What Will Move the Global Economy in 2024?
An expert panel discusses some of the most important risks and trends facing investors, executives, and policy makers.
What Will Move the Global Economy in 2024?Josh Stunkel
(upbeat piano music)
Hal Weitzman: What can police officers learn from embroidery, hotel staff from ballet, and software developers from video art? Companies and organizations such as Microsoft Research, Marriott Hotels, and, yes, Chicago Booth are increasingly creating visiting-artist programs, inviting artists to share their insights as a way to spur creativity and innovation.
But does it work? And is artistic creativity really the same as creativity in business?
Welcome to The Big Question, the monthly video series from Capital Ideas at Chicago Booth. I’m Hal Weitzman, and with me to discuss the issue is an expert panel.
Canice Prendergast is the W. Alen Wallis Professor of Economics and the Booth Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth. A former editor of both the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Labor Economics, his interests are wide ranging, from the contemporary art market to bureaucratic behavior and pay for performance. As well as his research and teaching, he’s also the faculty member who helps choose the artworks housed in Chicago Booth Harper Center, which Bloomberg Businessweek last year called the best-kept secret in the Chicago art world.
Harry Davis is the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Distinguished Service Professor of Creative Management at Chicago Booth. A pioneer of leadership education and creator of Booth’s Management Lab, he’s also served as board member at the National Opinion Research Center and the Argonne National Laboratory and has consulted for manufacturing firms, agribusinesses, and art museums. His essays were collected last year in the book Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else.
And John Michael Schert is the first visiting artist and social entrepreneur at Chicago Booth, where he works with students and faculty to explore the creative process. A ballet dancer by training, he’s been a member of American Ballet Theatre and Alonzo King LINES Ballet. He also cofounded and served as executive director of the ballet company Trey McIntyre Project.
Panel, welcome to The Big Question.
Canice Prendergast, let me start with you. What does making art have to do with making profits?
Canice Prendergast: So I think of making profits, and it’s the way we teach our students here, is largely about problem-solving. You have consumers who have needs. You have firms who have markets. And largely, good management is trying to solve problems in a way that maximizes your profits.
I think of art in exactly the same way. Artists are trying to say something to the world. They’re trying to communicate, and they also have to solve problems and to do that in the most efficient way or the most effective way that they feel they can do.
Hal Weitzman: OK. Harry Davis, do you accept that parallel, that solving problems is essentially what artists are doing? What businesspeople are doing?
Harry L. Davis: Well, yeah, I like the idea of dealing with problems, but I wouldn’t say solving problems. I think firms need to do two things well: they need to exploit what they’re very good at doing, but they also need to explore new possibilities. And I think the world of the arts is a world of creative thinking, new ways of looking at the world. It strikes me that that perspective may in fact be very useful for businesspeople.
Hal Weitzman: OK, well I’m going to press you a little later on whether that creativity really translates to the bottom line.
But as an artist, John Michael Schert, what’s your view? Is problem-solving basically what you’re doing?
John Michael Schert: I think in a sense. I think a lot of what art is is research and development for the future. We’re thinking about not just what is, but synthesizing what is and telling it in a unique story, in a unique way that’s looking to how it could be. A lot of times it’s aspirational, or it’s just a very eloquent telling of a story. And the closest distance between two people is a story.
So I think good art is really connecting people. I think the monetization of art and is art being made to make a profit, I think a lot of artists see the profit side is as a welcome sort of second stage, but they focus more on the forming of the idea and the process.
So I think art has great validity and value to business because it’s allowing us to delve deeper into a creative process, which arrives at new invention. I think that’s the role that art can play.
Hal Weitzman: OK, Harry Davis, something you said earlier. Let’s press you a little on that, on creativity. You teach creative management.
Harry L. Davis: Hm-hmm.
Hal Weitzman: Why is creativity of the artistic kind important in the workplace?
Harry L. Davis: I think the first thing that comes to mind is that so often in business, we think about creativity as coming from groups. We have to sit around and have a brainstorming session. And I would argue that to some extent that is relevant.
But it strikes me that often in the world of the arts, the original sort of seed that is so important is an individual contribution. And I think that certainly with Canice’s interest in art itself, or my—I have a great interest in music— it’s the composer that puts the score in place. And to some extent, I think that art to some extent celebrates both the individual and the group context. And I think it’s something that is somewhat out of balance in the business context.
Hal Weitzman: OK, explain how.
Harry L. Davis: So well, I think we tend to think that the way we solve problems is to get together in a group. The way we come up with new ideas as we brainstorm together. And I’m . . . I think . . . I’ve worked on this for a long time. I really believe that you need a group. But often the group is there to fine-tune the idea of an individual. And I think the artistic world is the world that celebrates the individual genius of putting things on the table for other people to play with and shape.
Hal Weitzman: So does that practically mean that people overmanage? Should they let people alone and allow their employees to flourish and be individuals?
Harry L. Davis: I like that idea.
Hal Weitzman: It was a question! (laughing) Is that something we should be doing?
Harry L. Davis: I think one of the things if we look at this institution, we have an enormous respect for the individual and the ideas that they have. But we also have this very active phenomena of workshops, where people take their ideas and people throw things at them and push and, and I think that’s very much in the tradition of the artistic world. And so we see it on the scientific side, the notion of possibly looking at it on the artistic side and seeing how these two worlds overlap strikes me as exciting.
Hal Weitzman: OK, Canice Prendergast, is there really a direct connection between artistic creativity and the kind of creativity you need to reward shareholders and build companies?
Canice Prendergast: Yes, I think so. I think my sense is that we learn in very different ways, and I think of art as essentially a different language. I mean I have my own language. I do research. But one of the things I’ve learned because I’ve been lucky enough to put together an art collection here is that there are different languages people use to often say the same thing. And sometimes those languages work in beautiful and very different ways.
We have a very strong tendency sometimes to think that only people that speak our language are those that we can learn from. Academics are as bad as many on this. But it’s also true, engineers think they only learn from other engineers. But I think the beauty of art is that it’s taught me at least that I can learn at least as much from other people who are different to me than I learned from people who are the same as me.
I think that’s one of the great lessons that I learned from an interest in art, and I suspect for me it could be that there’s lessons I learned from different types of creativity, but the one thing I know is I have a lot to learn from the artistic dimension.
Hal Weitzman: OK, but I mean being a creative in an artistic sense is about taking risks. It’s about being edgy, ahead of the game, you know, doing stuff and failing. How do companies balance that approach with the need not to upset people, to be able to manage their risk?
Canice Prendergast: I think we have to distinguish between two things, OK. I think there are some organizations or institutions where risk per se and taking risks per se is something you have to be very cautious about. So if I’m on an operating table, I typically don’t want the employees, you know, the nurses, the doctors, taking risks at that point. And those, there are some institutions that inherently have that feel.
Our institution is the exact opposite end, which is I do research. OK, and I can try things out in the classroom. For institutions like research, you typically want the best that anybody has done. We can throw away the second best. We can throw away the 15th best. Those are institutions where I . . . those are reasons why what you make sometimes is inherent and apparently it affects your decisions to take risk.
However, I think the way that a lot of our organizations are set up is that we tend to penalize people often for making mistakes. I think we have to distinguish between the inherent product that you make and the way that reward structures are set up in organizations, that those are the kind of cases where we have to try and encourage people to take risks.
Hal Weitzman: OK, Harry Davis, on that note about taking risks in companies. Often it’s if the payoff is positive, then the risk was a great decision. If the payoff is bad, then it was a terrible decision.
Harry L. Davis: I mean that’s easier to understand after the fact, but the whole notion . . . Indeed, it would work in strategy is that you make certain assumptions about: if you take certain actions, this is what’s likely to happen in the future. But we don’t have any data yet about the future. So in fact, it’s as sort of being much more connected to the process than I think being connected to the outcome.
And I think we tend to tell these stories after the fact of good outcomes, well, it must have been a great process. But in fact, it could have been due to many, many other factors. I mean, I’ve learned from John Michael in the sense of dance that sometimes the greatest creative leaps take place when people come to the edge and almost fall, which we’d argue is a mistake. It’s true of jazz, that the greatest improvisational breakthroughs happen when people throw me the wrong note. And therefore learning to deal with what’s thrown at you and to create from that I think is really very powerful.
Hal Weitzman: But I wonder if you go even further. I mean, what if they do fall? Is there some . . . we often say that . . . you know, tell business students there’s something powerful in failing and learning from that. That’s something that presumably the artistic process gives you is this space to fail. Do companies give their employees enough room to experiment and fail?
Harry L. Davis: Well, it’s hard to generalize across all companies, but I think the notion of encouraging people to try things that are not going to put the company out of business makes a lot of sense. In fact, I know a number of people that say, I really want to hire people that have had an experience where they made quote a mistake unquote and learned an enormous amount from it. That’s the kind of person that I think we really should promote.
Hal Weitzman: John Michael Schert, what’s your approach to this question about risk and whether people in business and in, you know, traditional organizations that have not been exposed to artistic creativity, are they prepared to take the risks and to expose themselves to the possibility of failure?
John Michael Schert: I think it’s interesting, like in a ballet context, I don’t think we’d ever see it as failure. we wouldn’t call it that. It’s more like, it’s rapid-fire iteration and because there’s also this group context, and you’re going through a rehearsal process where you’re fine-tuning, you’re doing it in some respects—earlier we talked about the group versus the individual—I think real artists do reach a level of self-creative process and then when they get in a group, they’re able to communicate in a variety of ways. Some of its intuitive and nonverbal, but something might go wrong, but it’s not seen as a failure. It’s seen as opportunity or possibility.
Yes, if someone falls and breaks a bone, that’s a massive failure. But it’s more about trying and constantly fine-tuning and finding new ways and new approaches. And I think that’s what’s very much needed in a lot of business culture. I mean, the words creativity and innovation are huge buzz words right now, and i think people are saying, well, how do we do that? How do we go about it?
I do think there’s a lot to learn from an artistic environment because we don’t . . . It’s a failure, I think, if you’ve invested a lot of resources and gone very far along the path and then it doesn’t work, and you can state a loss. That’s a failure. But i think if you’ve set up a context and environment where you’re able to keep trying and approaching it from different angles, and everybody’s bringing their best work—you know, people at Google talk about emergent leadership, which is the idea that you step forward, you have an idea, you’re in control of the room, you’re leading the idea, the concept, and maybe someone says something that counteracts what you’re saying, and then you have a low . . .You know, your ego as such, you can then blend back into the ensemble. They want those sorts of teams, where people are bringing their best work but able to keep collaborating. To me, that mirrors exactly what happens in a dance studio.
Hal Weitzman: So do you, I mean, you work with businesses . . . you’ve been working with students and faculty at Booth, do you find people in the business world receptive to the kind of ideas you’re talking about? Or is it kind of something that they do because, you know, it’s being done and it’s kind of of the moment, and then they go back to doing their, you know, 43-point PowerPoint presentation as they were before?
John Michael Schert: I think shockingly so. They’ve been very interested. Now, I’m a big fan of finding a personal and organizational balance. There’s nothing wrong at all with having the 43-point presentation and the data that shows what has come before and what is needed and what’s necessary, what our strategy is. I think I’m very interested exploring the space in between. So if there is a strategy, and there’s five points that have to be accomplished, how do you go about creating them? What is the space in between that you’re discussing and evolving?
So Harry and I have done a number of presentations now for advanced management and for alumni groups as well as for students. I’ve interacted with staff and senior staff here at Booth. I’ve had many conversations with faculty members like Canice. I would say everyone’s very interested. In the true Chicago Booth fashion, they’re interested and they say, now prove it.
I think there’s something to that that I’m learning as an artist, that our world does need to better articulate and prove that we have this value that we can bring. But the receptivity of the business world has been very high.
Hal Weitzman: OK, wonderful. Harry.
Harry L. Davis: You know, I’ve brought jazz ensembles into class. I’ve had executives and MBA students watch Charlie Newell, who’s the artistic director of the university’s Court Theatre, working with actors. And not only do I find them tolerant of this. I find them actually very excited about it because they begin to see a different way of interacting than we typically observe in day-to-day meetings, either here as students work in groups or in companies. A much more, what I call much more of an ensemble working together, and in John Michael’s sense, an incredible amount of give-and-take and using data from peripheral vision and so forth that they don’t typically think about.
But quite the opposite of being resistant, I found them hungry for this—which I must say, because I typically like to experiment, I was surprised that there was this much enthusiasm.
Hal Weitzman: Canice.
Canice Prendersgast: So let me add one thing to that, and I don’t know how Harry and John Michael feel on this, but one thing I’ve learned from the arts is actually often that greatness makes me feel really uncomfortable initially, and I think . . . I mean, I’ve learned this from looking at the visual arts, which is often I see something great and new, and I really don’t like it when they see it. And it’s only a year later, I realize how great it is.
And I think one of the difficulties that the arts has taught me about in a business context is that you know, the prophet often is not liked initially. And I’ve sort of learned that about the art collection here, that we have bought things that were very comfortable to me when I purchased them, and they turned out not to be so good. And it’s often the things I’m most upset about or most uncomfortable about, they’re the ones that really end up leaving the firmest mark for me.
Hal Weitzman: OK. John Michael.
John Michael Schert: I would add to what Canice is saying. We’ve had this conversation before. The discomfort is a large part of the creative process, so putting yourself in a place where you don’t know and are somewhat uncomfortable but you’re putting yourself through this process of delving into the unknown and making sense of it, to me that’s a huge component of what we call creativity, what I call creativity. I think because it makes us uncomfortable and because you can’t state what the outcome will be but you’re committing to the process, that is anathema at times to how business functions, where you need to know what the end goal is going to arrive at.
But the best works of art and I think of products that I personally consume are ones that have a process built-in. It’s like a well-marbled piece of meat, and there’s this level of innovation that’s constantly, you know, ingrained. And to me, that makes for a more exciting product.
So even to your first question earlier, I think products are enriched by a creative process. Do you have the appetite and stomach to allow the time and the resources to go through that process? That’s a big question.
Hal Weitzman: Right.
Canice, I wanted to ask you about the art because we have this tremendous art collection here at Chicago Booth, and you’re one of the lucky people who gets to pick the art that’s there. But I mean, to what extent—you know, you obviously put a lot of thought into what goes on the wall—to what extent does that really feed, in a practical way feed into the creativity of the faculty and the students, and to what extent is it just something that’s, you know, interesting, but it’s on the wall and I walk past it once I’ve looked at it?
Canice Prendergast: I think one of the things that we’ve tried to do with the art collection, along with my colleagues who are choosing the work with me, is that we try to use the art collection to align with the mission of the school, and we think of the mission of the school as curiosity.
So we are not trying to put things that look pretty on the wall that you see the first time and never notice again. I think largely what we’re trying to do is get people to think about the world in a different way. And we’ve done that in various ways. One is through tours. One of it’s through labels on works, and I have to give great credit to the Student Council, who’s basically been involved in designing a phone-based app in order to aid people in that.
So largely it’s about what I called language originally, which is trying to find a way to say something about the world that’s different to the other languages that we have.
Hal Weitzman: But is it your sense that, you know, there are companies that do this. They’ll buy . . . you know, the owners will be very interested in in contemporary art, so they’ll buy very challenging work and put it up. Does it really feed more creativity than having, you know, a sort of beautiful traditional Stubbs painting or the, you know, something like that on the wall?
Canice Prendergast: I think we tell—
Hal Weitzman: Or the Mona Lisa or whatever.
Canice Prendergast: I think we tell our employees a lot about what we choose to surround them with, and I think what we choose to surround our students . . . We have these prompts to get them to think about the world, and I think a Stubbs painting as you describe it is a different kind of prompt.
I think for the mission that we have here in the school in terms of the idea that you try to question everything, which is such an important issue for our students moving forward, and for our faculty and for our staff, I think it fulfills that mandate.
Harry L. Davis: You know, if I could add—I don’t know if Canice would agree with this—but I would consider the art somewhat edgy. I think it makes people sometimes uncomfortable, but that is exactly what our faculty are rewarded for, which is working on a question that initially people, when they say, why are you asking that question, and then years later turns out to be actually critical to the advancement of the field.
So I think it’s very much . . . it’s very different than just putting something on the wall that’s attractive, or you know, just happens to be Canice’s idea.
You know, I was reading a couple of weeks ago this lecture given by a Nobel laureate in physics from the university, [Subramanyan] Chandrasekhar, and he was comparing Beethoven, Newton, and Shakespeare, saying, what might explain their creativity across these fields? Is there anything that’s related? And his conclusion was they all produced beauty, which I thought was very interesting because he defined beauty, quoting Heisenberg, as all of the pieces fitting together and relating to each other, but also related to the whole.
And I think that would be true of research. It would be true art. It would be true of music. It would be true of dance. So I think that there’s a real commonality to what we’re doing here, rather than we’re doing something really different.
Hal Weitzman: John Michael, you talked earlier about how, you know, you thought that dances or dance companies could learn from some of the kind of, prove it, demonstrate it, data-driven approach that we have here at Chicago Booth. In your view, what about the reverse? What are some of the institutional arrangements that can enable creativity to flow that companies could adopt, say, from dance companies or other, you know, artistic creative organizations?
John Michael Schert: It’s difficult to create space for the unknown. Maybe that’s blocking off moments in the calendar where you have, you give yourself on an individual level or an institution says, we expect you—as some corporations have done—your’e to take 10 percent or 15 percent of your time to go work on projects in your own way and in your own space.
Something I’ve been doing here with members of the staff at Chicago Booth is talking about, how do you make space for the unknown? How do you block off time in your day to literally daydream or take a walk? And these are tried-and-true sort of methods, but they are proven effective.
A big part of creativity is not being uber productive all the time and also having a level of trust with yourself and your team that when you need to be very effective, you can be. But I think we have a, you know, sort of a nine-to-five work mentality where you’re also constantly proving your worth—and the proving is important, but I think you have to be strategic about when you’re doing and when you’re being. So empathy is a big role that . . . I think a big skill that artists have developed. How are you processing the world around you and really listening? And that’s not just verbal but nonverbal. And how are you picking up on cues and how are you really interpreting? I think every human does that, but I think to a degree sometimes it is trained out of us and we become much more task oriented.
And so I see a role the artist can better play in an environment like this is helping create space, helping give permission for people to try things, helping give permission for leaders to acknowledge that it’s not a waste of time to use time in unique and creative fashions.
So I think you have to role model that though, and you have to have examples that it will still result in something that’s worthwhile. It’s not just that it’s completely unbalanced, you know, the cliched artist who has no focus and is just in this sort of, like, other world all the time. No. There is a balance of doing and being productive and also time for a reflective process.
Hal Weitzmnan: You talked about companies giving their employees 50 minutes or whatever it is every week to do something creative. Typically what they’re doing is something related to their job. They’re not, you know, dancing ballet or painting. If they were, would that be, would they be more creative?
John Michael Schert: I think creativity doesn’t have to be through a creative quote-unquote art form. I think the form—and Canice was getting at this earlier—we all speak different languages. But when you become masterful in one language, you can look around and see masters in other languages.
And I think that the vehicle, the medium through which you get to that is maybe important. Canice finds it through his research, and his process, and I’ll sort of quote you from a few weeks ago. We took a group of MBAs over to the Smart Museum and gave a tour, and Canice said something very poetic: that his research is his art. That is how he sort of makes sense and finds beauty, as Harry was just alluding to. How these pieces all fit together. I might do it through dance.
So I don’t think trying to prescribe to someone, go take a ballet costume to be more creative. That’s not going to work. It’s about through their medium, helping them make better choices and better know themselves so they can iterate, evolve, try new things. So it’s not this foreign application of another form that’s going to help you. I think it’s helping you better understand yourself.
Hal Weitzman: Rights. Sales managers are gonna love that. They’re gonna say to them, be creative by going out and making sales calls.
(panelists laughing)
Harry Davis, apart from this sort of . . .
I like the way you describe creating the space for people to do the daydreaming or doing nothing, things aren’t scheduled.
Harry, what else can companies do to encourage creativity? Maybe companies that don’t have the resources to bring in an artist in residence or to buy expensive art works but want to create a creative environment?
Harry L. Davis: Well, maybe I can build on something John Michael said. I think to some extent the danger is to say, well, we want more creativity, so here’s a certain percentage of your time. Or here’s a certain playing field for you, which I think can often shut people down. It would be as though somebody said to Canice, so by the way, Canice, you need to do more empirical work rather than theoretical work because that’s what we really value. That’s not who he is.
So I think the notion really is: How do you let go to let people interact and sort of be who they are and bring their process into the workplace? Because I think we learn by understanding another area’s work process or creative process, as you may see. So I think one of the things that we’re thinking about here at the school is we don’t want to overly specify what an artist is going to do at the school. If they are interested in, as we are, interested in interacting with a different audience, they will find vehicles and ways to make that happen.
Hal Weitzman: So don’t only leave space for creativity; don’t tell them how to be creative. When you were talking, I was thinking of the companies where they have ping-pong tables and pool tables, and nobody ever uses them because presumably that’s not what they want to do during working hours.
Canice Prendergast, a lot of art is about challenging the status quo, challenging things that came before or even disrespecting history, in some sense. How is that useful for companies?
Canice Prendergast: I think in a time of change, one always doesn’t want to get locked into the status quo. I think part of art’s objective is per se to challenge the status quo, and finding the right role for that type of challenge is a more nuanced one in business.
But I do think there’s a tendency for most of us to gravitate toward the status quo. That was part of why we feel discomfort when we feel the new, even when, particularly when the new is a far distance from what we’ve done. So I would say the lesson for business is actually to listen, and to listen to sources that are different to the usual sources that we listen to. Often we find out what we most want to hear.
I mean, I noticed this in my own work, which is I have realized over the years that usually when I do my own research, the idea comes from somewhere outside my own area. You know, it’s from reading the newspaper. It’s reading the sports pages. It’s going to an art gallery. And I think sometimes we use these languages that we’ve talked about before. Languages are great. They allow us to communicate, but sometimes they constrain us too. And I think part of the beauty of talking to people from different fields—I think of art as just one language—is that maybe they can teach us something, but we have to open our ears. And that’s kind of hard to do sometimes.
Hal Weitzman: John Michael Schert?
John Michael Schert: What I find very interesting about being in this environment is also learning from the scientists and the economists that are here what Canice just stated: there’s now science to prove that creativity and ideation happens when you turn away from a problem and allow your unconscious and subconscious to keep working on it. That’s why ideas happen to you in the shower and what not. There’s science to prove these things, which is really fascinating for me to bring back to my brethren and say, there’s a well-grounded scientific method that can show us that what we’re doing is worthwhile.
But I very much agree with what Canice and Harry have been saying about how we learn from other worlds. And one of the things I think most excited me about coming and helping build this position at Chicago Booth was Harry introduced me to a colleague and said, I hope that someone like John Michael can help us break down silos so we can understand each other better.
And I think part of the role of the artist is living in between the silos and being a translator, and when people ask me what do I do here, my short answer these days is that I feel like a translator. I’m not here being a ballet dancer. I’m not trying to be an economist. I’m not here to get an MBA. I’m here to make sense of all these worlds and maybe find the common language and the differences and the similarities and better articulate them, so that we can learn.
And I think artists to a degree have certain skills like empathy, combinatorial creativity, the ability to see a lot of what’s happening, distill it, process it, and deliver it back in a very eloquent fashion. Those are great skills, great roles that hopefully we can lend to this world, but I know what I’m taking away is weight and the gravity of really going deep into a question, an idea, and asking challenging questions and being challenged. In true classic Chicago Booth fashion, I’m being challenged every day. I’m very uncomfortable a lot of the time. Luckily, as an artist, I’m to a degree comfortable with being uncomfortable, but it’s making me more articulate and more certain about what I have to lend to this world.
Hal Weitzman: OK. Wonderful. Well, on that note, it’s our time to go and daydream. My yhanks to our panel, Canice Prendergast, Harry Davis, and John Michael Schert.
For more research, analysis, and commentary, visit us online at chicagobooth.edu/cap ideas, and join us again next time for another The Big Question.
Goodbye.
(light piano music)
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