Posts from — March 2009

Paul Cézanne: start of life hack…
End of life “old master”

Last week we did the test of the new system for my web-based seminars and it went great! I’m glad we had the technical glitches that we did, because that’s what a test is for after all. Later this week, the newsletter readers will get first crack at the new set of webinars on the Secret Rules of Career Success. (See the link in the sidebar.)

Today, let’s deal with the “Young Genius” vs. “Old Master” ideas of David Galenson. Galenson, a professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, came to what is probably a pretty straight forward idea but one that troubles the fields of art and economics both.

Galenson studied artists and why a particular painting would be worth this or that. He usually sums up the argument by contrasting Pablo Picasso with Paul Cézanne. Galenson studied both auction prices and the paintings selected to appear in textbooks over time. The latter has its short-comings (paintings in Russia, for example, almost never made it in during the Soviet period, nor those that were stolen during the wars) but it produced something odd:

In almost all cases, the largest number of an artist’s paintings included in textbooks and retrospectives were painted at the same age that his or her works brought the highest prices at auction. For Cezanne, auction prices are highest for works made in the last year of his life, when he was 67. For Picasso, the highest prices were for works he did at age 26. The age at which Cézanne paintings were most likely to appear in textbooks was when he was 67. For Picasso, it was age 26. In the two artists’ most recent retrospectives, Cezanne’s best year was age 67. Picasso’s was 26. I’ve done this analysis for several hundred artists. [from Smithsonian interview]

Creativity, Galenson argues, comes in two different forms. In “conceptual” creativity, this tends to be people who have a Big Idea and then milk it for the rest of their careers. Most economists are Conceptual people. The Art World worships these folks, too. They are the Young Geniuses who come out of nowhere and do amazing things.

It’s not that Picasso didn’t study. He did. He was doing amazing things at 12, so he had been painting for the requisite 10 years to have mastery over the techniques he needed. But his paintings come whole cloth, all at once. For the Young Geniuses, Galenson argues, the idea is the thing: execution can (and often is) done by someone else.

The “Old Masters” are the creatives like Cézanne. It’s not just that they take years to develop, although that’s true. It’s that they are Experiential rather than conceptual. It’s an entirely different way of experiencing the world.
Burgeoning fields are often about Stars, the young people who have already made a great contribution to the field. The problem is that after that, they are usually done. Because they were not involved in the underlying elements of their field, they usually don’t contribute anything else.

There are some big exceptions that try the rule. Here in Indiana, one can easily think of Larry Bird who followed being an NBA superstar with 1998 NBA Coach of the Year and a conference championship in 2000. Even in athletics that require youth, people like Michael Jordan and David Robinson lacked star status in high school but through hard work and a systematic approach to perfecting the sport (and, in Robinson’s case, a massive growth spurt in college) led to increasing levels of performance. [Basketball fanatics can feel free to correct my examples here.]

The idea is fairly well known in the publishing world, too. Normally, there is a great debut novel. These are often by young people who amaze us all. Often, however, there is no second good novel, or not even a second novel at all. One bright shining moment. Others work forever to get that first novel published, then continue to develop as writers. They continue to add to the field, building the foundations of the field.

I’ve said before that one of the reasons that EJ’s work is resisted is that it prevents stars from working. You can’t be a hero: you have a much more predictable environment even in areas that are not predictable. (and the general idea of levels of work, including as developed by Billis, Stamp, Rowbottom, Kinston and others) is res

And this is a pretty good reason for resisting it. But it also illustrates a fundamental problem in at least American values and thinking.

America worships the Star, in business, the arts, religion. We love the youthful genius.

Taleb, the “Black Swan” thinker, argues that the conceptual-ness of economics is the problem. Experiential creatives would take their hints not from theory but from reality. He doesn’t make the connection to Galenson, but it’s pretty obvious when you’re reading his stuff that the duality is there.

The problem is not that we should do away with conceptual thinking or young stars. We shouldn’t. It’s just that we’ve gone too far. We’ve excluded the other piece that has to be there for organized existence in human groups to really work. By worshipping only star creativity, we deny ourselves the

It’s the duality of creativity.

If you haven’t figured this out yet, most Hidden High Potentials are “experiential” learners rather than conceptual. It’s among the reasons that I think you can save the world.

External Links

• “What Kind of Genius Are You?” from Wired
• Galenson’s draft of his forthcoming And Now for Something Completely Different: Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art
• Galenson’s papers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (more interesting than it sounds)
• Extended interview for Smithsonian Magazine
• Bootstrap Art did an interview with Galenson. Artists, art historians and art gallery folk asking him questions.
• “Social Innovators as Long-Horizon Creatives” — Galenson’s talk to to an audience of social entrepeneurs over the age of 60 at the 2007 Purpose Prize awards.

Michael Bates of the prolific Batesline has nudged me to put in some of the posts that didn’t make it from my earlier personal blog when I made the transition over to here. For the most part, they deal with the idea of “underachiever” and why that’s straight from the Devil’s mouth to your ears.

These are retreads: they originally appeared awhile back but didn’t make it onto this site because of thematic problems or being too personal. I have since decided to ignore anyone who is offended by either.

I’ve probably changed my mind a bit on some of this, toning some things down, but this remains the same: there is a large population of people who are consistently misunderstood and put down. Most people call these folks “underachiever” or just “losers”.

I call them Hidden High Potentials.

And they’re going to change the world.

Articles are listed after the jump.

[Read more →]

Wilfred Brown

People are always surprised that Wilfred Brown — Elliott Jaques’s collaborator, and the guy who hired him in the first place — ended his life in favor of unions and workplace democratic principles. Jaques, who could be so exacting in other areas, left ensuring that voices down the chain be heard to the goodness of the managers’ hearts. Brown understood power, as Alistair Mant says, and this showed in his understanding of representation in issues values, what he called “policy”.

In 1978 and 1979, Brown has a series of discussions with Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber, Professor of Political Science at the University of Mannheim (Germany). These were facilitated and recorded by Alistair Mant, the management writer. I’ll cover more on Mant later, partly in a shameless exercise of attempting to suck up and thereby convince him to write a biography of Brown but mostly because he’s wickedly interesting. (See for example his 2003 screed, “Muddying the waters between guardians and traders” or his interview on ABC [Aus] where he says “you need to be really bright for these very, very complex jobs, [to] know what not to be thinking about.”)

Mant thinks extremely highly of Brown, by the way.

Brown and Hirsch-Weber’s conversation was later published by the Anglo-German Foundation (1983) under the ungainly title Bismarck to Bullock: Conversations about institutions in politics and industry in Britain and Germany between Wilfred Brown and Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber, whence this excerpt comes. “WB” is Wilfred Brown and “WH-W” is Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber.

Here’s how Brown described the only strike that Glacier Metals had during his 25 year tenure as Director:

[Read more →]

One of the things that “Tim” could do was to predict the future. No, he didn’t have a crystal ball. He simply could somehow see more of what was going on in the present, and create viable scenarios for the future. These scenarios were usually rather simple, just taking into account certain things that made certain events more likely. For example, he could work on a project for a couple of weeks and make a series of predictions about its success, including particular risks that were likely to come about and the results. He even predicted certain actions by different individuals.

It was uncanny. He was almost always right.

And totally, absolutely not wanted.

Because, as Douglas Adams observed, “the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.”
This is a lesson that is easily learned from the stories of the Israelite prophets. The people killed the prophets not because they had a bad track record but because they didn’t like the implications of the message. Even when they turned out right, people didn’t flock to them.

It turns out that being right is usually the wrong thing to do, because it has a nasty habit of getting you killed, fired, or sued. (There’s nothing quite like barristry to suck the life out of you.)

[Read more →]

I spent some time looking for some c. 1880 images for the new Manasclerk Company logo. We’re going old school, because apparently I spent too much time with Trey Felty and frankly a steam punked logo attracts the right type of clients (i.e., those that pay). I spent some time trawling the US Library of Congress’s digital collections. They’re amazing and well worth the time if you have it. The New York Public Library also has some great stuff.

But a big part of the collection comes from federally sponsored artists and photographers during the Great Depression. Like this shot of a displaced family in California from the LoC’s FSA collection:

Nipomo Calif, March 1936. From Library of Congress
(click to enlarge)

Then there are shots that remind us that some people faced treatment in my country that was just plain wrong. Even worse than those Okies who got to Cal-eye-forn-y-ah and got turned back or worse, beaten. Some folks had the beating threat all the time, and it got worse when times got bad.

Sign in diner. c. 1935

I talk a lot about high mode individuals being underemployed. One of my grandfathers was an avid reader, who read Bacon and Darwin and Plato, but worked as a butcher his entire life. Towards the end he reported to much less wise and less experienced and younger men who saw him as an obstruction to get rid of. He never graduated from high school, but his son got a masters degree and held four patents, and his daughter taught at university and married a university president.

Sometimes you do what you have to do, and hope you give your kids a chance.

I’ve also been reading Born Losers, which describes the responses to panics back in the 19th century here. Much of what is said about the reasons for financial collapses of that century sounds like a more flowery version of what is written in newspapers and business rags today. We’re not going to learn and all of this is going to happen again. Because that’s the way it is.

All this got me thinking about what I’m thankful for, in these hard times that are starting in on us. I’ve gone through the poverty-income years before, so it perhaps is easier for me because the situation isn’t new. I didn’t see some massive paper loss.

But you can’t be thankful for avoiding some pain. “There but for the grace of God goes Dwight L. Moody!” may have worked great for the American evangelist, but it’s tougher for us normal folks. We need to be thankful for positives, for something that we have.

It even is linked to better health. Just forcing yourself to be thankful (in whatever way one is thankful — one doesn’t need a deity) for ten things every night changes you. Don’t know why.

For me it often is about something beautiful. The pattern created by sneakers hung over power lines. A glimpse of a fox as it crossed a snow covered field as I drove by. The page of book where the typographer knew his craft. So it can be inane things. It doesn’t have to be something important to anyone else.

Take some time. Find something that you rejoiced in experiencing, participating in, or having. I grew up singing a hymn written by Johnson Oatman, Jr. that cried “Count your blessings, name them one by one”:

Are you ever burdened with a load of care?
Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear?
Count your many blessings, every doubt will fly,
And you will keep singing as the days go by.

The Apostle Paul of course had already chimed in with his two cents, but it wasn’t nearly as catchy.

The Christian thought may be something you’re not into, but the idea is solid for everyone. Even Cicero said:

A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.

What are you thankful for today?

nbsp;

A little historical note about Oatman: he reportedly wrote over 3,000 hymns before he died in 1926, while keeping a day job “having charge of the [life insurance] business of one of the great companies in Mt. Holly, N.J.” and having a family, according to a contemporary book of biographical sketches.

Has anyone else noticed that Jack Welch’s impeccably run company has stock worth less than it was 16 years ago? If you had bought stock on May 7, 2000 — one day before the split 3 for 1 — and kept it all, you would now be worth less half of what you paid. (Right now GE is at 7 and change, and was at 52 right before the split.

I’ve been wondering whether or not GE’s spectacular rise didn’t have more to do with GE Capital. (Disclosure: I once worked as a consultant to an IT contractor working at a company that was later merged into GE Capital.) They certainly made a lot of money in the Internet bubble and then in housing.

Take a look at this chart from Yahoo! Finance showing GE from 1981 (Jack’s CEO begins) to today, with annotations of what the increases were. The stock price multiples do not take into account stock splits, and probably should. So it goes.

[Read more →]