Breaking barriers

"On our 'Management of creativity' course we try to open the MBA's minds to ways of organising groups in a business setting so that members can be more open to accepting each others creative thoughts. To illustrate this Jeremy played the Britten Metamorphoses to them. He played the work correctly but deliberately with no imagination. Students then made suggestions as to how he could improve the performance using metaphors and other images and came up with creative ideas which he would try to incorporate into the music - once the creative juices are flowing we find that there is never a shortage of ideas. We always try out each suggestion to see how they sound and we make a point of involving all participants in the creative process, even the quietest people because sometimes they are the ones to come out with the most original suggestions. We then discussed how the students arrived at successful suggestions, which could be summed up as letting their ideas evolve and compete with each other - not their egos"

Business and Music

Jeremy: "In a way I think I can expand on this better because I work in Diana's orchestra. What Diana does is she makes it clear, in a general sense, what her vision of the music is. We talk about such things as the atmosphere that she is hoping to create at the beginning of a movement that we are about to work on. It is then up to us and if the music leads me to work closely with the 2nd flute we listen to each other and work together. There must however be control because we have specific ground to cover and there is a clear structure to our rehearsals..." "but" Diana continues "because I do not wave my arms around it is up to every one to listen. In fact one of the nicest comments I have heard about our playing is from the orchestra's president Jonathan Miller who told us that he had not realised how much fun it was to see orchestral music being made by musicians who were so responsive to each others ideas and would look and take leads from each other."

Inspiring businesses

"One memory remains vivid in my memory" says Jeremy. "On the final Sunday morning we ask them to act out some feature of the MBA course. There was one guy who decided he was going to sing a song. His singing was awful but he went for it and it was very effective. An excellent example of that man's willingness to take a risk and to trust in his non-musical abilities to carry his performance off. That's another thing that we learnt from the course, seeing how commitment in an artist's performance can carry the audience along, no matter how technically bad it is!

JM

this article is copyright protected. Morgensterns is licensed to reproduce it. No further copying is permitted without Morgensterns or the author's permission