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CEOs must be artists?

Published: 8 September 2010

It's time to start developing a new type of business leader, according to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at one of Europe's top business schools, HEC Paris. The modern world is so complex, she argues, that we need people in corporate boardrooms who can embrace science, art and philosophy as comfortably as they can financial analysis and management theory.

Perhaps the most high profile supporter of the use of art in the development of business leaders is to be found at the Desautels faculty at McGill University in the person of Dr. Nancy Adler.

Adler's day job is teaching at McGill. And helping major international corporations such as Rio Tinto and the Business Families Foundation with cross-cultural management issues.

She has also built a reputation as a highly respected watercolourist over the past 20 years.

"There's been a tradition of hostility between the arts and commerce," she says. "Artists, too often, think of businesspeople as Philistines, and they, in turn, think of artists as a bit flaky.

"But if you dig deep enough, then you find there is a lot of common ground to creating a great work or a great business."

Adler argues that successful leaders and successful artists share three qualities: the ability to see reality as it is, to imagine possibilities on the basis of this and to inspire others to see both reality and possibility.

Read full article: thestar.com, September 8, 2010

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