Arts-based Learning For Business

In recent years, there has been a remarkable growth in the use of arts programs by businesses to meet a wide range of their organizational learning and employee training needs. In the USA alone, dozens of Fortune 500 corporations and countless smaller firms employ arts-based learning to foster creative thinking, promote the development of new leadership models, and strengthen employee skills in critical areas such as collaboration, conflict resolution, change management, presentation/public performance, and intercultural communication. We therefore believe that the time is right for a journal to dedicate a full issue to the strategic implications and practical dimensions of arts-based learning in business. Recent surveys consistently identify imagination, inspiration, inventiveness, improvisational ability, collaborative and inter-cultural skills, spontaneity, adaptability, and presentation as among the most sought-after attributes of business leadership. These qualities are frequently summed up in a single word – creativity. Clearly, artists have profound insights into creativity, gained from years of hands-on experience, backed by specialized training and fostered by carefully honed skills. Their knowledge represents a formidable resource, waiting to be tapped by companies in search of creative solutions and managers striving to enable, empower and engage their employees’ imaginative and inventive powers. The growing use of arts-based learning reflects a dramatic shift in the boundaries that previously defined the limits of experience deemed relevant to the business world – a shift triggered by profound technological and social changes that transformed the culture of business over the past decade by favoring companies inventive enough to find their own ways forward, flexible enough to respond quickly (and competently) to the unexpected, and spontaneous enough to lead change effectively. This issue features separate interviews with three corporate leaders who have concluded, from their own direct experience, that there are valuable business lessons to be learned from the insights and skills of artists: Harold G. (Terry) McGraw, Chairman and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Companies; George Stalk, Senior Vice President of The Boston Consulting Group, Inc.; and James Hill, Vice-President (Home and Personal Care, Western Europe) of Unilever. We have also included an interview with two leaders who have spent years integrating arts-based learning into corporations, Harvey Seifter and Tim Stockil, to give our readers insight into the design, implementation, and impact of a broad range of these programs. We then move on to a more specific exploration of arts-based learning in action. Maxwell Anderson takes the reader into the art world for an investigation of visual literacy and a Quality Instinct, explaining how both can benefit businesses. Michael Gold and Steve Hirshfeld break jazz improvisation into five behaviors – passion, autonomy,