The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Artists in business are visionaries, inventors, entrepreneurs and general managers, people who create something larger out of the assembly of resources. They are quick learners, they recognize problems and opportunities ahead of the crowd, they shape visions and enlist others in support, they communicate well and are socially aware (in the "macro" sense of understanding big issues in the world and in the "micro" sense of reading a room full of people to understand their issues). They serve with integrity, and, as leaders, they have a bias for action. Bill Marriott, chief executive of Marriott International, and Warren Thompson, of Thompson Hospitality, personify audacity and vision. Bill Crutchfield, founder of Crutchfield Electronics in Charlottesville, exemplifies social awareness when he argues that the most successful firms have a special "soul." Connie Hallquist, chief executive of Gold Violin in Charlottesville, and Patrick Sweeney, chief executive of Dulles-based Odin Technologies, personify superior communication. And so on.

Bruner's distinction is an interesting one, to which I'd add the following observation: That the work of a business "painter" can be objectively judged as either good or bad, right or wrong, correct or incorrect, while that of a business "artist" is measured on a very different set of scales.
What we think about a particular business visionary depends very much on out personal values. That's why millions of people have strong, often contradictory, opinions about today's leading business artists, from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Starbucks' Howard Schulz to Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And of course it's the same in the world of art; for every person who would name Hopper as his/her favorite painter, there's another who prefers Van Gogh or Velazquez or Van Eyck--and who's to say that any of these preferences is wrong?

And a corollary is that there are many different ways to be a business artist. To use one of Bruner's examples, in the hospitality industry, Bill Marriott is one kind of artist (and a very successful one), while my sometime co-author Jonathan Tisch of Loews Hotels is quite another, and Ian Schrager, often called the founder of the boutique hotel movement, still another. Each pursues his unique vision, and while the three sometimes compete in the marketplace, they mostly operate in separate arenas where all three can be winners.

Debates about corporate social responsibility sometimes devolve into arguments over whether personal values have any real place in business. To me, it seems obvious that they do--that business, like art, politics, education, religion, science, and virtually every other human endeavor, involves and expresses the whole person: body, mind, heart, and spirit. Our greatest business artists are those who successfully combine the widest possible range of human impulses and find ways to incorporate them all in the enterprises they create.