The Art of Business: Make All Your Work a Work of Art

by Stan Davis, David McIntosh

All of us—business executives and artists, audiences and consumers—can benefit from seeing the world with both an aesthetic sensibility and a strategic bent. When you see yourself as an artist, everything you do can be a work of art—planning strategies, developing technologies, creating new products, working in teams and serving customers.

In the traditional model, business operates in an economic flow of inputs
(resources and raw materials), outputs (products and services) and processes that help get you from one to the other (research and development, production, distribution). Davis and McIntosh show that artistic flow operates the same way, but with inputs that include things like emotion, imagination, and intuition; and outputs that include things like beauty, meaning, excitement, and enjoyment. Step by step, Davis and McIntosh show how you and your company can blend the two flows, interweaving them to achieve both success and fulfillment in everything you do.

By blending the aesthetic and emotional richness of the arts with the strategic and operational perspectives of business, you'll begin to see texture where everybody else is seeing shapes. You'll see colors where others see only grays. You'll see not just what is, but also what can be.

Genres: Management

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Stan Davis is a highly respected commentator on business in the future. He is the author of twelve other books, including the best- sellers Blur, 2020 Vision, and Future Perfect, as well as It’s Alive! and The Monster Under the Bed. His creative thinking makes practical connections to new business opportunities, and his restive mind has led him into and out of many fields. With a doctorate in the social sciences and an honorary doctorate in the humanities, Stan spent twenty years as an academic, mainly on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. For the past two decades he has been active in re- search, writing, consulting, public speaking, seminars, training, and video. He is a Publications Board Advisor at the New England Jour- nal of Medicine. Stan was a member of the Board of Directors of the Boston Ballet for sixteen years and of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Center for six years, and he has served on the Board of Directors of Opera America, the trade association of 197 opera companies, for the past six years.

Reviews

[Lori Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

An optional-read book on creative ability in self development for knowledge workers, managers, executives, and entrepreneurs.