Towards a Business School of Arts and Sciences

Abstract

When Dean Gautschi asked me to present my ideas at this Fordham Consortium, he said two things: 1) say something about arts and business, and 2) be provocative. I confess I am in no way an expert on the former, but possibly more capable of the latter. So let me try to sketch out my thinking, which I will directly connect with the reason we are gathering: to examine the purpose of business and the role of the business school. In my first part I will sketch out the various relationships between arts and business: the hegemony of business (business > arts), the arts as market maker (arts> business), and equivalence of arts and business as fundamental human expressions of life (arts= business). In the second part, I will infer what we can learn from that discussion about the purpose of business. To ease that transfer I invoke the analogy of the brain as left-sided (linear, routine, useful in commerce and science) and right-sided (intuitive, emotive, visual, and necessary to appreciate culture, arts, and creativity). I argue that in the a) hegemony of business mode, all purposes that serve the linear, rational mode of the left side of the brain e.g. shareholder value maximization will be acceptable. For the b) arts as market maker mode, all business purposes must speak to the right side of the brain (e.g. any form of value creation). For the c) equivalence of arts and business mode, the purpose of the business must present purposes that engage both parts of the brain simultaneously, e.g. inspire and function at the same time (Google’s mission of making the worlds information available). In my final part I sketch out what that could all mean for the role of the business school. I am concluding that given the need for massive innovation, the current inability of business schools to foster that innovation we need to rethink the business school. Borrowing from Daniel Pink’s argument about the whole mind, I suggest that we need a business school that educates the left brain (linear, routine) and the right brain (creative and purposeful). Because the business school at a university needs to be more than a vocational school, I suggest that we can learn from the traditional Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Why not create a business school of arts and sciences that focuses on business related problems by invoking both sides of the brain, left (science) and right (arts).