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- As Sho-ton said, Megan Matthews,
and I teach arts management classes,
I teach business management classes,
and I have been working for 20 years
with creatives, artists, businesspeople,
community activists, politicians.
My passion has been trying to bring all these folks together
because what I've found is that actually,
they're not that different, right?
And I'll talk about that in a second.
But you can ask why do I care that artists are at the table
when a new product is being developed,
or you can ask why do I care that creatives are at the table
when a community is developing
a new economic development strategy?
Why do I care that artists think about earned income
and revenue and the consumer
and how to distribute their product?
Because, having worked in this field for 20 years,
I know that the arts help people
think about things in a different way.
They help people relate to someone unlike them.
They help people respond to change
in an effective and productive way.
Businesses help people have
decent, productive lives.
They give them money to buy houses
and buy clothes for their kids.
When businesses run well,
they can make significant change and improvement
in a community.
That's why I care about both sides of this world.
Both sides, the arts and business,
people want to make a living, to be happy,
to be healthy, to make change,
to impact their world positively.
They just go about it in different ways.
And when we work together on this,
we're better together.
So let me give you some examples
of where businesses have brought in
creatives to work with them.
For instance, Hallmark, you know,
greeting cards, Hallmark.
What I found out is that they actually have
what they call Hallmarket, where their employees,
they create artwork outside of their business lives,
they actually allow them a place to sell the artwork
to whomever is interested,
because they're recognizing that their employees
have this creative side to them
that needs to be recognized.
They also have a six month sabbatical
for creative employees.
Can you imagine?
Just think about this.
Being paid for six months to go be creative,
and some of you, but the thing is,
creative, there isn't just one way to do it.
I mean, some people say,
"I couldn't even think of what I would do "with that six months."
I'm gonna talk to you in a minute
about how you might walk through that process.
But Hallmark recognizes that their employees
need to have creativity.
The Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis.
They work with lawyers on improv techniques
for the courtroom.
Can you not imagine lawyers meeting
to be able to do improv, like on the moment,
being able to respond to something they didn't expect?
So theaters, the Guthrie Theater in particular,
goes in and works with them to help them do this better.
They use staged readings,
they use where they basically don't have to act it out,
but they work with lawyers and people in the law profession
to work through complex legal issues.
You talk about the Kohler Company
right here in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
They've got an arts and technology program
where they bring in artists from all over the world
for up to six months,
and they give these artists access to everything, right.
Artists can use all the foundry work, all the processes,
all the tools, and artists have been able to create
work that has been basically distributed
to all over the country.
The cool thing is, it's not just about
the artists benefitting from this.
The community, Sheboygan,
the artists go out into the community
and they work with the John Michael Kohler Art Center
providing programming and education opportunities
for people in the creative arts.
They go into the schools and they work with students
in creativity and processes and training them and things.
So both people benefit from this.
We've got the Wagner Company in Milwaukee.
I love this story.
Christine Harris is a colleague of mine,
and she tells this story all the time,
but she's working on creative industries
in the Milwaukee area,
and the Wagner Company (laughs), not unusually,
they had artists who had to have a second job,
because they had not figured out
the whole income stream thing,
and so they had to figure out how to make a living.
And Christine talks about the fact
that these artists worked for the Wagner Company
just doing their regular job.
They saw scrap metal all over the floor,
and they said, "Could we take that
"and make stuff with it?"
And the Wagner Company, being wise, said,
"Well, sure, okay."
Do you know what has happened, is that those artists
have created a whole new product stream
for the Wagner Company, right.
They've created a whole new product
that they can sell,
and the artists are using their creative gifts
and the talents and the things that they've used
30 years of their life to develop
to help the business do better,
and they get to do something that's very important to them.
Doctors, another example, doctors.
Did you know, I think this is so cool,
did you know that doctors actually, in their training,
many schools have doctors go look at visual art
to develop their critical and analytical observation skills?
They make them go look at this art,
because when you've got visual art,
you don't have the nonverbals, right?
I mean, I guess you have all the nonverbals,
but you don't have movement and you don't have words
and you don't have all the rest of this.
So they have doctors go observe,
and what it does is that when they work with a patient,
they're better at figuring out how a patient
is feeling and thinking and reacting to a situation
just by observing versus having to do more tests,
which saves money and is less invasive.
So I think that's a great example of using the arts
to help people do their jobs better.
And finally, the last example.
The Wormfarm, has anyone heard of the Wormfarm?
(laughs) You've been there, right?
Okay, you gotta go, this is so cool.
The Wormfarm Institute in Reedsburg, Wisconsin.
It was basically, a couple of artists bought
a dairy farm up in Sauk County,
and I have two things I wanna talk about,
the Fermentation Fest and the Farm/Arts DTour.
Fermentation Fest is where they do all things
about fermentation and culture.
So they take the agriculture, they take the local community,
they create this whole festival that has taste testings
and people learn how to ferment things,
I don't even know, sauerkraut and things like that.
But the thing is, they bring people into the community.
They bring money into the community.
People come and spend money,
they find out more about the culture,
the farmers do better, local food providers do better,
it's better for everybody.
And then they've also got this Farm/Art DTour,
which you need to go.
50 miles in the middle of beautiful Sauk County,
where they have public art in the middle of nowhere,
like, artists will go do these installations.
You know those long white things
that they put in the fields where the hay is
over the winter, right?
Farmers will paint these things
in whatever thing they want,
and people will go through and tour.
They have pasture performances,
where they have concertos in the middle of a pasture.
They have roadside signs, oh,
and the last thing about this,
they've got these really cool, they call them
roadside culture food stands,
where artists create food stands that sell
art and culture, but they're beautiful,
and they can get a sense of the history
and the culture of that area.
It's amazing, and you really need to go.
Okay, so that's enough of that.
So then we talk about this.
You can see that I'm enthusiastic, can I say.
So how do you create a space for creativity?
One, be intentional.
When you're in a business and you're a business manager
and you're making decisions about what to include
in this time for your employees,
you gotta make space for creativity.
Be intentional about it.
Gene Chenoweth was talking with me earlier
about thinking positively.
One thing I talk about in my classes
is that people spend 90% of their time
figuring out what went wrong and who to blame
and 10% of their time figuring out what's possible
and what to do about it.
And I say that in the creative process,
you need to flip that.
You need to go, 90% of your time needs to be spent,
"What's possible and how do we make that happen?"
And 10% going, "Okay, that didn't work so great.
"What do we need to do about it?"
Think the yes and rule.
Improv, theater, basically any idea,
when you're in a brainstorming session,
any idea you have, the only response is, "Yes, and."
You know, in this class I had a student,
"I have this idea.
"I want to have underground tubes for travel
"between Whitewater and Janesville
"because I hate driving on the roads in the winter."
Okay, all the buts starting coming.
"Oh, that's impractical, whatever,"
but there was no "Yes, buts."
It was all "Yes, ands" in that class,
so the next thing was, "You know what?
"We could put news along the side of those tubes
"and so we could get all sorts of advertising income."
I mean, think about it.
If all we'd spent time on was the "Yes, but,"
we would never have thought about those things.
Listen, listening is a big part of the creative process.
Shh.
Big talkers like me (laughs), it's a skill I have to learn
and practice intentionally.
Also, bring creatives in early.
Oftentimes businesses tend to go,
"Hey, you know what, let's create this thing
"and then we'll bring the creatives in to do it."
Oh, I don't know, a logo or something.
Bring them in early.
Bring people in to do the creative process
at the beginning of the process.
They'll have more passion about it,
they'll have more commitment to it,
and they understand the creative process.
Everybody will be better.
So creative entrepreneurship.
It's like a thing, right?
What I wanna say about that is that sometimes
people, artists, creatives, don't tend to think
of themselves as entrepreneurs.
I say they have a different purpose for entrepreneurship.
They're not about scalability, building a big business,
and moving on.
They're about, "I've got this thing in my soul
"that I must create, and I wanna put it out there,"
which can be very frustrating for people who have
the entrepreneurial mindset, like,
"Oh, okay, let's figure out how to distribute this
"and make it cheaper and all that."
So you need to understand when you're working with
arts entrepreneurs, their goal in doing this is different,
and that's okay, it's just different.
But where we're together, whether we're same,
is that arts entrepreneurs,
that entrepreneurship and arts entrepreneurship,
and business and creativity, there's a process.
It's like a loop, right?
So in order to sell a product,
you need both a product and the customer, right?
Without them, you don't have the process.
In theater, you got the same kind of process.
I have a gentleman, a friend who runs
the arts entrepreneurship program
down in Southern Methodist University.
His name is Jim Hart.
He has an MFA in theater from Yale,
so he knows his deal, right?
He basically talks about the fact
that you need to have both an audience
and artist and theater people to have
the whole creative process,
and so if that's the case, why can artists not use
their consumer as a part of the process?
Why do artists think that that can't be
a part of their process?
And that's why I talk to my artists about it,
when I'm talking about arts entrepreneurship,
is that we're really very similar.
We have this inspirational process, and we work together.
Okay, so why do I believe
that arts and business are better together?
I've gone through and told you a lot about it,
but let me end with this.
I believe that artists and business, when we work together,
we create better products,
we create stronger communities,
we create better opportunities,
we create more ability to adjust to the world around us,
and I believe we're better together.
Thanks.
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