Great! I was going to try to get away with not doing a post today, but now Drew McManus has gone and linked back to my website as a result of a discussion we have been having about a recent post of his. Now you know, there is all this pressure to come up with something pithy so that the new visitors he is sending my way will stay and read a bit.
Okay how about–“Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.”
I can’t take credit for that, it is the warped genius of writer Terry Pratchett.
Drew’s ideas are intriguing though. I don’t know if it is viable in practice, but it is something that bears considering. In these changing times, I think any intelligent proposal begs looking in to. Before people label his suggestion as preposterous and not in touch with the reality of how things are done, I actually saw a hint of something similiar in the last two weeks.
In a recent entry I mentioned getting a call from a woman working for a potential competitor.
What I didn’t mention was that this woman was working from her home office as a consultant working up a business plan for the organization. Now granted, if the organization had a building constructed, she might have been working out of there as a full time employee. The fact that the organizing group had picked a person with a home business rather than one with a snazzy office in town might be a harbinger of things to come…or may be not. Perhaps the overriding motivation was that she was cheaper than the guys in town and the organizing group didn’t have a lot of money to spare.
But that is Drew’s exact point.
So we will see how things play out over the next few years. Given that just yesterday The ArtfulManager suggested that the 501 (c) (3) route may be the wrong business classification “tool” for the goals of organizations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next 25-30 years brought a transitional period where the way arts entities are organizes morphs and perhaps diversifies.