THE Old Masters propelled themselves to greatness in part by an obsessive study of the painters who had gone before them. Such study of relevant prior art can boost your own career too.

Picasso is a fine recent example. In his famous painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he employs the fruits of his detailed studies that ranged across Egyptian, Greek, Negro and Catalan art. He also drew heavily on Cézanne. If you compare Les Demoiselles with Cézanne’s Bathers, you will see how Picasso was inspired by specific individual figures. Continuing the chain backwards, Cézanne included in Bathers many elements from studying El Greco’s paintings, painted 400 years earlier.

Further examples include Géricault and Delacroix, who spent months in the Louvre slavishly copying Rubens and Michelangelo; Rubens himself made many detailed copies of Leonardo da Vinci’s works; van Gogh went further afield by diligently studying the art of earlier Japanese artists.

If we accept the Old Master analogy of career excellence, we have then to ask how much we need to use a study of prior art to further our own careers. Beyond the college course or the occasional training session, are you obsessive enough in mining the experience of experts in your industry or func-tion? By doing so you can expect to reap many rewards. Learn new techniques. If you do a lot of public speaking, why not ditch PowerPoint and study the speeches of Martin Luther King and Churchill. Go further and read Cicero’s De Oratore on how to be a great orator. Find techniques that have worked and practise them regularly. Gain encouragement and inspiration.If you are a manager or leader, regularly faced with seemingly impossible challenges, put down The One Minute Manager and instead watch a documentary about how Shackleton rescued his entire crew from near-certain death. See the Promised Land. If you have to persuade teams to make radical changes, junk the economic logic and instead take the team to visit organisations that have made similar changes so that they can see the art of the possible and how to achieve it. In short: 1. Establish who your role models are — individuals or organisations that have achieved success in your field. 2. Learn about them in detail, find out the techniques they employed and then use them. 3. If relevant, initiate an out-ward-looking project to scan your company’s competitors, suppliers, clients or other firms that could provide relevant insights into excellence.

Isaac Newton said: “If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. To excel in any career requires finding the giants, the gurus, the Old Masters — and standing on their shoulders.

Max Landsberg is a partner at Heidrick & Struggles, an executive search and consultancy firm and author of The Tools of Leadership and The Tao of Motivation.

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