Six investment bankers walk into an arts studio. No, that's not the start of the joke. Turns out they needed to feel safe and be left alone to do what Well, feel safe and be left alone with their thoughts or waste of time? Hardly who knew these folks were also needy? Aren't they? The masters of the universe? Amy Whittaker of New York University tells us why Amy's written about and taught the intersection between finance, economics, and art. Welcome to
Bloomberg Benchmark, a show about the global economy. I'm Daniel moss I write and edit global economics for Bloomberg View, and I'm Scott Landman and economics editor with Bloomberg News in Washington. Amy, it's so great to have you with us. Thanks so much for having me on. Great to be here. You're the author of art thinking how to carve out creative spice in a world of schedules, budgets and bosses.
Well we'll get to those last three qualifies in just a second, but I want to come to this phrase that you use that's originally attributed to Daniel Pink m f I is the new MBI explain. I think It's one of these things that relates to the stereotypes that we all have of art business, and even the sexy overlap of art and business. When Daniel Pink wrote that in the Harvard Business Review in two thousand four, I already had an m b A and I was studying
for an m f A and painting in London. I would show up at the studio and my colleague painter would be in three piece pen stripe tails, painting at nine in the morning, having been out all night. And that is not something that ever happened when I was in business school. I think the idea is that creativity is really important in business. So that's an idea we've had at least since Shupiter. But the question is really
how culturally we make space for that. Now. Does the m f A is a new m b A paradigm survive the post two thousand a night world. The post two thousand and eight world is a great example of
art as a really really broad process. This idea that we live in a point a world and then something happens, whether we do it ourselves or it happens outside of our control, that completely turns the world upside down and changes all of our assumptions the idea of the m f A as the new m b A. On the one hand, it survives in perpetuity because all of us have a creative and a practical self and need more
space to own both. And on the other hand, you could easily say that two thousight was the result of overly creative thinking and markets and about risk. Now let's let's go back to what Dan talked about at the top, which was the six investment bankers who walk into an art studio. How does your training in art square with that picture that we're painting? That picture with words that Dn just painted, and you invoted six, how many showed up? I yielded six. I invited about thirty five. Now I
probably invited ten. The first year I was in art school, we had a show at the end of the year, and for some reason, honestly, probably dealing with my own vulnerability getting back to making art after having an MBA, I decided that there was this question of who's an
artist and what kind of work gets made. So think of the kind of art you've seen that makes you most skeptical about modern and contemporary art, Like a hundred bicycle pump sealed in a can of large Joseph boys, or something that's an event or a you know, a broom and a bucket with an extensive wall label. I was kind of thinking about the frame of art, and I thought, everyone is an artist. Everyone's neatly creative. So
I invited some friends. None of them were actually investment bankers, because the art studio building closed at ten pm and none of the investment bankers are off work at that time. It was investment managers and attorneys. And there are six of them who came, and I have to say, you know, the most important thing was to leave them alone and let them do their own thing. And they were hilarious
and brave. There's a guy called Guy who was an economist through and through, who came and made an abstract artwork and then came back the second week and completely changed the artwork in a way that requires all the moral courage you'll ever bring to a painting. My own tutor and art school stop by to tell me he really liked the direction my work was taking, and uh, I think it just reminded me that everyone has this
capacity to be an artist. And I mean that in the sense of the exact moment you have a paint brush in your hand and you have to put it on a canvas. All of us have that moment in our daily lives, in our time in the art studio, figuratively speaking, and so it was really fun fun to watch that. Now some of our listeners might and I'm wrestling with this myself. It can sometimes seem a little frivolous to link art to the serious, hard decisions that take place in a safe suite. It's trilled down a
little bit. What is the link? I think we actually live in a time when the art world is a bit insulated from its own civic, economic, and political importance outside of itself. When I talk about art, I don't mean paintings and museums. I mean the human capacity for creativity, the thing that will become increasingly important as work gets automated,
the thing that only people can do. So the way I think about it is kind of folkasy, but it's in terms of my parents and some thing that my father once said he was a neurologist and our mother is a medievalist. And he was once asked how they got along being in such different fields, and he said, He was in the business of saving lives, but she was in the business of making lives where it's saving, And I always loved that because they did the opposite.
He helped people with quality of life issues like headaches and the inability to walk, and she helped people with basic survival skills like writing and complete sentences. So I think the reason art matters in the c suite is because it represents a spaciousness of curiosity and skepticism. And it doesn't matter a hundred percent. It matters in a portfolio since that you just need some space for it. You can think of it as the alternatives allocation in
your investment portfolio. You'd never want to be a hundred percent in bitcoin, but you might want to own a little bit of it. So what does that have to do with the term creative destruction? You did mention Jupiter earlier. He's credited with coining that phrase. Why is he so important in your work? What does that have to do
with art? The idea of creative destruction, I think is the original way that economics as a field grappled with creativity because economics traditionally is based on the idea of competition. So Sjupiter is making a case for creative destruction that you have to think imaginatively or you will be competed away. And I think all of us can relate to this idea that ultimately there's no such thing as stasis. There's
a constancy of change. You know, if you had an amazing haircut in night four, it's probably not still an amazing haircut. If you had a great business model in the industry you're in is evolved beyond that. So for me, I'm less interested in the destruction part of it, which is fear based, right, you better be creative or you're going to be in trouble, and more about it as a form of expansiveness and the root of being able to bring your whole person or your actual sense of
self and judgment into the workplace. Now, one of the words in the title of your book is budgets, And the reason I'm raising that word specifically is most companies like to talk about words like creativity and certainly give voice to its importance. They also don't like to be too dependent on one particular product. Yet number crunches can kill an idea before it's even born. Now, with art, you don't necessarily know what you're creating. So like, that's
even worse for a number crunch er, isn't it. It is, It's terrible, it's the worst. It's it just is. But it's the It's the kind of risk that's worth taking. I think the worst thing that can happen in the workplace is to get a perfect answer to a question and then realize that you're asking the wrong question. In the first place, a number cruncher can get a perfect answer to the wrong question. I think the reason art
matters is that art is part of the compass. It's part of the orientation for how you move forward when you don't have a template, when the past patterns are the only thing that will help you in the future. And I don't think this idea is unrooted from expertise in finance already Oslaft to motor in who teaches valuation, and y U has a new book on narrative versus numbers and the necessity of both. I'm in no way
of suggesting that you shelve your analytic self. I'm suggesting that your analytic self is brought to life by the other parts of yourself that are creative and imaginative amy. One way maybe we can bring this discussion more into global economics is to talk about a subject that we've covered on this program before um, which is the you know, why productivity has been so low in recent years, why growth has been low in this recovery. We've had Robert
Gordon and Eric Brynjolfson on on the podcast before. Gordon, as you probably know, talks about how technological advances haven't compared in recent years to the ones that were you know, say a hundred years ago, like the invention, invention of electricity, plumbing, and so forth, you know, things that probably required some of the art thinking that you mentioned. Do you feel or have you seen that in a historic sense there is less of this art thinking today that can drive
the economy or the economies of the world. I think one of the challenges is that we live in an era of short term measures of success quarterly earnings. Electricity is a great example. Electricity. The original charity experiments were not done with an outcome in mind. They were done as a side project out of curiosity. No one really understood how they would work and how important they would become. There's a very beautiful essay called the usefulness of useless knowledge.
About this if you want to check it out. So I think we lack the capacity right now for what I would call a cathedral business. Not a business that returned some money to venture capitalists in eighteen months to four years, but businesses that are important and have the kind of nobility of creating, you know, shar Tra or Notre Dame. But we lack the ability to embrace that time horizon. We lack the ability to be essentially value
investors in that particular sense. Now you've talked about companies here, what about the people who populate the companies? What about executives who are just stuck. They've had a great track record, but they know they need to get to another place to adapt to avoid their own destruction. How does art help them? I think this is such a great question because I think one of the difficulties in that scenario is what you do once you've already been successful. And
this happens in anything. It definitely happens if you're making a painting. But you develop a set of skills, they serve you the new world it or requires a different set of skills, or this is the creative instruction moment where you have to edge out a little bit of your past success to make room for a new experiment. And I think the thing that we need the most in that situation is culturally what I would call a holding environment, a space in which it's okay to take
risks and to share vulnerability about moving forward. And most workplaces don't have space for that. And has that gone down in recent years? I mean, would you say, based on your research, there's less of that happening today than there wasn't the past, or or you know, how would you characterize it? I think there's a delicate cocktail of distractions of technology and enhance stabilities to measure outputs that makes it really hard to have those conversations, because those
conversations sometimes feel like wasting time. New projects just feel unfamiliar and slightly ridiculous, And at least for me, if I if I come up with a good idea, there were fifty awful, hilariously bad ideas in front of it, and fifty more that weren't even funny. That we're just
like just bad. And to be able to have colleagues where you have the capacity conversationally to run through those ideas and to have tools in the workplace for clearly identifying the questions and values that are driving you from the outset, so that once you get to those ridiculously bad ideas, you can discuss them without it feeling serious
like you're about to break the whole place. If you know why you're having the conversation, and if that's established, then there's a lot more space for kind of working through what the different possibilities are to answer the question. To get back to the executive for a second, how many seasoned executives who have spent decades at the same company done pretty well for themselves are prepared to use
art to take a leap to destination known? Aren't they trying to have some sense of what the destination is? But you seem to be saying forget all that. The premise of art thinking is that if you're making a work of art in any field, you're not going from a known point A to a known point B. You're inventing point B. And a manager, seasoned manager in a large corporation has a portfolio of projects. You can picture
BCG growth share matrix. They're all the different boxes of things that you know, the cow and the dog and the star and the question mark, and what we're talking about here is a part of the whole. We're talking about the question mark. We're talking about the things that have high potential but are not yet demonstrated. And I think that the biggest thing I would say to that executive is that we have archetypes right now of what a creative manager is that I honestly think are a
little bit outdated. We picture someone who's a guru, and Steve Jobs is an amazing human being in an incredible visionary But I think what we actually need, or what I would call good enough managers, managers who can hold the space for their teams to rise up and solve problems. I think most of the challenges that corporations and even society space are so large they're not solved by individual people.
So this idea of the kind of mythic artist or the gallant, imaginative CEO are are really doing us a disservice in terms of harnessing the collective intelligence of the team. And are these the kinds of things that can you know, boost the size of a company, boost profits, boost jobs, and help the economy in general. Well, I think that we're really talking about value. When I think of art, I think about the creation of value. So there are many different things that boost jobs and profits that are
not about the creation of value. They can be about, you know, making bad investments that don't get over your hurdle rate, but that grow the size of your kind of net income. Or they can be about uh, you know, risk taking or extraction of value or short term profiting. I think what we're really talking about are things that create long term value across many different categories of what
value is. And I can imagine that that sounds naively idealistic to someone who has been running a division of a company or a company for a long time, But I actually think that there's room in the portfolio of the managerial skill set for kind of willful impracticality and idealism that if managers aren't making space for that, then who is. There's room for that, but will they actually make space for it. It's the question that's why there's
a portfolio of view to this. This is why, and I'm working on this now, but why we need to create r o I dashboards or return on asset dashboards internally that include a wedge of the pie that serves creative work and that can be measured in a number
of different ways. There's a company called to sixty one that embeds artists incorporations and they measure the output in terms of reduced cycle time on R and D. So there are lots of ways to quantify and measure, but they're often process based measures or their value measures that
are not pure short term profit. I mean, this is a this is a real challenge in the economy, and I think the reason I think it's important to name is not just kind of idealistically to name it, but to say, you know, these are the questions we need to answer. These may not be the questions we have perfect data for, but they're the questions we actually need to grapple it now. In your book, you also bring
cinema into this. You talk about Dallas, Bias Club and Inside Out, two movies which don't seem to have a lot in common. What's the lesson there? Well, I have to say it's a It's a book with a lot of different topics in it, and everyone who writes a book should have the privilege of having their book translated into Chinese by this lovely man and Yon fang. You will, you will, You're about to tell us that you have right I have. Well, it's the most humbling thing that's
happened to me in many years. And editing a book is humbling for anyone who's telling you the truth. But having your book translated by Jan Fayg, you're like, yeah, these are pretty disparate examples. I do need to do a little bit across cultural explaining. So Dallas Buyer's Club and Inside Out come from really different parts of art thinking framework. Dallas Buyer's Club encapsulates the idea of the producer, and we know what movie producers are, but the idea
of the producer is broader than that. And it's anyone in a corporate environment who's taking on the secondary creative work of commercializing an idea or making it economically viable. So you have this brainstorming moment you come up with something amazing. The producers the person who actually brings it into reality, and their job is incredibly resourceful, involves ingenuity instant and these two instances. The producers of Dallas Buyer's
Club had a roughly four million dollar budget. Matthew McConaughey, the lead in the movie had lost thirty eight of forty pounds, getting ready to play an emaciated person ravage by the HIV virus. They had to call him right before they were set to shoot to say that their funding had fallen through and that they have to postpone, and in the most relatively angry moment I've heard of, he said, polately, you'll have to figure that out, kind
of hung up the phone, and they did. And the way they figured it out is that they cut the entire lighting budget of the film, which saved them about a million dollars. If you watch that movie, it's naturally lit, which I think gives it a gritty authenticity that is part of its effectiveness. The head and a code to me, I'll have to watch it again very quickly. Inside Out. Inside Out is an example of Pixar's brain trust process
idea of radical candor and warmth of feedback. Uh The a director of the film, was three years into the development process, couldn't figure out the central question, was afraid he'd lose his job, thought about how that would affect his life, and made a huge pivot to be able to move forward in what was really important about it. So it's an example of being able to identify the question and the value system and the the warmth of
the interaction around creative work. Amy last question, is there a hope for corporate America without this kind of art thinking that you've been that you've been talking about. I would like to think that there's a hope for corporate America no matter what, because corporate America is really a
collection of people who happen to work inside companies. Economics is based on the theory of the firm, and I think the firm is like a cow, and corporations are like a bunch of people inside a cal costume trying to behave like a cow. So I have tremendous faith in people ultimately and in the capacity of people collectively to build the world that we are want to live in. So we end on a hopeful note. Amy, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me.
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Podcast is Alec McCay. Thanks for listening, See you next time. Four