creativity – Page 16 – The Consulting Artist

Heroes – Henri Matisse

This is the first in a series of posts about heroes. If you have a hero and you would like to write about them in a guest post for this blog, just drop me a line and we’ll take it from there.

On a recent trip to the Cote d’Azur we visited La Musée Matisse, a beautiful building in Cimiez, Nice, dedicated to the creative genius Henri Matisse. It was a stunningly hot, sunny day and the red plaster coated building shone gloriously (I attempted to capture some of that brightness in the above sketch, an early picture from my learning to paint experiment). My wife Carole introduced me to the work of Matisse several years ago and we’ve long been looking forward to this day.

The museum contains all kinds of wonder. Paintings, sculptures, models, drawings – fabulously simple, beautiful drawings. Their simplicity hides years of practice.

The scale of some of Matisse’s works is awesome. The wonderful Dance II commissioned by the Barnes Foundation is a triptych mural 15 feet high and 45 feet long.

Later in life, Matisse designed stunning stained glass windows for a small chapel in Vence. They flood an otherwise white space with beautiful blues and yellows.

As he aged Matisse became ill and could no longer paint. You would forgive him for calling it a day and sitting back to admire his vast catalogue of work in his twilight years. And you wouldn’t need to.

Confined to his bed, Matisse continued to create great art using cut outs. Some of his most famous and stunning work was created in this final phase. The Snail is almost three metres square. It’s part of the Tate collection and I think it’s simply beautiful. This tiny image doesn’t begin to do the picture justice – please go and see it for yourself. Excellence doesn’t need to be complicated.

I love Matisse’s work. And what I love most of all is his adaptability. I imagine him thinking, ‘Can’t get out of bed to paint anymore? No problem, let’s make cutouts. I can design and cut them and my team can arrange the pieces just so’. Matisse’s drive to adapt in the face of adversity is inspiring, what a creative leader.

What heroics could you and your team achieve with a little of Matisse’s adaptability?

You will fail

In my early years at school I loved learning French. The fact that my first French teacher was a kind, enthusiastic woman who drove a yellow Triumph Spitfire had no bearing on my enjoyment whatsoever. Miss Draisey was an excellent teacher, encouraging and trusting. I remember how shaken she was when discovering two girls cheating in a French spelling test. You just didn’t cheat in Miss Draisey’s class, she was too…nice.

Jump forward a few years and I’m sitting in the exam hall at Purley High School for Boys, aka Colditz. With a few notable exceptions, the teaching staff led by DGS Akers, our thoroughly unpleasant cane wielding headmaster, were a similarly grim bunch. They made Severus Snape look like Mr Tumble. My French teacher at this school was Madame Ananin. She came across pretty miserable most of the time, and seemed to have a loathing not only for all of us school boys, but her beautiful native language too. How odd.

Back to the exam hall. I’m at my desk, just one boy in an anonymous swathe of rows and columns. The teachers responsible for adjudicating the exam stalk the rows and columns as we prepare to start ‘O’ Level French (yeah I’m really that old!). Madame Ananin is on duty and she walks purposefully along the row of desks. She stops, puts a hand on my desk and leans over. She speaks four words, ‘You will fail Shaw’. She moves away from my desk and carries on. Thanks for the vote of confidence!

I passed ‘O’ Level French. I got a B grade and an A grade for spoken French. I won the inaugural Bruce McCallum Memorial Prize for spoken French that year too. My love for the French language was and is too strong for Madame Ananin.

Nowadays in the pursuit of helping people and teams to develop I encourage people to push themselves, often to and beyond the point of failure. Through failure we learn. To make mistakes and to fail is simply human, and in an encouraging environment it is a most powerful thing.

Know this. Creativity and innovation are forever locked in a whirling dancing fling with failure and chaos. As a leader, when you tell me you want creativity and innovation that’s great. And when you join the dance you never know whose hand you’ll take. You will fail. If you practice, you will learn and you will improve. And I will be there to celebrate that with you.

Thank you Madame Ananin.

photo c/o theirhistory

Entrepreneur

This post was inspired by two things. A talk given by Luke Johnson at the RSA this evening, and Adam Murby, who invited me along to listen and learn.

Entrepreneurship. It’s not about the money.

It’s about the creativity, the flexibility and the suffering, or passion if you must call it that.

And for me, it’s also about the encouragement.

Entrepreneurship. The money is a by product.

What can the world of work learn from entrepreneurs?