Is management in need of a revolution of the sort Picasso brought to painting?

Citation

Steane, Y.D.a.P. (2014), "Is management in need of a revolution of the sort Picasso brought to painting?", Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Administration, Vol. 6 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/APJBA-03-2014-0045

Is management in need of a revolution of the sort Picasso brought to painting?

Article Type: Editorial From: Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Administration, Volume 6, Issue 2.

Who does not know the name of Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. Perhaps not surprisingly early in his career he dumped his given name to the benefit of the family name of his mother only: Picasso. That is seen by some as one of his first clever moves in his brand management strategy. His tactics and strategies to transform himself first into a successful painter and then into a successful brand would even make Lady Gaga envious.

The name of Picasso is indeed no stranger to the field of strategic thinking. Henry Mintzberg used Picasso's bleu period – from 1901 to 1904 when he painted essentially monochromatic painting in shades of melancholy blue – to explain his idea of strategy as pattern in a stream of decisions and actions. He pointed out that by this definition, when Picasso painted blue for a time and therefore that was a strategy, just as was the behaviour of the Ford Motor Company when Henry Ford offered his model T in black only. In other words, by this definition, strategy is consistency in behaviour, whether or not intended.

Later on he and his college James Walter used Picasso's work in order to highlight the difference between deliberate and emergent strategy. He indicated that Picasso's blue period can be called a personal blue strategy, since there was consistency in his use of colour across a sequence of painting. But did Picasso really “decide” to paint blue for a given period of his life, or did he simply feel like using that blue each time he painted during these years? That is an interesting question. But Picasso did not have to explain his intentions to anyone and that meant that he was not forced to think them through

In his seminal paper titled “Strategy as revolution” Gary Hamel one of the authors of the celebrated book Competing for the Future also used the example of Picasso in support of his second principle and main contention that strategy making must be subversive. He pointed out that Galileo challenged the centrality of Earth and man in the cosmos whereas the American colonists challenged the feudal dependencies and inherited privileges of European society. Picasso and other modernists challenged representational art. Einstein challenged Newtonian physics. Revolutionaries are subversive, but their goal is not subversion. What the defenders of orthodoxy see as subversiveness, the champions of new thinking see as enlightenment.

Bob De Wit and Ron Meyer authors of the book Strategy Synthesis: Resolving Paradoxes to Create Competitive Advantage pushed the idea further. Paraphrasing one of the famous remarks made by Picasso, they pointed out that every act of creation is first an act of destruction and as a result in the same way than painters and sculptors and therefore strategists must enjoy the task of eroding old paradigms and confronting the defenders of those beliefs. However after pointing out that Picasso truly created a subversive strategic innovation Chris Bilton and Stephen Cummings authors of the book Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation argued that business strategists and art people have had a love-hate relationship for too long and that there are several forces behind the rising imperative to create new bridges. They suggested that Business leaders often adequate creativity with novelty, individualism and originality – an unplanned, spontaneous eruption of new ideas. This view, when taken to the extreme, suggests according to them that the two ways of thinking even occupy different sides of the brain. Creativity would be unfettered, dynamic, borderline-crazy, right brain thinking, strategy and management would be solid, rational left-brain.

In any cases Picasso had a rather long turbulent career. He started painting at an early age and when he died in 1973 at the age of 91 he was still drawing and painting in the expectation of his next exhibition. More than four decades after his dead the debate over the total number of his works is still raging and so is the debate among scholars and critics over the total number of major stylistic phases in his artistic career. Nonetheless according to Mintzberg's definition of strategy as a pattern in the stream of decisions and actions it is possible to suggest that Picasso used seven major strategies: the blue strategy; the pink strategy (1904-1906); the black or African art strategy (1907-1908); Cubism (1909-1920); Classicism with a hint of Surrealism (1920-1936); Expressionism (1937-1945) and finally Eclecticism (1946-1973). The first three periods feature a single predominant colour whereas the fourth one showed numerous but mainly dull colours before integrating bold and simple collage making them more colourful and decorative. The fifth strategy is puzzling as it features a return to more traditional and conventional figures leaving a classical impression with an inkling of dreamworld. The sixth pictures the terrors and horrors of war with rough and powerful double images and extreme distortion. Paradoxically the seventh and final strategy does not show a pattern of consistency but a pattern of inconsistency in behaviour as after the war Picasso moved casually forward and backward between his previous six strategies pushing them further and developing more colourful works.

Yvon Dufour and Peter Steane