ARTISTS routinely deride businesspeople as money-obsessed bores. Or worse. Every time Hollywood depicts an industry, it depicts a conspiracy of knaves. Think of “Wall Street” (which damned finance), “The Constant Gardener” (drug firms), “Super Size Me” (fast food), “The Social Network” (Facebook) or “The Player” (Hollywood itself). Artistic critiques of business are sometimes precise and well-targeted, as in Lucy Prebble’s play “Enron”. But often they are not, as those who endured Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” can attest.

Many businesspeople, for their part, assume that artists are a bunch of pretentious wastrels. Bosses may stick a few modernist daubs on their boardroom walls. They may go on corporate jollies to the opera. They may even write the odd cheque to support their wives’ bearded friends. But they seldom take the arts seriously as a source of inspiration.

The bias starts at business school, where “hard” things such as numbers and case studies rule. It is reinforced by everyday experience. Bosses constantly remind their underlings that if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. Quarterly results impress the stockmarket; little else does.

So begins the Economist’s Schumpeter blog – the art of management - which describes the ‘thaw’ taking place in the business world regarding the arts and what they may have to offer business – managing ‘difficult’ people among them

Directors persuade actresses to lock lips with actors they hate. Their tips might be worth hearing.

But perhaps more importantly the article makes the point that arts organisations and artists have been used to problem solving, working with egos, adopting and adapting to change, getting the show up and running, satisfying customers and in many cases making substantial amounts of money.  Our newfound interest in renewal and regeneration post-apocalyptic-economic-meltdown may be lip service but might (just might) amount to a different way of integrating these two worlds which have much more in common that is often imagined.  If business schools (as outlined in the article) are finally willing to learn from the arts then it (hopefully) won’t be long before governments realise that funding the arts is as much of an investment in the future as funding universities, research and job creation plans.  Artists and arts organisations can then start taking the business world more seriously too – as a site for learning – rather than only a revenue generating opportunity.

If businesspeople should take art more seriously, artists too should take business more seriously. Commerce is a central part of the human experience. More prosaically, it is what billions of people do all day. As such, it deserves a more subtle examination on the page and the screen than it currently receives.

When a client demands my attention – be that a reasonable or an unreasonable demand I have to ask myself the question – who’s pressure is this? and “what is the request contained in the demand?” Sometimes a client can’t tolerate an unbearable pressure emanating from without and will seek ways to alleviate that pressure by passing it on to me. I’ve seen this quite a bit in my coaching practice. The request contained within a demand for a shorter/longer/revised meeting is generally “make what is intolerable go away”. Now there are times when it may be appropriate to step in and take action. But more often than not “helping” in this instance isn’t helping my client address his or her need to acquiesce to their pressure. If I jump and say “yes of course” then the pressure is just passed down the line and learning leaves with it.

It’s really important to hold a boundary when a client is pushing against it. This isn’t the same as saying “no” but it’s more to do with hovering on the edge of the boundary and trying to use it as a learning experience. Here’s what I’ve learned about being helpful:

1. Any request for help from a client that comes with a hidden tinge of pressure should be questioned. The chances are they may be unable to tolerate their own pressure and want you to alleviate it for them.
2. Holding the boundary between an immediate “yes”and an immediate “no” is a very uncomfortable place to be. The chances are that uncomfortableness is the same feeling a client wants to get rid of.
3. Checking in with our own need to “help” from time to time is a useful way to stay on top of unconsciously colluding with clients.
4. When we feel the uncomfortable urge to “help” ask yourself – “what am I trying to get rid of here” the chances are – it’s the same thing that the client wants to get rid of.
5. If you can tolerate the pressure a client brings to your relationship then you can teach a client how to make sense of their own pressure instead of removing what may be a powerful symptom of a more profound issue.

“Jazz is inspiring to me; it’s lessons can be applied to other aspects of life”

There are quotes from 11 great Jazz musicians that can be applied, in a heartbeat, to any area of life, even (and most particularly) business. Can you apply any of these to your business? I know I certainly can.

“The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke-Ellington)
“Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.” (Paul-Desmond)
“Don’t bullshit… just play.” (Wynton-Marsalis)
“If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit!” (Louis-Armstrong)
“Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” (Charlie-Parker)
“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy-Gillespie)
“You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.” (John-Coltrane)
“When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them.” (Don Cherry)
“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music…” (Billie-Holiday)
“A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.”
(Herbie-Hancock)

I’ve just created a Library page on the site that includes PDF copies of papers that I hope will be useful to clients and readers. You can reach the library via the link in the sidebar or from the main page of the website. Enjoy!

Both the patient and the analyst are the recipients of these side effects, of all the things said and implied and unintended and alluded to as the patient speaks as freely as he is able, and begins to understand the ingenuities of the censorship he imposes on himself…Psychoanalysis, essentially, is an attempt to redescribe the whole notion of concentration (Side Effects, p.xi).

Phillips’ suggests that you can only be distracted if you have a plan and in attending to the distractions our plans (ones we may not even be aware of) are revealed. So when people ask me “how I work” and “what I do” I refer them to Phillips because his accessible interpretation of psychoanalysis (and indeed, pscychodynamic approaches to working in general) make sense of the ways in which my interest is captured by “oddness” and incidents and issues that somehow “don’t fit in”. Working below the surface of organisations and with people, means drawing clients attention to their plans – the ones that are unspoken and unconscious. Very often those unconscious plans derail the conscious ones and getting to the heart of that difference (very often exposing it for the first time) is the key to unlocking blockages in the system.
If I am working with a group then there’s the “group” plan; the conscious plans of the individual members of the group and the myriad unconscious plans of the group that nobody may be aware of. Add to this the consultant or coach’s plans – conscious and otherwise and there’s a lot going on. All of these agendas are organised in different ways depending on the life stories of participants and the organisational system in which they work. It’s complex work and finding the right time for a client to hear an interpretation of what’s going on is also an important factor in the mix.
So distractions and interruptions are very welcome intrusions into my work space because they help reveal the agendas and plans of a group and as such are such fantastic resources to work with. Phillips also talked about anxiety – and how anxiety leads people to try and engineer pleasure – distractions may be part of that coping mechanism…so attending to distractions generally means we are getting closer to the issue at hand. But pleasure is such an ephemeral thing – can we engineer pleasure? Phillips doesn’t think so – at one point he talked about dinner parties and how we can’t engineer the perfect dinner party – we can only create the context in which it might happen – therefore anxiety – the calcuation of pleasure is the bridge and negotiation between pain and pleasure and as such a wonderfully rich place to begin to understand our fears and desires in a business context.
I’ll leave the final word on this one to Phillips:

If someone were to invent a drug – say, in this context, a psychotropic drug, one that is designed to improve people’s mental health – and to say that the point of this drug, the whole value of it was its unpredictable side effects, there would be a public outcry. (Side Effectrs p. xii)

The full interview with Adam Phillips (in which yours truly is heard asking about collusion among psychoanalysts and about Woody Allen) is available as an audio download at the NYPL website. Pic of Phillips and Holdengräber from NYPL.