my EMBA Chronicle

As the semester draws to a close, I’ve been inspired by the many similarities between business school and the fine arts college where I received my undergraduate degree.  Like Loyola, the end of the school year at MICA is a time filled with excitement, activity and celebration.  Both colleges go the extra mile to honor and support students and take pride in their accomplishments.

A big distinction between a visual arts college and business school is the way that student talent and work is shared.  At MICA’s senior exhibition every graduating student is given a space on campus to display her work.  A special preview event provides the opportunity for the general public to tour the studios and meet the artists.  I can’t think of a better way to showcase talent and provide students with an opportunity to share the culmination of their learning.

In b-school, this opportunity for sharing our knowledge and experience in the program is more private.  Our semester ended with a series of team presentations which brought together much of the learning from the last module.  What could b-school learn from an art school about making the learning experience more transparent and accessible to other students, family and community members?  And what can business learn from the art traditions of critique and feedback?

As John Maeda wrote in this post, individuals and organizations that are open to models of critique indicate that “…you are open to asking bigger questions about your work and its validity within your organization.”  Some colleges in Finland are bringing the worlds of business and design together and I am very interested to follow their progress.

Critique @MICA (www.mica.edu)

Last month I attended another Leaders and Legends lecture where the featured speaker was (John) Chris Inglis of the NSA.  Chris suggested that there are three attributes of successful organizations:

• everyone knows what the company is about  — there is a common purpose and goal
• everyone understands what their personal contribution means to the organization
• the organization is able to discern changes that are taking place around it and respond or take action

It’s pretty easy to sit in our offices and believe that everyone in our organization understands their role, what the company is about and how we, as an organization, are able to get a head start on industry changes.  But think about this:

“Leadership is about recasting what is possible and appropriate.” — John Chris Inglis

Michelangelo's Pieta from http://commons.wikimedia.org

Michelangelo is central to so many of the topics of Chris’s talk because he was not just a leader but an innovator. Time and time again the individuals who make the most difference in how we embrace solutions are those that have tried them out on their own. What is so interesting about Michelangelo is that he understood the business of his line of work.  While he was innovative, he was limited by his ideas around how marble could be mined, transported and turned into amazing pieces of art.  As Chris Inglis suggests,  it is really about the risks you can afford to take and strategies that exist within your organization.

A central theme of Chris’s talk focused on information — not only information brought into the company, but information capital of employees.  And this is great connection to a case presentation my team is working on this week about knowledge management.  Although he did not utter the phrase, I believe Chris Inglis was talking how organizations think strategically about business knowledge when he explored topics such as organizational resources and change management.  Ultimately, leadership (and success in business) comes down to how employees are engaged in the vision of the organization AND what kind of knowledge infrastructure is in place to support transfer of knowledge across all members of the company.