Professional guitarists think and act like managers and entrepreneurs.

Classical Guitar Study as Creativity Training: Potential Benefits for Managers and Entrepreneurs

“Business, Innovation and Art” Special Series Issue #7

BeiBei Song 宋贝贝

Published in

Essinova Journal

5 min readJan 26, 2019

By Jonathan Gangi *

Published in Special Issue “Business, Open Innovation and Art” for MDPI Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market and Complexity, September 2018

[Editor’s note: Although more conceptual than empirical, this paper demonstrates promising linkage between musical creativity and non-musical problem-solving, supported by cognitive science. It also draws insightful parallel between the career of a professional classical guitarist and entrepreneurship and management.]

ABSTRACT:

Divergent thinking ability, as an aspect of creativity, seems valuable to managers and entrepreneurs as they employ the tools of creative problem-solving and innovative thinking in pursuit of business success. Musical study in general, and classical guitar study to a greater degree, has the potential to improve divergent thinking and creative problem-solving abilities. As such, I suggest that utilizing classical guitar study as a creativity training tool may benefit entrepreneurs and managers within a variety of industries.

EXCERPTS:

Introduction

“The arts provide many benefits to humanity, such as the physical use of the hands and body and using the whole mind, among many others, and are sources of alternate ways to learn and solve problems […]. There are many ways to develop creative thinking, of course, and I am not suggesting that classical guitar study is the only way, or the best way. Many managers and entrepreneurs may not find music or guitar appealing as an area of study or long-term hobby. I am simply illustrating, for those that find it attractive, how a particular approach to classical guitar study presents a rich environment for creativity training.”

Cognitive Function Similarities in Guitarists, Managers and Entrepreneurs

“Successful professional classical guitarists think and behave like managers and entrepreneurs. […] when combined, these ten ‘minds’ illustrate the similarities between the cognitive functioning of successful professional guitarists, business managers, and entrepreneurs.

“ First, from the management literature [… ], we see five perspectives of management practice:

Managing self: the reflective (thinking abstractly ) mind-set;
Managing organizations: the analytic mindset;
Managing context: the worldly mind-set;
Managing relationships: the collaborative;
Managing change: the action mind-set.

“Secondly, from the entrepreneurship literature come five entrepreneurial minds [… ], each pertaining to cognitive skills that successful entrepreneurs possess and utilize:

The Opportunity Recognizing Mind: the recognition of opportunity is essential to entrepreneurship;
The Designing Mind: this mind defines the need to combine disparate ideas, people, or physical objects in novel ways that appeal to others;
The Risk Managing Mind: the ability to manage risk refers both to the ability, emotionally, to manage perceived risk and the ability to reduce actual risk through specific actions;
The Resilient Mind: successful entrepreneurs develop resilience only through multiple real-world failures;
The Effectuating Mind: this mind is about taking action in a world of uncertain and often unpredictable outcomes.”

Divergent Thinking Defined

“In contrast, divergent thinking involves flexible ideation to generate many responses to open-ended and multifaceted problems. Convergent thinking works best with well-defined problems that have a clearly defined response, while divergent thinking is best suited for poorly defined or unstructured problems . . .”

Research Suggests Musicians May Be Better Divergent Thinkers

“Musicians are a particularly relevant population to study because of their intensive, long-term training that may have a significant impact on neural circuits that are associated with creativity . . . Therefore, it was logical to ask if trained musicians might show increased creativity in non-musical tasks as well.”

“These results suggest that musicians have increased convergent and divergent thinking compared with non-musicians . . . It is possible that music training influences brain organization such that the resulting cognitive system is prone to divergent thinking.” [… ]

Divergent Thinking Expertise Applied to Management & Entrepreneurship

“Expert guitarists think about what can be done to solve fingering problems in a musical passage, and what else can be done. This is the particular manner in which the cognitive processing of classical guitarists, as described previously, is identical to innovative managers and entrepreneurs.”

“ Managers and entrepreneurs who are already creative and exhibit expert divergent thinking abilities may still benefit from classical guitar study. One research study in particular shows that preoccupation with reward reduces creativity: […]”

Summary

“Cognitive science research suggests that musicians may possess distinct advantages in divergent thinking tasks. Divergent thinking skill may result from utilizing a particular method of classical guitar study. Thus, anyone who is interested in creativity training and classical guitar study could develop divergent thinking expertise through long-term, focused practice. In this article I have presented conceptual evidence to support my suggestion that classical guitar study may benefit and enhance the creativity and innovative behavior of managers and entrepreneurs. A future research goal is to empirically test this hypothesis.”

Read the full article in MDPI Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market and Complexity.

*Author affiliation: School of Music, College of Arts & Architecture, The Pennsylvania State University