Blog d'e-Mergences

Extrait de l'article de Business Week

Today, innovation is about much more than new products. It is about reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet untapped customer needs. Most important, as the Internet and globalization widen the pool of new ideas, it's about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time.

In the 1990s, innovation was about technology and control of quality and cost. Today, it's about taking corporate organizations built for efficiency and rewiring them for creativity and growth.

Intégralité de l'article 

 

 

Le livre "Artful Creation: Learning-tales of Arts-in-Business" de Lotte Darso est un remarquable travail d'enquête montrant combien la vision des artistes peut apporter au business, notamment du fait de leur vision prospective souvent aiguisée.

Short description
This book is about social innovation and organisational transformation through the Arts. It deals with live artists working in business settings as catalysts for change.
Abstract

The book primarily deals with two approaches for Arts-in-Business:

1. The Arts applied as an instrument for e.g. team-building, communication training, leadership development, problem solving and innovation.

2. The Arts integrated as a strategic process of organisational transformation.

Lotte Darsø has traveled round the world and conducted 50 interviews with the most visionary and courageous artists and business people in order to 'map' this new emerging field of Arts-in-Business. In this study she examines, describes and illustrates how the Arts can bring forth new learning opportunities and real transformation in business. Throughout the book people tell their amazing stories, which are analysed and elaborated into a coherent theoretical framework.

This book is an attempt to show the large potential of 'Artful Creation' and at the same time point out that the birth of a new paradigm offers promising prospects for the future of business and society.

The book is written for curious people, who are looking for new ways of making sense of a complex world - whether this is in business, research, the public, consulting, or in the Arts. The book offers groundbreaking ideas, new methods, inspiration, and concrete recommendations.

Téléchargez le premier chapitre (pdf en anglais).

It seems increasingly obvious that the search for fast profits within the private companies and the constraint with the balance in the budget like only leitmotive within the public organizations are going to lead them to forsake more and more the use of a vision like catalyst of the employee’s mobilization. Indeed, what would be the use of a vision whose range would be continuously obnubilated by the increase in the rate of return on the capital gain for the shareholders or on the recovery of the surplus of the incomes on the expenditure by the governments? From such a point of view, the presence of a vision remains an obstacle which one usually prefers not to have to face out.

It is there however a bad calculation in tems of future for the aforementioned organizations or companies. As much it goes there from the interest of a company, wishing to remain at the fine point of its crenel, to not sacrifice its budget of research and development for an increase in the percentage of profit, as much it goes there from the survival even of the public organizations to not confining itself with the only research of the balance in the budget. In one and other case, it would be to mortgage the future for the only present and to forget that the future it is only the repeated present! Under these conditions, the search for fast profits or deficit zero will early have take out the aforesaid organizations and companies from their direction.

However what makes live the organizations and the companies and feeds their significance with the eyes of those which work there, it is precisely the presence of a meaningful and mobilizing vision. As soon as this vision is sacrificed to the benefit from primarily material contingencies which benefit only some (shareholders or politicians), temptation is large for those which work there to let be distracted from the interests of the company or the organization to the benefit of their individual interest, thus increasing the need for exercing more control on the mechanisms of production or offer of service and, therefore, to decrease the employees’s feeling of responsibility. In short we continue a chimerical spiral which is likely to cause a continuous increase in fusions and/or regroupings just as of the human costs as they generate for a tiny increase in the profits in the private company and a chaotic financial standing for the public organizations.

While giving up a carrying vision appealing in the future organization or company in terms other than countable, one fixes it at one present who risks to make it rock in the past! While sacrificing medium term to the short term, one makes quasi-impossible, for the employees, the identification with the organization more weakening it in this period of uncertainty. In fact, because the values make vibrate the individuals, that these values are material or spiritual, and to fix them with only financial objectives are likely to pervert them. In period of upheavals and uncertainties as that which we cross, the people have more than ever need to refer to a vision which enables them to rise above the day by day approach and to go beyond the present. In making the economy or, worse still, by denaturing it with using a pretence, is a very bad calculation for the organizations or the companies.

The absence of brake on growth of capitalism can seem, initially, extremely advantageous but is to forget that the organizations and the companies are like the individuals: their perenniality depends primarily on what animates them, on the values which under tighten them and the vision of their own future. Without these elements, they are not any more masters of their destiny and, from the point of view of the change, they undergo it rather than to be the source for it.

Raymond Vaillancourt is consultant, from Quebec. ©Prospect Gestion - ©Le Temps de l’Incertitude

Your contributions are very welcomed. Feel free to participate and communicate with us in english.