There are those that say: “I work well with others when they leave me alone.”
The following presentation isn’t for them.
Partnerships can drain, dilute, and deplete creativity and innovation. Ernest efforts to ‘work’ side-by-side, turn into long hours of hanging out, making jokes, and producing little.
Yet some partnerships can energize, enliven, and excite visions and agendas. Just look at the following three examples:
Business leaders aren’t always raised in a board room. More often than not they have to work long hours to gain the respect and influence they have. The following business leaders prove that moving up the ladder takes more then a degree or two and a letter of reference. Instead, it takes the ability to work odd jobs, have interesting experiences, and learn from them.
1. John Y. Brown, Jr.: Before Brown made the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken into a household name–he sold Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door. While Brown attended law school he earned an estimated $60,000 a year selling the reference works to Kentucky’s bibliophiles. Later, Brown entered politics and became the governor of Kentucky.
2. Michael Dell: Chances are you’ve used one of his Dell computers. However, it’s unlikely that you ate at the Chinese restaurant he used to work at when he was 12 years old. Dell was a host at a local Chinese restaurant until he was bought out by a neighboring Mexican restaurant a year later. When he was 16 he sold newspaper subscriptions by cornering the newlywed and new resident markets with a direct mailing campaign. Needless to say, he dropped the sales job to study computers.
3. Stephen M. Case: Case, founder of AOL, was one of the first entrepreneurs to set America and the Internet up on a blind date. Before that Case worked in Pizza Hut’s marketing department testing and advertising new flavor combinations. What Case discovered, we individually knew: people like their pizza simple. The basic cheese, crust, and sauce recipe always won out over complex flavor mash-ups and cheese stuffed crusts. He brought this “keep it simple” aesthetic to AOL and made the internet as user friendly as possible.
4. Ben Cohen: Cohen was a part-time, minimum-wage-making, Renaissance man before he helped create the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s. Cohen worked as a McDonald’s cashier, a security guard, a taxi driver, and a mop-boy at the restaurant chain Friendly’s until he finally settled down and became a teacher. His steady teaching job gave him the free time to start experimenting with quirky ice cream ideas. As you probably know, he had a knack for flavors and eventually started a small ice cream shop in Vermont.
5. Adolf Zukor: Zukor redefined the film industry. He made one company responsible for the production, distribution, and exhibition of a film. It was a winning formula that made Paramount Pictures a industry leader. Yet, Zukor wasn’t always involved with the stage. Oddly enough he was involved in what stands in front of it. He was a hard-up New York immigrant chair upholsterer. Later, he got into the fur and fur sewing business and made a large fortune. He used his new fortune to invest in a playhouse along with a friend. The profits convinced him that he was on to something and he eventually created Paramount Pictures.
6. Christian Dior: His family wanted him to be a diplomat and he wanted to become an architect. It’s too bad he became one of the biggest names in fashion. Dior’s first job wasn’t exactly grueling. He was a gallery owner in Paris who sold works by Picasso, Braque, and Cocteau. Sadly the gallery shuttered when Dior’s family lost their wealth just before World War II erupted. After the war Dior was convinced France and the world were ready for a new fashion and a new look. His artistic eye and tastes, molded from his days as an art dealer, helped him shape and define post-war fashion.
7. Warren Buffett: Now the CEO and primary share holder of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett wasn’t always one of the world’s richest men. Instead, he was a newspaper delivery boy who worked small side gigs to get by. He famously filed his first income tax return in 1944 at the age of 14. He landed a $35 dollar deduction for the use of his bike and watch on his paper route.
8. BONUS—William Addis: In 1770 Addis was imprisoned in England for starting a riot. While he was there he wanted to make something of himself–so he turned his attention to oral hygiene. At the time teeth were brushed with a rag dipped into soot and salt. Addis had a better idea. He stole a bone form his prison meal, whittled holes into it, and lodged bristles into the holes. The modern tooth brush was born. When Addis was released from prison he massed produced the toothbrush and became wealthy by 1780.
Photo Credit:
In 1989 William S. Rubin, curated what must be considered one of the greatest 21st century exhibits at the MOMA, entitled Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism. To this day I think of this show when teaching my management and leadership students about synergy.
In a landmark article titled Artists’ Circles and the Development of Artists, sociologist Michael P. Farrell describes the synergistic circle of French artists, including Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renoir, who pioneered Impressionism. Monet and Renoir often painted next to each other in the Barbizon woods. For a time, their work was so similar that Monet had to look at the signature to tell whether a particular canvas for sale in a Parisian gallery was his or Renoirs.
Another of these historic creative dialogues occurred early in the twentieth century and gave birth to a new means of painting and creating art. George Braque and Pablo Picasso through an intense creative dialogue gave birth to Cubism. While previous art movements (Impressionism and Post Impressionism) began to evolve into flatter forms, Picasso and Braque were more radical in their approach.
While earlier artistic movements were based on expression of emotion, Cubism focused on an intellectual experiment with structure. Picasso’s and Braque’s early Cubist forays were enhanced by their constant discussions; they saw each other almost every day, constantly debating their revolutionary new style. Their influence on one another was so complete that they even began to dress alike, in mechanics’ clothes, and jokingly compared themselves to the Wright brothers (Picasso even called Braque, ‘Wilbourg’).
Braque later described the intensity of their creative influence as that of “two mountaineers roped together.” In 1907 the year in which Picasso painted, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a painting that many art historians consider the first twentieth century work, the synergistic energy between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had reached its zenith.
Gifted individuals working alone can waste years pursuing useless lines of inquiry producing little or nothing. A collaborative action group can act as a check, a sounding board, and a vote of confidence. In the case of Picasso and Braque, dissecting the others mind allowed them to elevate their artistic conscience to revolutionize how we relate to art and everyday objects. In fact the cubist ideology espoused by Braque and Picasso effectively set the course for art in the twentieth century.
Over the years, art historians have relegated Braque as minor or inconsequential character in the development of Picasso’s artistic style. His painterly style is assumed to be predictable and fundamentally incapable of altering the way we see and feel. However, as the show took great pains to demonstrate, Braque’s remarkable flexibility and artistic innovation influenced Picasso’s conception of art. The most prominent artistic development of the century was unthinkable without Braque and Picasso continuously pushing the other to elevate his art. Like Henry James said, “Every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, and emulation. Great things have of course been done by solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances.”
Synergy has become one of these unspecified, new-agey words that sometimes means very little. We often hear people talk about the “synergy of collaboration.” Braque and Picasso give this term an empirical reality. The sharing of ideas. The almost unconscious dialogue, as if two were riding parallel surfboards on the same wave, each calling out to the other as they move ahead.
The synergy of collaboration is exactly that. It doesn’t mean enmeshment. It doesn’t mean altruism. It means an awareness that the other is present in engaging in dialogue. Each rides their own board, but each is conscience that their are both moving forward. Braque and Picasso have much to teach in the world of leadership…and so do Matisse and Picasso, but that’s a different story (…that I’ll talk about next week).
©2020 BLG-Lead.com All Rights Reserved. | Designed by Princeton Internet Marketing