It's an Art, not a Science.

What's is an art and not science? Well, it depends.

For my vocation as a military person, I've consistently heard that warfare is an art, not a science. The vagarities and the limitless variables and parameters in the conduct of warfare has made it an artform. The officer in command of the campaign would be able to creatively utilise his information superiority, his speed of manuever and even his environmment to overpower a technically superior foe, with greater firepower and larger numbers. Of course, the converse is also true. Hence, we have Sun Tzu's Art of War.

Of course then, I found out that the business world wanted to copy this state by alluding that business is war. Hence, the conduct of business is again an art form and not a science. Here at Fletcher, and in my first week of lessons, this concept is brought to a whole new playing field.

Is accounting an art or a science? Prof. Larry Weiss shows us that it is an art. Wow! Imagine that. You'd think with all that balancing and the mathematics, it should be clearly a science. We now know however that accounting is merely management's way of signalling and representing information to a phethora of users ranging from investors, bankers, competitors, suppliers, customers, employees, regulators and even Greenpeace. (Haha... that's another story).

Nice.

So the question is, "Is everything an art?" This is where Dean Uvin's explaination of the offering of Fletcher comes in. There is 3 levels. Firstly, you need to know the subject matter of things and how to do it. At this level, it could be very well an Art. Then there is an underlying layer of the skill sets and tools that we will learn. This level given the technicalities, it would be a science. Then of course, we need to know the ethics and the RIGHT thing to do. That's beyond art and science.

Wonderful. I'll get all 3 of it here.