Corporate Strategy as an Art (I). Introduction.
Have a beautiful Wednesday! As mentioned previously, this week we will begin with “Corporate Strategy as an Art”.
Personally, it will be a challenge, as you may know, I am not an expert in arts. Even though when I was a little kid, I was a classic ballet disciple for some years. Moreover, I studied some basics about how to sing, play the guitar, flute, and piano, but I have never had an academic exposure to arts formally. That means I have not studied arts at a university. Since last year, I re-started to paint using watercolors, and I am a beginner and autodidact in relation to this visual art discipline. You are exposed to my basic painting results. When I am not writing, I am playing with brushes and colors. What started as a method to cure my smartphone addiction, is now a beautiful hobby. As you know I started to paint in October last year. As a painting learner, I try to replicate the watercolors of other artists that I like. Believe me when I write this: I deeply enjoy the feeling of using brushes to spread colors with water over a cotton paper. I thought I wouldn´t discover a hobby that attracted me better than swimming or singing, but here I am determined to learn to paint.
I am amazed to notice how my brain becomes relaxed when I paint. And what makes me happier is the detection of a new routine which helps me to be inspired to write for you. It is a new revelation!. Once I stop to write when I am stressed about my own deadlines, I dedicate at least 4 hours to art (in this specific moment, it is painting). Later, when I return to sit down in the lead of my laptop, the inspiration to write about corporate strategy overflows. This is a new breakthrough or finding. This idea of balancing my life with something new (out of the digital world) triggers a new conceptual lifestyle that recharges me, as much as other sports I practice daily without digital devices. And I am sure, in the consulting world, we have forgotten arts or human interactions because we are over-connected to digital tools.
Let´s start. The purpose of the saga “Corporate Strategy as an Art” is to share with you all the discoveries and relevant information that I find attractive and relevant to corporate strategy, about the development of arts since the beginning of our history. Intuitively I follow a hunch that has become my hypothesis in this research saga. This hypothesis is: Corporate Strategy is also imbalanced. As corporate strategists who have had formal education in conceptual strategic frames taught at recognized universities or through our work experience in top consulting firms, I am sure that we are heading to imbalance by only applying the technocratic and numbers-based approaches. Our technocrat corporate strategy models have evolved into the utilization of big data and advanced analytics for decision making. Excellent corporate strategists have been practicing data analysis for years. The high skilled consultants who have advanced degrees in statistics, mathematics, computer science, engineering are our experts in big data. These consultants apply data analysis techniques and tools to originate powerful insights from the company’s data to look for new strategies, decision support, operational effectiveness, and other process improvements.
Don´t get me wrong. I am not against advanced analytics. I was trained as an engineer, and I am used to seeing numbers, analysis, financial models, stochastic displaying, dashboards, management control systems, excel spreadsheets, programming, etc. The technocrat establishment has given us amazing possibilities. But be aware, we may cause imbalance if we start to see everything through data analytics. We are now spreading the mental frameworks related to data analysis in any situation or task or problem in the context of a relative universe which we did not see before. In our quest to do problem-solving using advanced analytics frameworks, we are also kicking off a new disbalance. We are forgetting that our nature for artistic expressions is based on our feelings, and human beings have feelings, which are an essential component in our life.
At the end of the day, what differentiates ourselves from computers and robots are our feelings. Arts are based on our feelings. And by doing this saga, I am trying to keep myself on board as a human being. The top consulting industry has to be reminded of it. Let´s not forget it.
Stay tuned. This saga will have a duration of 30 episodes during the following months. Hope you will love it.
Thank you.
Eleonora Escalante Strategy 