Business Models

What If They Don’t Want To Be An Executive Director?

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On the Harvard Business Review blog site, Anne Kreamer asks “What If You Don’t Want to Be a Manager?” (h/t Daniel Pink) where she talks a little about the alienation one might feel moving from being a producer of material to a manager. While she talks about an experience in a corporate environment, it was easy to see the same situation cropping up in the arts when someone moves from creating content to producing revenue reports and reviewing labor laws.

One of the options Kreamer suggests, other than leaving the company and striking out on your own, revolves around changing the existing work environment. It was her last two sentences that resonated with me (thus my emphasis).

This is something more companies need to address. To remain globally competitive, organizations need to devise innovative ways to encourage and reward creativity. The unorthodox titles embraced by start-ups — directors of fun, ministers of information — can seem ridiculous, but the emphasis on improvising new ways of doing business is important. Furthermore, research conducted by Office Team found that 76% of employees did not want their boss’s job. If employees are no longer responding to the old carrots, it’s time for companies to establish new means of rewarding talent.

This reminded me of the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead reports I had written on in the past that reported young arts leaders were chomping at the bit to gain greater responsibility in their arts organization, but didn’t necessarily want to assume an executive role.

It got me to thinking that while there is a lot of discussion about exploring new business models for arts organizations like the B Corporation and L3C, maybe there needs to be a corresponding discussion about changing arts job descriptions so that people actually want to assume the roles.

Two issues that seem to rise to the top for executive directors is work-life balance and that the position seems 75% about fundraising and increasing. It may be time to institutionalize the idea that marketing and development aren’t the sole province of those departments by spreading the responsibility around in job descriptions.

I have read a lot of criticism of Michael Kaiser’s ideas, but I have never seen anyone say he is wrong when he advocates for paying attention to the interests of potential donors and connecting them with your corresponding needs rather than viewing them as the source of a lot of money to answer the need you have prioritized.

With the proper training and expectations declared at the outset, marketing, education and artistic staff could take a more proactive role in identifying, engaging and meeting with donors than they do at present. Hopefully freeing the executive director to balance their personal and professional lives, improve their job satisfaction, connect back with the parts of the organization that excite them, and perhaps encourage others to crave their position.

The same can obviously be done with marketing where development, education and artistic, etc. are more active in expressing and advancing the organizational message.

I think people are already cognizant of this interdependent need based on a Twitter exchange between Adam Thurman, Howard Sherman and others this past September.

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Stuff To Ponder: The Fairness and Transparency of Ticket Lines

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Seeing and hearing about people queuing up this year for Black Friday sales on the Monday prior reminded me about an article Tim Roberts wrote on Fullhouses.org this September. In it, Roberts asked if making people line up for theatre tickets was really the fairest way to distribute them.

I am sure the British Commonwealth nations who sponsor Fullhouses.org don’t experience the homicidal shopping frenzy that is Black Friday, but it occurred to me that it is something of a double standard to expect arts organizations to be fairer than retail stores.

It isn’t fair to have to take time off of work to stand in line for theatre tickets, but people camp out for a week to get $50 off a flat screen TV and no one blinks, eh?

Arts organizations are expected to operate more like businesses, aren’t we? Why not make people line up and wait? We may be worried about hurting our relationships with our patrons, but it doesn’t seem to hurt retail stores even when customers know they are being manipulated with sale prices.

Shakespeare in the Park in NYC has a long history of making people line up to get free tickets to their shows. And from their website, apparently people are queuing up before 6 am to be online for the 1 pm distribution. My suspicion is that their policy of randomly distributing seats rather than giving the closest seats to those at the head of the line is probably meant to dissuade people from lining up even earlier. It probably also keeps things from getting as emotionally charged as the Black Friday conflicts.

I did a couple posts on the subject a few years back. Now that I look at their site again, it appears they now offer an online lottery of sorts for tickets. While there are some alternative options, I am guessing your best bet is probably still going to be on the line in the park.

I know there have been some grumblings about the Shakespeare in the Park ticketing process, but I think their long history of requiring people to line up proves it is a viable model.

Back to the original question, is it really important to be fair? People generally have no awareness of whether the organization they are buying from is for-profit or non-profit. They are mostly motivated by the content of the show and tolerate quite a bit of unfairness.

People will go online to buy tickets and are poised to make a purchase at the exact moment they go on sale only to find they are all snatched up in a blink by automated processes. The fact people will still crave those tickets at a higher price on the re-sale sites empowers the very practice people say they despise.

A physical line is actually solid proof of your relative standing. If the line snakes down 5 blocks and you don’t get tickets, you may be disappointed but you could see that there really were 500 individuals ahead of you who had invested more time and effort than you did into making the purchase. While more inconvenient, it would seem a much more transparent and fairer option than online and over the phone ticket sales.

What I think the defining factor is is what your audience values as the basis of your relationship with them. In terms of retailers, the whole relationship is based on price. JC Penny found out people don’t care if they are being manipulated, just so long as the price is right.

So even if most people don’t discern between for and non-profit performing arts events, as a non-profit you can’t pursue a relationship based on price for the simple reason that price conscious people don’t make $1000 donations on top of their ticket purchases.

Patrons of non-profit organizations also don’t generally encounter having all the available tickets disappear in a matter of moments so aren’t likely to crave the transparency of physical lines.

Ultimately, how you handle the process of ticket sales is going to depend on your community and what they value. As a non-profit you are working on showing value in areas retailers often ignore.

There is part of me that thinks that if people are willing to queue up to buy something, either physically or virtually, it is hard to buy the sort of buzz and publicity that generates. It may be ill-advised to try to replace that in deference to some sense of fairness if people are not resentful about it.

Even if they are, it could be the sense of excitement inspiring that resentment. People are more likely to be angry that they have to go to work rather than standing on line to buy tickets if they drive by and there is a line of people threatening to buy up all the tickets before lunch break. Without that line, there is less urgency to see the show.

Before Thanksgiving I was listening to NPR as they interviewed people who had already planned to skip Thanksgiving dinner with their families in order to camp out in line–or they made arrangements to essentially tailgate their Thanksgiving dinner. As much as I thought they were crazy, it was clear even over the radio that people viewed the whole thing as a rite of passage type bonding experience.

I don’t think it was that long ago that people regularly did this sort of thing to get tickets for concerts too. I am betting there is an element of the concert tasting all the sweeter for the effort invested too.

The more I think about it, if you are going to have a physical line up, I think Shakespeare in the Park’s solution of providing a chance to be selected to receive tickets provides the best balance. You get the uncertain convenience of online acquisition balanced by the inconvenient certainty of gaining a ticket of your own merit by lining up early. I am not exactly sure how Shakespeare in the Park handles it, but if they keep the percent of the house they are releasing online a secret, they can vary it according to demand and maintain their attendance numbers.

We DO NOT Need Another Abraham Lincoln

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Last month, Drew McManus posted that we need another Abraham Lincoln. He didn’t go into many details, but I wonder what he could be thinking. Since he suggests replacing Henry Ford with Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar, perhaps he is implying musicians need to be freed from the slavery of assembly line performance where standardization makes one concert interchangeable with any other concert.

All Abraham Lincoln exemplifies is lead from behind disengagement. When Republicans met in Chicago to nominate someone for president, Lincoln was in Springfield content to let his surrogates drum up support. After he was nominated for president, he didn’t even hit the campaign trail, again content to let surrogates like Henry Seward, a former rival for the nomination, speak for him while he sat in Springfield never making a speech.

Heck, Lincoln was so disengaged, he wasn’t even going to go vote on election day until someone pointed out it was his civic responsibility to do so for state and local races also being run that day.

This is not the type of leadership the arts need, especially orchestras. They need leaders who are engaged and involved with all their constituencies.

You may say that this is unfair and the Lincoln was only following the custom of the time and you would be correct. In Team of Rivals , Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential race, Stephen Douglas,

“Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country…becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”

Even though Douglas was supportive of the spread of slavery, shouldn’t we look to him and the strength of character it took to break with tradition and face criticism when the country was at the brink of a national crisis as an example of leadership for the arts?

All right, so…. admittedly I am exploiting the fact Drew was a little vague about what characteristics of Lincoln are needed and quoting from a book whose premise is that Lincoln was a good organizer of people rather than a solitary leader to refute Drew’s thesis. Lincoln was faced by challenging circumstances which forced him to alter his position and practices throughout his career. That is what makes it so easy for those with opposing political view points to claim him as their own. It is easy to cherry pick from different periods of his life.

Not to mention that some people’s strength lies in mobilizing capable subordinates while others are really only effective when they step to the fore. There is probably more blame to be attached to bowing to pressure and adopting practices that run counter to your leadership strengths than to resisting popular expectations in order to operate effectively.

The fact that I was being intentionally inflammatory doesn’t diminish the fact that we are at a crossroads in history that will demand changes in behavior. Some aspects of how we operate may never change.

Lincoln stayed at home and didn’t make speeches because he didn’t want to commit to any course of action or give the newspapers anything to misconstrue. Today we expect presidential candidates to make an appearance everywhere, but they still try their hardest not to commit to anything specific and fear what the media may make of what they say.

For his time, Lincoln was actually rather politically savvy and aware of all the different constituencies he needed to please. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the reasons why Henry Seward didn’t get the nomination was because he spent the summer touring Europe while Lincoln was shoring up his support among key groups.

The changes the arts world need to effect are numerous or else there would be little for myself and hundreds of other arts bloggers and writers to talk about. So in effect we DO need someone like Lincoln as a leader, one who can recognize they stand at the crux of complicated times that requires one to change and respond in a nuanced manner.

There is a lot to admire in Henry Ford. He did much to improve the lives of his workers, but like the parts of his automobiles, they were viewed as parts that could be replaced without any impact to the viability of the company. Ford created a system where the means of production was low skilled labor. That is not necessarily the case with the arts.

Expectations Feed The Disease

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Thai-Klingon cellist Jon (J’onn) Silpayamanant commented today on a post I did on economist Tyler Cowen’s discussion of Baumol’s cost disease as it relates to the arts. He quickly followed up with another comment apologizing because he assumed I was talking about piece Cowen did in 1996 rather than a more recent post on his blog where he makes much the same point.

I started to write a slightly snarky response wondering if Cowen had been more efficient writing the more recent piece because he had better technology and 16 years of thinking about it to back him up or if he was subject to cost disease because it took just as long to write four or five as it did back in 1996, inflation has made his time more expensive and he had to distill down 16 years more experience into a thoughtful entry.

At that point it occurred to me that every time people talk about cost disease related to the arts, they do it in connection with the actual performance. Other parts of creating art has actually benefited from greater efficiencies. Computers aid the design of performance elements as well the transmission and discussion of those designs allowing them to be received and acted upon much quicker than in the past. The marketing and advertising of the performances are likewise aided by technology in terms of design and dissemination. LED lights promise to cut electricity bills by an enormous amount once the ability to control and insure the quality of the light improves.

The quality of the performance itself also has much more potential of benefiting from technology in terms of the amount of research the performers, directors, choreographers, conductors, etc can do in preparation. Every aspect of the performance can be informed by concepts promulgated half the world away. In many respects, the audience is getting a much better product than they were years ago and it is made possible less expensively than in the past.

In fact, they are in a position of being far more informed about a performance they are about to see than a person with the same level of experience with the arts 10 years ago might have. Of course, the whole issue we have is whether the audience values that experience or not.

Had Cowen used this approach in support of his argument that the arts aren’t really impacted by cost disease, I might have been a little more receptive to it.

In some respects, I think that non-profit performing arts have done a great job of employing technology to keep their costs under control, (often to the detriment of the artists, orchestra musicians in particular these days), in comparison with the movie industry where technology has resulted in sky rocketing costs. They employ wide spread distribution options like movie theatres, DVDs and streaming as a substitute for economizing.

It is often said there is a lesson in that for the performing arts but just like the independent film maker, the small arts organization would have to depend on a relationship with a big company with the resources to replicate something on the scale of the Metropolitan Opera and National Theatre broadcasts.

Of course, many times audiences demand the spectacle that technology brings to the movies and some of that carries over to even the solo artists that Silpayamanant mentions. While touring solo might have been a cost cutting measure at one time, that often isn’t the case any more with the huge tours many major acts take on the road.

As an aside, I wonder at the economics of J-Pop groups like AKB48 which has 66 active members spread out across four performing teams. Even though they don’t tour, that is a lot of people to support.

But getting back to the discussion of Baumol’s cost disease, even though people cite the fact it still takes as long to perform a particular work as it did X hundred years ago, it probably really isn’t those two hours of performance that is the costliest part of the process, it is everything else that surrounds it. Because of audience expectations about their experience more preparation precedes the performance, much of which involves salaries and benefits.

As I noted above, technology has brought efficiencies and quality to many parts of the preparatory process. What is it coming down to now is balancing the expectations about the quality of the experience and the cost of delivering it with what people are willing to pay. Right now the focus seems to be on how much of the product can be trimmed back before people notice and become concerned with the drop in what they value.

While this is translating into seeing how many musicians an orchestra can cut before people figure the music is suffering, you see the same thing manifesting in other areas of your life as well. Just try to buy a half gallon of ice cream these days. You will find it is 1.75, maybe 1.5 quarts.

I don’t think that is really a sustainable practice. There should be an corresponding push to shift customer expectations too, and not toward accepting less ice cream and music for the same price, but rather expecting a slightly different sort of experience surrounding a quality performance. I am not sure exactly what it would look like. I know I would like it to be less structured and more educational than what we have now.