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.
