and the flames would spread. And while that may in fact still be true, and indeed with the advent of social media even more tantalizingly possible, it hasn’t happened yet, and that was a number of years ago when I tried so hard to be heard.

Regardless of the outcome and the chapters yet to come in that story, what’s relevant is that it eventually, painfully, became obvious to me that in the meanwhile I’d need to find a source of income and tap into it. At first I tried part time work so I’d still have time to dedicate to my passions, but as time wore on I learned that there existed, at least for me, a cruel conundrum where regardless of how few hours of real-life job work I did, I could not use my remaining waking hours efficiently enough to progress as an artist.

And some part of me decided that I would work, and somehow make time, or maybe save up enough for short breaks between employments, and continue to contribute to the world of art in modest deliveries. The result was two decades or more of a fitful career path in the world of corporate employ. A path of mostly undirected growth, taking opportunities as they presented themselves as though they were logical choices, ultimately unguided by passion or desire to become something more successful in that world, but instead learning and adapting, and promoting those skills I possessed that I saw rewarded, and dimming down those bright parts of me that caused resistance in others.

It’s that process, that long road of observation, that has helped me develop a set of core principles which have preserved me. It’s these principles that help me understand the culture and oddity that is business. There are cycles and patterns that recur, and there is a cultural dogma that pervades all things business, that lead to the strange legitimacy of phrases like “it’s not personal, it’s business.” What on earth can people be thinking? At its worst, life during working hours seemed like a terrible amateur theater production with no director and no script.

Over time and with considerable rehearsal and repetition, I’ve observed, studied, and formalized a set of ideas that help: the Spectrum Theory; the Recursive Complexity Phenomenon; Language and Chaos Theories; Good Approximation; the Mechanics of Frustration; the Known Quantity; the Tree in the Forest metaphor, and variations of these as they apply to real world conditions.

I’ll refer to these often, and refine their definitions in use and reference. But here’s the quick outline that starts the fire:

The Spectrum Theory is an application of basic bell curve phenomenon to an unending universe – where we as humans tend to see black or white and a line between, it turns out that most everything tends to be distributed along a continuum. The closer you look at what is the line between one and the other, you find that our original notions become inadequate because things are just more complicated than that. As a general rule, It’s Always More Complicated; and things tend to recede away when we try to confine them to clear definitions (Recursive Complexity Phenomenon). But why do we persist? Because we’re wired that way; we look at things and form words that capture an essence of what we see, and those words work well enough to tame the world in the same way that a surfer rides a wave – not owning the wave, not breaking or stopping or affecting the wave, but riding and coexisting (Language and Chaos Theories). It’s this talent we have for approximation that allows us as humans to succeed to a reasonable extent (Good Approximation) and it also is responsible for our most terrible failures. It’s ultimately this human facility we have for forming concrete notions that give rise in us to expectations, which are the root of all frustration (Mechanics of Frustration). But in business and in life, we carry these expectations with us like the script of the unknown play, and it’s in the details where all of the friction occurs, yet we persist in believing that our own expectations must prevail regardless of the overwhelming evidence against imminent change. So we crash up against what has already proven itself to be a consistent irritation (the Known Quantity) and that leads us to the final principle: I can’t take responsibility for you hurting your nose against that tree over and over because it does not move. Are you trying to move through the forest?

Introductions

The modern world of business presents a daunting and confusing challenge to an artistic mind. It is an inexplicable thing, filled with noise and contradictions, and marked by an almost constant background hum of ethical dilemma. An artistic mind looks to find the things in life to celebrate whereas the main quest of a business is to profit.

 

Granted, I will be the first to say that the above statement is a gross oversimplification.

 

It’s the very sort of authoritative claim that inspires immediate debate and criticism among those who are prone to show their appreciation of an idea by disagreeing with it. It might even be worth closing this book for a moment and seriously considering whether it’s worth continuing. That’s quite appropriate; one of the main premises of this work is to offer insights into the dichotomy that is modern business, a constant juxtaposition of ambiguous, impersonal processes and a bottomless social butter churn – it is impervious to definition yet constantly subjected to it.

 

That’s part of how we humans deal with complex situations, we define them, impose conceptual constraints, eventually leaving us with simpler concepts that we can manage.

 

The definition of the word “artist” is like most words, multiple and ambiguous. In the great philosophical tradition, this would be the sort of place where I’d be held responsible for coming up with a single working definition that would form a firm foundation for this treatise. Instead, I think I’ll reinforce the ambiguity, which is exactly the sort of thing that happens in business all the time. When I was in college my buddy and I felt that there was some serious misuse of the word at large, and entertained the idea of separating Wassily Kandinsky somehow from the art majors at school by imposing a capital letter for Artists of known and appreciable contribution, and consequently ordaining hacks and posers with the diminutive “a.”

 

This is patently unfair, but then so is insisting on defining anything to the point of exclusive specificity. Part of my enthusiasm for tackling this topic is the knowledge that things especially in business are unfair, and it took me with my artistic sensibilities a long time to understand the nature of that unfairness. Now that I have a better sense of it, I can appreciate what constitutes “fair” in business and can say for certain that railing against apparent unfairness with self-righteous indignation is Not Productive.

 

The artists for whom this book is written are less an exclusive group of folks according to my personal definitions, but rather are people who are possessed of a certain kind of soul which is easily confused by the peculiar machinations of modern business and its social milieu. Symptoms of having this sort of artistic nature include hypersensitivity, anxiety, and passion. Not a particularly exclusive list; most people have these qualities to varying degrees, I should think.

 

It might be better for me to suggest that the title means that this is my guide to business, I’m the artist in question, and you can be anyone and that’s just fine. That works for me, and it adds another (legitimate) meaning to the title of the book. Having two meanings is considered a good thing when it comes to product names, editorial headlines, that sort of thing. I’ll point out that the quality of that particular double entendre counts for a lot, whereas a blind application of the rule (as frequently occurs in business) can often result in something less than successful – one of my favorite examples is of a cleaning service that tags itself “keeping up appearances,” which seems to imply that the company doesn’t really do anything but likes to look like they do. Which is sad, because they do a great job, and I still patronize them, but it’s still just awkward.

 

I don’t think that this book will serve very well as a step-by-step method for financial gain. It’s more like a tourist guide to a foreign country with an emphasis on culture and how to get along more comfortably so that you can get home in one piece with some tolerable experiences and things to laugh about.

 

The best way to approach this book is to assume that a) your author is a fairly qualified artist (and art historian) and will either prove it in the course of this book or he won’t, and that b) this book discusses business in a way that appeals to the artistic nature inherent in everyone including yourself, even if you’re a graying executive or an insomniac market trader. Hopefully you’re reading this in order to get a new perspective.

 

Perspective is an essential element in art, and the ways in which the use of perspective has developed, changed, mutated, and splintered throughout the centuries are highly relevant to this book. The relatively recent death of art (as proclaimed by Marcel Duchamp among others) did not merely coincide with the industrial revolution, it heralded and expressed the new fractured nature of human existence in a world of machines and factories and emergent corporate entities. It’s kinda like Cubism, seeing one thing from a bunch of different perspectives, but all at the same time so that your brain hurts and comes up with excuses and explanations that don’t hold water.

 

Art, business, and life became noisier and have continued to degenerate in the century since – noise in this context meaning significant static, interference, a buzzing that clouds over the relevant information; non-valuable input. People adapt to their environment to survive, and in a world of noise, the natural reaction is to compartmentalize and filter. I won’t argue the necessity of modern business or judge it, but rather merely point out that people in the business milieu tend to apply a dehumanizing filter to the tasks that confront them, it’s a proven survival aid, and it is a constant to be reckoned with.

With that in mind, I’ve collected here a series of subjects that might appear in an ordinary self-help business publication, and have thrown them through a host of filters and contexts and isms and schisms until I’ve reached my limits of intelligibility and reasonable humor.