Why Growing Your Business Doesn’t Mean Selling Out

THE GROOVE

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You may wrestle at times with the idea of growing your business or moving up in your career and the sacrifices or changes that it entails. Some people are afraid of being perceived as a sell-out; others fear the dilution that comes with expansion. I hear you; not everybody is made for huge positions of leadership or for growing complex enterprises.

But if you look at how Henry Moore's work played a pivotal role in redefining modern sculpture, it wouldn’t have had the impact it did without the evolution that he orchestrated in his mid-career. It would’ve been a completely different chapter in art history if Moore would’ve stayed a local English artist instead of the international celebrity he became. And to do that he needed to scale his practice.

The seventh of eight children of a coal miner and a homemaker, Moore and his family struggled with poverty in the town of Castleford, England in the early 1900s. But his work paved the way for modern sculpture and challenged traditional notions of figurative art, later making him one of the wealthiest artists of his time. Here’s how he did it.

If there’s a complaint I get from other friends who are business owners, it’s how their much younger employees want to run the business without fully knowing what they are doing. I often hear similar concerns from friends who are in venture capital funds, who sometimes have to face very smart people who believe that with the power of their minds alone they can bend reality and skip the many years of experience that it takes to be a true expert on something. (Cue Elizabeth Holmes.)

That was not Henry Moore’s problem at all. He started modeling and carving odd slabs of stone by hand in the 1920s and becoming intimately familiar with materials and the way they reacted to each chiseling and scraping directly from his hands. Besides lead and stone, he also worked in wood, terracotta, and clay. The man knew his job really well.

Moore found favor moving away from traditional figurative forms and embracing abstraction in a way that merged the two. His sculptures often featured natural forms and his innovative approach to sculpture, marked by organic shapes and a harmonious relationship with nature, redefined the field. He said he spent countless hours thinking about the aesthetic direction of his work and countless more working on their creation.

When WWII brought lack of material, Moore turned to drawings and worked in small-scale models. Never stopping and continuously improving his thinking and execution, he had reached the point where he understood the ins and outs of sculpture, which prepared him for the next step. “I’m glad I did all that carving, but I know now that there has been modeled sculpture, which is just as good.”

Not only do your clients (or higher-ups) expect you to know your business deeply, but you can’t really advance and grow without having real hands-on experience in what you do. Focus on this no matter how much you think you know; mastery is something that nobody can take away from you.

Everyone has conflict and dualities inside. It’s that tension that creates the most interesting things. For Moore it was “this conflict between the excitement & great impression I got from Mexican sculpture & the love & sympathy I felt for Italian art, representing two opposing sides in me, the 'tough' & the 'tender.”

Not an uncommon push-and-pull in most humans who want to express themselves in business or in art. What’s the contribution that we bring to the table if not the synthesis of our varied and distinct influences?

With this compass in Moore’s mind, he was able to come up with sculptures that combined abstraction with emotional depth. He was able to convey universal themes such as motherhood, the human condition, and the relationship between humans and nature through semi-abstract forms. This unique ability to infuse unusual shapes with profound meaning set him apart from his contemporaries.

When a business like Warby Parker addresses the contradiction between affordable eyewear and high-quality design, or Amazon Prime bridges the paradox between instant gratification and cost savings, we find very compelling ideas that don’t have to stand on just one side of the equation.

You can grow and still have an excellent business or practice based on your values. One thing doesn’t exclude the other.

“I don’t have a head for business because I’m [creative/artist/or whatever]” is as big a fallacy as saying that scientists never capitalize on their inventions.

Once the war had ended in the mid-1940s, Moore largely abandoned direct carving for modeling on plaster over wire and began working principally in bronze. This allowed him to increase both the scale and quantity of his work. He also had practical concerns: bronze was a robust material and tended to age gracefully, an important consideration for an artist who wanted to leave his mark on the world.

Moreover, he had bought a farm one hour outside of London and employed different assistants in a variety of studios he built on the grounds of his new home. He also outsourced the casting of the bronze sculptures to outside foundries. The scale-up was real.

In the late 1950s, Moore came up with a crazy idea: he offered payment to some of the owners of his unique works (in cash or in kind through additional sculptures) if they allowed him to recall a work and cast from it an edition of new works. He would multiply production of his best works while retaining his original style. By doing this, money started pouring in and his international fame grew at lightning speed as more collectors and more museums everywhere would have access to a Henry Moore.

Another move that helped increase his profile was that the artist often agreed a relatively low price for public commissions as a philanthropic gesture, finding his work in places ranging from the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris to the Lincoln Center fountain in New York.

Henry Moore didn’t have an MBA, heck, the man even prohibited his workers from bringing a computer into the studio, but he clearly saw the business opportunity to take his art to more people and he executed it flawlessly. It was having the real-life experience of years of work, direct contact with his patrons and collectors, and a full understanding of the manufacturing process of sculptures that got him there.

By the time of his death in 1986 at the age of 88, Henry Moore had produced more than 10,000 works including sculptures, drawings, tapestries, and textiles. He had amassed a multimillion-pound fortune and formed a foundation that helped him mitigate the taxes that he so much despised paying.

It wasn’t only the groundbreaking nature of his work, which was distinct and revolutionary at the time, but the way that Moore scaled his practice skyrocketed his career and earned him the title of one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.

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If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).

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HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD

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How Creativity Rules The World is filled with practical tools that will propel and guide you to get any project from an idea to a concrete reality.

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It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook.

TEDX TALK

Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?

I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.

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