Harvard's version of Christology

Apr 21st 2006 From Economist.com

Christology
EARLY in April Harvard Business School played host to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, renowned landscape artists whose most recent work involved hanging saffron-coloured drapes along the footpaths of New York’s Central Park. To the disappointment of some, the pair were not in Boston to wrap the iconic Baker Library in polypropylene fabric (as they did Berlin’s Reichstag in 1995). Rather, they were the guests (and subjects) of a first-year MBA course studying the artists’ self-financing business model.

In order to maintain complete control over their work, Christo and Jeanne-Claude shun potential sponsors and fund their projects by selling the preparatory studies, drawings and models that go into each venture. If extra money is needed, they sell their earlier work from the 1950s and 1960s. But with their projects costing upwards of $20m and growing in size, the complexity of their financial dealings is increasing. Most recently, with “The Gates”, their project in Central Park, the pair struggled to find a bank willing to open a multi-million dollar line of credit so they could pay their workers.

It is an unconventional business model, to be sure. But Josh Lerner, a professor at HBS and co-author of a case study on the creative couple, believes that students can learn a lot from their example. “There are a significant number of students who see themselves going into non-traditional entrepreneurial ventures, and for them it can be very instructive to see how one takes the entrepreneurial model and applies it to a non-traditional setting,” Mr Lerner told the Harvard Gazette.