BAUMGART.COACH

Rhyme & Génre

In ‘The Practice’, business and creativity theorist Seth Godin talks about ‘rhyming’ and ‘génre’. He says that the world is not ready for your completely original conception: it is important to understand what your efforts or ideas ‘rhyme’ with, what ‘génre’ they embody.

These concepts are drawn from literature, poetry, and writing. They have a special resonance in the world of emergent AI and pervasive Large Language Models (LLMs).

What are you working on? What are you trying to achieve? To what génre does it belong - what do your efforts and ideas rhyme with?

Below are a few areas of focus to consider.

FOCUS AREAS FOR THE COACHING

  • Stack of handwritten notes and typed documents on a white desk, with two black pens and two transparent pens standing upright.

    IN WRITING

    Writing is Marcus’ first love, despite 27 year spent in the design professions. Writing is a powerful way of distilling creative ideas, and he has built a career out of ‘writing to design’. A writing practice is one of the most valuable habits of the creative professional.

    Baumgart Coaching encourages new methods and tools of exploration in this medium.

  • Designer chair

    IN DESIGN

    The design professions thrive on creative and lateral problem solving, and dialogue lies at the heart of creative production. Design incorporates product, furniture, object, digital, UX, graphic, print, architecture, interior, landscape, and artisanal craft among many other fields.

    Dialogue powers production in all of these media.

  • Hands typing on a laptop keyboard on a desk with a notebook and pens nearby in a well-lit room.

    IN BUSINESS

    The world of business is a hive of potential creativity. Business can be a grind day by day, it is true. But the application of searching thinking and creative invention to the exploration of products and services is a deeply engaging process. Business ideas are not merely ‘mercantile’, or somehow sullied by commerciality.

    Baumgart Coaching is a great way to interrogate business ideas.

WHAT ABOUT ART?

Above, Marcus references writing, all kinds of design, architecture, and business creativity. But what about fine art and ‘serious’ artists?

Art practices and practitioners operate in a world with ambiguous and indistinct, but very real, features and boundaries. Marcus knows enough of the art world to know it is a world outside his experience, which is, by contrast, in applied and vocational creativity.

Much writing, design, and business ideas operate in a context somehow linked to functionality and utility, even if only tangentially. The ideas we trade in, in these media and génres, are ideas generally linking cause and effect, or action and outcome. These are ideas with purpose, ideas with ‘use cases’. This is the workaday world of applied creativity.

For this reason, Baumgart Coaching is not for artists, but for vocationally trained and applied idea and design merchants and practitioners. A select group of creativity coaches cater specifically to professional artists: Marcus deeply respects this capacity, but the coaching is not designed for such practitioners.

REAL ART: Caravaggio’s earliest painting: ‘Boy Peeling Fruit’ (1592-1593).

Photo credit Gianni Papi

NOT REAL ART: AI’s mawkish version of the above, generated with the prompt ‘Boy Peeling Fruit in the style of Caravaggio’. (Leonardo.ai - 2025).