The following text on executive and organisation development is excerpted from:
The Pursuit of Perfection
Paul Robertson, leader of the Medici String Quartet, and Ashridge Consulting's Hugh Pidgeon contemplate the true nature of the musical experience and how can we learn from it.
Copyright, 2004 Ashridge Business School UK.
Hugh Pidgeon: My work with Paul began to suggest a quite different understanding of imperfection. Current science tells us that the experience of pitch and sound - and ultimately of music itself - has a unique role to play in our neurological development and brain anatomy. So it is by more than analogy we might conclude that human beings too have flaws, but flaws as an intrinsic part of what it is to be human - wherein lies our creativity, as well as our fallibility, as well as our liability to make errors.
I recall a recent invitation made by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, originators of the Balanced Scorecard, to join a virtual seminar on the successful implementation of strategy. Their premise was that nine out of ten organisations fail to execute strategy successfully. You need to know, the invitation read, why this is and how to fix it. It now seems to me that the implication that 90 percent of most organisations' best endeavour is fruitless seems an extraordinary premise on which to offer benefits to the 10 percent; that maybe 90% is telling us that there is something else at work here than simply miscalculation or incompetence.
In the Kaplan and Norton invitation was also the seduction of certainty, of being right - and the lure of evident confidence that the goal was attainable. The pursuit of objectives, even of the goal of perfection, of itself has provided much necessary dicipline to many an organisational enterprise. For many, too, it is the source of motivation, and of a sense of achievement. It is not for nothing that the metaphor of the playing field so pervades the management lexicon. It is when being so sure about something is brought into combination with the belief in perfection that the potential for most mischief seems to be created.
LEFT: When The Levy Breaks, 1999, enamel, ink and varnish on birch plywood, 36" x 46"
There is an addiction involved. I think of the experience of an anorexic child, who lives in pursuit of an image of perfection. It is profoundly disturbing to be close to the obsession of their belief, despite the evidence of the mirror. But many organisations become equally obsessive in their pursuit of their ultimate goal, often in the face of available data. One only has to think of the disaster of the Challenger space mission, by way of illustration.
If we were now to reach a radical reappraisal of our own obsessive dedication to the pursuit of perfection, we find ourselves face to face with paradox - not least the paradoxical nature of the workplace and the human beings we find there. I have been greatly influenced by the writer Peter Block from whom I first learned how often the most persistent problems that call for consultation have no clear answer. I began to notice how often two opposing viewpoints will each be found to be true. Peter's view was that this sort of tension is always present and that we make a serious mistake if we choose one or the other, or even try to find a middle ground. As he puts it, "the best outcomes emerge in the effort to understand the truth in both sides".
So when Paul speaks of the need to "yield your own perfection to the greater imperfection of the group" I hear that very differently now. If we were to accept our own imperfection, indeed appreciate its utter inevitability, what implications follow?
To view the complete 7 page PDF text of the discussion, click here.
Discussion: Business/Pursuit of Perfection
46-57 (+/- nature) Interactive #1
%+/-#\(I_Y())/\\)))IVXK)/I/Y(Wii_#/(\YII/\Y\X\(()\VVX/)I/\%(IY())/\\N_)))IVX)/I/Y(W#((_#/(\YII/\+/-Y\X\(()\#VVX/)I/_%\(IY())/\\)))I/.Y(W/_#N\V(\YII/\Y\.X\K(()\VV_X/)I/\(IY()%)/\\)))_#IVX)/I/Y+/-(W/(_\YII/\N#Y\X\.(()\VVX/)I/\(I.Y())/%\\))#)IVX)/I/Y(W_/(\YII/\Y\X\_(()\VNVX/)I/\_#(_IKY())+/-/%.\\)))IVX#)./I/Y(Wii/(\YII/\Y\.X\(()\VV#X/)I/\(INY())/\_\%)))IVX)/I/Y(W#((_/(\YII/+/-\Y\X\((\V_#VX/)I/\(IY()_)/\\)#%))NIVX)/I/Y(K.W/\V(\YII/\#Y\_X\(()\VVX_/)I/\(IY())./\\)))%IV+/-X)/I/NY(W/_#(\YII/\Y\X\(()\VVX/#)I/\(IY())/\\)))I.V%X)/I/Y___(W#/(\YIIN/\Y\XK\(()+/-\VVX/).I/\(IY())/\_#\)))I%VX)/I/Y(Wii/(\YII/\Y\X\(()#N_\VV.X./)I/\.(IY(_))/\\)))IVX#%)/I/Y(W#((/(\YI+/-I/\Y\X_\(()\VVX/)_#I/\N(IKY())/\\)))_IV%X)/I/Y(#W/\V(\YII/.\Y\X_\(()\VVX/)I/#\(IY+/-())/N\\)))IV%X)/I/Y(W/(\YII/__#\Y\X.\(()\VV_X/)I/\(IY())/\\)))#IVXN)/._%IK/Y(W/+/-(\YII/+/-.\Y\X#\(()\VVX/)I/\(IY_())/\\)))IVX)/I%_#/Y(Wii/(N\YII/\Y\X\(()\V_VX/)I/\(IY#(_).)/\\)))+IVX)/I%/Y(W#((./(\_#YII/\Y\XN\(K()\VVX/)I/\(IY()_#)/\\)))IVX)/I/%Y(W/\_V(\YII/\Y\X\(()\#V.V+/-NX/)I/_\(/Y())/.\\)))IV#X)/I/%_Y(W/(\YII/\Y\X\(()\_#VVX/)I/\(IY_NK())/\\).))IVX)/I/Y+/%-_(W/.(.\#YII/\Y\X\(()\VVX/)I/\(I#Y())/\\)))NIVX)/I/Y_#(W%ii/(_\Y_II/\Y\X\(()\VVX/)I/_\(IY())/+/-\\)))IVX+/-)./I/Y#%(NW#((K/(\YII/\Y\X\(()\#.VVX/)I/\_#(IY())/\\)_))IVX)/I_/Y%(W/\V(\YIIN/\Y\X\(()\V_VX/).I/\(IY())/#\\)))IVX)/I/Y(W/(%\#YII/\Y\X\((_#)N__\KVVX/)I/\(IY())/\\).))+/-IVX)/I/Y(W./%.(\YII/\Y\X+/-\(.()\VVX/)I/\N#(I_Y())/\\)))IVX)#_/I/Y_(Wi%i/(_#\YII/\Y\X\(()\VVX/)I/\(IY())/\\N)K))IVX)/I/Y(W#((./(%\YII/\Y\X\(()\V_#VX/)I/\(IY())/\\#_).))I_V_#X)/NI/Y(W/\V(%\YII/+/-\Y\X\(()\VVX/).I/\(+/-IY(.))/\\)))_IVX)/I/Y(KW/N%(\YII/#\Y\X_\((#)\V_#VX/)I/\(IY())/\\)))IVX)/I/Y(W/(\_YI%I/\Y\NX.\_(()\V.VX/)I/\(IY())/\\)))IVX)/I/Y(#Wii_/#(\YI_#%I/\Y\X\(()+/-\VKVXN/)I/\(IY())/\\))_)IVX)/I/Y(W#((./+/-(\%YII/\Y\X_\(()\VVX/)I/\(IY(N))/\_\)))I#V#X)_#/I/Y(W/\V(\.%Y_II/\Y\X\.(()\VVX/).I/\(IYK())/\\).)N)IVX)/I/Y(W/(\YII/\%Y\X\(()\V_VX/)I_/#\(I_##Y+(_))/\\)))IVX)/I/YN(W/(\YII/\Y\%X\(()\V+/-.VX/)I/\(IY())/\\)))IV_X)/I/Y.(KWii/(\YII/N\_Y_%#\#X#\(()+/-\VVX/)I/\(IY())/\\))_)IVX)/I/Y(.W#((/(\YII/\%Y\X\(()\NV_VX/)I/\(IY()_)/\\)))IVX)/I/Y(#W_#/\V#(\YII/\Y\%XK\(()\VVX/).I/N\/IY.()+/-.)/\\)))IVX)/I/Y__(W/(\Y_II/\Y\%X\(()\VVX/)I/\(IY())/\#N\_#)+/-#))IVX)/I/Y(W/(\YII/\Y\X\(%().\V.VX/)I/\(IY_()K)_/\\)))IVX)/NI/Y(Wii/(\YII/\Y\X_.\(()%\_##VVX/)I/\(#IY())/\\)))IVX)/I/.Y(W#(_(/(\YNI+/-I/_\Y\X\%(()\VVX/)I/\(IY())/\\)))IVX)/I/Y+/-(WK/#\V(\_#YII/\Y\XN%\(#()_\VVX/).I/\(_IY(.))/_\\)))IVX)/I/Y(W/(\.YII/\Y\X\(()%\VVX/N)I/\(IY+/-())/\\)))IV#_#X_)/I/Y(W/(\YII/.\#Y\XK\(()%\V_+/-VX/)I/\(IY()N)/\\)))IV_X)/I/Y(Wii/(\YII/\Y\X\(()\VV_%#X/_#)_#
Article: Technology/Physics
June 26, 2002
Defects combine to make perfect devices
Faulty components are usually rejected in the manufacture of computers and other high-tech devices. However, Damien Challet and Neil Johnson of Oxford University say that this need not be the case. They have used statistical physics to show that the errors from defective electronic components or other imperfect objects can be combined to create near perfect devices (D Challet and N Johnson 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 028701).
Most computers are built to withstand the faults that develop in some of their components over the course of the computer’s lifetime, although these components initially contain no defects. However, many emerging nano- and microscale technologies will be inherently susceptible to defects. For example, no two quantum dots manufactured by self-assembly will be identical. Each will contain a time-independent systematic defect compared to the original design.
Historically, sailors have had to cope with a similar problem – the inaccuracy in their clocks. To get round this they often took the average time of several clocks so that the errors in their clocks would more or less cancel out.
Similarly, Challet and Johnson consider a set of N components, each with a certain systematic error – for example the difference between the actual and registered current in a nanoscale transistor at a given applied voltage. They calculated the effect of combining the components and found that the best way to minimize the error is to select a well-chosen subset of the N components. They worked out that the optimum size of this subset for large numbers of devices should equal N/2.
About the author
Edwin Cartlidge is News Editor of Physics World
Collections: John A. Wilson Building
Exhibition: Collectors Select
Essay: The Art of Wayne Edson Bryan
Paradoxes, Dichotomies, Contradictions and Coincidences
"In our plain defects we already know the brotherhood of man,"
Christopher Fry, in Act 1 of "The Lady's Not for Burning" 1948.
At a time when artists have an unprecedented array of high-tech tools from which to choose, Wayne Edson Bryan, the most relentless vivisectionist in the visual arts, investigates the vast, evolving organism that is the information age using the time-honored staples of signage: high-gloss enamel paint, brushes and wooden panels.
ABOVE: Wintermute, 2001, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 18" x 23".
Choosing painting as a medium for examining a society driven by computers and light-speed telecommunications seems absurd. How could any paintings capture the complex commingling of light, color and form, of speed, spirituality and venality that inundates the world at the beginning of the 21st century?
Yet Bryan's paintings do. They are signage in the Nitzschean sense of "signs and wonders," signs of the times whose contents he skims from the mother's milk of everyday life, from the gusher of words, images and ideas that shape mass culture for good or ill. His paintings also captivate because they embrace the cultural antithesis. They are alluring anomalies, miles from the mainstream, deviating from the norms of contemporary art and culture to the point where one can question whether they are paintings, painted objects, parodies of both or none of the above.
Finding the cutting edge in the middle ground is just one of the many paradoxes that make Bryan's art. No other artist mines delight, depravity and distress from the chaos of his times with such cold-eyed precision and consummate skill.
Bryan uses painting as a tool to examine the symbiotic relationship between visual art and society. Using paper sources and a photocopier, he appropriates imagery and symbols from computer programming, biology, mathematics, physics, astronomy, genetics and chemistry to create a visual vocabulary that is portentous but ambiguous, unsettling but engaging.
LEFT: Straylight, 2001, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 18" x 23".
That vocabulary is loaded into paintings that are lush, beautiful and insistent. They reach into space and draw in the viewer. The varnished surface Bryan applies as the last touch to every painting serves as a mirror, making the first layer of imagery a reflection of the viewer's face. Looking at paintings like Wintermute or Straylight, from his recently completed Perfect/Defect 2 series is like staring through yourself into a TV or computer monitor in an effort to find some deeper truth behind the tangles of imagery and the logic and aesthetics of the hard and software.
Some people - lunatics, perhaps, or visionary mystics - may actually find meaning hidden in the telecommunications labyrinth or in Bryan's meticulously constructed paintings. If so, it's because they put it there. In effect, they're looking at themselves, at our collective selves, at this mammoth anthill teaming with people and machines, and grasping at connections and concepts that provide comfort, however briefly.
And brief the comfort will be. For Bryan throws so many layers of information - ideas, symbols, colors and codes - into each painting that the eye and mind are hard-pressed to identify or linger on a single image. Yet each layer, if one could examine it independently, seems understandable. Kashmir, for example, a large, radiant, almost radioactive work from 2000, features two orbs superimposed on a patterned drawing Bryan created that resembles a magic diagram from the Taoist canon. That undulating drawing provides a bedrock rhythm, like the bass and drums anchoring a song. 
LEFT: Kashmir, 2000, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 46" x 58".
That rhythm energizes the orbs. Their darkened polar caps lean toward each other. Their voluminous curves seem to pulsate. They are worlds on a collision course. Or is Bryan referring to India and Pakistan, facing off in Kashmir? No, that can't be. There is something so sexual about these spheres possessing the hanging weight of major cleavage or testicles primed for a big Saturday night. The sexual tension evokes the hormonal hunt and chase, making the lines appear to be something a fighter pilot might see on a computer targeting screen. Somewhere in the back of your mind the Led Zeppelin song, Kashmir, starts playing, the bells of memory begin bonging and everything changes again.
Those are just two layers amond many in Kashmir. Trying to decipher them as a whole, to come up with some grand unification theory for this or any of Bryan's paintings doesn't work. With paint and brush, he has created a visual microcosm of the technologically powered information overload that greets us each day. He also captures the overwhelming effect these torrents of information have on our minds. Meaning gets stripped down to the most basic messages: this is cool, buy it now; eat me, drink me, smoke me, sex me, fear me.
It's a joke, in part, at least. Bryan's body of work is loaded with sly humor. His handmade paintings combine so many other processes - industrial production, the telecommunications revolution, advertising's techniques of psychological manipulation - that they become objects parodying almost everything involved in their making.
But the humor in Bryan's paintings often contains a painful measure of truth. By isolating then layering iconography from science, popular culture, business and technology, he is able to raise countless questions. If superficial certainty is what you're looking for in your art, his work isn't for you. If you like looking and thinking, Bryan is offering you the visual equivalent of heroin. His stuff is that addictive.
In the past, Bryan has turned his mind and technique loose on issues relating to language, fear, myth, race and identity. More recently, he has looked at how our minds process our culture's flood tide of information and commercial imagery. The Perfect/Defect, series compared the notion of attainable, even pre-packaged perfection, which is used by corporations the world over to manipulate public appetites and its antithesis: the defects; the accidents; the waywardness; the imperfectability of human nature. 
LEFT: 2001, 2001, enamel, ink and varnish on birch plywood, 18" x 23".
Perfect/Defect 2 looks further into the mysterious imperfections of existence. In Bryan's latest paintings, such as 2001 and Simstim, both produced in 2001, there is more evidence of the artist's hand than in previous works. Some of the paintings include Bryan's own drawings and where he uses stenciled subject matter from biotechnology or computer science it is clear that it was created by a human hand rather than a laser printer.
The composition in the new paintings has changed. In the past, Bryan balanced visual information in his works to force the eye to travel a circuitous route leading to the center of the picture. The newer pictures overload the left side with visual information. It's a bit like reading a short story where the first paragraph is several pages long. The eye keeps looking for punctuation and when it doesn't find it, it tells the mind that something is seriously out of balance. The mind says, "keep reading, it's just Samuel Beckett messing with us." The eye obeys, reluctantly, continuing on it's left-to-right track, getting seduced by the visuals and ending up in the middle, then starting the trip over again. "After September 11th, it occurred to me that sudden death, disasters or threats unfold, in a narrative sense, in the same way," Bryan says. "All the information is at the beginning. With little time or context to process the initial barrage, we later need to return to it."
LEFT: Simstim, 2001, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 18" x 23"
The imagery Bryan works with in Perfect/Defect 2 has also evolved. The visual context of his recent paintings draws heavily on information from the Genome Project that he discovered on a visit to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
The depictions of an incurable disease passing down through generations of a family or of DNA replication, the double helix separating and unwinding, each strand acting as a template for the formation of a mirror image of itself, dazzle with their perfect symmetry and mysterious inexorable logic.
In the context of Bryan's work, all images replicate and mutate in ways predictable and coincidental. The passage of disease through a family begins to resemble an organizational flow chart, the corporate structure, perhaps of God.com. Replication of DNA, one of the key images in Transmission, painted in 2001, serves as an allegory for the transmission of sounds, pictures, bits and bytes, files and folders. It's also the title of a radio program that airs in the Washington area at midnight on Saturdays, focusing on techno/rave dance music. The genetic code turns into a lava lamp. Praise the Lord and pass the Ecstasy.
LEFT: Transmission, 2001, enamel, ink and varnish on birch plywood, 18" x 23".
Close your eyes. Press your face against any window. Feel the light from the other side illuminating your being and nothingness. Forces behind the frozen glare are bombarding you with things seen and unseen. Forces supported by codes, structures, programs, connections and relationships, binding ties of webs, wires, polymers and enzymes containing binary heavy metals bringing about or accelerating reactions at body temperatures without themselves undergoing marked destruction in the process. Yet unmarked destruction abounds. A cellular holocaust occurs daily in every living thing. Outside, the sun burns like hell, night and day regardless of where its rays meet.
LEFT: ad infinitum, 2001, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 18" x 23".
Focus on art. It's there, embedded in mankind's collective DNA/memory/consciousness, inseparable from the human condition, influenced by the times and tides, replicating toward God knows what.
"Just as artists such as Man Ray, Picabia, Duchamp, Schwitters and Ernst grappled with and commented on the industrial revolution and scientific advances that changed their world," Bryan said. "My work is a response to the new information economy."
Remarkably, he does it without ever having been online. That's a tribute to his intelligence and perception and to how awash we are in information. "Windows 3.1 is more than enough computer for me," Bryan says. "I've never owned a microwave or a cell phone and until July 2001, I never owned a CD player. It's not that I disapprove, I just don't have the need. What truly attracts me to technoculture is, in it's purest form, the art: music, literature and the visuals. I indulge in them through radio, cassette tapes, books, TV, movies and advertising. I looked up techno in the dictionary. It means art, craft."
So Wayne Edson Bryan keeps mainlining the mother's milk of post-modern cultural madness, breaking the rush down into its component parts and putting them back together in strange and beautiful signs of the times that mean everything and nothing. It's what significant artists have done since the beginning of time.
"Bless the paps that gave thee suck," Dostoyevsky wrote in "The Brothers Karamazov," when his central characters meet a Russian holy man. Two words to ponder regarding Wayne Bryan, art and the 21st century, Fyodor: fake tits.
Ferdinand Protzman, in "P/D2: A New Strain" Copyright, 2002
The catalog "P/D2: A New Strain," is available for purchase at Amazon.com.
random notes & quotes
A man must have chaos within him to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Humans have sought perfection through many forms in both the past and present, and yet our tools continue to both betray our desires and describe (celebrate) our nature. It seems that the more perfect one thinks they are, denying human nature, the more flawed they are in actuality.
He who thinks he knows, does not know. He who knows that he does not know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know, and not to know is to know.
~ Lao Tzu from Tao Te Ching
ABOVE: The Dance @ 22, 2001, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 18" x 23".
Repaired tea cups used in a Zen tea ceremony are more prized than new cups; not for the monetary reason of the gold used in the seams of the cracks to "glue" them back together, but because the mysterious has collaborated and is manifest in the shapes of the broken bits. The gold is used as a frame embracing defect... not defect = bad, but defect = perfect truth.
Imperfection... the thing that makes you human and not supernatural and immortal - that's what's lovable.
~ Joseph Campbell
