A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Louvre

Before launching her speaking career, Amy E. Herman directed education programs at New York City’s Frick Collection for over a decade. Her unusual background—degrees in art history, international affairs, and law—make her uniquely qualified to offer “lessons in looking,” as explored in her 2018 TED talk. I used her first book, Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life, in literature classrooms because I admired her acuity of insight and her ability to illuminate art for others. In some ways, Herman was an inspiring muse when I began writing about the art of sales for the Mastery Blog.

Herman runs an organization, The Art of Perception, that offers professional development courses for those operating in high-stakes, high-pressure situations including not only sales leaders but law enforcement officers, doctors and nurses, and Navy SEALS. She faces the recurring challenge of asking authoritative, expertly trained individuals to shift their thinking for the sake of collaboration and finding innovative solutions. These sessions inspired Fixed.: How to Perfect the Fine Art of Problem-Solving, which uses close observation and guided discussion of visual art to help readers replicate Herman’s approach on their own. 

The book has unusual features, and I’m not just talking about that pesky period in the middle of the title. This is not one to purchase as an audio version or for a grayscale digital screen; you’ll want full access to the hundred full-color illustrations. Three sections (“Prep,” “Draft,” and “Exhibit”) riff on the process of completing a work of art, and the material is also subdivided into nine chapters arranged as steps (“Step #2: Change Your Shoes”; “Step #6: Set a Deadline”). Most importantly: take your time. Trying to read this book in one sitting would be like trying to tour the entirety of Paris’s Louvre Museum in a day.  

BIASEDLY WE ROLL ALONG

Fixed. opens by examining The Raft of the Medusa, a nearly life-size work painted in 1818–1819 by the French Romantic artist Théodore Géricault, which depicts a historic and notorious maritime incident (spoiler alert: cannibalism). By positioning The Raft of the Medusa as a controversial political document and cultural conversation-starter, Herman argues that just because we’re in the realm of artwork does not render our reactions and opinions decorative. From there she moves on to examples of American presidential portraiture, asking us to compare Gilbert Stuart’s painting of George Washington, Alexander Gardner’s photograph of Abraham Lincoln, and Kehinde Wiley’s painting of Barack Obama.

We can’t talk about changing our existing approaches to evaluating the world around us without talking about bias—which, if you’ve been reading along in recent weeks, you know is one of our favorite topics. In the case of the U.S. presidents, Herman encourages us to reveal the biases tied to proximity in era, i.e., we’re probably going to have stronger feelings about Obama than Washington or Lincoln. (Though Herman opts not to mention Donald Trump here, one of the book’s strengths is that the text feels very up to date, including references to incidents as recent as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.)  

In the first section, “Prep,” Herman draws attention to our biases by showing us, not telling us. We’re prompted to react to multiple works that share themes but differ in mode. Sometimes a flip in subject subverts judgment, as when a woman depicted nude is canonized as art, while a man depicted nude seems pornographic, or when a piece’s perceived politics is based on assuming (wrongly) some aspect of the author’s identity. Sometimes the change in perspective is as literal as rotating an anamorphic surface, relative to your eye, to reveal a hidden image. 

Herman keeps this from veering overly academic by using lots of contemporary examples, as well as case studies of Herman’s interactions with students. Even if you aren’t moved by Artemisia Gentileschi’s 16^th-century radical feminism, you might care about an oversized child-image peering over the U.S.-Mexico border wall in 2017—or, figuring out how to stop your local ICU nurses from bullying one another next week. The author draws parallels between noticing the details of an artwork and the details of a problem, encouraging us to use rigor in defining the conflicts we seek to address. Yet she also invokes Albert Einstein, who said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

A LITTLE NIGHT NOTAN

The second section of Fixed., “Draft,” is where I dog-eared the most pages of practical advice and quirky anecdotes. (Ever wonder where the word “deadline” came from? Read this book and you’ll find out.) Among the many gems, Herman offers this practical template for architecting deadlines as part of solving a complex problem, which could come in handy for any sales organization:

• Create self-portrait to find perceptual filters.
• Seek out other perspectives.
• Define the problem.
• Sort and prioritize the data collected.
• Sketch a solution.
• Execute solution.
• Measure and follow up.

I particularly appreciated this section’s explanation and application of notan, a Japanese design concept and a way of examining an artwork or scenario that distills its core concepts; or, “to strip away color and detail so an artist can concentrate on the fundamental building blocks of an image.” The notan version of a woman sitting by the sea is all circle, rectangle, and line, light and dark. Being able to recognize this version of a scenario or problem is part of being able to “Break It into Bite-Sized Pieces,” as the chapter titled “Step #4” advises, all the better to consume or resolve. 

As soon as I saw this described, I recognized notan as methodology that is both deeply useful in sales, and one with which I’m deeply uneasy. I take refuge in shades of gray, constantly elaborating (and, some may say, overcomplicating). But to dismiss notan as seeing things “in black and white” is to miss the point, because it is about facilitating harmony through the study of opposites. Often, we get our greatest insights by identifying our framework of the problem, then reversing it completely. Or, as a DEA agent tells Herman, “You took me so far outside my box that now I know what to look for when I go back in.” 

WABI-SABI STORY

Although Herman offers examples of problems corrected in real time and under urgent circumstances, this is not a book about quick-drying glue. “Things can be fixed now, four days from now, in four years, or in four decades,” she observes. Nor should mending necessarily erase the evidence of what was broken. She describes kintsugi, healing cracks with gold, which originated in ancient Japan and continues into the present day (as someone who thought I was already familiar with the concept, I learned a lot). Wondering what this has to do, on a practical level, with your life? According to Herman, kintsugi may offer the key to designing better local landfills and addressing our American epidemic of trash output. 

In the third section, “Exhibit,” kintsugi is put into conversation with wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy that change is inevitable and there is beauty in imperfection. For Herman, the leap from kintsugi to wabi-sabi is an opportunity to discuss the labor of Ai Weiwei, a Chinese activist artist whose projects often act as witness to ongoing refugee crises and intractable destruction. Although that might seem a dire premise, Herman advises that “We can embrace uncertainty as a cauldron of creativity.” The founder of any start-up might feel compelled to agree.  

As the book draws to a close, Herman returns to discussing The Raft of the Medusa. In part, this is to showcase how all nine “steps” resonate with Géricault’s journey to finishing his masterpiece (which he did when he was only 27 years of age; this proved timely, because he died before his 33^rd birthday). Maybe Herman also uses this tactic of mirroring her opening because the author knows her ending will be a bit anticlimactic. We cannot wrap things up by combining forces to discuss a specific, complex problem at hand—as is an opportunity in a live training—but rather by hoping, as solo readers, we are now closer to solving some future, undetermined difficulty. 

At Maestro, we talk about the importance of the 40/20 rule, which states that sales professionals should spend 20 hours honing their craft for every 40 hours they spend working. When people balk, as they often do, we point out those 20 hours can include activities that we already incorporate into our daily routine, such as reading or podcasts. So yes, count turning the pages of Fixed. as part of your 20 hours. After that, apply Herman’s lessons and clock some more of your 20 hours by walking the floors of an art museum. Maybe, if you get a good deal on airfare, you might even head to the Louvre. 

We’ll help you with the science (and, yes, the art) of sales. Reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, coaching, assessments, and more.