Indie films. The stuff of Brooklyn hipsters. And a great exercise for your Accounting Department... WTF??? Because its a windy and verrrrrry cold Sunday, and because the coffee is hot and the office is toasty, and because the wind chimes on the porch are melodically tinkling to give just the faintest sense of spring and hope...were going to give in to the desire to be...well....ruminative. You know what? Ruminating is an underrated word in business. Think of the synonyms: to wonder, to muse, to ponder, to puzzle, to contemplate. Combine it with impassioned curiosity and, Holy Zen-like State, Batman, youre on to something here! Last night we watched the Oscar-nominated documentary, Cutie and the Boxer. The film is a portrait of Japanese artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, living and working in a cluttered space in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. His work is a form of action painting -- he punches paint onto the canvas with boxing gloves fitted with foam rubber pads. And her work consists of a memoiristic graphic novel whose main characters, Cutie and Bullie, are stylized versions of herself and her husband. Its a fascinating story of lives lived for and with and in art, and also of relationships in their full complexity: we love, we compete, we support, we challenge. Why are we writing about this today? Because it led us to yet another cool conversation. About work. About life. About that Venn diagram in which we live where there is little more than the teensiest sliver distinguishing the two. Life, work, passion, business, interests, assignments and projects. Theyre all part of the same mix! And maybe as a result of living our brand in this way, we believe the distinction between artsy-types and business-people -- or, more judgmentally, between the impractical and the hard-nosed, as it has traditionally been presented -- is way too reductive and limiting. In most organizations, #strategy is separated from #creativity by a wide gap. Strategic thinkers are the logical, analytical, linear, numerical and verbal types. Creative thinkers, on the other hand, are intuitive, emotional, spatial, visual and physical. Left brain/right brain. How about putting them together? Imagine what becomes possible! Were clearly not alone in this! Thanks to the Stanford D-School, the Design Thinking Boot Camp and design thinking in general has now cleared the way for the business-minded to start thinking more creatively. And the growth of programs in the design-oriented MBA has the door moving in the opposite direction, as well. In a scene straight out of Les Mis, we imagine teams of people storming the corporate barricades and demanding that strategic people and creative people in a single organization be co-mingled. Work together! Bring analysis AND imagination to a project. To the organization. And, yes, to the worlds problems. Led us to a crazy idea: How about doing a film screening with a client? Gather together a group of people (strategic AND creative types). Watch something like Cutie and the Boxer and then talk about it as a group. No PowerPoint. No slides. Just something stimulating -- inspiring to some, maddening to others -- to get people talking and to start breaking down some of those barriers. Youve heard of Sundance, right? And Cannes? And SXSW? Lots of film festivals out there. How about the one in your conference room? Count us in!
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 13:50:27 +0000
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