Art has been a human right before civilisation started. The earliest cave painters at Lascaux, France, dating back 30,000 years, drew animals. The San people in South Africa drew people in 27,000-year-old caves. Ancient Indian cave art 20,000 years ago in Bhimabetaka, Madhya Pradesh, had both animals and people, often fighting wars.
Several civilisations have been lost over centuries, buried under the soil with volcanic or earthquake eruptions, or vanished due to human destruction or negligence. But whatever discoveries have happened, the testimony has always been from art left behind in the form of cave paintings, stone engraving or sculptures with figurative or nature expressions. Art was the first medium of communication in human society. The era of petroglyphs faded to pictograms before logographic writing gave way to the alphabet.
My thought was, if art is so elemental for expression, why is it not better meshed into business? After all, there is great symbiosis between art and business; they share the same five fundamentals of thought, subtlety, elegance, loudness and sustainability. In art, thought translates to a unique idea beyond time, subtlety is subliminal, elegance is being always displayed in a sophisticated place, whereas loudness in art is the shock of the new expression of an artist. Art is sustainable as its monetary value rises with time.
Similarly in business, you need to think how to strategise to expand the market with uniqueness. Subtlety is engraving the product or service into the customer’s top-of-mind, while elegance is being aspirational.
Business needs loudness to have all-time differentiation in the market while sustainability is business growth with high net worth.
In the past 35 years, I have been privileged to spend time with several CEOs, MDs and chairmen in different countries across four continents on business transactions for their growth and increased net worth. Our discussions invariably took place at a strategic and creative level. I found creativity in their thoughts, which inspired me to think beyond expectation on how their businesses can sustain end-customer connect. From such interactions I have long been convinced that CEOs are successful in business because they have a high-value artist’s palette in their mind, which is similar to the management palette. So, I’ve strongly believed, a CEO’s performance on canvas would definitely be brilliant. In an attempt to execute this idea, a unique venture has emerged. We have inaugurated in Mumbai the world’s first exhibition of paintings done by CEOs. For the first time in their lives, 26 CEOs took a brush in hand and boldly put colour on canvas. You can view their out-of-the-box art from noon to 8 pm at Piramal art gallery, National Centre for the Performing Arts, till March 12.
This is how the saga started. I asked the 26 CEOs to spend a crazy, creative session with me. I didn’t divulge anything more. I arrived with a large suitcase of acrylic paints, brushes, a colour palette and 18″x24″ canvas, arranged it all on the CEO’s table, and gestured an invitation. Puzzled, the CEO asked, “Do I have to paint?” The beauty of this initiative is that, to them, my sudden proposition to paint was like an enigma. It’s generally known in industry that I started my management consulting business from a fine arts career, and that I still paint. That’s perhaps why the CEOs spontaneously agreed and immediately became engrossed in painting.
I met them either in office or at home. They could have avoided the painting session, but they seemed to have a hidden urge to express themselves, and chose their colours. Their confidence soared when I mentioned, “You are at total liberty here. There’s no shareholder, promoter, employee or competitor scrutinising you!” It was just as well that I discreetly captured them with my movie camera as they painted, because people are now asking me if I’ve helped them. This goes to show their paintings are very appealing. The CEOs spontaneity of thought and application was indeed a lesson for me.
Business always runs with rationality and the glamour of numbers. But the tragedy is that business crunched with numbers alone confines you to mere logic in a given blocked system. Shareholders always expect to encash this result of numbers in unlimited multiplication of their investment. Only an empty canvas can inspire you to paint with unrestrained thought for business. A vision with numbers can be foggy, hypothetic, so the next step for CEOs is to go beyond that boundary. When you can paint the vision on canvas, imagination gets concretised and unlimited possibilities morph into visuals. Once the art is done and understood by everybody, application of technicalities is a mere slave.
Art circles always critique the craftsmanship and quality of an artist’s painting. “CEO Thinker Painters” can be considered a new art movement because they took up the challenge at a moment’s notice, made no trial, yet their boldness, confidence and passion on the canvas were outstanding. Asking them to sing or write would not have taken me anywhere, but this adventurous act has proved that the expression of art is an inherent human inclination that demystifies expression. In fact, a few were so absorbed they took the initiative to paint on a second canvas.
Western art has had several collective movements after prehistoric cave paintings. From the medieval period’s religious art, the masters painted realistic portraits and reproduced real life around 1506. When photography was invented in 1826, it shocked the art world as realism was no longer required. So artists had to think out-of-the-box and express images in their mind. Art movements have since given a boost for the world to think differently. These movements were Expressionism (1888), Impressionism (1897), Cubism (1910), Surrealism (1929), Abstract (1940), Pop (1960) and Graphic (1965) art to street graffiti (1969), Vanishing art (1994) to Extrapolated art (2006). As no globally renowned contemporary movement of painting has emerged in India so far, CEO Thinker Painters can represent a new, collective, first time effort and movement that can be taken forward to become part of global art history of the 21st century.
Everybody in business talks about creating differentiation. My prime objective of inspiring the 26 CEOs to peel out their creativity was to prove that differentiation is not the buzzword it has become in business today. In this uniform, digital world, differentiation that’s tangible in a product or service will bring business success.
?Shombit Sengupta is an international Creative Business Strategy consultant to top managements. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com