Business Schools Bring the Arts into Classrooms - Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 03:38PM 
Gleaning business lessons from "The Godfather," painting watercolors in class and using comic books as strategy textbooks—faculty are bringing the arts into business-school classrooms in an effort to push students to think creatively.
As B-schools have grown open in recent years to less traditional teaching methods and areas of study, the arts have gained a greater presence in many programs. Some schools are offering courses, concentrations and even specialized arts-management M.B.A.s for students planning careers in creative industries, a sector where strong business skills are needed more than ever as budgets grow tight. On other campuses, professors are using techniques from the visual arts, theater and music to help those on more conventional paths to approach business problems from a new perspective.
"Most of our students who come in have been taught in a very, very non-artistic way as they've come up through the business world, a very, very linear way," says Mark Powell, an associate fellow at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, who has used Shakespeare's plays, modern poetry, painting and dance to press senior executives in his leadership classes to think about their work differently. "If you really want to get people to become better leaders, better managers, you have to find ways of connecting to them personally."
Dr. Powell has used jazz music to illustrate an unorthodox approach to teamwork and leadership. "In a jazz group there is no leader, they move leadership around," and the analogy has helped many executives adjust their management styles, he says.
At the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School, strategy lecturer Allègre Hadida says an issue of the French Asterix comic-book series serves as one of the best strategy textbooks she has come across. Its plot focuses on Julius Caesar's fictitious effort to corrupt a rebellious village in Gaul by introducing its residents to capitalism.
"I use it as a sort of unconventional case study," she says, focusing on issues like creating new markets, benefiting from a first-mover advantage and dealing with copycats. "It's a wonderful way to illustrate the fact that strategy is everywhere."
Dr. Hadida also screens clips from "The Godfather"—sparking discussion on business topics like succession and diversification—and "Star Trek," whose "boldly go where no man has gone before" introduction illustrates the importance of having a mission statement. The goal: to help students approach problems without getting distracted by the details of a sector they know personally.
When she uses examples from real-world industries, "chances are that one person in the room will have worked in that industry," she says. "Chances are that none of the students in the room will have ever been a Mafia don or a Starfleet commander."
Dr. Hadida also invites the Britten Sinfonia chamber orchestra to play for students, and draws lessons about leadership and creativity from its performances. When one student asked how they can express themselves while playing notes written by someone else, orchestra members performed multiple interpretations of the same piece to show how different they sounded.
The lesson applies to managers as much as musicians, Dr. Hadida says. "Creativity can occur even if you have a very, very strict brief and even if all the notes are written down," she says. "You can still be inventive and creative and deliver above and beyond, surprising your audience."
Such unusual lessons stick, says one of Dr. Hadida's students, Marielle Lopez, a marketing expert with experience in the health-care industry.
"Coming to business school, I was expecting to sit in a class where they tell you, 'OK, let's do a case study about a Fortune 500 company,'" she says. "It's an unconventional way of doing things but I think it's a very creative way of getting the message across."
Entrepreneurship and strategy professor Rita Klapper, who often brings paintings and songs by pop stars like Beyoncé to the classes she teaches at Rouen Business School in France, says the creative skills artists depend on are also important in the business world.
In a course at Tokyo's Rikkyo University business school, she used photographs of Japanese women to spur discussion about the barriers they face in the corporate world. And at the Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, Dr. Klapper's students made links between theories of management and a grouping of intense, brightly colored paintings from Tunisia.
As well as using the arts to teach business, B-schools are also giving students who have worked in cultural industries a firmer grounding in the principles of the marketplace.
At the University of Manchester in northern England, the Business School and the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures collaborate on a two-year-old joint master's degree in arts management. With arts organizations under pressure from budget cuts and competing demands on potential audience members' attention, such practical training is needed more than ever, says Lynn Sheppard, director of Manchester Business School's Entrepreneurship Centre.
Many students "come from groups that perhaps have expected to have some government subsidy or funding from sponsors and haven't had to think about how to make their activities sustainable," she says. "And of course we're now in a different environment."
Those from the arts world often start out skeptical of topics like marketing, branding and strategy, but they quickly realize how relevant such areas are to museums, theaters and concert halls, particularly when teachers use examples drawn from the sector, Ms. Sheppard says.
"They need to understand the audience more than they ever had to," she says. While bosses at a theater, museum or symphony may not have direct local competitors, "we try to get them to think about competition in the wider sense, what's competing for time, competing for your money."
At Cambridge's Judge School, M.B.A. students can concentrate in culture, arts and media management. One prospective student is a classical dancer nearing retirement and looking for a way to stay involved in the field, and current and past students have included a museum curator, record-label founder and philharmonic fund-raiser, Dr. Hadida says.
Such students are generally looking for a strong grounding in business basics, "tools of management that they don't necessarily have access to" in the arts world, she says.
While students on both sides of the business-arts divide are sometimes puzzled at first by lessons that cross those boundaries, faculty say most soon come to appreciate the new perspective.
The Saïd school's Dr. Powell acknowledges that corporate human-resources departments were sometimes wary of sending employees to executive-education classes in which they engage in activities like painting visual representations of their businesses' problems. But he says almost all the managers attending his sessions eventually appreciated the unconventional approach.
"At the beginning, they just think, why would I want to sit in a four-hour session with a poet," he says. "By the end they absolutely get it. Later in the week they're saying, 'What's the next weird thing we're going to learn from?'"
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