metlife foundation national arts forum series

Past Forums

Arts & Business Council of New York
New York, New York

And All That Jazz: Arts-Based Solutions for Workforce Development
05/15/2007

Introductions:

• Will Maitland Weiss, Executive Director, Arts & Business Council of New York; Julie Muraco, Managing Director, Business Development, NASDAQ; Harvey Seifter, Director, Creativity Connection, a program of the Arts & Business Council of Americans for the Arts

Presentation by Michael Gold, Ph.D., Director & Founder, Jazz Impact, Bass; David Glasser, Saxophone; Larry Ham, Piano; Jerome Jennings, Drums

Julie Muraco opened the program with some brief, contextualizing comments with respect to the importance of creativity and innovation in the contemporary business landscape. Traditional business logic looks askance at risk taking as a conduit for growth and instead focuses on means to increase productivity. Management teams of publicly-traded companies face enormous pressure from shareholders and are rebuked even for minor missteps. Executives, facing an average tenure of only five to seven years, spend too much time avoiding error and too little time taking the creative risks that all innovation requires.

Muraco argued that the criteria for sustainable success in the increasingly globalized business community can no longer revolve solely around the bottom line. Strategic and conceptual freshness are of paramount importance if executives are to stay abreast of the tide of merger and acquisition activity sweeping the international corporate landscape. Furthermore, companies must concern themselves with keeping foreign-based employees engaged in the corporate mission and culture: innovation must extend beyond corporate offerings of products and services into the realm of human capital. Muraco made the case that vital partnerships between the arts and business sectors are both appropriate and critical as means to address the challenges faced by the corporate community today.

Harvey Seifter added to Muraco’s thoughts on the necessary role of innovation in the business world. Fortune 500 companies place increasing emphasis on building a strong corporate culture of team-oriented individuals. Artists are well equipped to address the concerns of team-building and innovation: they rely on communicative ability and creative spark as their livelihood. Recognizing this, companies are looking increasingly to arts-based solutions as an engine for both individual and organizational innovation.

While Muraco’s and Seifter’s comments about workforce development were not specific to New York, their remarks were certainly germane given the city’s concentration of corporate offices and national headquarters. Currently, there are New York businesses employing arts-based training programs for leadership development, strengthening of corporate culture, and change management.

Jazz Impact provides arts-based training to industries as far-ranging as retail, insurance, management consulting, and publishing. They seek to demonstrate how a system of collaborative improvisation, the governing structure of a jazz ensemble, provides skills that inform a corporate response to change by stimulating innovation. Jazz Impact’s goal is to impart an understanding of how a jazz ensemble operates in order to help companies develop their own innovative responses to change.

Gold’s presentation delineated five key dynamics at play in a successful jazz ensemble—autonomy, passion, risk, innovation, and listening, or APRIL—that have direct application to the business environment.

• Autonomy—The ensemble operates both as multiple individual units and as a group, with the overall whole being greater than the sum of its parts. In jazz, individual musicians have distinct roles and responsibilities, but these shift over time in relation to the whole ensemble. At times, leadership roles within the group will change. Fulfilling one job description involves a synergy between leadership and support, i.e. being self-governing but also adaptable to where and when one’s role within the larger group will change.
• Passion—The musicians have an emotional commitment to their work that keeps them focused and engaged and in constant pursuit of excellence. It is of critical importance to foster an environment in which individual passion is nurtured and not driven primarily by leadership.
• Risk—Jazz performance does not involve taking direction from a prescribed score. Jazz musicians constantly face the challenge of reinventing a new musical “reality” in their own time and in collaboration with other musicians. Risk management means navigating within an environment of uncertainty in which whatever structure exists is flexible enough to foster individual creative potential.
• Innovation—Improvisation provides the seeds for new ideas within a context of uncertainty and the spontaneous creation of structure and form.
• Listening—Gold drew a distinction between listening and hearing. Listening involves not just recognizing sounds (i.e., hearing), but also being responsive to and aware of others.

In context, Gold used these five dynamics of jazz to demonstrate that collaborative improvisation means working together in a willing climate of uncertainty. By suspending preconceived notions and trusting oneself and others to remain responsive, take risks, and embrace change, fruitful innovation emerges.

During the Q&A session, conversations centered largely on the Jazz Impact model. Audience members asked Gold and Seifter about challenges they had encountered in the corporate setting when bringing their presentation. Gold related that the biggest challenge for Jazz Impact is not engaging employees on-site, but is marketing arts-based training to disparate decision-makers in the business community. With clients and corporate prospects including chief learning officers, human resources departments, and executive offices, Jazz Impact’s messaging must be adapted appropriately to demonstrate its relevance.