Business as Master Craft

Whenever I'm asked which of the arts I love most, I always give the same answer. None of them.

Or perhaps more accurately...all of them. I don't really care whether the medium is cooking, architecture, filmmaking, music, photography, comedy, interior design, or business.  What fascinates me is something else entirely.

If you offered me tickets to an average production of Wicked or the chance to spend three hours watching the greatest needlepointer in the world make a pillow, I'd choose the pillow every time.  In fact, I'd probably be absolutely captivated.

Odd?  Perhaps.

But what I care about is mastery.

Fortunately, my career has allowed me to spend time around an unusual number of masters. I've been lucky enough to witness them not only performing, but thinking.

I've watched Chef René Redzepi taste a new ingredient and instantly know what it wanted to become.

I've heard Steven Spielberg explain the breakthrough that finally unlocked Schindler's List.

I've walked through a home with Ken Fulk as he decided, almost instinctively, exactly how each room should feel.

I've listened with Rick Rubin to a new album for the first time.

I've watched Dave Chappelle work new material in a tiny club.

I've stood directly in front of Eric Clapton for hours while he played guitar.

The disciplines couldn't be more different. The experience couldn't have been more similar.  Every time I walked away with the same feeling — Awe.

Over the years I also began to notice something else. Despite working in completely different mediums, the masters all seemed to share the same operating system.

Foundations

People often mistake innovation for simply doing something different. Masters don’t. They begin with fundamentals.

Dave Chappelle and Will Ferrell may make us laugh in ways we've never laughed before, but underneath is timeless comic structure.

Steven Spielberg once explained that Schindler's List only truly came together after he realized he should think of it as a classic buddy movie between Oskar Schindler and Itzhak Stern. Only then could he layer the enormity of the Holocaust around a story audiences instinctively understood.

Mastery doesn't skip the foundations. It builds on top of them.

Artistry

The difference between competence and greatness often isn't another technique.  It's taste.

At noma LA, I once tasted a pickled pine cone that remains one of the most memorable things I've ever eaten.

Pickling wasn't the innovation. Choosing a pine cone was. The craft was already there. The artistry just elevated it.

Years ago I stood beside the renowned photographer Roberto Dutesco as we photographed exactly the same moment with nearly identical cameras.

His photograph was breathtaking. Mine wasn’t, vastly so. The equipment wasn't the difference. His eye was.

Masters simply see things the rest of us don't.

Detail

Finally, there is detail. The almost obsessive commitment to tiny decisions that most people never even notice.

It's the precise stitch inside a Hermès bag.

The subtle shade of paint Ken Fulk knows will completely change the feeling of a room.

The one word a songwriter rewrites twenty times before settling on exactly the right one.

When I worked for Oliver Stone, he carried precise emotional beats in his head and would push relentlessly until his actors found them.

To outsiders, that level of precision can seem exhausting. To people who understand mastery, it's exhilarating to be around. Because that's where greatness actually lives.

Not in grand gestures. In tiny decisions made exceptionally well.

We tend to associate mastery with luxury products, Michelin-starred restaurants, legendary musicians, or Academy Award-winning directors.

But why should it stop there?

Why shouldn't businesses aspire to mastery? Ritz-Carlton has built an entire culture around "Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen." That commitment to craft is what makes the experience feel different.

Isn't every business problem its own work of design? Doesn't it require the patience of a Japanese Takumi and the eye of a great photographer to discover the solution everyone else missed?

Why shouldn't leadership? Is it simply having a stated culture, or is it all that comes from knowing how to truly read and connect with people? Shouldn’t assembling talent be chosen with the same precision as building a great cast or assembling an F1 engineering team?

Why shouldn't the way a company builds a financial model, designs a customer experience, develops a product, or presents an idea reflect the same care as a Ferrari interior or a Patek Philippe movement? Aren’t there precise levers and movements to a model that mean one is not like another?

The foundations make something work. The artistry and detail determine whether anyone remembers it. In designing a growth initiative, shouldn’t the same feeling of “that’s it!” that a great designer knows accompany the business plan?

Perhaps that's one of the greatest opportunities of the AI era.

As technology makes competence increasingly accessible, mastery becomes increasingly scarce. And scarce things become valuable. Anyone can move fast. Anyone can try and fail. Mastery asks something much harder:

To care enough to get it exactly right. Not because perfection is possible. Because greatness never happens accidentally.

Businesses shouldn't aspire merely to competence. They should aspire to mastery.