Joe Patti

The newly opened Honolulu Design Center is really trying to change the way people think about the place home and office furnishings has in their lives by positioning this facility as a gathering place.

If you have never considered your furniture store a center of social activity, you aren’t alone. The HDC figures this is the first time anyone has ever tried anything like this. If you look at their plans closely, you can see they have really done some thinking about their target audience.

The three story building has a cafe, a wine bar offering 90 choices and a 90 seat fine dining restaurant which will feature some of the furniture they are selling in their 6 showrooms. There is also an events area where Jazz is performed on Thursday nights and Wednesday and Sundays are film nights.

Just as Home Depot and Lowes offer little classes for the do-it yourselfers, HDC offers seminars that fit the lifestyle of their target clientele. The Small Business Administration held a micro-enterprise workshop for people wanting to start their own small business with monthly seminars on other topics to come. Another workshop offered helps people view home construction as an interconnected system so that all the segments integrate well together and result in low operating costs.

A television show, “Generation X and WhY Inquiring” will be filmed there featuring students

“-ages 9 to 17 – from various schools who will discuss and debate…the dynamics between boys and girls and issues ranging from harmless teasing to more serious topics like safety, drugs and health. Other important areas like global conservation, pollution, oceans, Social and educational issues…”

A number of thoughts passed through my mind. First that it must be nice to have the money to build the place as well as the money to buy from this place. While I am told there are pieces I could afford, $42,000 leather couches are more in line with what they offer.

Still, even though they are in a good position to recoup part of their investment being located next to the construction site of two towers of condos which need to be furnished, they are taking a big chance with this project. People might buy coffee or wine while perusing furniture–but are they going to go to a furniture store, nice as it might be, for dinner and a movie?

I also wondered if all the performing arts centers that have been built in the last few years at costs the exceed those of that Honolulu Design Center by millions have had as good a handle on how to serve their target audiences as the furniture place does.

In some respects, clues about what to offer and how to position themselves already exist. As mentioned earlier, they have upgraded the classes that Home Depot offers. They also seem to have improved on Target Stores’ Design for All campaign. At the prices they are charging, they certainly aren’t offering design for all, of course.

As I observed in an entry two years ago, humans seem to have an intrinsic need for art/beauty/meaning/purpose in their lives. Target Stores aim to bring the semblance of the aesthetic high end stores like HDC possess within the reach of everyone. HDC has moved a step further and is trying to bring many elements of the lifestyle their furniture already represents into one location.

To their credit, this isn’t some new initiative that marketing research indicated was a good idea. It is just another chapter in the company’s long history of sincere investment in local arts and culture. Their weekly print ads feature local visual and performing artists and promote their work and upcoming performances.

Thinking about what lessons could be derived from this for the arts, I came up with a great deal of “if onlys”- If only arts organizations had the kind of money to do market research to develop a great plan for serving the needs of a target audience; if only they could maintain a consistent staff and cohesive vision to see the plan through (Took HDC 8 years to come to fruition); if only they had the funding enabling them to ignore the distracting noise of earned/unearned income woes.

What I ultimately end up thinking is that HDC may serve as an example of what an arts organization should be– an unexpected arrangement that suits the community in which it is located rather than based on a standard set in other places. Somewhere out there may be a mini-van dealership/daycare/athletics field/community arts center catering to dual career-soccer parents.

Reflecting upon my use of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to discuss the definition of quality, I wondered if my support of his grading experiment might have been an early predictor of my involvement in the arts.

It seems to me that a person who valued insightful comments on their papers might be more likely to gravitate toward professions that provided more intangible rewards like esteem and self-actualization rather than high pay and material perks. On the other hand, I wonder if people who valued a specific letter or numeric grade over extensive commentary might be more likely to join professions with clearer remuneration.

I did a brief search for studies that might have examined this and didn’t find anything. I suspect the failure to do so is more a factor of not knowing what terms to use in a search than lack of research related to this topic.

About three years ago I included a Harvard Business Review article about the single perfect customer satisfaction survey question in an entry about customer service. (How willing would you be to recommend company X to a friend?)

I would be interested to know if there is any research out there that might support the dependability of using a single question to determine if someone in high school or college was disposed toward a career in the non-profit field based on what form of feedback they valued most on their assignments.

If there was a correlation between preferred form of feedback and profession, perhaps the perfect career path question might be: “What do you find more valuable in assessing the progress of your academic career, a letter/numeric grade or extensive written/verbal feedback?”

Does anyone know of research studies that might prove or disprove this notion?

The question about what constitutes quality is one of those things an arts manager usually doesn’t have time to ponder but which is central to all the activities an arts organization undertakes.

Most mission statements for arts organizations allude to providing quality to the community if they don’t do so outright. But when the doors open, are you offering the very best quality, the top quality you can afford or the top quality people are willing to pay for? Or does your product fall right there in the middle of the bell curve–something of middling quality that the largest group of people is willing to pay for?

Every couple of years I go back and read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In the book, Pirsig methodically advances through various philosophical schools of thought in an attempt to create a valid definition of quality. He doesn’t actually complete the process until his second book, Lila.

There is a summary of his conclusions here. It is pretty heady stuff and tough to see the application to the arts just by reading the summary unless you are avid about philosophy. There is an essay by Mark S. Lerner called “Management and Art” that takes a crack at it that might be helpful in understanding some of the implications of Pirsig’s work.

I like reading Zen… because it gets me thinking and the detailing of his process aids my comprehension of the issues involved. I will admit I get lost at various points, though I make progress on each rereading. I don’t know if he actually arrives at a valid definition of quality. What he does arrive at makes more sense than what the dictionary says. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I come away with a broader appreciation of the elements and considerations that comprise the measure of quality.

Does reading the book better inform my administration of my theatre and programming of its season?

Yeah, well it is often tough to take satisfaction in knowing that you have been responsible for the propagation and dissemination of a large concentration of quality into the universe when box office receipts are so dismal.

We go before legislatures and tell them that they should be concentrating on all the lives that have been changed and not numbers served when choosing to fund the arts. But when we get back to our offices, damned if it ain’t a lot about the numbers, eh?

In his book Pirsig talks about how he decided not to let his students know what grade they got on a paper but instead give extensive feedback about the work they did and how to improve. The students went crazy. The comments on the quality were well and good, but they wanted a quantitative measure of their success.

When you are running an arts organization it is much the same way. You love the comments about how great the show was, but what you really care about are a satisfying number of butts in the seats (or butts passing through the doors if you are a museum/gallery.)

I should note that subsisting solely on a diet of comments, most of Pirsig’s A & B students improve their performance. The C and D students either saw an improvement or hovered about the same with some D & F students sinking into oblivion. Operating an arts organization in ever fluctuating social, technological and economic environments is a lot more involved than applying oneself in academic studies. It is nigh impossible to survive solely on that diet of feedback, but handled well some nutritional value can be distilled resulting in organizational health and growth.

So yes, absolutely, reading the book definitely informs the day to day decisions I make. I ponder such things as I have written above and throughout this blog. Obviously, I think reading and thoughtful consideration of different issues is important even if the idealism presented in writings seems far divorced from the hectic, time crunched reality of our daily lives.

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A brief related story I wanted to share. I first came across this book while taking a class in college. I wrote a paper supporting his ideas about replacing simple letter grades with brief evaluations of a student’s work. Much to my delight, my professor took me at my word and didn’t grade my paper. (She was already in the practice of writing comments on our papers.)

Given the college’s expectation that she assign a grade, she invited me to come to her office to discuss what grade I should receive. After reviewing her notes on my paper, I decided I had earned a B+. She was prepared to give me whatever grade I chose, but agreed that is what she would have assigned the paper.

Factoring in all the time and energy she invested in this whole encounter, this was very expensive for my professor. It is also one of the incidents that contributed to my feeling that I received a quality education at that school. An experience that resonates with me so many years later though she has probably forgotten all about it. (Though hopefully she offered similar experiences to other students.)

Back in January The Artful Manager linked to Peter Sellar’s speech before the American Symphony Orchestra League (text found here.) One of the comments he made was that Beethoven didn’t write polite music.

On the way into work the next day I heard an ad that said something to the effect of “this moment of calm is brought to you by…” and named the local symphony while playing some sedate music. I wryly thought to myself that they were taking the wrong approach and should be advertising that they performed impolite music by the bad boys of their day.

I almost immediately started wondering how symphonies defined what music they played. Is it music that has stood the test of time? If so, why don’t they try to adapt enduring music by groups like Led Zeppelin and the Doors. Some of the pieces might might not be appropriate, but “Kashmir” had orchestral backing and I think a symphony could do something interesting with “Riders on the Storm.” Some effort in arranging the music for a symphony might create the basis of an interesting program that might attract some new audiences. These artists were certainly not writing polite music and were bad boys of their day.

About two weeks later at the APAP convention I actually came across a group in a showcase that had arranged many classic rock tunes for chamber instruments. I have subsequently learned that the London Symphony Orchestra has performed an orchestral arrangement of “Kashmir” and The Who’s rock opera Tommy, which I had forgotten.

I suspect that symphonies define the music they play as falling within a certain aesthetic that bears similar elements to works by predecessors like Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, etc. This seems like a very limiting approach. Admittedly, there is some logic to this. Nora Jones is defined as a jazz artist based on similarities in song choice and vocal execution to Bille Holiday and Nina Simone.

I looked around at the websites of about 15 symphonies, both large and small, and saw that some were performing works by composers who are still very much alive and haven’t needed to stand any tests of time. The only person I knew enough about to call a “bad boy” was John Cage.

I don’t want to get into a whole elitism debate regarding orchestral music so I will simply say I can see why the music of Led Zeppelin, The Doors and The Who, while standing the test of time, might not be considered appropriate for the main season. So I started looking at the Pops seasons for each of the 15 groups I mentioned before. By and large, most of the pops programming seemed to consist of the orchestras performing with popular artists like Manhattan Transfer, The Chieftans and Marvin Hamlisch. Old standbys like Gershwin tunes and the 1812 Overture appeared in Pops seasons, too.

I don’t know if I was looking in the wrong places or if performing arrangements of these songs represents a trend that has passed, but there seems to be a missed opportunity by not performing more contemporary but enduring works, even if only in a Pops season. If video game themes and cell phone rings can be the subject of symphony performances, why not these works? There is some real power, majesty and craftsmanship in these songs (or at least opportunities to use orchestra instruments to infuse these things into them.)

One of the strengths musicians of any stripe have is the ability to choose from a wide variety of songs. In theatre and dance, unless you are doing a series of short plays or short dance pieces, you are usually tied to performing a show linearly as written. People go to the symphony expecting they will hear selections from different artists in programs with titles like “A Foreign Affair” and “Glances of Love”. I will be the first to admit that I have no idea how the music integrates with these titles. From my vantage, it appears as if some sort of randomization computer program is used to pick the titles.

My point is symphonies have a ready made format and an audience that probably only knows slightly more about the logic process that places these songs together on the same night. If someone advertised a program titled “Bach You Tonight” that featured Bach and “Stairway to Heaven” at the right price, people who had never attended a concert might be intrigued enough to attend. (I certainly would because I am having a hard time imagining them working together. Who knows.)

I am not going to suggest that people will come for the Zeppelin and be entranced enough to return for the “Strictly Strauss.” It may be that the new attendees never become comfortable with anything more than the annual “Rock N’ Rachmaninoff” series. (Yes, I am having fun making up these names. I promise to stop before something really goofy like Haydn and Halen). These type of programs would also need to be part of a larger effort to attract and welcome new people, to be sure.

Folks will say if I really understood how symphonies operate, I wouldn’t make such ludicrous suggestions. Yeah, admittedly this may all be akin to the suggestions on our surveys that I present Christina Aguilera in my little theatre. From my perspective it can’t be too far afield from what Pops programs already do. Even if I am off base, perhaps all this will inspire someone with the practical knowledge to make something similar happen.

The biggest problems I anticipate are 1) Some drunk guy standing up and yelling, “Play Freebird!” and 2) Existing patrons feeling that it is dumbing down the program to include it in the main season. Good monitoring at the bar will solve the first problem. The second problem–well even as unexperienced as I am with classical music, I know that it will take a lot of skill to arrange some of this music so it sounds awesome at a performance. Dumb ain’t gonna cut it.

While I am talking a lot about classic rock, I don’t want anyone to get their minds stuck on that. There is plenty of other enduring material to explore for rearranging like some of the works of Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, etc.

Not everything deserves to be arranged to be interpreted by a symphony. It should be more about showing off the symphony’s prowess than playing something just because it is easily recognizable. Yet something recognizable can also make it easier for a person with a low level of experience to appreciate the skill with which a piece is rendered.

Many people recognize the “Blue Danube Waltz” but might not be able to discern whether it is played well. On the other hand, an existing familiarity with “Gallows Pole” (which has absolutely endured centuries) provides a reference point from which to judge a symphony’s rendition.

When I was at the APAP conference last month, Neill Archer Roan commented that sometimes it was difficult to figure out who bloggers were. I mentioned that I tried to keep identifiable specifics out of my entries because I wanted to create an everyman-everywhere environment. When writing about my own experiences I wanted to avoid having people dismiss them as having no application in their situation because they weren’t in the same region or discipline as me.

From some discussions I have had and comments the blog has received, I think it was a good choice to make. In some cases like yesterday’s entry, I think I may have gone a little overboard. In my attempt to avoid identifying the specific discipline by using words like “field” and “genre”, I think the entry may have been confusing and difficult to read. (And why didn’t I use the vastly better term, discipline, I will never know.)

I apologize to my readers for obfuscating matters in my zeal for greater relevance. I am not going to reveal the discipline out of a desire not to be seen as pronouncing its imminent demise. The other reason I am purposely vague is to protect the identities of the innocent or at least those deserving of compassion. If you really, want to know, email me and I will tell you.

One of the moderators of the Emerging Leadership Institute I attended, Rosalba Rolon, is the Artistic Director of Pergones Theater in Bronx, NY. She spoke briefly about the organization during the institute but it wasn’t until I read her brochure that something had caught my eye that synched with the stories she told.

She spoke a lot about the support the theater had received from the neighborhood and how indebted the organization was to their neighbors for their survival. Now things are looking up and the area, formerly one of the most crime ridden places in the country, is becoming gentrified. (Apparently, there is talk of changing the name from South Bronx to Downtown Bronx to support the spiffed up image.)

Many arts organizations target mailings to zip codes with affluent neighborhoods because they are more likely to be comprised of a demographic that is inclined to attend events and hopefully donate funds. Pergones uses zip codes to cultivate a different kind of currency.

The theatre remembers to whom it is indebted and offers 50% discounts (scroll to Zip Tickets) on tickets to anyone living in zip code 10451 up until 30 minutes before a performance. At first I misread this as a type of rush ticket available at 30 minutes before the performance but this anytime prior to 30 minutes before the performance.

As rush tickets, I thought this was nice, but when I realized this was a discount on advanced tickets, I thought it was great! This goes to creating a sense of investment, value and good will in the immediate community.

And even if you don’t live in the specific zip code, the theater has negotiated a reciprocal agreement for its members giving them a 40% discount at a theater in Manhattan, one in Washington, DC and a festival in Coral Gables, FL. Maybe few will ever be in a position to redeem the discount in the other cities. Still, they have an incentive to experiment and attend while they are away from home rather than doing something else.

The immediate message to the member is that their theater is working on their behalf to give them privileges when they are away from home. The goodwill generated from that is probably more valuable than any discount they might realize while on the road.

Since I have been invoking the idea of assessing technology and only using what is suitable for you instead of jumping on the latest trend, I need to issue a mea culpa.

At various times I have suggested in my entries that organizations should have the artistic staff blog about their rehearsal experience. I still think this is a good idea. However, of the few organizations I have seen who have had their artistic staff blog, I have to say I have been really unimpressed.

Many of them start out the first couple days of rehearsals and then either come to a dead stop or don’t pick up again until just around opening night. The entries that are there are pretty predictable. They start out talking about the great group that has been assembled and how exciting it all is. Then often nothing more.

Certainly one could get more entries generated if one made it a contractual requirement and set aside time each day during which performers and the creative team were to scribe their musings. After reading the experiences of a college professor who required her classes to blog, I am not sure this is the most constructive or productive tack to take.

Frankly, the blog postings I required my students to write were just not very interesting. Those students are bright, insightful, frequently opinionated, and, as a whole, a pleasure to be around. Their blogs were not.

I imagine that if you assembled the most brilliant group of performers and artistic collaborators the world could imagine, you might find that their brilliance was less apparent in what they produced for the blogosphere.

So I take it back. If you can do it well and your audiences will benefit from it, blog away! If not, turn the creative energies toward creating a great performance.

To pick up a little where I left off yesterday.

A good part of the rest of the first day was devoted to reading literature and discussing the difference between leadership and management and how you can exhibit leadership even if you aren’t an area or department head.

The second day we were a little bit more crunched for time because it had been requested that the ELI participants attend the plenary session and super sessions planned that day. (More on them in a later entry.) One of the exercises the institute leaders had us engage in was August Boal’s Forum Theatre practice. Members of the group were given a script and scenario and then the rest of us were encouraged to stop the action and replace one of the actors to move the situation in a more positive direction. I had heard about Forum Theatre before but never witnessed it in action. It was quite an interesting experience.

Another exercise we engaged in was Story Circle (explanation starts on pg 3). This activity is often to assist with conflict resolution. We used it to talk about people who have exhibited leadership in our lives and then examine the common elements.

There were a number of observations that came out of these activities. Some members of the group felt they would put their jobs in jeopardy if they attempted to shift the direction of meetings to make them more constructive. By which I don’t mean trying to use these activities in their organization, but rather recognizing where things were falling apart and trying to shift the tenor of the conversation. Other than working very gradually and subtly, we didn’t see any solution to this dilemma.

One of the biggest issues that came out of our discussions was succession planning. Many felt there wasn’t any effort being made to secure succession in arts organizations in general. A few felt like the discussion about it in their organizations was going something like this:

Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! WHO WILL TAKE OVER WHEN I AM GONE? THE NEXT GENERATION HAS NO DEDICATION. WHO WILL TAKE THE REINS?

Emerging Leader: me! me! mentor me! i love all this. look over here. i am energetic and excited.

Leader: OH WOE! OH WOE! ALL THAT I HAVE WORKED FOR DOWN THE DRAIN…..

To some degree we wondered if the existing leadership might be holding out for a clone of themselves when changing times required different skill sets.

After discussing the plenary and super sessions we had attended, we met with alumni of the Emerging Leadership Institute. This was apparently something that had never been done before. The alumni had been meeting earlier to discuss plans for Institute graduates.

Many of the alumni still felt a strong bond to those with whom they had gone through the program and some kept in touch. Unfortunately, the graduates as a whole didn’t keep in touch. At one time there was a person who put a lot of work into keeping the members abreast of each others’ activities. Once she stopped, everything fell apart.

The alumni (including the most recent batch) have expressed an interest in not only staying active on the listserv/discussion forums but also increasing the visibility of program graduates at the conference. Among the ways the graduates would like to participate are moderating panels and introducing speakers so that the same people don’t have to hustle from session to session.

Also, since participants in the institute are early in their careers and rather poor, the plan is to request some sort of break in conference fees for 5 years in return for volunteer work on the conference. The alumni that attended this year is only a small portion of those who have gone through the institute. The thought is to make it easy for graduates to continue to stay involved with APAP and the conference allowing them to expand their network of contacts and improve their leadership skills.

One of the concerns the alumni had was that the Emerging Leadership Institute isn’t perceived as important or valuable to arts organizations. One graduate was in the position to encourage and approve the participation of a colleague from her organization. She said her decision to do so was second guessed by her superiors who questioned it as a waste of time and money.

This was one of the reasons why the alumni are so interested in keeping everyone communicating. The better a resource of advice and answers the group becomes for its graduates, the more valuable attendance at the institute may be seen. This is also the reason why we want to be more visible at conferences as well.

I just wanted to observe–Like social networking sites (Myspace.com) and technology sites like YouTube, this is an example of users essentially taking the initiative to promote something they value and asking the host company for assistance in doing so. This was a theme that came up a lot during the conference–but I will talk about it later.

I should mention that despite the poor image organizations might have about the ELI, the 22 or so accepted were culled from a much larger pool of applicants. The process is fairly competitive and hopefully will become more so with alumni input.

Okay, so obviously there was a lot I liked about my experience. There were also a few places I felt things fell short. I have already submitted a written evaluation and had a discussion about all this with the group leaders so I am not telling tales out of school.

First- The application to the institute required us talk about the strengths, weaknesses and threats to our organization. I went expecting part of the conversation to include that. It never was.

According to one of the ELI leaders, they had been trying to get rid of that application for quite some time now since it did not reflect the content of the program and hoped to revamp the form for next year.

I don’t know if any sort of discussion in that area was supplanted by the request that we attend the plenary and super sessions or if it never occurs. I do think a discussion of the threats to the industry could have been valuable. I wouldn’t have been interested in an open grousing session where people laid out a lot of blame on the K-12 education system, home entertainment systems and the internet. The second day would have been the right time to have it. By then the ground rules for thoughtful discussion would have been firmly established.

But really, you can engage in discussion about threats to the industry in a lot of locations. What I think would have been really essential was an opportunity to address weaknesses in ones own leadership and how to better take a leadership role in ones current position. The environment was specifically designed to preserve confidentiality and to create bonds between participants to serve as resources for each other.

The more I think about it, the more I believe this was what many attendees were looking for. There were a lot of clues throughout the two days. Early on people specifically admitted they weren’t good at dealing with conflict. As I noted earlier, others mentioned that they were in dysfunctional environments. I went up to a person and told them I empathized with their situation based on my own history. And of course, some felt they were being overlooked as potential inheritors.

We were given some good tools and activities for dealing with conflict and affecting change when we returned to our organizations. I strongly suspect, however, that many in the group would have welcomed the opportunity to essentially engaged in a group therapy session, air their concerns and fears with colleagues and receive some advice and guidance in return.

I imagine that would have run things into a third day and even at the conference rate, it was pretty dang expensive to stay in those hotels! The whole experience was absolutely worthwhile. I am going to put some effort into making it even more so for those who follow by providing feedback and encouraging increased alumni involvement.

As I noted earlier, I was at the Arts Presenters Conference over the last week. I will be writing about the experience over the next couple days and maybe even longer. I took a lot of notes and picked up some literature I still need to digest.

On the whole, it was really a great experience. I took the opportunity to see a lot of artists and to talk to many colleagues. I debated my theories about press release writing and marketing.

I also spoke at some length to one of the APAP board members about creating discussion forums as I recently vowed to do. Of course, she challenged me to step up to my convictions and join the communications committee.

What I wanted to talk about in today’s entry was my participation in the Emerging Leadership Institute. The Institute is one of many conference leadership training efforts associated with a conference. I listed many of them in an earlier entry. In that same entry, I cited Andrew Taylor’s frustration that there are so many of these programs and none of them talk to each other.

At one point during the institute I spoke to the aforementioned board member, (who was helping to lead the institute), suggesting that if APAP was pondering conducting leadership activities regionally, they should first look to tap into the existing leadership seminar infrastructures like the National Arts Leadership Institute (NALI) rather than reinventing the wheel. I then sought out Philip Horn who is associated with NALI, asked him how things were going with the organization and told him what I had suggested.

Anyway, there were about 22 people attending the institute. Everyone was in the first 5-10 years of their career in presenting. Almost everyone was a presenter with a couple artist agents, a couple of service organizations but no artists. Apparently, this year was unusual in that there were no artists participating.

I also noticed and commented that nearly everyone was from either a university, city or state associated institution. There were few people from “independent” presenting organizations. I was told this was reflective of the general membership–it started 50 years as a university presenters organization and remains generally so. I noted this as another reason I think APAP should host open bulletin board forums. If the website is viewed as a resource for many, perhaps the conferences will be as well and attendance will diversify.

One thing I was surprised at was that the institute sessions were lead by an artist agent and a presenter rather than a professional leadership consultant. In my mind this was a strength because the leaders had a practical understanding of the environment in which the attendees were operating. Consultants tend to live in a more theoretical place. This type of objectivity is certainly useful in many cases.

In this particular instance I think the arrangement helped the group develop a trust bond with each other and the leaders much faster than if it had been lead by consultants. And lord knows, we had little enough time to waste.

One of the first major activities we engaged in was splitting into groups based on our major leadership style. One group was comprised of those who look at the big picture and storm full speed ahead toward it pulling everyone else along. Another group was the process oriented people who make sure everything is well organized and accounted for. The third group were people who took the feelings and concerns of others into account. The last group were those who celebrate every little victory and act as cheerleaders. Only two people identified themselves in this last group so they merged with the third group.

Each group was then assigned to go off and list what they felt were the hallmarks of that particular leadership style. I was in the third group and had joined it semi-reluctantly because it sounded a little too touchy-feelie, but suited me better than the descriptions of the other areas. Come to find out, most people in the group didn’t feel the category wholly defined them and that they had strong elements from the other areas. Many, like me, were very much lovers of spreadsheets and databases as decision making tools. The institute leaders are going to transcribe our notes and email them to us so I can touch on the specific elements of each style at a later date.

Briefly, my group decided our style was focussed on generating consensus and buy-in from people. It was felt that involving people in this way was important because the pay in the industry was so unrewarding. Many of us said that we knew we needed to be decisive at the end of the day even knowing that some people disagreed. A few admitted that they shied away from confrontation and these type of decisions. We felt it was important to have people like us around in a presenting environment because often artists visit us as the 35th stop on a 50 city tour and people like us work hard to make them feel safe and comfortable.

When the groups came together to discuss the hallmarks of our style, we had a little bit of a surprise. While we compared and contrasted ourselves against the other groups privately, we realized we were an amalgam with the other styles. One of the other groups, (I won’t say which) essentially dismissed our leadership style publicly generally characterizing us as touchie-feelie and really only good for organizing receptions, parties and soothing hurt feelings.

Now to be honest, a couple people in my group did admit that their boss was the yeller and their role was to motivate and organize the traumatized staff when meetings were over. That wasn’t what we saw as our primary function. For many of us, throwing parties and making people comfortable wasn’t even something we did directly but rather delegated and enjoined others to do.

After this stage of the exercise, we were asked to go back in our groups and create a definition of leadership. This information too will be emailed to me so I will address it more directly at a later time. When we got back in our group, we discussed the comments directed at our style during the session we just left. Then a number of us wryly observed we were probably the only group actually doing so. One member confirmed that before he left the other room he overheard one group launching into a discussion before all the members had assembled.

Despite the differences in our leadership styles, each group created remarkably similar definitions of what leadership was. Even though we used varying tactics to demonstrate leadership, we agreed what the ultimate product of those actions should be.

At this point my entry is getting pretty long so I will continue with my ELI experiences tomorrow.

One thing I want to say before I end is that the attendees of the institute really developed strong bonds with each other fairly quickly. I can’t speak for everyone in my leadership style group, I will say that while I can remember which leadership style group made the unflattering comments, I can’t remember who was actually a member of that group. In speaking with others from my particular sub-group at other times during the week that followed, no one ever said anything critical about any other institute attendee, much less commented that they were going to keep an eye on X because he/she was a member of “that” group.

I won’t be posting for a couple days because I am at the Arts Presenters Conference in NYC. I hadn’t posted earlier because I was using the opportunity to surprise my sister who works there and she occassionally reads the blog.

I have been participating in the Emerging Leadership Institute and been talking and listening to a whole bunch of interesting folks so I will have much to post when I return.

I have also met, albeit briefly, Andrew Taylor and Neill Archer Roan. Watch their blogs as well. This is a big conference and their experiences will undoubtably be wholly different from my own.

..and it is one of the many reasons I have a rule against quoting review blurbs provided in press packets. Contextomy is the practice of quoting people out of context. (The term caught my eye while I was brushing up on logical fallacies.) It has found applications in many arenas, but is widely practiced with movie and theatre reviews as noted in this Wikipedia article.

If you don’t like Wikipedia as a source (though most of that article is footnoted and cited pretty well) here is an article from Gelf Magazine on the subject with many amusing examples of the lengths publicists go to in order to make a dud sound great.
(Added: This article is actually the inaugural entry for a continuing series where the magazine tracks misleading quotes. Didn’t realize that when I first posted.)

I have a suspicion that this practice which is already being recognized by an increasingly skeptical audience may be approaching its final days. The difference is that in the past audiences were suspicious. Now they can access information on the web via their cell phones. As people walk out of movies and performances thinking “Geez, that was godawful, how could she say it was a cinematic tour de force?” they are going go online with their cell phones and search (reviewer) (show name) and discover that the reviewer said the show made Teletubbies look like a cinematic tour de force.

Without the drive home with a stop at Starbucks to buffer the disgust that will inspire them to go online and check things out, the distrust level could skyrocket. That is assuming people weren’t skeptical enough to check things out in advance.

And hey, if I am wrong and the practice flourishes for years to come, at least you have a fancy vocabulary word with which to impress your friends as you mutter “‘Superb and invigorating?’ Bah, it is probably just another case of contextomy..”

I heard a poem today that really electrified me because it succinctly and adroitly summarized the relationships between artist, consumer and a work. I was excited by “The Secret,” by Denise Levertov, because it points out that your perception of a work doesn’t need to be in synch with that of the creator for you to have an authentic experience.

For that reason alone I think every beginning level fine art and literature class should start with this poem. Handing it out at arts events to assuage the fears of attendees that they are stupid if they don’t “get it” would be valuable, too.

The only flaw with this is that people have to understand the message of the poem without much need of explanation. Lengthy instruction about what they are supposed to think runs counter to the whole intent after all.

The poem also talks about how revisiting a work multiple times can be rewarding. Often I wonder if people don’t recognize this about art: How there are valid reasons to read a book, listen to a symphony work, see a play, a sculpture, a dance piece many times over the course of your life.

I could go on and on for a bit talking about what great messages I see in the poem. As I said though, that is a bit counterproductive. I am including the poem below and hope if you don’t find it particularly inspiring, you at least enjoy the sentiment.

“The Secret” Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line.

I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

While revisiting some of the resource links on the blog, the title of a piece on the Community Arts Network site caught my eye- Putting Culture Back in Agriculture. The piece is a grant report for the University of Wisconsin Extension, but don’t let that dissuade you from reading it. It is not dry in the least and is very inspirational.

As a small town boy who goes nostalgic at the smell of cow manure, there were a lot of tidbits that caught my eye. The first was the vision of one of the earliest university presidents, Charles Van Hise.

“I would have no mute, inglorious Milton in this state-I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him, and that is only possible through university extension supplementing the schools and colleges.”

My imagination was also set afire by the story of John Steuart Curry

“…hired as the nation’s first visual artist-in-residence, with a job description of helping anyone on the farm – farmer, farm wife, farm youth – to paint. …he believed that everyone has the ability to paint what was most alive to him – that it was just a matter of enabling people to do so. He emphasized personal vision over technique. As a result, paintings by farmers who worked with Curry are dramatic, breathtakingly alive.”

I am sure the reality isn’t as ideal as my imagination makes it given that Curry was going around Wisconsin during the middle of the Great Depression. It is hard to imagine him being welcomed with open arms at least initially. In fact, according to the piece farmers are a little suspicious of artists in these days of prosperity (relative to the 1930s).

One of the observations the grant writers make as they report about the project is that “Rural arts groups have tended to emulate urban arts groups, and management books have suggested that nothing but scale distinguishes urban and rural arts groups. More and more, we are realizing that this is not the case.”

The writers openly admit that their initial plan of having a statewide conference where they were setting the agenda was probably wrongheaded. It was only due to having to cut back their planned activities because they weren’t fully funded that they feel they ended up stumbling on a much more constructive approach.

In the interests of brevity, I will leave it to you to read how they ended up supporting projects at four locations around the state and what the projects entailed. Some of the project conclusions that jumped right out at me came from the program at a place called The Wormfarm Institute.

Conclusions included: 1) putting ‘agri’ back into ‘culture’ is perhaps more important than putting ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture’; 2) culture and agriculture are interdependent and this does not mean that ‘artists interpret farmers’ lives; nor does it mean artists are marketers or political mouthpieces for farmers;…

There were a plethora of valuable observations throughout the report at the other sites, including why it was better for them to have taken this route than implementing their initial conference plan. The next thing that really jumped out at me was in the “What We Learned” section.

That ‘art’ is indistinguishable from ‘culture,’ and that this is a good thing and it resonates with people. ‘Art’ may conjure up the stage, galleries, appropriate audience behavior. Even the word can leave people out; where blending creativity with food, traditions, history, meals and conversation communicates and invites people in.

This is a loaded observation for two reasons. First, because solutions to problems like the ones they had getting artists and farmers to talk to each other productively go deeper than just saying culture rather than art. The reporter writers certainly know this. Honestly, I am making this point because I have come across a number of egregious examples of late where people seem convinced they can solve their problems by shuffling terms and buzzwords.

The second reason is that the observation touches upon the whole “What is Art?” and “Art vs. Craft” debate. Yes, they seem to be celebrating rural culture more than art. But they are also saying art and culture are the same and are specifically getting artists, whom they label separately as a group from the farmers, involved in the program so they presumably have something to offer.

So then, is a loaf of homemade bread equivalent to a painting?

The debate has never been clearly resolved in my view but it can be fun to engage in from time to time. Certainly for me a loaf of homemade bread has a greater emotional and sensory appeal than most paintings. I am actually tearing up as I write this remembering baking (and eating!) bread.