At our Reimagining the Role of Artistic Creativity in Business event at Aalto University on September 11th 2025, Ben Hartley, CEO of Silkroad, gave a keynote that resonated far beyond the lecture hall. This reflection captures the essence of his talk: a call to see artists not as decoration at the margins, but as strategic partners who expand perspective, embrace ambiguity, and open new pathways for business to grow and endure.
Some talks rearrange the furniture in your mind. Ben Hartley’s did so by asking: what happens when we treat artists not as vendors at the end of a process, but as partners at the beginning? His answer was a reframing. If business today is defined by optimization, then perspective – the ability to see otherwise – becomes the rarest strategic resource. And perspective, he reminds us, is an artistic invention.
He begins in Florence. Filippo Brunelleschi, seeking a new way to depict depth and light, gave us linear perspective. Within years, that artistic breakthrough rippled through trade, finance, and science, reshaping how people saw and measured the world. The point is not nostalgia but recognition: art has always generated the conceptual tools commerce later scales.
From there Hartley distinguishes between designers, who solve given problems, and artists, who often ask if we are solving the right ones. In an age when AI excels at recognizing patterns, artists keep alive the faculty to imagine what doesn’t exist yet. Ambiguity and contradiction are not inefficiencies but the raw material of invention.
He stresses that too often artists are invited late in the process, asked to decorate rather than to shape. But when they are trusted as partners, they can alter the very structures in which business operates. Picasso’s La Vie illustrates invention as practice rather than epiphany – layered, erased, and repainted until meaning crystallizes. Sophie Calle’s mapping of heartbreak shows how lingering with discomfort can transform private pain into cultural resonance, reminding leaders that not every problem demands immediate resolution. And the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra creativity can redesign governance itself, proving that shared leadership can build both performance and trust.
The heart of Hartley’s case is Silkroad, the music collective he now leads with Riannon Giddens, founded by Yo-Yo Ma on a question without KPIs: what happens when strangers meet? From that question grew a global organization with touring, education programs, and artist-led governance. The process is messy, but precisely because artists sit inside the system, it produces resilience and relevance.
For business leaders, the choice is clear. Continue to optimize what already exists – or, likeBrunelleschi, use perspective itself as a tool for transformation. Artists,Hartley argues, are not cultural decoration but strategic allies who navigate ambiguity, provoke contradiction, and expand what is possible. Involving the mearly and honestly gives companies not just creativity, but a second operating system: one built for the not-yet-defined, where the future is waiting to be imagined.
