The Business of Art
The Art and Science of Business Storytelling
Posted by Chris Sissons on Aug 14, 2024
Stories in Business ยป Chris Sissons
Between 1956 and 1986, my father was a self-employed sheet metal worker in Sheffield. He carried one of the tools of his trade in his pocket, a slide rule. I must confess I never really got to grips with slide rules. I understood the theory behind them but I never really took to them. These days you never see them, redundant since the advent of the pocket calculator.
My father’s only qualification was in technical drawing, which was all he needed. He worked at the bespoke end of his market. No two factories are the same. There may be similarities between machines of the same type but most factories would have different combinations of machines that were expensive to move once installed. This means things like machine guards, ducting (including external chimneys) and balustrading had to be designed from scratch. Understanding the problem, designing a solution, producing the required items and installing them, all required careful planning.
If you saw my father’s finished work (probably impossible as it is long gone) you would not recognise it as a work of art. You might grudgingly concede it is a craft but craft is applied art. Art does not have to look pretty or carry a deep message. Art can be functional. Accordingly, we speak of design to distinguish functional art from fine art.
Similarly, science is an art. Although science is seemingly valued more highly than art, in reality, science is subordinate to art. My father’s slide rule was a tool based on understanding the mathematics of logarithms. My father used it to help turn his ideas into reality.
Perhaps these days marketing is too easy. We ignore the sequence of idea – tool – marketing. It's easy to leap to the tool, scientific marketing methods without the first idea. You can feed anything into your marketing tools but no matter how advanced they are, incorporating the most advanced AI perhaps, they will not work without the initial idea. You’ll get an initially convincing simulacrum of a marketing campaign that simply won’t work. Now you know why!
This is the fourth in a sequence of posts about business storytelling. The first post was Marketing: Art or Science? The last post was What Do Businesses Contribute? and the fifth post will be What Business Am I In?.
To try out one of your business-related stories and receive feedback from me plus other business owners, please comment below for an informal conversation. I run these sessions free of charge on the second and fourth Thursdays. Restarts late September.
Minerva tells me she knows all about slide rules and uses one to design owl cages. You'll be delighted to see she uses a circular version invented by William Oughtred in 1622. It's probably safest not to ask why she needs the spear.
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