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February 17, 2005

You Can Learn a Lot From Art

As I walked through the billowing saffron panels of The Gates at dusk last evening, I began looking for lessons in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s environmental art in Central Park. I recalled a time about 18 years ago when Bob Pittman was head of MTV and, at my request, he came to talk to students at Menlo College where I was teaching at the time. A student asked Bob where he got his creative ideas for MTV. Bob replied that he often visited galleries and museums to look at art—mostly paintings—to inspire him and teach him practical lessons about life and how to solve problems. "What a brilliant insight," I thought at the time.
I thought of Bob’s insightful remark as I walked through The Gates as a brisk wind blew the fluttering orangish panels parallel to the ground. A few of the panels had wrapped around some of the uprights and were no longer waving. I knew the monitors who Christo hired to keep the panels flowing and to protect them from vandalism would unfurl the wrapped panels in their assigned areas in the morning. They would use their long, boat-hook-like tools with a thin, bent mental hook at the end that was used to rip off a Velcro strip that opened the cloth boot that wrapped the nylon saffron panels up before they were unfurled. But after the crews and monitors used the tool to unfurl the panels, a chartreuse tennis ball was cut and placed over the hooks so they could be used to free panels that might be wrapped around uprights without hurting the nylon panel material. The light green tennis balls were the complementary color to the saffron of the panels.
As I looked at The Gates, the lesson that came to me was that they were not only a monumental creative idea, but an immensely complicated project that could never have been pulled off without flawless execution. It took 26 years of planning and paying attention to the minute details of execution on the part of Christo’s brilliant engineer, Vince Davenport, which made the idea of The Gates a beautiful reality.
Over the weekend The Gates opened, Carly Fiorina, the CEO of HP was fired by the HP board of directors. I read stories throughout the week in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, business magazines, and on the Internet in Marketplace and other business-oriented sites about why one of the highest-ranking and most visible female corporate executives lost her job. Some of the business pundits thought it was her imperious style that did her in—spotlight-seeking, increasing the number of corporate jets, eating lunch alone in her office and not practicing management by walking around, which David Packard had made famous. Others opined that Fiorina, with a sales and marketing background, was never accepted in the engineering-dominated and family-like culture of HP. Other thought she was toast the moment she changed the name from Hewlett-Packard to HP.
However, the HP board approved the merger with Compaq, it approved the name change to HP, it backed her strategy for growth, and it praised her marketing efforts. What undid Fiorina was not her style or her strategy or the HP culture, it was her inability to execute on her grand plans or to get enough people to cooperate in helping her execute. The board recommended that Fiorina hire a chief operating officer and restructure to give herself more operating help. She refused; she didn’t want to give up any power (sound like some big media companies?).
Perhaps Fiorina should have read Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan’s, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. The book is required reading in my online graduate course, Media Management and Leadership, for the University of Missouri School of Journalism because just as execution was the key to the success of The Gates, execution is the key to success in business.
You can learn a lot about business and life from reading a book or from art.

Posted by Charles Warner at February 17, 2005 11:26 AM

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