Change is Good

Marshall McLuhan described the artist as a person of integral awareness, one whose work is a "social navigation chart" that tells us how to cope with the consequences of change. McLuhan's notion of the artist's special skills might explain the career trajectory of Fred Mandell-a historian-turned-financial advisor-turned-artist.

Mandell is a man of integral awareness, in the McLuhan sense, someone who has always studied the process of change-in his own community, through history, across financial markets. In his sculpture and painting, he celebrates the beauty and quirkiness of human nature, the essential qualities we all have that make us capable of change.

In his younger days as a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and assistant professor of history at the Roosevelt University , Mandell was active in the Civil Rights movement and worked in urban areas trying to initiate social change. His model for this engagement came from his mother, who helped spearhead school desegregation in Malverne, New York, in 1954. Mandell's father is someone he describes as a "Horatio Alger bootstraps" type of man who grew up in poor circumstances and made a life for himself and his family, despite the odds.

Even with such strong visionary models, Mandell was not entirely prepared for the discovery he made toward the end of his successful career with American Express, when he took a sculpture class on a whim and discovered he was an artist.

"I always liked shaping and reshaping things, whether it was an organization or a sculpture," he says. When people started paying him for his pieces, he began to pursue art in a serious way, not knowing where it would lead.

Mandell's artistic output revealed to him a natural inclination we all share to build a coherent body of work over a period of time-work that draws on our talents and experience but that always anticipates the future. In this sense, we are all artists, he says. And we might benefit from a keener understanding of how art expresses the ebb and flow of life, even giving it a nudge at times. As McLuhan suggested, art can be a social navigation chart through uncertain terrain.

The practical applications of this concept of art became clear to Mandell. "What began to occur to me was that there were amazing parallels between the challenges that artists face in creating a body of work and the challenges that business leaders face in creating a great organization," he says. "The creative processes of the great masters of art mirrored the process of change in organizations."

Today, Mandell calls himself a life-change artist, writer, and creative catalyst who shows senior executives (and others) how to think about what comes next in their lives. Change is the most inevitable of all human conditions, and we have to be ready for it no matter who we are: "We're in the midst of a significant economic downturn. People are being forced to retire, they're dealing with ageism. It's a challenging environment for people to make a transition in-they have to develop a different set of skills moving forward, different from the ones they had as employees of a company."

Change doesn't have to be like jumping off a cliff, Mandell says. It can take place over time; it can be planned. It requires patience and forethought. His recent book, Becoming a Life-Change Artist: 7 Creative Skills to Reinvent Yourself at Any Stage of Life, focuses on the logistics of making life-altering transitions. "A lot of my work comes back to the skill component," he says. "A lot of people have a vision of what they would like to do but they don't know how to get from here to there."

In getting from here to there, Mandell advocates a calm embrace of the unknown. One of his early bronze sculptures, "Acrobats," depicts three human figures, one perched on top of the other. He created each figure individually, never knowing for sure if they would balance perfectly on top of one another in the final piece. They did.

The life lesson here: work with the material and experience you have at hand. Trust your vision of what it will become. Mold it piece by piece until it comes together. It will.

www.fredmandell.com