Introduction

Arts-based Initiatives (ABIs), like any other management initiative, have to be properly aligned and integrated with organisational operations and strategy, in order to produce positive and significant benefits for the improvement of business performance. The arts in management contribute to developing the emotive and energetic dimensions of organisational functions and working mechanisms that modern management has fundamentally disregarded. However, to make sure that the managerial uses of art forms respond to business purposes, ABIs have to be combined with traditional management approaches. ABIs are instruments used to manage the aesthetic organisational dimensions that in turn allow managers to create and affect organisational emotive knowledge, both in people and infrastructure. Through art forms management can handle emotions and energy states in and around organisations. However, the emotional and energetic dynamics sparked and nourished by art forms need to be channelled towards strategic and business objectives. For this reason, ABIs have to be managed and assimilated within the management system of the organisation.

In this chapter, attention will be focused on how management can integrate ABIs into the organisation's management system, by clarifying the arts-based strategic approaches grounding the adoption of art forms. In particular, the focus will be on how to run arts-based management actions so that they are structured consistently with the design and implementation of other management actions aimed at driving business performance improvements.