This paper argues that management education needs to consider a trend in learning design which advances creative learning through an alliance with art-based pedagogical processes. A shift is required from skills training to facilitating transformational learning through experiences that expand human potential, facilitated by artistic processes.

This creative learning focus stems from a qualitative and quantitative analysis of an arts-based intervention for management development, called Management Jazz, conducted over three years at a large Australian University.

The paper reviews some of the salient literature in the field, including an ‘Artful Learning Wave Trajectory’ Model. The Model considers four stages of the learning process: capacity, artful event, increased capability, and application/action to produce product. Methodology for the field-based research analysis of the intervention outcomes is presented. Three illustrative examples of arts-based learning are provided from the Management Jazz program. Finally, research findings indicate that artful learning opportunities enhance capacity for awareness of creativity in one's self and in others, leading, through a transformative process, to enhanced leaders and managers. The authors conclude that arts-based management education can enhance creative capacity and develop managers and leaders for the 21st century business environment.

This paper proposes an Artful Learning Framework as an organisational development initiative. The framework is designed to assist people in organisations seeking higher levels of engagement in their strategic and operational endeavours, such as navigating change. The Artful Learning Framework offers three strategies as potential artful learning events designed to help people in organisations engage with each other creatively to achieve their organisational and professional goals. The Artful Learning Wave Trajectory model (Kerr 2006) forms a conceptual antecedent for the Artful Learning Framework. The Framework's strategies align with the relevant literature on organisational learning and, in particular, a proposition of Kerr (2006) who identifies a suite of skills, capacities and capabilities that are important in organisations. The notion of the wave, with the effect of ‘pausing and gathering’ to consider amidst the inevitable ambiguity and turbulence offor-ward movement, is invoked as a metaphor for the elements of the Framework which support its strategies. The paper will be of interest to individuals and groups that are committed to profound learning and capability building for the benefit of themselves, their teams and the organisations in which they work.

Artists derive inspiration from daily life. According to John Dewey (1934), common experiences are transformed into works of art through a process of compression and expression. Our paper adopts Dewey's frame to demonstrate that experience in the artful classroom plays a valuable role in management education. We asked students to reflect on their work experience and then to provide an artful expression of their reflections. For this exercise we defined artfulness as a process which relies on the discursive practices of satire, and in particular irony and parody. Offering a service management class as an exemplar we demonstrate the use of these rhetorical techniques as reflective learning tools. A class of students were first prompted to consider their common experiences as both customers and service providers, and were then asked to create an ironic artefact. Our paper, which analyses a cartoon sequence produced by students in response to this assignment and in which they parody the fast-food service experience, illustrates how a business studies classroom can be transformed into an artful space.

The concept of artful management education and development is applied to the Burning Man Project. The unique social routine of the Burning Man community is highlighted, including an explanation of the 10 cultural Guiding Principles embraced by that community. Various ways the identity of ‘Burner’ manifests are used to examine how the smoldering potential of shared community can be transformed into managerial practices and organizational frameworks that facilitate positive learning and lasting individual change. The paper concludes with illustrations and examples from the author's personal experiences with specific techniques used in conducting the annual Burning Man event.

In this article we will argue that leaders facing complex challenges can learn from the arts, specifically that leaders can learn by examining how theatre directors direct creativity through creative constraints. We suggest that perceiving creativity as a boundary phenomenon is helpful for directing it. Like leaders who are caught in paradoxical situations where they have to manage production and logistics simultaneously with making space for creativity and innovation, theatre directors need to find the delicate balance between, on the one hand, renewal of perceptions, acting and interaction and on the other, getting ready for the opening night. We conclude that the art of directing creativity is linked to developing competencies of conscious presence, attention and vigilance, whereas the craft of directing creativity concerns communication, framing and choice.

We wish to develop the argument in this paper that through aesthetic and artistic work, practices and their metaphorical use, we have a potential to better understand the relationship between academic leadership theory and practical action. By aesthetic approach we mean the experiential way of knowing that emphasizes human senses and the corporeal nature of social interaction in leadership. In this paper, we discuss how leadership could look, sound and feel like when seen via the artistic metaphor of dance. We use the traditional dance, waltz and the postmodern dance experience of raves to illustrate our argument. By doing so, we challenge traditional, intellectually oriented and positivistic leadership approaches that hardly recognize nor conceptualize aesthetic, bodily aspects of social interaction between people in the workplace.

The ballroom dance waltz is used as a metaphorical representation of a hierarchical, logical and rational understanding of leadership. The waltz metaphor describes the leader as a dominant individual who knows where to go and the dance partner as a follower or at least as someone with a lesser role in defining the dance. Raves, on the other hand representparadigmatically different kind of a dance and therefore a different understanding of leadership. There are neither dance steps to learn, nor fixed dance partners where one leads and the other follows. Even the purpose or aim of dancing may not be known at the beginning of the dance, but it is negotiated as the raves go on. We think that raves describe the organizational life as it is often seen and felt today: chaotic, full of unexpected changes, ambiguous and changing collaborators in networks. Here leadership becomes a collective, distributed activity where the work processes and the targeted outcome is continually negotiated.

Through the dance metaphors of waltz and raves, we suggest aspects such as gaze, rhythm and space to give an aesthetic description both to a more traditional and an emerging aesthetic paradigm of leadership where the corporeality of leadership is emphasized. We wish to make the point that leadership is aesthetically and corporeally co-constructed both between the leader and the followers as well as between the researcher and the subjects. The metaphor of dance illustrates the corporeal nature of leadership both to practitioners and theoreticians.

In a world where there has long since been more at play than functionality and cost price, we need creative innovation more than ever before. Organizations are trying to find ways to embed more creativity, more innovative potential, and more entrepreneurship into the everyday running of their businesses. They are constantly in search of effective ways to make their organization's culture better equipped for change. The Belgian non-profit organization Arteconomy has developed a method for doing this, by bringing business people and artists together in a series of particularly unique projects. In this paper, you can read about the philosophy that give rise to Arteconomy and the pioneering work that preceded it. The paper describes two specific projects that provide a concrete illustration of the arteconomy approach in two Belgian textile firms: ‘The Dragon of Deerlijk’ at Promo Fashion and ‘The Walk’ at Concordia Textiles. This paper is particularly relevant to illustrate change as an organizational process and to demonstrate how organizations can stimulate employees' creative skills.

We end this special issue with a case study (Darsø 2004) of how Miha Pogacnik, virtuoso violinist and cultural ambassador of Slovenia, works to inspire and engage artful behaviour. Miha's interpretations of musical masterpieces illuminate universal human archetypes, which are profoundly meaningful to individuals as well as to organisations.

Music reaches of all the arts the most, the deepest into our experience.

Miha Pogacnik

At a time when pressures for change are at their highest, from globalisation, new technologies, product and process innovations, successful business leaders need to be at their creative best just to survive. Creativity is the hallmark of art, and artists are increasingly a source of inspiration for entrepreneurs world-wide.

Miha Pogacnik's unique contribution stems from this new consciousness, the need for creativity, imagination and perfection in business. Time after time, his input in countless business conferences has been magnificent, unexpected and unique. Through music and art, Miha Pogacnik ignites a new force in us, the power of rising above our old selves in perceiving problems and opportunities in an entirely new light, and thus striking in new directions. Miha is truly at the leading edge of business as we move towards the 21st century.

Marcello Palazzi, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Progressio Foundation Rotterdam, Netherlands (Balough 1996)

Miha Pogacnik saw the potential of Art & Business long before anyone else and has worked in the field for more than 20 years. Today Miha Pogacnik uses his violin to decompose and play classical masterpieces when doing his presentations around the world as a business consultant with, among others, ABN AMRO Bank, General Electric, JP Morgan, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, LEGO, Mitsubishi, Nike, Nokia, Novartis, Procter & Gamble, Shell, Volvo, World Bank, World Economic Forum, and many more.