Text 4 　　Artists routinely mock businesspeople as money-obsessed bores. Or worse, many businesspeople, for their part, assume that artists are a bunch of arrogant wasters. Bosses may stick a few modernist paintings on their boardroom walls. But they seldom take the arts seriously as a source of inspiration. 　　The bias starts at business school, where “hard” things such as numbers and case studies rule. It is reinforced by everyday experience. Bosses constantly remind their inferiors that if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. Manager’s reading habits often reflect this no nonsense attitude. Few read deeply about art. 　　But lately there are welcome signs of a thaw(融化) on the business side of the great cultural divide. Business presses are publishing a series of books such as The Fine Art of Success, by Jamie Anderson. Business schools are trying to learn from the arts. 　　Mr. Anderson points out that many artists have also been superb entrepreneurs. Damien Hirst was even more enterprising. He not only realized that nouveau-riche(暴发户) collectors would pay extraordinary sums for dead cows and jewel-encrusted skulls(颅骨). He upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby’s, an auction house. Whatever they think of his work, businesspeople cannot help admiring a man who parted art-lovers from £70.5m on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed. 　　Studying the arts can help businesspeople communicate more eloquently. Most bosses spend a huge amount of time “messaging” and “reaching out”, yet few are much good at it. Their prose is larded with clichés and garbled with gobbledegook. Half an hour with George Orwell’s Why I Write would work wonders. 　　Studying the arts can also help companies learn how to manage bright people. Rob Goffee of the London Business School points out that today’s most productive companies are dominated by what they call “clevers”, who are the devil to manage. They hate being told what to do by managers, whom they regard as dullards. They refuse to submit to performance reviews. In short, they are prima donnas. The arts world has centuries of experience in managing such difficult people. Publishers coax books out of authors. Directors persuade actresses to cooperate with actors they hate. Their tips might be worth hearing. 　　Studying the art world might even hold out the biggest prize of all—helping business become more innovative. Companies are scouring the world for new ideas. In their quest for creativity, they surely have something to learn from the creative industries. Look at how modem artists adapted to the arrival of photography, a technology that could have made them redundant, or how J.K. Rowling (the creator of Harry Potter) kept trying even when publishers rejected her novel.