Painting outside the bottom line

Ms. Adler, who holds a PhD in management from UCLA, has been thinking like an artist since at least the early 1990s, when she took up painting. In addition to winning distinguished teaching awards from McGill, she has been artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Last Friday, Montreal's Galerie MX opened a limited-run exhibition of her work, titled Reality in Translation: Going Beyond the Dehydrated Language of Management, which coincided with the Academy of Management proceedings. The exhibition will reopen to the public from Sept. 1-19. It combines her art with sayings intended to inspire leadership. Those whose quotes hang alongside her watercolours range from Aristotle ( "The soul ... never thinks without a picture) to investment guru Warren Buffett ( "I am not a businessman. I am an artist.")

Every September, Ms. Adler teaches a three-day seminar on global leadership to incoming McGill MBA students, encouraging them to appreciate beauty and ponder what they can create beyond a healthy bank balance. She holds similar sessions with executives at large corporations. Many students, she said, are surprised to learn that they are not alone in their concern for such issues as poverty and the environment.

"When people come into an MBA program, everybody thinks that what they're into is individualism and greed, and that you have to play that out," she said in an interview. "What I'm supposed to do is learn a bunch of stuff, so that I can be richer than you. That's the ethos, that's the mythology, that everybody -- business, new MBAs, management schools -- is colluding around." She tries to bust this myth by encouraging students to "talk about what's really important, what they would really like to do."

Read full article: National Post, August 14, 2010