Learning the rules of the game

The first business school programme of its kind for artists, it’s always oversubscribed because it answers a very pressing need. More of us want to escape the confines of corporate soulsuck, but watched friends step out into the freedom of freelancing or creative entrepreneurship and fall down a chasm, eventually claw their way back to the numbing safety of a grey job, worse off than when they left. The unexpected truth of their fall, is that despite having worked for a big business, they may know nothing about running their own. 

For artists ..and recently-escaped company execs too

This holds true not just for creatives. Many are they who come swaggering into a startup with their big swinging CVs and crashland their jetsized egos on the undulating ground of entrepreurship. Business in the buffered realms of a big company and running your own, share enough genetic markers on paper to be alike; but in the realworld, it’s like you and a sightless sea-urchin.
 
To my utter despair I’ve also watched as people of genius hand the business-end over to experts (read: recently escaped swaggering execs) so that they don’t have to be muddied by marketing, sales, admin and money. Which seems perfectly logical, but almost always ends in tears. We need to be involved in our enterprise on all levels (or at least understand how to check the reports) if it’s to be a success. It’s essential to bring in specialists to do things like our taxes, but to hand over the engine to someone else to remote control isn’t amongst the finest strategic move ascribed in biographies of the greats. But despite eons of creative geniuses handing down their stories, we still fall into the same sticky tarpit generation after generation.
 
Business can be terrifying, disheartening, overwhelming as a solo venture. But to do it with the fundamentals in place when it all starts shaking, the right people on speed-dial and having built-in back-up plans are all best practises that winning creative entrepreneurs have learned. 

Who’s this program a best-fit for?

Business Acumen for Artists goes a long way to getting those elementals in place for:

• those planning an escape
• those bravely out there plying their creative trade but frustrated that they’re not doing as well as they should.
• ..and also as a refresher masterclass for those already successful artists wanting to get a better idea of what opportunities they could be grabbing to strengthen their marketing [Dave Duarte will be leading 2 sessions on marketing with todays new tools! if nothing else, this is makes it worth it] or stretch into a global market [should you go PayPal? use an agent?].

MONEY, PLACE, TIME and WHAT TO DO NEXT

• It’s R 4995 for the 13 week programme, including personal mentorship (priceless)
• You also need to be geographically right for this one: you need to be in Cape Town from the 30th Aug – 29th Nov 2010 (Monday eves from 6pm til 9pm – built in for those still with dayjob).
• It’s held at UCT Graduate School of Business (right by the V&A Waterfront) with plenty of safe parking
• The group can only work if the numbers are kept tight [which means that you will be held accountable for your development and working through your OWN business outcome to share at the final wrap celebration]. It’s for the quick and decisive. If you KNOW you need it, grab the opportunity.

If this sounds just right for you, or someone you know who’s a perfect match (and you’re in South Africa) text ART & your email address to 31497 or book online: www.gsb.uct.ac.za/artists. If you prefer human contact give Mario a buzz on 021 406.1268 or mail him: mario.pearce@gsb.uct.ac.za to find out more or grab your place on the journey.

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The Digital Dreams Department

With the help of some exceptional people, the Digital Media department launched this week. The first class of students have started a 4 week programme to infuse the internet’s power into their being. Skills they will walk out with next month will allow them to speak to the world, to work global and stay local, to channel life, laughter, business, creativity through a screen in ways they couldn’t have imagined (and most of us still can’t imagine). Skills that WILL change their futures.
 
The impossible is being effected here at 9 Ntemi Piliso Street through the hearts and minds of some very special people:
 
Taddy Blecher -  the legend whose mind evoked CIDA University (<< read this for an inspirational dose of defiance of ‘reality’) and now this School of Management
Mandy De Waal -  whose rare quality of getting things done, took a conversation and made it so >>
Dave Duarte - cited as one of the most innovative forces in global business education, specializing in digital marketing and philosophy, takes up the mantle of Dean of the faculty.
The Quirk team – especially Lyndi Lawson who collaborated with Dave to craft the first curriculum around their eMarketing textbook (psst.. free for download here).
My particularly heartfelt thanks to Ismail Dhorat and Saul Kropman who have generously offered their time and fine.grained expertise to teach the eager first class of 60 in my stead.
 
No photocopied keyboards to learn and imagine from this time, CIDA’s new sister business  school will be accelerating deep into the digital with some of South Africa’s social media finest lighting the way.

[I'm looking forward to seeing this school, and those without whom 9 Ntemi Piliso would be just another anodyne downtown building, grow strong and reap rewards for generations to come].

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26 Mentors have stepped up to contribute to this special programme, and I’ll introduce them as the as the journey progresses, because they deserve to be recognised. Each chosen for their particular approach to bridging business and creativity.

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For the reason that I don’t think too many of us get the opportunity to create a mentorship program¹, I’ll share some of my thoughts, maybe it’ll spark interest about creating one for your organisation/class/local good cause/ ..or yourself.

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8 Ideas on Modern Mentorship:

As a mentor:

1. You don’t have all the answers. There was a time when it was feasible that we could predict (with fair accuracy) how the world will operate in the years to come. That time is not now. Share skills, show the hidden paths you’ve discovered – but know that we aren’t in the certainty of our parent’s world. Our job is to inspire greatness.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity -General Patton

2. Stories are the best way to learn from someone else’s experience. It’s a quirk of the human brain – music and stories have the sticky stuff. We remember and pass on case-studies, parables, gossip, jingles. Embed big lessons (softly) in captivating true tales of luck, calamity, humour ..and let it unpack later as an aha! Be a great storyteller (the once and future king of all leadership skills)
3. Monoculture is bad, and not just in agriculture. Leave the cloning to the gene-splicing engineers, mentorship is not about sculpting someone into your likeness. Our job is to spot what makes our charge special, draw out what was dumbed down to ‘fit in’. Genius is rarely safe and orderly.

As a mentee (horrible word, but it gets the consensual nod over apprentice):

1. ASK. Most of us far too polite to ask for anything that may inconvenience anyone else (PLEASE do yourself a favour and refresh yourself on Stanley Milgram’s subway experiment). Oh yes, also grab a copy of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational², and read the chapter on social norms vs market norms. It WILL do your head in about what we assume about money and work.
2. That said, the kryptonite to a mentoring relationship is.. asking too much. Take a quick peek at Tim Ferriss’ post on getting this contact right. Entitlement is creepy. Demanding meetings to discuss the Next Big Thing ( still in idea.ware format and prefaced with the ubiquitous NDA), the assault of thick book manuscripts, lifeless CV’s and half.baked business plans to be analysed is something many people in high-profile positions get pelted with daily – witness any Branson gig! Stand out, offer something that would be of value to your would.be mentor (not the great opportunity to buy in now!)
3. You’re never too old or too successful to get a mentor. Brain plasticity³ is an invitation to free.choice learning. Go borrow someone else’s brilliance >>

I think you should profit from the mistakes of others. You don’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” – Lowell Ferguson

As a mentorship curator:

1. This isn’t your average mentorsheep program, so I needed to hunt for mentors who can look around the corner, not just behind them to point paths to success. Many high profile mentors who have forged their success in the world as it was. Globalization, the web, mobile, resource-strain – have rapidly forced us into new work for a new kind of world.. and so we need new kinds of guides.
2. Use fresh tools. It wouldn’t be much of a pioneering program if we didn’t experiment with the different channels that make up our blended.reality⁴. Challenge the idea that mentorship should be bound to 1 hour coffee meetings. The web is teeming with wonderful tools to enhance communication and inspire creativity (struck with tech.terror? ..hunt a mentor to help you learn, of course).

1. Yes, I have been watching Star Wars again in celebration of some of the most famed sequences of masters and apprentices (or padawan). We have very few powerful formal institutions or guilds left that require the mentor/apprentice model that demands that we face a great trial (no, end of year exams don’t qualify) to prove our mastery before entering our profession ..and maybe we’re collectively paying the price for that (but mercifully, I’ll save that discussion for another day!)
2. there’s an audio extract at the bottom of this page link if you’re living 3 weeks from a bookstore
3. your brain isn’t just doomed to entropy with the best wasted on your youth – IF you exercise it. Challenging learning = new neural connections, fresh brain cells and a cranked up IQ whatever your age
4. Our digital home base will be a custom social network from which we’ll begin the journey tomorrow night.. I’ll report back on what works

Back for its 3rd year: BUSINESS ACUMEN for ARTISTS

It’s a dream.manifest of Director of UCT’s GSB Executive Education, Elaine Rumboll, also a published poet and blues.singer, who realised that her fluency with business, negotiation and marketing was an exception among artists. She developed the rich curriculum for Business Acumen for Artists, lobbied to have this needed programme subsidized, and launched with some of the school’s finest minds offering their time on the faculty.

THE BENEFITS

It offers that blessing of breathing.room -when you thought you have to give up on your dreams and do some #*!!ing desk job to make it by in a recession- and the astounding stories of success born of Business Acumen for Artists backs this up. Whether by learning the language of business, dealing with money, the quality of teaching, mentorship or camraderie; something in those 13 weeks changes the future of those writers, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, designers for good.

THE FEATURES

• An on-campus, THIRTEEN week programme at one of the world’s most innovative and prestigious executive education units.
• An immersive and PRACTICAL business practices course – finances, administration, marketing, negotiation made relevant and simple enough for artists to run singlehandedly.
• You’ll be introduced to the freshest evidence.based understandings of how business works today – not your average juice.less abstract theory taught by people who’ve never stepped beyond the safety of academia.
• Dave Duarte is on the faculty. Don’t know Dave? Worth coming for this session alone to have your perspectives scooped one level up. Between illuminating governments, corporate leadership, MBAs, he’ll be leading the marketing sessions  -  opening online opportunities to creatives, that even their fertile minds couldn’t have imagined -
• 6 months of individual mentorship support from creative industry leaders

okay, here’s the real clincher : the full cost for this business school programme is R 3 260. that’s it.seriously.
It’s worth pretending to be an artist just to get on this programme.

[go here for the official blurb] or call Mario on 021 406 1268 and have a chat with him for more details – or grab your place* on this programme (the group HAS to be limited because of the nature of the attention given, so get in there early and put forward your case to join the learning journey).

* (may even be worth offering as a life.altering gift for someone you love who’s battling to get their brilliance to market and more than make a living, start making a life from their creative genius.)
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PS. if you’re a leader in a creative field; and bighearted enough to get involved by contributing your wisdom and time to nurture one of these young artists’ success, please connect in with me to become a mentor, and help change the trajectory of someone’s life. No pressure.

the very old and very boring question is whether or not designers and their teachers have ended their distaste for commerce and business culture. I have nothing to say about this except that this debate about art and commerce is so last century. If you are even discussing the issue, you are way behind. If you haven’t fully integrated your design, engineering, business and marketing students and faculty into teams on a regular and systemic basis, you are behind.
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There are two great barriers to innovation and design in the world today. Ignorant CEOs and ignorant designers. Both groups are well-intentioned and well-dressed—in their own ways—but both can be pretty dangerous characters.

I read that and cheered because I popped up a quick blog: Business Acumen for Artists and some online PR in support of a superb course that bridges the divide. The program will be run by the GSB’s visionary Executive Education director, Elaine Rumboll and all proceeds of the 13 week course go to strengthening the Observatory Community Centre. We’ve reached the point where we can’t afford to be lopsided in using our brains. Operating from both hemispheres is imperative to future success. Dan Pink’s “Whole New Mind” is a worthwhile read if you haven’t picked it up yet. Business leaders need to be visionaries and creative problem-solvers, and artists to be balanced with practical administrative skills for success.

Dostoyevsky once said:

Beauty will save the World

Coming from a Russian, the guarantee is in that he wasn’t referring merely to eye-candy fluffy Paris Hilton-like phenomena! There is substance to style, striking the strategic path through form and function. Great design, real beauty, is often about discerning the simple at the heart of complexity. Simple, not barren.

Paradoxically the only way to a new and more elegant solution/evolution tends to be by way of apparent chaos. Play in Photoshop, grab a box of crayons & giant paper for strategy meetings, pop into an art gallery at lunch, get inspired by Flickr to take more interesting shots, sling a fresh theme on your blog if you have one. Enabling your design eye through practice, developing visual literacy, will open up a visionary capacity that will prove a very handy skill as times get increasingly chaotic and messy.

PS. I heartily recommend the Gaping Void primer on Creativity >> go NOW.