Weekly inspiration #6: Business as unusual
August 17th, 2009 by Nico Luchsinger
Maybe it’s just us, but at Sandbox we feel that the expression «business as usual» is starting to lose its meaning. There just isn’t much «usual» left in business; young entrepreneurial-minded people are challenging every assumption about how it is «supposed to work». Gone are the days where every CEO had an MBA: Nowadays, artists are leading very successful companies too, writes Primer Magazine: «In this age of innovation, qualities like creativity and collaboration are far more valuable assets than the ability to read a balance sheet and tactfully layoff an employee.»
And remember the time when «working» meant sitting in an office from 9 to 5? Well – today, you can also just wear a t-shirt all day. If you do it smartly, you’ll get rich (kind of). Or you can get paid for spraying on the wall Israel erected between itself and the Palestinian territories. And if you think that opening a restaurant is a more traditional way of earning your bucks, then this list of the 15 most strange-themed restaurants all over the world might just prove you wrong. Of course, there’s also businesses that are unusual in a bad way – say, Nigerian e-mail scams. But I still enjoyed reading about how they are effected by the financial crisis too.
And these are just the links from last week. Have you got examples of unusual businesses, or of how business is turning more unusual? Let us know in the comments!
Nico has co-founded Sandbox and just spent basically the whole weekend swimming in the lake of Zurich, barbecuing and listening to the Holstee Boombox (especially to «Toe Jam» by The BPA).
Photo by Samwilkinson @ Flickr
That last statement is definitely true. I think an additional booster to this is that in a service-based economy, you can do what you do well and outsource other jobs to freelancers or service companies - or MechanicalTurk for simple research, for example.
The same surely is true for young companies as well - the boss doesn't have to do all managerial tasks himself - some can be done more efficiently by the use of corporate wikis, others by small teams working independently instead of a huge team being coordinated by many layers of control-instances.
Thierry, thanks for your thoughts and all the references!
You are certainly right: Artists don't make better CEOs per se, and an understanding of business is always needed.
The development we see is that there increasingly isn't just one way to run a business, but several, and that it becomes easier and more accepted for people without a business background to move into leadership positions.
As a creative myself, I'd say the sentence you quoted from the «artists as leaders» article is a bit overstated. Having a bit of an economics background myself, I feel I understand better how things work in a company - I know there are things like a cashflow and not looking at such things will have the ability to cripple your plans before you even take off. Have someone in your company who understands it and as a boss be ready to dip into it yourself.
All in all the concept is a very interesting one. I took part in a recent lecture by English researchers [1] about this topic. One of their basic premises (after their first study [2]) is that artists can be great leaders, but not when they try to be manager types, they have to function as artists first and foremost. New types of leadership structures surely help doing that by balancing leadership between many employees and not just with the top boss.
This seems to be confirmed by what I hear from a lot of designers with successful studios of their own.
Some don't want to grow at all: Stefan Sagmeister, one of the most well-known graphic designers worldwide, does not grow his studio despite all the opportunities he gets. He wants to keep working as a designer and not become a manager.
Others like Adrian Shaughnessy leave their own baby after a decade or so because they stop being creatives and are occupied mainly with managerial duties. He is a design writer nowadays and wrote a great book about «How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul» (title of the book), an informing and captivating read for young and upcoming designers.
[1a] Anne Douglas
[1b] Chris Fremantle: http://www.fremantle.org/chris/writing/the-artist-...
[2] http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/subj/ats/ontheedge2/artistas...
Without reading the article, I wonder if there is any statistical "evidence" that more and more "non-MBAs" are leading companies today?
I remember a Swiss study, which states that more CEOs and C-level managers in large Swiss companies come from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology than the University of St. Gallen (a pure business school; sorry don't remember the source), which would contradict your above mentioned statement. In my understanding it implies that only today have those people started moving into C-level positions. I'd then wonder how all these people from ETH have gotten there?
I'm aware that I'm streching the designer vs. manager discussion a little bit, but I think my arguments still fit into the original topic and the general content.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like