The book takes a conventional business-school approach in examining case studies of successful businesses for the lessons they have to teach us when applied to other businesses. What’s unconventional is that the businesses examined in the book are not mobile phone operators or widget manufacturers, but a pop star, an upstart Venetian painter, a maker of über-kitsch art objects or the inventor of Cubism.

There would appear to be a certain degree of hindsight in Anderson's analysis. Tintoretto, for example, didn’t start off with a business strategy; his first aim was to be a great painter. Isn’t his book ignoring the primary motivation of the people he uses as examples?

“Artists of course begin with the art in mind,” Anderson says, “but they also want their art to be shared and to be recognised. And, let’s face it, they want to make money. Those who are successful have a vision that is bigger than just the art itself. It’s not just art for art’s sake; it is also about how that art is going to change the world.”

Anderson talks about Madonna, who, when she was interviewed right at the start of her career, said that she was going to take over the world. “Or take Damien Hirst,” he says, “who once said that his dream was to create really bad art and get away with it. It’s a big idea that goes beyond the art. They don’t just have a dream. They actually do the hard work to get there. It’s not enough to have a strategy. Strategy is the easy part. The important thing is to be able to implement it.”

The book reinforces the widely accepted idea that business management in general suffers from a lack of creative thinking. Companies and even whole sectors seem to be fixed in their outdated modes, running along behind new trends, watching upstart enterprises spring up and eat their lunch.

“I’ve worked with, studied and interviewed artists from different industries, like fashion, the performing arts and media,” says Anderson. “These people work very, very hard. Their work needs to be focused, which is a problem with creative people – they often think that they should spend most of their time on the creative element of their work. Which is wrong, I think; they need to balance their investments in the business side with those in the creative side. Or partner up with somebody who can handle it for them.”

Good artists often understand that balance better than others “and find complementary people to work with,” says Anderson. He cites the example of Bernhard Wilhelms, a young German graduate from the fashion department of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts “and one of the most successful graduates in the last 10 years in terms of international recognition. He used to have a business partner in school who was already laying the groundwork for the launch of the Wilhelms brand.”

Anderson says that AMS is keen on bringing that creative activity together with the established business world. “My role is to facilitate that cross-pollination.” One example is the young fashion designer Sofie Claes, who next month will be named as one of the school’s artists in residence. Anderson hopes that her creativity and passion will rub off on his business students, while their business acumen will be of practical use to her.

The institutional infrastructure in Flanders seems to timidly agree, with organisations like FlandersDC (for District of Creativity) and Flanders Investment and Trade.

Those infrastructures are “very useful,” says Anderson, “but I think the problem in Belgium is bigger than that. Most young people aspire to have a stable career with a contract in an established company. Belgium is way down on the list of global entrepreneurship. How can we change that? I think it starts in schools, where we can teach children that they can work for themselves, that they can start their own companies, that they can build something. How many parents in Belgium would encourage their offspring to leave a steady job, to take a leap into the unknown and start their own business? I’m not sure.”

http://book.art-thinking.com