Beauty and the Business School—What Is the Connection?

No, this HR Strange but True isn’t about a Disney® movie or beauty school dropout Frenchy in Grease. It’s about a fascinating new course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business taught not by an MBA but by the artist in residence—Diane Ragsdale—that addresses a possible link between a concept of beauty and success in business management.

According to a university press release, while many business schools now introduce the topic of aesthetics to students within the context of product and services design, this class is aimed at developing broader leadership skills, tools, and encouragement to cultivate an “aesthetic sensibility” to workplace problems.

Ragsdale is particularly interested in scholarships that suggest a relationship between cultivating a personal relationship to beauty and becoming a more responsible, courageous, and visionary leader.

Ragsdale, of the school’s Bolz Center of Arts Administration, who will teach the course, explains, “There is great value for future business managers and leaders in having the capacity to approach the world, or respond to it, aesthetically.

“The most compelling justification I found for a class in beauty is that it develops leaders with moral imagination—leaders with the vision to imagine beautiful solutions to local and global problems, as well as the courage and moral character to do the right thing for its own sake.”

“A person’s approach to beauty intersects with how they think, their capacity to lead, and their ethical sensibility,” says Sherry Wagner-Henry, director of the Bolz Center. “Those are core elements of a business education so talking about beauty in this class and finding ways to continue that conversation going forward represents our innovative learning approach that will give our students a competitive advantage.”