Prof. Adrian Zicari, ESSEC Business School and CoBS Academic Director, goes beyond business as usual to contend that it’s time for beauty – in its many forms but universal in its essence – to make a come back into business and management practice.

Beauty Recalled: A step beyond business as usual by Adrian Zicari.

Beauty. What a surprising word to begin a CoBS Magazine Editorial with! Beauty, a word that sounds so strange to our sanitised world, that is so absent in our business logic, that never appears in our spreadsheets, deadlines, and quarterly results.

Yet, if we listen to Dostoevsky, it is beauty that will save the world. Because beauty makes us human, brings out the best of us, and invites us to look beyond business as usual.  

Let’s bring back to our memory an image of any of the great cathedrals of Europe. When visitors climb to the rooftops, they discover the minute details, creatures, and cornices that anonymous artisans of centuries past carved. Importantly, no passer-by could ever see those marvels from below.

Why devote hours of labour to something invisible? For the sake of beauty. Because creating something noble, delicate, and perhaps unnecessary was a beau geste – a beautiful gesture – that would remain for the centuries. An anonymous gift to innumerable people over time.

Beauty: Taking it to the bridge

Coming to a more prosaic field, indeed the football field, a comparable spirit of beauty for its own sake exists. In Brazil, they call it jogo bonito – the beautiful game. While victory is sought (after all, it is a competition), there is still a search for grace, fair play, and artistry. It matters to win the game, but the beauty of the play also matters, how the ball is passed, how players interact – this is what remains in our memory. Pier Paolo Pasolini used to compare such kind of play to poetry.

How far we are from this view nowadays. Our innate tendency is to reduce everything to efficiency, to performance indicators, and to financial projections. Necessary as these tools may be, they are not sufficient to capture the intrinsic value of human work.

Functionality without beauty may build a useful bridge, on schedule, and within its budget. That’s fine. But only by adding beauty to that bridge, would it inspire and enrich our lives.

Beauty is the the inner elegance of doing things well

Such a beau geste can be a hidden act of integrity when no one is watching, a commitment to fairness in negotiations, or a refusal to cut corners, even in those circumstances when no auditor will ever know. It can also mean a real commitment to products that delight rather than simply perform, and policies that uplift rather than merely regulate.

Indeed, beauty is not superficial decoration; it is the inner elegance of doing things well, a business model of doing business honourably, and going further than the bare minimum.

In an imperfect echo of that noble spirit, the CoBS Global Voice magazine attempts to bring some reflections and insights, under the common denominator of going beyond business as usual. 

More than ever, we need today to recall this lesson from medieval cathedrals and jogo bonito: the perennial value of gestures that exceed necessity.

Let us dare to search beauty.

Useful links:

• Link up with Prof. Adrian Zicari on LinkedIn
• Read a related article: CSR in Japan and the concept of Yoi‐Shigoto
• Download this and a host of articles in Global Voice magazine #33
• Discover ESSEC Business School
• Discover the Council on Business & Society.

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Member schools of the Council on Business & Society.

• ESSEC Business School, France, Singapore, Morocco
• FGV-EAESP, Brazil
• School of Management Fudan University, China
• IE Business School, Spain
• Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, India
• Keio Business School, Japan
• Monash Business School, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia
• Olin Business School, USA
• Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Canada
• Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa
• Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Warwick Business School, United Kingdom.