When you realize that pursuing what you love is not enough… maybe your business game needs an upgrade.
This may take you to business school. Re-minting your personal brand with an MBA.
Or it might be seeking certification from a reputable institution.
What you learn there may be necessary, but it is not sufficient.
That’s because business school is logical and task oriented. It says that when one thing happens another thing occurs.
It does not explain that businesses sway and strain from random winds.
People make the predictable world, predictably irrational.
What happens if we cannot determine how an employee, a customer, or an investor is going to react?
Behavioral economics is a good start to make these mysteries understandable.
However, it is not enough.
Consider the time, expertise, and money by pros in the capital markets to predict price of a stock.
Big brains, intense math, and warehouses of computers still cannot deterministically choose winners.
We chase multi-variable, Monte Carlo analysis and still a monkey with a dart is arguably more accurate.
Maybe it’s time we open the aperture.
Maybe it’s time to employ Art and Science to round out our THINKING.
Business thinking relies on trusted concepts like Supply and Demand. Or Return on Investment (ROI). Or Cash Flow. It uses linear math to create easy-to-read charts.
Art employs lyrical and magical thinking.
It rushes past our analytical mind to speak to the heart. It taps into symbols and the collective unconscious.
Our shared experience is more than shared DNA. Our shared experience are hero stories told time and again. They contain lessons of our forefathers.
Science incorporates atomic thinking. It searches for the rules of small to help explain the effects of the big.
Life sciences search for chemicals which trigger larger, biological functions.
Neuroscience describes the brain as a clusters of neurons working together in several networks. A system of systems.
We know the whole by knowing of the parts.
Art and Science expand our EXPERIENCING.
We experience business in making purchases or subscribing to services.
We engage in budgeting by rationalizing who gets a portion of our paycheck.
However, our senses are not fully engaged in the decision making process.
Art affords us a kinesthetic experience.
We see, we hear, we touch, we feel. If we want to deepen our understanding, if we want to deepen our impact, we light up all of the senses.
When rhythms quicken, our hearts excite. When it slows, the heart slows.
Science demands observational experiences.
It looks without expectation. It seeks to understand by measuring changes over time.
Science borrows technology to understand natural phenomenon. It measures molecules by watching the bending of light. It shoots radiation for penetrating views underneath the skin.
It is a culture of creating instruments to count and to calculate, in order to conclude.
Art and Science introduces a different kind of PROCESSESING.
Businesses have program professionals, office managers, and year-end evaluation periods. It is a culture of setting time and money aside for the year ahead. It’s about extrapolating the past to predict the future.
To plan the work, then work the plan.
Art tells stories. It show us extraordinary ways to see the ordinary.
Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt Ph.D., rightly claims “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.”
Stories are moving. Stories are motivating. Stories are memorable.
Science teaches us to experiment. It teaches us to put our hunch on trial. To prove that it doesn’t work as much as it does.
It operates with a different kind of freedom, bound by a shared covenant called the scientific method.
Art and Science in Business School is not just a theory.
It is a reality today.
Visit the Wizard Academy and you will learn how to grow your business in a non-traditional, non-boring way.
You will THINK like visual artists like Claude Monet or Robert Frank to write more convincingly.
You will EXPERIENCE the complex decision making process with cognitive neuroscience.
You will steal from codified PROCESSES condensed from thousands of patents to solve business problems.
You will, however, never be the same. And that is a good thing.
The Visual8 