Art, Heart & the Future

Sean Roth

How automation and globalization are changing our world.

Writer Daniel H. Pink, a columnist who was a speechwriter for former Vice President Al Gore, recently gave a commencement speech to the 2004 graduating class at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota. Following is an excerpt, edited for brevity:

In another life, I worked as a political speechwriter. So every now and again, people ask me, ‘Dan, what makes a good speech?’ I’ve thought a lot about that question. And I’ve discovered the three most important elements of speeches in general - and of commencement speeches in particular.

The three most important elements in any speech are: brevity, levity and repetition. Let me say that again: brevity, levity and repetition.

So I promise to be brief. I promise not to be too, too serious. And I promise to repeat the important stuff in case you aren’t paying attention the first time.

But I’d like to begin by telling you about one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made.

A decade and a half ago, I did something that I very much regret - something that I’m slightly ashamed of, something that I wish nobody would ever know. I’m willing to tell you tonight - if you promise to keep it in this room, just between you and me.

When I was a young man, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. Now, I didn’t do very well in law school. In fact, I graduated in the part of my class that made the top 90% possible. I didn’t enjoy law school. I never practiced law a day in my life. If I could press the rewind button and do it over differently, I would.

So why did I do it? Why did I go to law school? Why, oh why, did I go to law school?

The answer is actually quite simple. It’s an answer some of you have given before. It’s an answer some of you have heard before.

It’s my parents’ fault.

Let me explain.

When I was a kid - growing up in a middle class family, in the middle of America in the middle of the 1970s - most parents dished out the same plate of advice to their kids. Get good grades, go to college, and pursue a profession that would offer a decent standard of living and perhaps a dollop of prestige. If you were good at math and science, become a doctor.  If you were better at English and history, become a lawyer. If blood grossed you out and your verbal skills needed work, become an accountant.

That’s the advice my parents gave me. That’s the advice most middle-class parents gave their kids. Doctor. Lawyer. Accountant. Engineer. Those were the jobs that led to the promised land of financial security, professional prestige and overall happiness.

The advice was so widely believed that if you deviated from the path, everybody tried to step in and steer you back on course. For example, in college, I majored in linguistics. And I got the same question over and over again. It’s a question some of you have asked before. It’s a question some of you have heard before.

What are you going to do with that?

Linguistics? What are you going to do with that?

Sound familiar?

Go to law school, my parents told me. It’s something to fall back on. Go to law school, everyone said. It will keep your options open.

Now, to be fair, that advice was well-intentioned. And at the time, it wasn’t exactly wrong. Back then, going to law school was a wise pathway into the respectable world.

But today that’s no longer true. These days, that advice is not just boring. It’s dangerous. Because the future you’re facing looks very different from the future I faced when I graduated from college 18 years ago.

Today, the future doesn’t belong to those engineers, lawyers, and accountants. It belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The future belongs to artists and designers, photographers and illustrators. It belongs to creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.

In other words, it belongs to people like you.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago, a man named Robert Lutz took over a top job at General Motors. Now, Bob Lutz is in many ways a typical auto executive. He’s a white-haired, white man in his 70s - a former Marine.

But when a reporter asked him how his approach would differ from that of his predecessors, here’s what he said: ‘It’s more right brain. I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.’

Let those words settle in for a moment. The art business. General Motors - General Motors! - says it’s in the art business.

In the middle of the last century, Charlie Wilson, a GM executive who became U.S. Defense Secretary, uttered a line that helped define an era. He said, ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for America.’

Well, I think it’s time to update Wilson’s soundbite for a new century. What is happening to General Motors is happening to America. Today we’re all in the art business.

In the U.S., the number of graphic designers has increased tenfold in a decade; graphic designers outnumber chemical engineers by four to one.

Since 1970, the U.S. has 30% more people earning a living as writers and 50% more earning a living by composing or performing music.

More Americans today work in arts, entertainment and design than work as lawyers, accountants and auditors.

And that’s just the beginning. Because several powerful forces are converging to make my parents’ advice obsolete - and to make your degree from Ringling more valuable than you ever imagined when you enrolled here four years ago.

One of those forces is automation. Computers have begun to shake up the lives of white-collar workers this generation much as they disrupted the lives of blue-collar workers last generation. Computers can now do many routine tasks - processing claims, adding figures, searching data - faster, cheaper and better than humans can. So accountants lose work to TurboTax and other accounting software. The same thing is happening to lawyers. The typical lawyer charges $180 an hour. But now you can get basic fill-in-the-blank legal forms on the web for 15 bucks. You can even go online and get a divorce for a mere $249. That will leave a lot of lawyers unemployed.

Then there’s globalization. As we’ve seen this year, there are millions of capable white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and elsewhere willing to do work like basic computer programming and financial analysis for a fraction of the pay of workers in the west. That will leave a lot of code slingers and number crunchers unemployed.

These two forces - automation and globalization - are profoundly changing the world of work. They mean any job that is based on simply following a prescribed set of rules - that can be reduced to a spec sheet or configured to produce a single right answer - is a goner. And that means that the jobs that remain will be the sort of things that computers can’t do faster and low-wage overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper. The jobs that remain will involve creating beauty and touching the human soul. They’ll rely less on the sort of left brain, SAT kind of intelligence we’ve been schooled to respect and hectored into worshipping - and more on the right brain qualities of art and heart.

Art and heart. Creating something the world didn’t know it was missing. Forging meaningful relationships and empathizing with others. These are qualities that are difficult to replicate. These are qualities that will define the workforce of the future. And these, I’m happy to say, are the very qualities you’ve been mastering here at Ringling.

But wait, there’s more. You see, that economy filled with left-brain workers did pretty well. This country, and most of the developed countries, became wealthier than any group of people in the history of the world.

This has changed the nature of business - and it will change the course of your working lives. And if you don’t believe me, look at this.

This is a toilet brush - but not just any toilet brush. It’s a designer toilet brush - designed by Michael Graves, one of the world’s most famous architects and product designers. It costs $5.99 at Target. Yes, when we’ve got designer toilet brushes, life in America must be pretty good.

But there’s a serious point here - a very serious point. In business, it’s no longer enough for a company or an individual to offer a product or a service that’s simply functional - that merely works. Anybody can do that. In today’s overstocked, materially abundant marketplace, that product or service also has to be physically beautiful and emotionally transcendent.

Now, where do you learn about physical beauty and emotional transcendence? At law school? No, at art school.

And that explains why an art degree is now perhaps the most valuable degree in business. And if that toilet brush wasn’t sufficient proof, just take a look at what’s going on in American graduate schools.

Last year, Harvard Business School - the premier MBA program in the world, the place where even the president of the United States earned his degree - admitted only about 10% of its applicants. That’s pretty tough. But there are several places where the admissions standards are even tougher. For instance, the graduate program of the UCLA Department of Art admitted only 3% of its applicants. In other words, it’s easier - much easier - to get into Harvard Business School than UCLA Art School.

With applications climbing and ever more arts grads occupying key corporate positions, the rules have changed: the MFA is the new MBA. In a world of breathtaking material abundance, in which General Motors is in the art business, in which what used to be good jobs are going overseas or being done by computers, in which people are yearning for beauty, uplift, and meaning, an arts degree is the most valuable degree a person can have.

Now, that’s not why you chose to become artists and designers. You chose this path because you listened to your heart. You answered the call that all creative people hear in their souls but that few have the courage to act on - the call to create, to express yourself, to push the limits of what had ever been done with paint or clay or pixels, to surprise the world and put a dent in the universe. You didn’t choose your profession because it was a savvy career move. But you know what? It was a savvy career move. Your BFA is not a one-way ticket to a dingy artist’s garret - at least not for all of you. Your BFA is a passport to the economy of the future.

In fact, one of these days, mark my words, a young man will come home from college and tell his parents, ‘Mom, Dad, I’ve decided to go to law school.’ And his parents will look at him - shocked, disappointed, worried for his future - and respond, ‘Law school?  What are you going to do with that?’

Let me leave you with one last thought. About 10 years ago, well before I decided to work for myself, I began a new job. I became a speechwriter for then-Vice President Al Gore, whom some of you may remember � though you can never be too sure � especially in Florida.

I was nervous when I started that job - just as many of you are nervous about the careers you’re about to begin. Then I read something that Peggy Noonan once said. Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for President Reagan, said she had a three-stage reaction to working in the White House.

Stage One: I hope nobody figures out how stupid I am.

Stage Two, after few months in the White House: Hey, I’m as smart as everyone else.

Then a few months later came Stage Three: Oh my God, we’re in charge?

That three-stage reaction has been the same no matter where I’ve worked. It may be the defining recurrence of my adult life. And trust me: I guarantee you’ll have a similar reaction no matter where you choose to ply your trade.

And so, Ringling class of 2004, on this happy day, I’ve got some news for you: Oh my God, you’re in charge.

But in a world that demands art and heart - that requires artistic sensibility and emotional acuity - I can’t think of anybody I’d rather have leading the way.

Godspeed to you all.

Email Etiquette and the Perils of "Reply All"

RON ASHKENAS

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

July 5, 2011 

Have you ever been puzzled by the ways that people use email? The global proliferation of email may have been one of the most significant advances in human communications, but the technology did not arrive with an instruction manual. As a result, email sometimes reflects both the best and worst of human behavior. Here's an example displaying both:

Our story begins when the production editor for a major online business journal (not HBR) mistakenly sent a blast email about "invoicing procedures" to all of the site's bloggers, approximately 50 people. The mistake was that all but a few of the bloggers produced their content for free, so the need for an invoice was irrelevant to most. Although it was an innocent mistake, this erroneous email set off a chain reaction of responses.

Moments after receiving the initial email, a few recipients used the "reply all" button to ask the sender what this message was all about, or to inform the sender that he had made a mistake. Another questioned whether the sender was really the editor, while still another wrote: "CALL ME IMMEDIATELY TO EXPLAIN."

Somewhere in this blizzard of emails, the production editor sent an apology, admitting his mistake. But the avalanche couldn't be stopped.By now everyone was using the "reply all" button: Several demanded (in the strongest terms possible) that they be taken off the distribution list, while others demanded (in the strongest terms possible) that everyone stop using the "reply all" button.

In the midst of this frenzy, one brave soul sent a note asking everyone to calm down, that the editor had clearly made a mistake, and that using Caps Lock (i.e. email yelling) was not necessary. Somehow this broke the tension so that the next "reply all" email was a humorous question to the editor asking if she could send him all of the invoices that the others were so clearly angry about. Suddenly the tone changed, and a dozen people tried to top one another's humor while others commented on the quality of the jokes. What had been a virtual mob became a social gathering of previous strangers now appreciating each other, suggesting that they get together, and truly enjoying themselves. In other words, it was the best side of email: not just communicating, but creating a network and community at the same time.

So what can we learn from this vignette? Here are a few thoughts:

First, remember that whenever you send an email to more than one person, you are creating a community. The mistake made by the production editor may not have been as much about the content as it was the format of the email that allowed for mass responses. The lesson for all of us is to be intentional about whether we indeed want the recipients of the email to engage with each other, or just with the sender. Both choices are valid, but it depends on what you are trying to accomplish with the email: One-way dissemination of information (in that case, hide the addresses) or group discussion.

Second, recognize that people make email mistakes and give the sender the benefit of the doubt. Just like in social situations, it's easy to jump to conclusions and get angry, often without much information. In this case, the editor indeed made a mistake and sent a message to many people for whom it was not intended. That doesn't make him a bad person, and getting angry about it doesn't help anyone. Instead, assume the sender's positive intent — at least as a starting point.

Third, think before you respond. The current email culture almost forces instantaneous responses. To keep up, often we reply without thinking. Now if we did this in personal interactions, most of us would probably not have any friends. But somehow in the virtual world many people feel more comfortable blurting out the first thing that comes to mind, which can create a spiral of even more unintended responses. When you can sense one of these situations beginning, often it's best to either not respond at all or wait a few minutes to see if a "conversation" or argument is brewing — and then weigh in with more measured input.

Finally, let's recognize that emails often convey emotion and are actually a reflection of our personalities. So think about how you want to be perceived, and whether your email personality is consistent with your real personality.

What other lessons would you draw from this example — or from others that you have seen? How can we start developing some rules of email etiquette?

Not just art...

Some of Our Other Training Programmes:

Assertive communications at work: How to make your point, say ‘no’, negotiate for deadlines or persuasively  put across your idea, all this is covered in the two day programme.  Helps participants understand themselves and their colleagues better and  become more impactful in their communication.

Business language and grammar: Essentially an English language programme that aims at enhancing language skills and helps in improving both verbal as well as written communications.

Business writing and email etiquette: Covers the 7 Cs of Effective Writing making communications at work more crisp and clear. Also covers netiquette and ability to communicate sensitively.

Presentation skills: A two day programme that helps participants improve their presentation skills through activities that improve posture and tone, remove stage fright. The programme also helps in structuring the presentation, and in creating impactful and creative powerpoints. This programme helps participants look at their individual styles and habits and improve them to make powerful presentations.

Negotiation Skills: Develop a Win-Win approach!  Builds empathy and understanding, dissociates people from the problem, focuses on interests and not positions, and helps in maintaining long-term, sustainable relationships through trust and respect.

Interviewing skills: Helps define competencies required for the role, ask relevant powerful questions to assess the candidate accurately, document the interview in a smart manner, provide data and examples to arrive at the right decision. Also helps participants in structuring the interview, maintaining a professional and comfortable environment and in keeping the interview legal.

Sales & Sales Management Skills: Winning customers in a competitive environment, from prospecting to loyalty, to ensure market leadership and sustained revenues. Develop Sales Management expertise, to improve team efficiencies, enhance performance, develop goals and manage deliveries, to grow the team and the individual.

The art of inspiration

Liz Hall 01 January 2004 

Employers are turning to the arts to cultivate creativity in their managers.

Employers are turning to the arts to cultivate creativity in their managers.

To survive, companies need their managers to be like children: creative, innovative and prepared to take risks. Creativity is inherent in all of us, according to training and development guru Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. But by the time most of us reach adulthood, it is put on the backburner or safely limited to leisure time.

"We all start life being highly creative then others pour scorn on creativity and we start to learn to shut it off. By the time we get into the workplace, most people's creativity is hugely stifled," says Liz Willis, co-founder director of personal development consultancy Springboard.

A growing number of employers are turning to the arts - music, drama, visual art, fashion - in a bid to unleash this inherent creativity in their managers. Ideas and creativity are the business in most of today«s key industries, points out Robinson, now a senior adviser at the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles, US, and companies need managers who can innovate, roll with the changes they face, communicate and change direction as quickly as the landscape around them.

Robinson, former professor of education at Warwick University, blames the UK education system for bringing up adults who have lost touch with, or never discovered, their own creative abilities. Kanes Rajah, director for the University of Greenwich Business School«s Centre for Entrepreneurship agrees.

"Our education system encourages convergent thinking, with rights and wrongs, whereas companies need managers to think divergently, exploring many solutions before settling for one," says Rajah.

more at:

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2004/01/01/22038/the-art-of-inspiration.html

Dilbert

New Ideas. Are they necessarily Novel Ideas?

How often are we hit with an idea which is new? I mean, COMPLETELY new. Without some direct or indirect input from our environment. Some conscious or even subliminal stimulus, embedded in the brain.

Sometimes, and hopefully more often, the idea germinates through a conscious effort. Afterall, what we learn, we try to improve and implement. If that learning leads to a new idea, it may not be completely original. And that is fine.

Often, our "new" idea is but a consolidation of existing ideas. Clubbing of two or more, to bring out a novel solution. An innovation, not necessarily an invention. Art in Corporate L&D is direct case to point. Channelizing the artistic outputs of participants into people development deliverables. Allowing for creative expression and harnessing the energy and positivism in solving workplace issues and needs.

Also, is Copy-Paste a bad thing? What works elsewhere, can work with improvement, in later and local markets. Copy and Paste works because the value of the positioning is easy to explain and apply to new markets. Once again, we see Art in L&D used extensively in the west, and after extensive research, launched similar offerings in India. In a way, it is a copy of what already exists. And then, for every NetFlix, we have a Seventymm, for every Groupon, we have a Snapdeal, for every Amazon, we have a FlipKart. And it works.

At the end of the day, customers need better, more differentiated, more engaging offerings. Consolidation and Copy can enhance the customer experience. That's a good thing, right?

Once you have spent some time with your thoughts, choose a colour and start to play with it on the canvas as children do.

Ten ways to heal yourself with art

You don't have to be a natural-born artist to enjoy the emotional benefits of artistic expression. Louisa Wilkins finds out what art therapy can do for you, and how to go about it

By Louisa Wilkins

1. Identify your emotions

Write a list of different emotions, including happiness, anger, fear, love, hope, guilt and loneliness. Choose one emotion to work on first. Spend some time sitting with your eyes closed, thinking about the emotion and your own experiences with it. When you have the feeling clearly defined in your mind, open your eyes, choose a colour, and start creating. Some emotions might take longer to express than others - just let the process happen. When you have finished, sit back and look at your work. Don't criticise, or judge it. Just observe it and see how you have constructed that emotion. On the back, write the date, the emotion, a title for the piece, and a couple of sentences about what the emotion means to you. Work your way through the emotions until you have a full set. This may make you feel quite drained, so don't expect to be able to do it all in one go.

2. Be free

For art to be therapeutic, it needs to be free from self-criticism. Toma Gabor (www.tomagabor.com) is a UAE-based sculptor who has created art therapy workshops for adults, children and children with special needs. He says, "There are no universal recipes for individuals to relieve stress using art. The important factor in this process is for the individual not to think of it in terms of producing an aesthetic product... having expectations could lead to disappointment, which may be more stressful in the end."

3. Make it physical

Get creative with your art, by incorporating unusual materials in to the artwork. Gabor says, "You can relieve stress by using household materials, such as magazines, cardboard, photographs, plastic containers, Styrofoam, and other disposable items - anything is fair game." Try incorporating something which is representative of your emotional upset. For example, write it all down on paper, shred it and mix it in with the paint. Or, cut up photos and use indecipherable sections of them in your art.

4. Play with it

Berislava Grace (berislavaworld@yahoo.com.au) is an artist who has been practising art therapy around the world for more than a decade. She says, "Playing with colour is a good way of healing your emotions. Sit quietly, stay peaceful in the moment and listen to your body. Once you have spent some time with your thoughts, choose a colour and start to play with it on the canvas as children do. Welcome whatever comes out of you with love and understanding for yourself. As you play, your energy and the feeling of your work may shift and you may feel drawn to a different colour - either add to your first piece of art, or start a second."

5. Draw your future

Take three pieces of paper - one represents the past, one the present and one the future. Paint, draw, make a collage and create in any way that represents your life and feelings at these different times. Do them chronologically, starting with your past, then your present, finishing with your future, representing how you would like your life to develop. If you decide to do these as self-portraits, remember the aim is to be more expressive, rather than detailed and aesthetically correct. Once you have done them, keep your picture of your future somewhere you can see it every day.

6. Let it all go

As with most types of therapy, art therapy's main purpose is to help you get over an issue that is causing you grief, or stunting your life in some way. Salwa Zeidan is an artist, therapist and the owner of Salwa Zeidan Gallery (www.salwazeidangallery.com), which offers regular art therapy workshops. She says, "As we go through life, many of us get stuck in our personal growth because we suppress feelings of anger, or hurt, to avoid confrontations. However, the energy from those suppressed feelings doesn't just go away… it needs a release. Art therapy is an effective method for releasing our deeply held negative energy and transmuting it into something positive and beautiful. Don't be surprised if art therapy leads to a general sense of relief and overall better mental health. It's therapy, but with a completely different ingredient than what most people are used to."

7. Find the inner you

A good exercise for helping people express deeply submerged emotions is to encourage them to differentiate between the person they're perceived to be by others, and the person they feel they really are inside. Try this with two papier mâché masks - one representing how you're perceived, and one representing who you really are. If this is too messy for you, paint two portraits instead.

8. Deal with illness

For people suffering from long-term, or even terminal illness, art therapy can help overcome the frustration, anxiety and mental exhaustion which is experienced as a by-product of the illness. A study published in Science Daily found cancer patients reported feeling energised and also experienced a reduction in symptoms including pain, nausea, drowsiness and depression. A similar study found children suffering from asthma also enjoyed a better quality of life and less anxiety as a result of one session of art therapy per week, while another found art therapy significantly reduced depression and hopelessness in women struggling with fertility issues.

9. Uncover the issue

Art therapy can help bring repressed emotions to the surface. Dr Susan Hogan is the author of multiple books on art therapy and a professor in cultural studies and art therapy at the University of Derby, in the UK. She tells us, "We often make ourselves miserable through negative thought processes. Through art therapy, women can externalise their thoughts and feelings when, in the process of making images, recurring themes emerge. These themes could be feeling neglected, or abused, or patterns of destructive thinking, for example." Dr Hogan advises using intensive art therapy sessions to deal with these issues, and using simple affirmations, such as ‘My body is lovely' between art therapy sessions, to counteract destructive thinking habits.

10. Paint yourself strong

For people who struggle with self-esteem, art therapy can help boost their self-worth. Nicola Lee is an artist and regional manager for START, a non-profit body seeking to support children in need, and special needs children, with art activities. She says, "In our workshops, we use art to boost creativity and self-confidence and believe the skills learnt with us can be translated into all aspects of the children's lives.

"A popular medium to use is paint, as you can apply it in many different ways …Paint's versatile usability gives people the opportunity to work with colours without restrictions."