Artistry Unleashed, The Book

Artistry Unleashed is an unconventional business book that explores the work of horsemen, chefs, and painters alongside that of presidents, entrepreneurs, and organization consultants.

Why is that?

Because artists across disciplines know something that top analytic minds still need to learn: how to solve the problems for which no predetermined plan, no recipe, no quick fix will save the day.

Just a glance at today’s headlines—the recession, environmental degradation, challenges in education, the healthcare debacle—reveals that over-reliance on even the most sophisticated quantitative tools misses solutions to the kind of hard-to-grasp problems that artists solve every time they go to work.

Artistry Unleashed is about working and living at the edge, even beyond the edge, of what you know. Surprise, uncertainty, ambiguity, intensity, and change are all disruptive forces that we typically avoid or fear. Yet they’re the essential origin of both creativity and great performance. Imagine making effective progress in the face of an uncertain future; achieving excellence without sacrificing creativity; investing passion even as you apply reason and intelligence. This is artistry’s domain.

Artistry Unleashed reveals the unique features of artistic work in any field: enigmatic problems, qualitative intelligence, cognitive emotions, downstream and upstream learning, and your personal knowledge system. Learn how artistry, when allowed to escape studio walls, can help you to achieve powerful artistic capabilities in professions, in organizations, in education—in everyday life.

Of course, artistry may not be for you. Take the Qualitative Intelligence Quiz to find out whether it is.