There is a tendency, in business discourse, to treat education, the arts, and sports as charities - worthy of support, perhaps, but separate from the real concerns of organizational leadership. That separation is a strategic mistake.
Education: more than knowledge transfer
We fail to understand the value of education by limiting it to "learning stuff", aka knowledge acquisition. Our deeper dependency on education is moral development – the ability of someone to know the difference between right and wrong. Further dependency is accelerated by the enhancement of critical thinking, that is, the ability of someone to analyze, clarify, discern, decide, choose and act. Where the habits of mind that determine professional performance are formed: curiosity, discipline, the ability to learn from failure, the capacity to collaborate.
Without strong and viable education systems, where do we find future talent? Where will our growth ideas come from? How will we innovate and explore new opportunities? Or enhance our processes and expand our businesses? How will we handle the uncertainties of the future that will surpass the realities of the present?
Education is critical to us as business organizations. For business leaders, a weakening education system is not an abstract social concern. It is a supply-chain problem for human capital.
The arts: culture and capability
The arts influence society by changing opinions, instilling values, and translating experiences across space and time. Our businesses do not simply benefit from the arts as an addendum to our core focus; our success as businesses builds on the social experiences of the people who work – the art of the leader, the art of the manager, the art of the worker.
The arts build empathy - the capacity to understand perspectives radically different from your own. They develop creative thinking. They shape the cultural norms of organizations and societies: what is valued, what is worth building. Innovation - genuinely new solutions to genuinely difficult problems - draws on these specific capacities.
Rampant social unrest – xenophobia, racism, homophobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, hatred of the other: how prepared are we as businesses to deal with these issues in the workplace?
Without the pervasive influences of the arts, businesses will fail to create positive organizational cultures. The arts are not a “nice to have”; they are a “need to have”. Without the arts, where does our organization’s culture come from and where will it go?
Sports: more than competition
Sports have the power to provide a universal framework for learning values, thus contributing to the development of soft skills needed for responsible social and corporate cultures. Those values minimally include fairness, teambuilding, equality, discipline, inclusion, perseverance, and respect.
Sports also include a drive to win – aka, the success factor. There is a focus on performance outcomes, success and celebrating achievement that do not occur in other areas of economic and social activity. Furthermore, sports demand discipline, conforming to structured rules and submitting to higher authority [coach/team captain]. No matter how talented individuals may be, they still have to play by the rules of the game and the referees that enforce them.
Sports teach the important lesson that nothing in life is worth having that isn’t earned. They teach the value of winning, and the lessons that losing is about trying harder in the future.
The business case
When these sectors weaken, the downstream effects on organizations are real. Business leaders who treat them as "someone else's problem" are underestimating their own dependencies.
INVESTING IN THE CAPABILITY ECOSYSTEM
Think about the human capabilities that your organization most depends on - not technical skills, but the deeper ones: the ability to think critically, to collaborate across difference, to maintain composure under pressure, to be creative when standard approaches fail, to lead with genuine integrity.
Now ask: where did those capabilities come from? For most people, the honest answer is: education that was deeper than credential-earning, exposure to the arts that built empathy and perspective, and experience in sport or team environments that taught how to win, lose, and show up anyway.
In your next team meeting, ask: "What's one thing - outside of work - that has most shaped how you lead or make decisions?" Listen to the answers.
The reflection question:
If the arts, education, and sports programmes in your community quietly disappeared over the next decade, what would the talent pipeline and organizational culture of your industry look like in 20 years? Whatever your answer, is it the world you want to be operating in?