Aesthetic Intelligence: How to Boost It and Use It in Business and Beyond

Brown, former chairman of the luxury behemoth LVMH, offers a thin meditation on sensorial pleasure and the business opportunities it provides. The book contains lessons from her Harvard Business School course “The Business of Aesthetics,” which teaches how to use an understanding of aesthetics to win over customers. Tactics include “enhancing attunement,” “translating emotional reactions,” “articulating aesthetic ideals,” and “curating inputs and ideals.” In layperson’s terms, this is about finding a personal style for one’s product or service, while managing the sometimes conflicting interests of commerce and creativity. Brown talks at some length about how aesthetic intelligence (“the other AI”) can inform business strategy, offering the negative example of Google Glass—which failed, despite state-of-the-art-technology, because it made users feel awkward—and the positive one of Target, which has managed to compete against Walmart by creating a “cheap-chic” message. She argues that, in an era of increasing automation and a correspondingly stronger yearning among consumers for emotional connection, businesspeople should tap into aesthetics, “the pleasure we... derive from perceiving an object of experience through our senses.” This descriptor—and the text itself—is a lot of words to express the concept that people like pretty things, making for a book which is more filler than help. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency. (Nov.)