#117: Creativity in business
Good morning friends
The last week has been filled with wonder.
Matthew Hindley’s spectacular works Absent Minded Feeling and Fountain & Fountain form part of an Everard Read show that opened last week in Cape Town. Fountain & Fountain feels like Hindley found a door to the multiverse and decided to share the secret.
On Saturday morning, landscape artist Luke Williams’ work drew me to 131 Gallery. Williams speaks the multiple languages of sun. One imagines that Ra watches him work with approval, and thanks him for reminding humans that it is he, not them, that brings the day.
Alongside his work was Christiaan Conradie’s. Conradie and Deborah Poynton are artists that achieve the impossible with paint. ‘Maybe I’ll Make It, I Tell Them’, drew me back multiple times. You can see it and all the other works here.
Nightfall took us to Buddy Wells’ The Blue Room. Wells is one of South Africa’s most talented saxophonists and recently opened his own club. Every city needs at least one musician-led venue, preferably more. The Blue Room is Cape Town’s.
Young trumpeter Muneeb Hermans filled the night with performances from his debut album One for HP. South African jazz lovers will love the subtle connections to some of the country’s greats. If you’re not South African, HP is Hanover Park. It’s a tough neighbourhood. Hermans explained that the title pays tribute to all that has shaped him. They’ve done well. He’s done well.
Whilst all this was going down at home, Vanity Fair Italia showcased talented designer Reggi Xaba’s Ifele sandals, Simphiwe Ndzube’s work was hung on the facade of The Delaware Contemporary, and Times Square was lit up by young South African talent. What a week!
/STRATEGY
Over the last few months, I have shared snippets from Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers’ Creativity in Business. The book is based on the course they taught at Stanford Business School in the mid-1980s.
Ray was a psychologist and Myers an artist. They were able to attract Steve Jobs and Phil Knight, amongst others, to be their guest speakers.
Their course is frequently mentioned by executives and business owners reflecting on their journeys.
In the introduction to their book, they say “Who knows why our course works? But work it does.”
They gleefully weave together multiple spiritual and philosophical traditions, psychology, physics, history, and pragmatism. In their exuberant eclecticism is a critical strategic point. Building a business, or organisation, is a fundamentally creative act.
Their first chapter “Business as Art” argues that all successful business people approach their challenges as artists do. “They become totally immersed in expressing their inner visions, knowing that their chief challenge is to organise familiar materials in a fresh way. They are curious, adventurous, experimental, willing to take risks, and they are absorbed in meeting the challenges of their working day.”
To build a business is to be an artist. It is fundamentally a creative expression.
We often forget that. We impose overly directive rules, for ourselves and for others. But, in that world, all we get is a paint-by-numbers copy.
They organise the book around a series of heuristics, arguing that using them allows for creativity. Simply, a heuristic is a guideline, it points to possibility, but it is not an instruction. It shows a direction but not a route.’
Their heuristics include ‘Destroy Judgment, Create Curiosity’, ‘Pay Attention’, ‘Ask Dumb Questions’, ‘Do Only What is Easy, Effortless and Enjoyable’, and ‘Ask Yourself if It’s a Yes or a No’.
There’re a few others, but I chose those because you can easily apply them.
You’ll be amazed at what you unlock by orienting your workday around doing only what is easy, effortless, and enjoyable. Seriously, do one day like that. Nothing will break. You won’t go bankrupt. See what you learn.
/SELF
Myers and Ray challenge us to explore how much of what we experience is a product of our own thoughts. To test this, they invite us to try a number of experiments. Give them a try. Read them and then settle into your chair, close your eyes and let your thoughts run wild…
“Taste things. Cut open a lemon. Squeeze a drop of it on your tongue. Roll it around. Then open your eyes and close them again. Bite into a piece of chocolate fudge. Let it slide across your tongue. If it’s studded with nuts or marshmallows, enjoy the texture contrast.”
“Feel emotions. Pre-live a great loss – the death of someone you love very much, or the dashing of an ideal. Then recall a happy surprise. Dwell on the details of the event, and on your own physical reaction.”
“Do the forbidden. Sass a parent, disobey a boss, throw your hand at a bridge partner – anything you’ve always wanted to do. Luxuriate in the emotional aftermath, then pick up the pieces.”
Pause.
You’re now acutely conscious of how powerful your thoughts are. What you’re feeling right now, comes only from thoughts and memories recalled. Remember this moment. We can leap to conclusions and act because of where our thoughts take us. They’re not always accurate.
You didn’t really just buy a Maserati on the company expense account. That flash of guilt didn’t exist in the world. You’re not going to jail, but you momentarily felt it.
Our thoughts can quickly confirm our worst fears, potentially triggering a chain of events that might otherwise never have come to pass. It is useful to be aware of that.
/SOUL
I recently read Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust.
Dust takes us along paths carved by loss, love, and violence.
It is a story of love rejected, and of how love burns across decades. It is a story of the violence of colonialism, and the bitter betrayals of democratic pretenders. And, of the grudging, complicated connections of old foes, of the hope that glimmers in the murkiness of life.
She tells us that “Once upon a time, long, long ago, when he was only four years old, Odidi, carrying Ajany, had screamed at his mother: This is my baby! She was, for he had wandered a long, long way to bring her back home, having with Galgalu the herdsman, retrieved her from the fixed gaze of five waiting vultures.”
Her words include sentences like “his questions had dissolved, only to re-emerge as asthma”. Food is ‘lively’ with ‘touchable juiciness’. There is the ‘perfume of earth waiting for rain’.
A character says that he photographs warlords. When asked why he explains that they are “Souls that coexist with the shades with the shades of death that they create”. That he “wondered how their faces look through the light”. He says that he asked them to smile and photographed “how their eyes disappoint their attempts”.
It is written in the language of the dreams that you have just before you wake, equal parts vivid and elusive.
I wasn’t sure that I had described it well enough so I turned to Taiye Selasi’s review for help.
She says that ‘the visceral lusciousness of the prose will thrill a lover of language’ and “Owuor’s prose is a physical expression of the landscape it evokes: raw, fragmented, dense, opaque. Beautiful, but brutally so.”
That describes it well. It will challenge you, and it will expand your ways of seeing.
That’s me for today.
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All the best
Karl