The Corporate Artist
The Art of Working Beautifully
A book about creativity at work. The Corporate Artist is the recognition that you’re already creating. Working beautifully is the practice of bringing more of yourself to it.
#1 Amazon best seller
Everyone is creating at work.
The accountant creates a way of seeing the business. The salesperson creates trust. The engineer creates possibility. The recruiter creates a team. The colleague who walks into a room creates tension or space, and does it before anyone speaks.
You are already doing this. You are being paid to do this.
The Corporate Artist is not a different kind of person. It is the same person, who noticed.
Put simply
A Corporate Artist is someone who recognizes they’ve been creating all along, notices the characters they play at work, and begins bringing more of themselves into what they create with others.
Recognize
Creativity is our natural ability to shape what happens next, from our own perspective. There is no noncreative work. Only work we’ve forgotten to see as creative.
Try this tomorrow
Take one ordinary task and ask, “What am I creating here?” Clarity, comfort, connection.
Notice
We all play characters at work. The character isn’t the problem. The beliefs attached to it are: who you think you need to be to succeed, belong or feel safe.
Try this tomorrow
Notice a moment you tighten up. Where is it: jaw, chest, gut? Name the character and ask what it believes.
Bring
Seeing the character lets you decide where you create from. Bring more of yourself to the work, with others.
Try this tomorrow
Share something unfinished with someone and ask what they see.
The workplace is a studio
Every role has a creative medium.
Your title tells the organization where you sit. Your creative medium is what you keep shaping. The craft is learning to work with it beautifully.
The larger thought
We operate as if we are creating alone.
Almost nothing important is created that way.
The things we admire most are touched by countless people. A medicine. A film. A building. A company. A movement. One person may carry the vision, but other minds, hands, histories, constraints and relationships are already inside the work.
The corporation is not the villain in this book. It may be one of our greatest instruments of collective creation: a place where people make things together that none of them could make alone. It is also unfinished. That is the interesting part.
Think about the last thing you made at work. Can you find a single part of it that wasn’t shaped by someone or something else? You don’t have to carry it all. You never did.
What the book keeps noticing
The ordinary things are not small.
A colleague who lets the room breathe without speaking.
A rough draft that gets better when you stop guarding it and let someone else touch it.
The walk outside, and the long look into the distance, that settles what another hour at the screen could not.
A difficult person who reveals what you had not wanted to see in yourself.
The half-dead plant that keeps growing.
The Corporate Artist is less interested in becoming a special kind of worker than in seeing what you are already creating, and who is creating it with you.
Take this into Tuesday
Who is co-creating with you?
Your colleague. Your boss. Your co-founder. Your customer. Your team. And the Known Character you bring into the room.
Each character carries a quiet belief about who you need to be. The Expert says, “I always need the answer.” The Peacemaker says, “If someone disagrees, are they upset with me?” The Always-Busy Hero says, “If I’m not producing, I’m not valuable.” Those beliefs helped once. Over time we mistake them for who we are, and start creating for approval.
Once you can see the character, you have a choice. You do not have to eliminate it. You can choose who creates this moment.
What is your character protecting you from, and what are you co-creating because of it?
Read Chapter 6 · You Are Playing a Character →You do not have to quit your job to find your creative life.
You may already be standing inside it.
The Corporate Artist
Take a little of this into your day.
Read a few pages. Bring one idea to your next conversation. See what changes.