also common else general identify innovative position pursuit quest such what who whom which work Studying the arts can help businesspeople communicate more eloquently. Most bosses spend a huge amount of time “messaging” and “reaching out”, yet few are much good at it. Their prose is larded with clichés and garbled with gobbledegook. Half an hour with George Orwell’s “Why I Write” would Studying the arts can help businesspeople communicate more eloquently. Most bosses spend a huge amount of time “messaging” and “reaching out”, yet few are much good at it. Their prose is larded with clichés and garbled with gobbledegook. Half an hour with George Orwell’s “Why I Write” would 1 wonders. Many of the world’s most successful businesses are triumphs of story-telling more than anything 2 . Marlboro and Jack Daniels have tapped into the myth of the frontier. Ben & Jerry’s, an ice-cream maker, wraps itself in the tie-dyed robes of the counter-culture. But business schools devote far more energy to teaching people how to produce and 3 their products rather than how to infuse them with meaning. Studying the arts can 4 help companies learn how to manage bright people. Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones of the London Business School point out that today’s most productive companies are dominated by 5 they call “clevers”, who are the devil to manage. They hate being told what to do by managers, 6 they regard as dullards. They refuse to submit to performance reviews. In short, they are prima donnas. The arts world has centuries of experience in managing 7 difficult people. Publishers coax books out of tardy authors. Directors persuade actresses to lock lips with actors they hate. Their tips might be worth hearing. Studying the art world might even hold out the biggest prize of all—helping business become more 8 . Companies are scouring the world for new ideas (Procter and Gamble, for example, uses “crowdsourcing” to collect ideas from the 9 public). They are also trying to encourage their workers to become less risk averse. In their 10 for creativity, they surely have something to learn from the creative industries. Look at how modern artists adapted to the arrival of photography, a technology that could have made them redundant, or how William Golding (the author of “Lord of the Flies”) and J.K. Rowling (the creator of Harry Potter) kept trying even when publishers rejected their novels.