First Principles

HATTIE: Hi, I'm Hattie Bryant. Business is not about greed; it's about value and value creation. And this show is always looking for people who create products and services that inculcate the highest values of humanity.

So much of small business is about food, clothing and shelter. But the big future for us is not in these highly competitive markets, often the domain of big business. Our future is in the individuation market: uniqueness, higher perfections, the best of the best, aesthetics, making it more beautiful than was thought possible to be.

Today, we enter into the future of small business, and it may surprise you that at the front edge are artists: people who see what cannot be seen; people who hear what has never been heard before; people who think not just outside the box, but about new boxes. There is a deep-seated interiority where the boxes are tetrahedrons and octahedrons and where simplicity meets complexity and where we see our world and ourselves in new ways.

Ken Duncan started taking pictures to feed our souls, so maybe his business is about food. (Voiceover) Let's go just north of Sydney, Australia, to meet a prolific photographer who will teach us about the art of business and the business of art.

1

KEN DUNCAN: (Voiceover) Well, that to me, is the perfect beauty of God's creation. And it's something outside of you that you tap into.

Time tells what true art is because, you know, true art transcends time.

How could you be stressed about life when you're sitting there? I mean...

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Ken Duncan is founder of what today includes five galleries and a profitable web site that sell his amazing panography, a custom framing company, a publishing house and one of the most modern printing laboratories in the world. The art can be purchased as very large limited-edition prints or in breathtaking collections published in book form and on DVD. With a team of 54 employees, he and his wife Pam love working in and working on the business they started in 1980.

KEN: Well, our vision statement is to show the beauty of God's creation. That's it. I just want to open people up to the potential of bigger pictures.

All I'm trying to say is, `Hey, look, there's something out there maybe bigger than us.' When you're out in these wonderful places, the less of you, the more you can sense God's awesome creation. And he's anointing. Now not every photo of mine has that anointing, but every now and then, God gives me these little gifts, you know, just to humble me.

HATTIE: Most business owners we study on this show lead with quality because we all know that small business can't be price-driven. Ken Duncan is teaching us that quality to the Nth degree is what we have to give our clients. His photos may be just photos, but by stretching for perfection, he transformed photos into art.

If you take the challenge to be all you can be and inspire all those around you to be their best, is it possible that you, in your reach for an even higher perfection, can transform your work into art? I think so.