My right brain obviously needs a lot of help. So… I am doing my best to learn how to appreciate all of the world’s variety of art. In fact, I feel it is art, sport, and economics that unite people around the world when so much of everything else is devisive. I love sport and business is my life, but art has generally escaped me.
Therefore, I travel. Traveling always triggers my interest in art as it has this trip. I am proud to say (when at one point in my life I would have been embarassed to admit) that I have taken in six art museums, the opera, and tons of architecture in Europe. Yesterday, in fact, I saw an original Leonardo Da Vinci oil painting called “Lady with an Ermine”. According to the brochure, there are only like five Da Vinci paintings anywhere in the world (one of which being the Mona Lisa of course) and I just happened onto one in Krakow Poland. It was a pretty cool picture even actually, outside the fact someone famous did it. The light effects are really pretty cool when you check it out up close, I kinda see why the dude got so famous, haha. Actually, a Rembrandt I saw in Budapest is my favorite of the trip so far.
So… speaking of Budapest, guess what I did under my own freewill. Yes, I actually paid the full price of a ticket to watch the opera. And… it was marvelous. It is called an opera but there is no fat lady singing figaro (obviously a stereotype I acquired from a cartoon or something). No singing at all actually, more like a symphony and it is way better when you’re there in person because the different sounds from different instruments all come from different directions which you can’t do with speakers.
This crazy Hungarian guy was real famous I guess who both wrote and conducted the opera. So he wrote this thing (design and build phase) and then conducted it (execution and management phase) and made this hugely diverse set of instruments symphonize (if that is a word) into this wonderful sound that all these very diverse people in the audience went crazy over at the end.
It occured to me that if more CEOs operated like this guy they would be much more successful. In business, we generally take bigger problems or tasks and then break them down into small pieces we can solve. In art, there is some great vision and the objective is take small parts to create the vision. It is the difference between construcing and deconstrucing. Businesses fail (look at Ford or GM) because they creat no symphony, the departments or people or whatever the pieces are, are constantly working to solve their bit of the deconstructed problem and are pulling against each other. Great comapnies (look at Wal-Mart or GE) are constantly operating as an organization, not a department, in symphony toward some great vision (a vision which is generally not profit, that just follows). The composer knew when he needed to give the violins a bit of extra encouragement and when he could just leave the cellos be as they were cruising just fine because he had a clear vision of what the constructed result should have been. I think a bunch of us who call ourselves business people really don’t have this vision of what we are actually trying to create. Anyway, I think the arts are good, great in fact, so I take back all the mean things I once said about them :-\
