Since I live daily at the intersection of cultural enterprise and higher education, I’m always pleased to hear that the two are mutually exclusive. Knowing my chosen environment (a business school) is contrary to my espoused value (innovative leadership of expressive endeavor) is both a personal badge of honor, and an extraordinary opportunity to blame my limited impact on external forces. Think Sisyphus meets slacktivist.
It’s particularly fun when really smart people engage the cause, as Grant McCracken does in his recent post. Says he:
If the first business of business is innovation, the first task of management reinventing the corporation continually, the first order of problem solving broad and powerful pattern recognition, the ”b-school” will not serve us. We know at a minimum that b-schools do not confer the cultural literacy, the intellectual foundations, or the conceptual tools that capitalism now prizes and requires.
As a result, McCracken has been mulling alternatives to business schools, among the more compelling being his Bloggers Business School [which brought to mind Seth Godin’s New Order Business School (NoBS), or Josh Kaufman’s Personal MBA Manifesto].
As we all ponder the preparation and continuing development of cultural managers, it’s a topic I’m eager and anxious to engage. I’ll be first to admit that business schools specifically, and higher education in general, have lots of baggage and structural flaws blocking the effective development of innovative, responsive, and reflective leaders. But I also hold the opinion, perhaps self-serving, that such environments hold unique potential for engaging the issue.
The fun lies in releasing that potential while navigating the barriers. I can’t promise that the program I direct will succeed in that endeavor (since, as McCracken states, we are not structured to succeed). But we’ll give it a positive try, nonetheless.
Thanks to George for the link!
Hi Andrew –
This is a subject we’ve been attacking vigorously at the University of Michigan. As a former arts manager and current MBA, I’ve teamed up with other like-minded MBAs and students on the arts campuses here to focus on entrepreneurship in the intersection of arts & business. The group is called Arts Enterprise (www.artsenterprismi.com), and we’ve had great success linking students across disciplines, and beginning to give them frameworks with which to take ideas forward — the kinds of ideas the arts are starving for. Michigan’s Ross School of Business, dedicated to “action-based learning” is a great breeding ground for this kind of work. We’d appreciate any thinking from you or the field on our initiative, and would be happy to share more.
Sincerely,
Chris Genteel
Co-President
Arts Enterprise