Daniel Pink and the Economic Model of Creativity

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 2, 2008

One hopes that Americans for the Arts, the national lobbying group that fanned out across the Capitol yesterday to talk up government support for its cause, didn't pay best-selling author Daniel Pink a nickel for the talk he gave Monday evening. Pink, an author who has whipped up a very good career massaging talking points into books and books into speaking engagements, gave the annual Nancy Hanks Lecture at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Previous speakers have included Robert Redford, William Safire and Ken Burns. The speech is usually a celebratory affair for local arts leaders as they descend on Washington to make their case for such causes as funding the National Endowment for the Arts and arts education in public schools.

Pink wowed them. His basic thesis is simple: In our competitive and evolving economy, being logical and analytical is no longer enough. Left brain is out. Right-brain noodling, the kind of processing that is intuitive and creative and synthetic, will soon rule the day. Or as Pink puts it in a classic bullet point: The MFA is the new MBA.

By which he means that the must-have degree for survival in today's business world is no longer the Master of Business Administration. It is, rather, the Master of Fine Arts.

There are some problems with this, alas. Flip to the help-wanted ads in the Economist, a magazine where people with lots of beans look for expert bean counters, and tally up the number of ads that read: MFA Wanted. Not one, at least in a recent issue. It seems the world's top business leaders are still mired in left-brain hiring practices and can't shake off phrases such as "Minimum 10 Years Demonstrated Experience" and "Proven High-Level Management Skills."

You're reminded of that devastating moment when Jerry Seinfeld tells George Costanza that his chances of getting a job as a professional sportscaster are very low. "They tend to give those jobs to ex-ballplayers and people that are, you know, in broadcasting."

Pink is a professional speaker, however, and he was quick to dial back his thesis to something more defensible. The MFA isn't the new MBA, but it complements the MBA very nicely. Which boils down further to the not surprising observation that creative people are a big asset to a corporation. For this, and some self-deprecating humor, he makes the big bucks.

His talk was bolstered by some thoughts on the new economy, on how the oversupply of consumer goods means that corporations must be ever more clever about creating new products and new markets. Asia, with its rising middle class, will continue to absorb American jobs, especially those that are simple and routine enough to be outsourced. Automation will make inroads into white-collar work, as things like accounting or simple legal tasks are computerized.

Abundance. Asia. Automation. More bullet points, delivered as Pink wandered the stage with a microphone headset on. He avoided the lectern, with its unwanted suggestions of old-fashioned left-brain oratory.

It's rather shocking that the crowd bought this hooey. These are, after all, the nation's arts leaders, into whose hands our nation's vital arts infrastructure is entrusted. But, as anyone who has attended the Nancy Hanks Lecture before knows, it basically doesn't matter what you say, so long as you end up with an impassioned plea for government support of the arts.

It's not clear that Pink makes much of a distinction between generalized creativity and artistic creativity. And it's very unclear that his thesis holds up if it is limited to artistic creativity.

Financial mismanagement among artists is a notorious and recurring theme throughout history. For every composer who died rich -- Verdi, Rossini, Gershwin -- there's a Mozart, penniless at death. Artistic temperament, if there is such a thing, doesn't suggest a good fit with most corporate work environments.

"Where's Mussorgsky?"

"Out drunk, again."

Pink used lots of squishy phrases to keep himself clear of speaking too directly about artistic creativity in particular. He talked about how we need to "reason aesthetically." He quoted General Motors executive Robert Lutz saying, "We are in the arts and entertainment business," by which Lutz probably meant, "We're in the design and marketing business."

It's not even clear that one wants the economy led by people who are generically multitalented, or, as Pink says, "multi-taskers." Consider the sad reputation of the Roman emperor Gallienus.

"In every art that he attempted his lively genius enabled him to succeed," writes Edward Gibbon in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Every art, unfortunately, except the arts of war and government. "He was a master of several curious but useless sciences, a ready orator and elegant poet, a skilful gardener, an excellent cook, and most contemptible prince."

Artists aren't by necessity contemptible princes, or contemptible accountants, lawyers or CEOs. And to be fair, despite insisting that things such as seeing the big picture and synthesizing large amounts of information are artistic abilities, Pink wasn't really talking about the arts or artists. A joke he borrowed from Sid Caesar shows what Pink really means.

"The guy who invented the wheel? He was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three? He was a genius."

Funny stuff. And it shows how Pink defines the kind of creativity that he thinks is the right-brain panacea for the new economy. It's Tom Sawyer's basic skill set, the ability to persuade people to pay you for the privilege of painting your fence. It's an exploitative cleverness that has very little to do with artistic skill.

To be fair, there are people in the corporate world who are interested in learning different paradigms for thinking. There are efforts to teach doctors better diagnostic skills through honing their responses to art. Artistic skill, so long as it's not attached to a socially dysfunctional personality, is no impediment to financial or other left-brain kinds of success. And most artists have day jobs, at which many of them are highly successful.

Philosophers and aestheticians have spent centuries trying to define what distinguishes artistic skill from other forms of intelligence. One can't blame Pink for not having a better definition than the sloppy ones he used Monday. But it's a bit disturbing to think that the people who run our arts organizations are happy to sit through a lecture by someone who casually suggests that artistic skill is essentially the same thing as good design, or thinking outside the box, or exploiting opportunity in new ways. One hopes they believe artistic skill is much more than that.