MAKE ROOM FOR USELESSNESS

Entrepreneurs want to make useful things. But what if that holds us back from truly inspired ideas?

- JASON FEIFER

I'm not creative," people in business often tell Peter M. Krask.

That's nonsense, Peter responds.

He should know. Krask, who is on the faculty of the Paris-based International School of Management, calls himself "the creativity guide" and works with both artists and entrepreneurs who are stuck on a project. "Entrepreneurs are inherently creative," he says. "You're making something and putting it out in the world."

But still, he says, entrepreneurs should take inspiration from more traditional "creative" types like artists and writers-because these people approach their work very differently. They are willing to tolerate a lot of experimentation...and, dare we say, even uselessness.

Krask explains the value of uselessness.

Entrepreneurs strive to solve people's problems by creating useful new products or services. It's interesting to hear you say that they should think more like artists, whose work, while valuable, doesn't have that same utility.

This is a difference between art and business: Business has quantifiable immediate effects or connections, while the effects of art are indirect, and the artist has very little control over what those effects are. Sometimes I say this just to rattle people's chains, but art is kind of useless. Nobody really needs it. It's not something you need to survive, although you can make the philosophical case that we need art to help us be human.