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Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Accounts Ledger?

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This weekend I got to do something I waited an entire year to do…go to Decatur, IL. Your first response may be to wonder why the heck I was looking forward to that for an entire year. The reason is because the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference was being held at Millikin University.

At last year’s conference, I had learned about Millikin’s student run arts businesses and was eager to see it in person. I will just say the experience did not disappoint. Though I am still slogging through my notes from various sessions at different student run ventures so my readers will need to be patient for at least another day before learning more about that portion of the experience.

What I wanted to discuss today is a session I attended on one of the bugbears central to arts entrepreneurship — financial literacy. When people talk about artists needing to be more business minded, that is probably one of the top three issues they envision needing attention.

Of the seven people on the panel, two were accountants that work closely with artists, Jessica Jones and Elaine Grogan Luttrull. It was something that Jessica said that really gelled the whole subject for me. She mentioned that there is an emotional and cultural barrier everyone experiences when it comes to money and finances. It isn’t just people in the arts and it isn’t about numbers being inherently intimidating. She said that she has helped engineers and scientists who work with numbers all day and they have the same issues as everyone else when it comes to finances.

I don’t remember if it was Elaine or Jessica who mentioned it, but they were somewhat opposed to the concept that people should learn “basic skills” because the term means different things to different people. A CPA can look at materials and identify revenues sources in seconds whereas other people need to make an effort and consider the skills far from basic. Jessica commented that you can’t just carve out a top 10 or 20 list of things people need to know, rather people need to become comfortable with the language, concepts and terminology so they know what to ask and how to understand a conversation about their financial situation.

Ken Weiss from University of North Carolina reinforced this idea saying that it isn’t just important for people to know terminology, but the relevance. His school does a session on intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, etc. with a guest speaker who gets the students engaged by helping them understand how these issues help their career.

This idea emerged multiple times in different sessions at the conference. People discussed how their students had the “a-ha!” moment when they came to the realization that they needed to know something for themselves and not just because the professor said they need to know it.

One of the two CPAs spoke about how helpful it was for people to learn what resources were available in terms of things like software to handle accounting, sales records, etc., and then create operational plans and procedures based on whatever resources were most suited to their needs.

That way you aren’t constantly faced with the prospect of processing your numbers and you can spend the majority of your time doing the work you love. Sometimes the biggest impediment is being unaware that these resources exist and being intimidated by the thought of keeping track of it all. Ultimately it comes back to haunt you when it comes time to report your income for taxes.

Others on the panel commented that some arts disciplines were worse than others in recognizing the need to teach students skills to help manage their careers. However with the general concern about university students taking on so much debt, many schools are moving toward making financial literacy a skill that all students must possess.

If You Can’t Poach ‘Em, Praise ‘Em

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A few months back when Ceci Dadisman and Drew McManus first floated the idea of recognizing Creative Arts Administrators to the rest of us ArtHacker authors, my first thought was that the project shouldn’t just be about who is doing a great job, but rather who you would love to poach from another company.

I have mentioned this idea in something of an off-handed way in my posts from time to time. We frequently hear about people being lured or headhunted away in relation to for-profit companies. A recent discussion my board had about recruiting new members cited the fact that one woman was pursued and lured to a new job by another company in town as part of her qualifications and value to our board.

You rarely hear this sort of thing in the non-profit realm. I don’t know if people are concerned about being perceived as cutthroat. Perhaps more likely, they don’t feel they can offer pay, benefits or work environment competitive enough to entice people to leave their current job. Intangible factors like idealism about the work being done might also come into play.

All this being said, having a more competitive job market can be beneficial. First of all, it can raise employee morale if they are being courted or see colleagues being courted. It gives a sense that someone external to the organization is paying attention and recognizes their contribution. Not to mention contributing to the sense that a path to advancement exists within the industry.

This type of competition can also help justify the organization’s overhead ratio and funding requests if they can do more than cite the hypothetical need to offer good salaries to retain people. If you are losing talented people to poaching by other non-profits, that says something. (Granted, if you are losing people to poor salaries, that says something as well.)

I should note that I am not just daydreaming about how great it would be if non-profit arts organizations had to compete for the best talent. Drew McManus and I recently had a conversation where we both observed that search firms were increasingly being listed in job postings.

We were a little wary about whether this was a good thing since some of the firms don’t appear to have any experience conducting searches in the arts and culture field. This could be another indication of boards of directors looking to run the arts “more like business” and may result in organizations being lead by people with little practical background in the arts.

But it could also be an indication that arts organizations are seeing the need to have the recruitment and hiring process handled with greater care and alacrity than they possess.

So in time news that people are being actively headhunted away from an organization may come with greater regularity. Depending on what generalizations about Millennials you subscribe to, this may have the effect of attracting a greater number of very talent people to non-profit work as they pursue a desire to do meaningful work. But with that may come a lot more job switching than arts organizations are used to.

So granted, there is a fair degree of speculation in all this. Bottom line though. If you know someone in the arts you would really love to have working with you, but don’t feel like you could snatch them away —Nominate them on ArtsHacker.

And if you are working with an amazing person right now and having them snatched away would break your heart, nominate them on ArtsHacker and let them know their work is valued.

And if you are afraid calling attention to a person’s awesomeness is going to see them headhunted and it is better to keep the person hidden from sight, well you may already be creating an uncomfortable work environment that will cause them to leave anyhow.

Info You Can Use: Revise Your View Of Contracts

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I don’t regularly crosspost about things I have written on Arts Hacker. I sort of feel like I am cheating readers by trying to make one post do double duty on two websites.

However, I have a post today about a session on contracts conducted by the partners at GG Arts Law at the recent Arts Midwest conference.  As I mention in that post, contracts and legal issues always seem to be a concern for arts managers. I have attended multiple conferences in different regions and contracts and law sessions are always well attended, even if they deal with the exact same subject matter as the year before.

What grabbed me about this session was that Brian and Robyn from GG Arts Law started by telling attendees to shift their thinking about why contracts exist and what they are used for.  On television and in the movies, we often see someone suffering under the constraints of a contract they signed and perhaps they get saved by some obscure provision on the bottom of page 731.

While that might be closer to reality for big corporations, it isn’t really applicable on the scale most arts organizations operate on.

Which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen or people don’t try. I believe it was Brian from GG Arts Law that related a story about a contract that was being translated from Spanish where the person was only going to translate part of the contract because they intended to spring a “gotcha!” on the other party using the contents of the untranslated portion.

What Brian and Robin tried to convey was that contracts should be used to memorialize the details of an agreement at the end of a conversation rather than be used at the start of a conversation.  If someone follows up an inquiry by immediately sending their contract, don’t be afraid to start taking notes or marking it up with the changes you want. There are no iron-clad, non-negotiable industry standards no matter how much people may swear there are.

Even though people are often intimidated by contracts or see it as a bludgeon with which to enforce behavior, that isn’t really what it is for.

Take a look at my post and give the concepts there some serious thought. It may change your whole relationship with the contracting process.

There will be two other posts about contracts coming up on Arts Hacker. The second should appear on Wednesday and is a continuation of my goal to provide general information about contracts. The third is more focused on collaboration and commission contracts and will appear at some point in the future.

Non-Profit Arts Version Of “The Talk”

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From what I have been reading, the new Fair Labor Standards Act regulations regarding overtime pay is going be pretty tough for non-profit arts organizations to handle. If you aren’t up on the news, the salary threshold part of the overtime exemption criteria will rise from $23,660 to $47,476. Anyone making less than that or who doesn’t meet the other criteria for exemption will need to be paid overtime.

Generally, most of the criteria hasn’t changed so the big issue for non-profits is the salary threshold. Last month, American Theatre did a pretty good job of covering how the new rules will impact theaters specifically. There have been articles about non-profits in general, but few that discussed how arts organizations were planning to address the change.

The reason I say this new requirement is going to be tough is because some of the comments of the interviewees made me cringe. One person mentioned the benefit of staffing their organization with young 20-somethings to take advantage of the fact they would still be living at home and under their parents healthcare. Another respondent estimated the cost of living in their anonymous mid-size Midwest city was $20,000/year which I suspect is misinformed. The lowest costs of living, even for small Midwest cities, I found hovered around $25,000.

While I cringed at some of the tactics people were generating to deal with the projected expense they were going to incur, I didn’t view them as particularly extraordinary. The alternative approaches being considered are absolutely typical of the problem solving process arts organizations engage in. This is the sort of unorthodox creativity you have to employ to pull things off in the non-profit arts.

The problem is that depending on stop-gap measures and pressure of organizational culture will no longer be viable in the face of this new salary threshold and expectations of a work-life balance that new employees are bringing to the workplace. The gulf will literally and figuratively be too wide to straddle.

This is going to be one of those situations that is going to result in a lot of negative news before it gets better. Doubtless there will be cases we will be amazed have lingered only to explode somewhat scandalously a decade down the road (or sooner since the salary threshold for non-exempt moves to $51,000 in 2020).

The situation is likely to force long delayed conversations between arts organizations, their funders, boards, audiences and employees about what is really required to operative effectively.

The only consolation is that this conversation will still be way easier than talking to your kids about sex.

I don’t think I am being especially prescient when I say now would be a good time to develop a cogent response to the statement “Arts need to be self-supporting or close,” and start distributing the talking points to everyone. It is guaranteed that sentiment will be expressed constantly.

At the same time, a serious discussion about business plans and legal structures employed by arts organizations may become unavoidable. We may see groups recreate and reinvent themselves. Especially if non-profits are permitted to retain their assets as they transition into a corporate entity with a different tax structure.

All this being said, the American Theatre piece discusses how organizations are already making efforts to implement constructive measures to prepare for these changes.

Maybe around this time next year when people have been operating under the new rules for 9-10 months, I will suggest to Drew McManus that ArtsHacker do a series on some practices and restructuring efforts that initially seem to be working. The salary changes are going to have too significant an impact on the arts industry not to share advice about what has been successful for the organization and beneficial to employees.

In the meantime, I will work on learning more about the implications of FLSA rules in order to provide tips about how to prepare for the changes.

For example, many organizations may not know that use of comp time to offset “binge-and-purge” schedules around production time is already illegal  and is about to become more so for a wider range of employees.

But this kind of comp-hours time-shifting isn’t kosher under FLSA provisions. If a non-overtime-exempt employee works 60 hours one week, say, they can’t offset that by clocking just 20 the next week; they’ll be earning their regular salary for the 20-hour week and time-and-a-half for the hours over 40 in the 60-hour week. This was always the case under the FLSA, but with the new $47, 746 threshold, it will apply to many more employees than before.

Info You Can Use: Success May Result In Reduced Donations (Big MAY)

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I was surprised by a recent piece on Non-Profit Quarterly reporting the results of a recent study finding that the more successful an arts organization was in attracting an audience, the more donations will decline.  The theory the researchers had was that success made an arts organization look less needy.

I was skeptical of this based on what I have observed, so I did a little digging to find the full article which appeared behind a paywall in Public Performance and Management Review. The details of their finding are a little more nuanced.

Even though the researchers make the statement in their conclusion that,

“The evidence suggests that better performance outcomes in terms of increased awareness and attendance have a negative rather than a positive influence on charitable giving.”

The discussion of their findings seems to suggest this is only true in regard to foundations.

For a 10% geometric mean increase in an organization’s attendance, the amount of all contributions received in the following year decreases by 0.72%

If we separate private giving into its three components (individual, corporate, and foundation giving), this negative relationship is statistically significant for foundation grants only. The amount of all charitable giving decreases by 0.08%

They don’t really make any statements about how individuals and corporations handle their giving in response to increased attendance and awareness.

Other Items of Interest:

Some other interesting things they found was that:

“It is worth noting that the amount of donations appears to be unresponsive to both government funding and program revenue.”

Basically, donation amounts don’t seems to be impacted by the amount of government funding or program revenue an organization receives in a year.

•Giving away free tickets may slightly help donations

“The result for increased free access lends some support to the first hypothesis: a 10% increase in the number of free tickets provided by arts and cultural nonprofits results in a 0.34% increase in contributions. This positive relationship is, however, only marginally significant.”

•Younger organizations tend to receive greater support than older organizations.

Donors, however, appear to prefer relatively young organizations, at least in the case of arts and cultural nonprofits. When we divide private giving into its three components, organization age has a negative relationship with institutional giving but is not a significant factor for individual donors.

Big Surprise

Despite what we read about donors really scrutinizing administrative overhead, for arts and cultural non-profit organizations at least, high overhead is not penalized.

…donors to arts and cultural nonprofits do not care about fundraising efficiency, which is measured by the average cost to raise one dollar. As the cost to raise a dollar increases, donations increase rather than decrease. On average, a 10% decrease in fundraising efficiency (i.e., an increase in the fundraising cost to raise a dollar of donation) leads to a 0.72% increase in the total amount of contributions. In other words, an organization would solicit slightly more donations, as compared to other organizations of similar type and size that spend less per dollar raised.

[…]

This finding is counterintuitive and provides no support for the prevailing assumption that donors view high costs of raising funds negatively. The results show that donors to arts and cultural nonprofits, especially foundation funders, reward rather than punish nonprofits that spend more to raise a dollar of donation.

The idea that the appearance of success is what helps you raise money is what provided the impetus for my deeper investigation. I think we all have a feeling that a few big organizations seem to attract big donations. Because the researchers are only looking at data collected via the Cultural Data Project, the social cachet of being seen to donate to a popular organization isn’t factored into the results. The authors do acknowledge that popularity and visibility do seem to be factors.

They suggest that big organizations are attracting larger donations because they are pouring more money into their fundraising budgets and aren’t being penalized for incurring the overhead expense.

I was interested by their observation that organizational size didn’t seem to impact corporate giving. I would assume visibility in the community, and therefore the ability to make a business more visible, is a factor in corporate giving more than organizational size.

Caveats

The researchers admit that since very little research has been done on these specific questions before, more study is required to gain an accurate picture. They say the statistical significance of the relationship between increased success and reduction in donations is marginal.

They also note that they use attendance as their measure of success which may be a poor criteria since it has no bearing on the effectiveness or quality of the experience for an audience member.

Likewise they note that using website visits as a measure of awareness might not be valid for many organizations whose communities may depend on print media, mailings and word of mouth to raise their awareness.

Value Of The Arts At Most Intrinsic-It Fixes You For You, Not For Other People

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I am traveling to the Art Midwest Conference today where I will first take a seminar about using Google Analytics which Drew McManus promises will be akin to a heroic journey. Since I have intentionally opted not to fly through Chicago O’Hare this time around, hopefully his seminar will be the only heroic saga I undertake.

As always when I travel, I have dug back into the archives a little for some posts. Back in 2008 I wrote about a column on the value of the arts that Robert Fulford wrote.

Last month I wrote about how it was inadvisable in the long term to talk about the instrumental value of the arts in terms of education and economy. Fulford notes that the “makes you a better human being” argument is equally fraught with peril.

The arts won’t make you virtuous and they won’t make you smart, but they are nevertheless my faith, firmly installed in the part of me where some people put religion.

Great art, alas, has sometimes been loved by monsters, famously the Nazis. George Steiner, the eminent critic, delivers the bad news: “We know that a man can play Bach and Schubert and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”

[…]

On a more trivial level, we also can’t claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. I knew a man who had Shakespeare, Verdi, Beethoven and the rest of the gang played at him by the greatest performers of his time, night after night for a lifetime. Did no good. He remained gloomy, narrow and hopelessly addicted to conventional wisdom. He was like the oaf in Love’s Labour’s Lost who has “never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book, so his intellect is not replenished….”

Fulford says the value of the arts is what you, as the individual gets out of it. Presumably while the arts didn’t improve his gloomy friend for others around him, his friend found some value to himself in it. Right there is probably the value of the arts at it’s most intrinsic.

What, then, does it guarantee? Those who give it their time and love are offered the chance to live more expansive, more enjoyable and deeper lives.

[…]

The arts also let us live, imaginatively, within the world where they are produced. They give us an alternative human narrative — and perhaps that’s their most generous gift to us. History as seen through the arts doesn’t portray demagogues and soldiers as the greatest figures. It’s a history where delicate, fascinating traditions are handed down the generations, developed, subverted, forgotten and rediscovered, all within a drama that makes reality created by politicians seem pale and predictable.

Does Your City Need An Arts Bureaucrat?

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Given the Labor Day holiday and the fact that Wells Fargo seems to think kids need to set aside their childish artistic dreams for real career choices, it seems appropriate to do a post on interesting, constructive arts careers.

Jennifer Lasik, Arts Coordinator for the City of Evanston, IL makes a “Case for an ‘Arts Bureaucrat’ in City Government.”

While her boss hates the use of that term, (the real job title is Cultural Arts Coordinator), she sees the arts bureaucrat role as one of the most important parts of her job. (my emphasis)

In public performance or art installation, there is often perceived conflict between what the artists want to accomplish and the objectives of the City regarding liability, maintenance, budgets, and code regulation.

[…]

While intended primarily as a resource for the arts community, City staff has appreciates having someone who “speaks artist,” can plan and evaluate artistic projects, and listen to and fine-tune artists’ proposals to address various departmental questions and concerns. Both groups trust me to negotiate a balance between the artistic and practical aspects of the project, helping artists through the application and permit process, and cutting through some of the bureaucratic red tape that can cause frustration and bottleneck. The time and energy this position saves for both the City staff and the artists is a compelling argument for an arts bureaucrat position.

She lays out the scope of her position which makes it sound like this position, created in 2013, was the next step in a process in which Evanston was amenable. She notes, for example that:

“Public Works uses a “Complete Streets” model, which means that when maintenance or repair work is done, other goals such as public art, accessibility and sustainability are factored into the rebuild.

At the end of her post, she provides some suggestions for municipalities that don’t have the capacity for a full time arts bureaucrat, including appointing a staff person to act as an “arts whisperer” to help facilitate communications.

Failing To Your Back Up Plan

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Harvard Business Review had a short piece about a study that found that having a back-up plan often undermines one’s motivation to succeed.  The interviewer specifically uses an example of having a back-up plan to an arts career in one her questions. (not to mention the first image you see is a dancer en pointe in one sneaker)

So, to use another cliché, we need to always act as if failure is not an option?
The punch line of this research could certainly be this: If you prepare for failure, you may be more likely to fail. But the practical advice we would give is more nuanced than that. We’re not suggesting that you always avoid making backup plans. But maybe you could hold off on doing so until you’ve put as much effort as possible into your primary goal. If you’re a manager of a team working toward a certain objective, consider asking a second group, consisting of different people, to come up with the backup plan rather than your A team. If you’re an entrepreneur, think about committing to one start-up idea for a period of time, instead of planning for and being ready to jump to another project as soon as things go south.

My aunt always told my cousin, an aspiring dancer, that she should get a teaching degree to fall back on. Was she wrong?
Success and performance depend on many factors. For some people, not making a backup plan might indeed be beneficial in helping them put their best effort forward. Some parents assume that having a backup plan is always a good thing, yielding nothing but positive outcomes. Given our findings, we’d suggest that they at least consider the possible negative effects.

Before I go any further, lets remind ourselves that achieving a high level of performance in any endeavor is not necessarily rewarded with remuneration or acclaim. Often there is no direct relationship between financial success and ability.  Jihae Shin who authored the study states that plainly – success and performance depend on many factors.  When it comes to arts careers, it often seems like those factor are stacked against you.

Since we are at the start of a new school year, this is probably a good time to resurrect (if it has ever been buried) subject of whether those pursuing an arts careers should be advised to think about a back up plan.

If you tell a person who is highly skilled and possessed of the potential to be a world class actor/dancer/ musician/visual artist to have a back up plan, are you undermining their potential?

If they achieve their potential and can’t find a means of support for themselves through their practice and have no other skills, have you contributed to their misery?

This conversation intersects with the one about artists needing to be more entrepreneurial vs. diluting a conservatory experience to provide instruction in that direction.  Where is the cut off line of talent and skill between those who should be counseled to pursue a discipline relentlessly and those who should start making back up plans?

Who is the best judge of this? Many would say the budding artist can’t be trusted to know themselves. Either they overestimate their talent and ability or are squandering it.

Carter Gillies outright says there was evidence that he should not be an artist…then he stuck his fingers in clay, got an MFA and is supporting himself as a potter.

To a large degree, success in an artistic career is more attributable to an intersection of luck and good connections than the accurate prognostications of mentors, professors, friends and family.

My personal bias is toward picking up as many skills as you can and being open to opportunities that come along. My own career path is not what I envisioned it would be and some of it was a result of getting out of my own way. (Though I suspect I could be a bit more open.)

I am going to go out on a limb and say that when Drew McManus was working his butt off to attend Interlochen Arts Camp, he may have had an inkling that he would be an orchestra consultant one day.  But probably didn’t think he would be running a blogging exchange, arts job board, designing websites for arts organizations and rolling out a scheduling management service.

There are more opportunities to apply our skills than we are lead to believe. When I say this, I don’t just mean artists, I mean that we have been largely socialized to believe that success is found at the end of a college degree in a STEM or Business field and all else results in a job in a fastfood restaurant.

Does keeping your eyes and options open constitute a back up plan that will keep you from reaching your potential? Assuming you are motivated to find something that works for you and apply yourself to pursuing it, I would say it isn’t. Given that many people tend to have multiple careers over the course of their lives, it may be unwise to be too much of a specialist.

Jihae Shin suggests there are different ranges of time in which refusal to entertain other options is useful.  Eschewing any alternative for a lifetime can be destructive.

Aside from your job search, have these findings changed how you operate at work?

Yes, I now sometimes try to delay making a backup plan until after I’ve really done everything I can to accomplish my first goal. For example, when Katy and I were working on this research project, I didn’t think about other projects we could do if this one failed.

Just because you opt for your back up plan doesn’t mean you can never dance again.

But lets face it, the whole subject and conversation is complex and full of nuance. Not the least of which is that as an artist, even the suggestion that you may “never dance again” if you choose a back up plan is emotionally and spiritually painful.

Dances With Seedlings

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Via Non-Profit Quarterly is a brief story about the Farm to Ballet Project which is taking agricultural themed ballet to about nine farms throughout Vermont this summer. (Their second season, I should mention.)

When I first started reading about this project, The Wormfarm Institute and their various programs like the Fermentation Fest and Roadside Culture Stands immediately came to mind. There has been a concentrated effort over the last decade or so to call more attention to arts programs in rural settings.

The Farm to Ballet Project partners closely with the farms and reinvest profits either into the farm or other agricultural non-profits.

But he also has a passion for local farming, and the Farm to Ballet Project has allowed him to connect the not-so-obvious dots between dance and agriculture. The project supports the farming community because 75 percent of ticket sales from each performance go to the host farm or to agriculture-related nonprofits. Local farm products are highlighted in other ways, too. For example, at a recent performance, “many in the 300-plus audience of adults and children also enjoyed dinner beforehand made from locally grown ingredients.”

They perform a story ballet that follows farm plants, animals and soil over the course of a year. The dancers in the first video below talk about being lettuce, cucumbers, goats, bees and various other creatures in the performance which occurs outside in the farm fields.

In the second video below, two of the dancers talk about how much they have come to appreciate impact of different grass types (and cow patties) on what sort of movements they can safely execute.

In addition to bringing ballet to communities in a context the audiences have never seen before, they are also providing an opportunity for people to renew an artistic practice that had been interrupted by other life events.

In the interview below, a woman talks about how she never expected to be able to perform classical ballet again after having started a family. This season their youngest company member is 17 and the oldest is 73.

This comment reminded me of a post I made last year about a woman who started two dance companies in different cities for people who had trained in dance to a high level, hadn’t pursued dance as a career, but wanted to continue dancing and choreographing.

This interview is additional evidence that there is an unmet need for an outlet of creative expression in dance and probably other disciplines.

They mention a benefit of performing in a farm field they hadn’t initially anticipated is that kids can follow their impulse to get up and start dancing off to the side without really interrupting the performance.

What Is Required To Create Works That Matter?

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Can a creative person afford not to attend to the business details and promotion/branding of their practice these days?

Cal Newport, perhaps unwittingly, wades into the longstanding debate about pure practice of ones craft vs. being more business savvy and oriented with his post “Want to Create Things That Matter? Be Lazy.”

In this instance, the “laziness” is not doing anything that distracts you from deeply investing in your core pursuit. So no engaging with fans on social media or email; accepting speaking engagements; show casing work, etc.

While Newport doesn’t explicitly say this includes ignoring personal finances and legal arrangements, his definition that:

“…shallow work is an activity that can impede more important deep efforts and therefore cause more net harm than good. It might slightly help your writing career in the moment to be retweeted, but the long term impact of a distracting Twitter habit could be the difference between a struggling novelist and an award-winning star like Stephenson.”

could easily be used to support a rationalization for avoiding the less pleasant aspects of a creative career.

Paying attention to the contracts you enter in and analyzing if you are effectively pricing your work provide a net benefit to one’s career, but this is also time consuming if you don’t have the resources to pay someone else to do it for you.

While you would be on solid ground to claim these are definitely worthy pursuits, according to Newport activities like public speaking engagements are on shakier ground. Still, public appearances, especially ones you are paid for, aren’t really on the same level as busyness that you engage in to avoid doing substantive work.

Emails and social media can be a time suck and you can rationalize that you are getting things done and advancing your career, but Newport has a point that the trade off of spending an hour on tweets vs. an hour of productive creation in unequal. At a certain level of notoriety, public appearances can become a huge time and energy suck of themselves.

At the same time, we can point to examples of people who have had their careers start based on the effort they have put into a social media presence. Whether you think that success is deserved or not or whether you believe the career will endure or not is another issue.

Even though I am pretty much firmly on the side of balancing your checkbook and reading your contracts, I think the conversation about how best to pursue a career as a creative isn’t one that can be definitively settled.

That said, it doesn’t serve creative artist well to lecture them on being mindful of all aspects of their lives without some good practice guidelines (if not best practice guidelines).

Most creative oriented folks would say it is important to them to create work that matters. But if no one is aware of the work’s existence, if no effort has been made to make people aware of it, does it matter? Or rather, does it matter to the extent that others feel it has impact in their lives.

There can also be the question about whether it matters enough to support the creator financially, but that touches upon an immense conversation so I will just leave the question as one of impact.

So how do you know when you are neglecting the practical requirements of a creative career? How do you know when you are favoring shallow pursuit of your creative goals over deeper pursuit of them?

These statues were in a side alley people park their bikes in. Does this work matter?
These statues were in a side alley people park their bikes in. Does this work matter?

“…The Art That Is In You Has Only Faintly Touched The Lives Of Your People.”

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Last month, Americans for the Arts blog was printing excerpts from the writing of Robert E. Gard who primary focused on manifesting the Wisconsin Idea through theater and creative writing starting around 1945.

I first became enamored of the concept of the Wisconsin Idea about 10 years ago. The idea that a state government and university system would be focused on a holistic improvement of the lives of the state’s citizenry is pretty inspiring.  Even though political opposition began work to undermine and unravel elements of it almost immediately, people have hewn to the Wisconsin Idea for over a century.

There was an excerpt on Americans for the Arts’ blog of a piece Gard wrote in 1952 that illustrates just how long some themes and debates about the arts in the U.S. have endured.

Your struggle, America, has matured so rapidly that the quaint folkishness of your village has been swept into an almost common molding, and the economic fruit of your struggle has been so plentiful that we, your people, have tended to shun the responsibility of art, sometimes to scorn it, and to look at it askance as a manifestation unworthy of our virile American manhood. You have put down deep taproots, America, that have given us the stuff of wondrous plenty, but these same roots have starved off the expressiveness of yourself. For those of us who have loved you best have not completely understood your struggle, and the art that is in you has only faintly touched the lives of your people.

[…]

It became suddenly and completely apparent to me that we could no longer pretend that theater, to have its true vital meaning, could be fabricated and foisted upon the people as entertainment alone, or as sociology, or as an art form practiced by the few for the satisfaction of individual egos. But that theater must grow spontaneously from the lives and the necessities of the people, so that the great dream of a few men and women who saw true visions might come true: the dream of an America accepting the idea of great popular art expression without question, as a thing inherently American.

So there you go, in 1952 Gard expressed concern that: 1 – America has a slightly hostile streak when it comes to the arts or creative self-expression; 2 – Arts needed to be viewed as more than just simple entertainment; 3- Yet not viewed as the province of an elite few, but as place where people saw their own lives reflected.

In 60+ years since Gard wrote that, little has changed. These topics still dominate conversation and are cause for hand wringing.

I am optimistic that things are headed in a constructive direction. Given all the attention focused on programming, casting and employment choices being made in theater and movies, there is a greater opportunity to see oneself and one’s stories.

The same with the effort to build public will for arts and culture I have been writing about recently which has creative self-expression at its core.

I am sure Gard was pretty optimistic back then too, and with good reason if you look at all that was created and still endures in the name of the Wisconsin Idea. It is also pretty clear that the effort has to constantly be sustained against both external forces that seek to oppose and erode it, as well as simple internal neglect and entropy.

To some degree, I see the effort to build public will for arts and culture as a spiritual successor of the Wisconsin Idea. The Idea was always meant to become a national influence. While its spread hasn’t been as prevalent as initially hoped, the folks in Wisconsin have been really good about actively keeping the torch lit and the light has indirectly had a positive influence on others.

If you are looking for a guiding principle to help you speak about arts and culture to those who have negative associations with the concepts, you could do worse than to meditate upon and internalize the empathy and ambition of the last line in the first paragraph I quoted:

For those of us who have loved you best have not completely understood your struggle, and the art that is in you has only faintly touched the lives of your people.

Is There Rising Market For Silence?

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The journal Nautilus had an interesting piece about the value of silence.

The article starts out talking about how 100 Finnish marketing experts met to discuss how to promote the country for tourism. Someone half jokingly suggested promoting the silence of the country. The group decided it actually wasn’t a bad idea.

One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” An international “country branding” consultant, Simon Anholt, proposed the playful tagline “No talking, but action.” And a Finnish watch company, Rönkkö, launched its own new slogan: “Handmade in Finnish silence.”

The “Silence, Please” campaign has apparently become one of the most popular aspects of the branding effort.

Despite the current theory that an arts experience shouldn’t require participants to be passive receivers in a dark, quiet room, silence is healthy for our mental and physical well-being and may be an asset worth promoting for some arts and cultural entities.

The Nautilus piece mentions research that shows how exposure to noise while we sleep can have emotional and mental impacts that may also manifest into physical problems.   Silence, on the other hand, can have positive impact on our development.

Yet to her great surprise, Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses. This was deeply puzzling: The total absence of input was having a more pronounced effect than any sort of input tested.

It should be noted that these observations were made with mice, but they are researching the implications for dementia and depression in humans.

There is also mention of a 1997 Washington University study (with humans) that noticed there were interesting increases in some brain activity when subjects were quietly doing nothing that get suppressed when people are engaged in an activity.

Artists of all disciplines have known about the power of empty space and silence in their work. Still, I was surprised to learn of following result that occurred when monitoring the vitals of humans listening to music:

In fact, two-minute silent pauses proved far more relaxing than either “relaxing” music or a longer silence played before the experiment started.

So perhaps concert goers do have cause to be upset at those who clap between movements. It isn’t ruining the composition, the noise from clapping is robbing them of a positive physiological effect!

Many creatives, including one cited in the Nautilus article, are very much aware that silence is often the best method for generating creativity and inspiration.

If the arts community is going to encourage people to become more actively engaged in their own creative expressions, it is probably important that the value of silence not be overlooked. It is easy to forget that when there is so much to say about technique, history, artistic value, monetary worth, personal practice etc., etc.

For those who are seeking to unplug themselves from their regular lives, the opportunity and implied requirement of silence may be the most valuable aspect.

Heck With Garage Bands, Rock The Porch!

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Ever since I first heard them mentioned during our state arts council’s grant panel discussion, I have been keeping an eye on the PorchRokr Festival up near Akron.

The hook of the festival is that the artists apply perform on people’s front porches. The audience can wander throughout the neighborhood and decide which lawn to recline on.

Truly an event with deep roots and involvement in the community (unless you want those damn kids to stay off your front lawn.)

What is great is that there an investment and willingness to share what has been learned with others.

I came across a mention of a community panel discussion in a couple weeks where the festival organizers will teach others about their process in advance of the upcoming festival.

Since the Eventbrite link will expire in a couple weeks, here is a description:

Have you ever wondered what it takes to plan and execute a community arts and cultural festival? Join us on Tuesday, August 9th to hear from Katie Carver Reed, Jon Morschl, and Anita Marron of PorchRokr Festival. We’ll learn what it takes to create PorchRokr and the influence the festival has on the local community.

This year’s PorchRokr festival takes place on August 20, 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. in Highland Square. Over 100 bands and performers, rocking 30 porches, on 12 streets, all in one day.

PorchRokr is planned by the Highland Square Neighborhood Association, a Knight Arts Challenge recipient.

In the process of looking for that event listing, I discovered a group is partnering with PorchRokr to offer workshops for the performers over the course of a month.

Again an excerpt since the Facebook event will expire:

A collaborative partnership between The Highland Square Neighborhood Association PorchRokr Festival and Wandering Aesthetics, it is a way for performers – of all genres and all experience levels – to enhance their onstage presence, work through stage fright, brush up on invaluable performance skills and practice in front of an audience.

Each session is designed as a “one-off” workshop geared to nurture onstage success.

1) Making Contact: Overcoming Stage Fright & Forming a Genuine Connection (JULY 23)
2) Do Not Be Dismissed: Presence and Energy in Performance (JULY 30)
3) Seen, but Not Heard: Voice for the Performer (AUGUST 6)
4) From Vamping to Banter: Improv for the Unexpected (AUGUST 13)

*Participants are encouraged, but not required, to attend all four (4) sessions

I am encouraged and inspired by programs like these that recognize the value of helping artists help the festival help the audience to have a more enjoyable and memorable experience.

Even if you didn’t run a festival, the topics they cover would make for a good workshop series for any arts organization that was looking to make or strengthen connections with the community.

Every Musician Is Important To A Symphony

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In a move that I like to see as reinforcing the importance of orchestra musicians in a time where their value is being diminished during contract negotiations, a long time supporter of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), Marjorie Fisher, recently left $5,000 to every one of the 78 current full-time musicians.

If supporters of other orchestras being to follow her example, we may see musicians fighting a lot harder to maintain the number of permanent positions during contract negotiations.

When I first scanned the story on the Non Profit Quarterly, I initially wondered if this bequest might be in response to the poor treatment symphony musicians have received during contract negotiations. However, given that the Fisher family has made donations to support the DSO in every way possible, (and just illuminated a new possibility), it would be difficult to make that assumption.

That said, between the prevalence of crowd funding campaigns and indications of a shift toward direct support of those in need, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people were investing greater effort into ensuring support was going specifically where they intend.

What Many Of Us Have Learned

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Awhile back Barry Hessenius asked me to write a “What I Have Learned” essay for his blog. He noted that in the past he often featured similar pieces written by people who were approaching the end of their career. This time around he wanted to feature the voices of people who were on the upward arc of their careers.

This past Sunday he posted the collection of essays. I should warn you, the post is L-O-O-O-N-N-G. I wasn’t given a word limit and I would guess none of the other 17 people whose contributions appear were either.

True to Barry’s purpose of providing a forum to some lesser known people, there were names a recognized but many I didn’t and ended up Googling. I had originally intended to provide a list of the contributors with links to bios or websites as a reference, but after opening 10 tabs in my web browers, I realized my entire post was going to end up being a list of names.

So read the post and if you see someone you like, Google them to learn more.

There is a lot to read but there is a lot worth reading. Over a couple days I made note of the next person on the list and performed a Find on the page when I came back to continue reading.

To give a small sample of what people submitted, I was really struck by this advice from EMC Arts’ Karina Mangu-Ward:

Accept offers of support, even if it makes you feel vulnerable:  Early in my work at EmcArts, a more experienced colleague of mine approached me and said that if I was ever interested in developing my practice as a facilitator he’d be willing to mentor me.  I brushed it off at the time, unsure of how to accept the support.  But I kept in the back of my mind.  Four years I later, when I was in a difficult moment of growth, I called him up and asked him if he’d be willing to to set aside two hours a month to talk with me about the big questions I was wrestling with.  Now, he’s one of the most important people in my professional life.

A few contributors mentioned issues of Power, but Ian David Moss from Factured Atlas & Createquity made it his central topic. After a lengthy admonition about abuse of power which included the first sentence below, he suggests people are often unaware of the power they possess and the effective, if seemingly mundane ways, in which it can be exercised.

Power is like a precious, poisonous metal: it requires care and professionalism in handling or people are going to get hurt.

[…]

Know that speaking up is always, always an exercise of power – no matter who you are. Know that asking uncomfortable questions is a way to change the course of a meeting, a policy discussion, a decision. Know that sharing your experience in a forum where it will be heard is an exercise of power. Know that doing so again and again is more powerful than doing so once, as tedious as that may seem to you.

Know that doing your job well, maybe even better than anyone else, is an exercise of power. Know that understanding what you’re good at is an exercise of power. Know that vacuums of leadership mean more power for you. You never need to let your title and salary have the final say on what you’re capable of.

[…]

Know that charging yourself to gain more knowledge, particularly knowledge that most people around you don’t have, is one of the most valuable and impressive forms of power you can exercise. And absolutely no one is stopping you from exercising that particular power starting right now.

Taken out of context, any one paragraph might come off as advice for ruthless ambition, but he figuratively starts and literally ends his contribution with the reminder that “…with power comes responsibility.”

Each of the contributors comes from a different place with their “lessons learned” essay, but generally offer insight of a similarly high quality. Bookmark it and allow yourself to read through it over time.

Safe Deposit Insuring Arts Center Future

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Well here is a novel idea for funding an arts organization–using the proceeds from leasing space in storage vaults.

The inspiration for building the largest underground storage vault in China was finding a way to fund an art museum.

The idea for the vault came to the company’s founder, Liu Feiguo, while he was lobbying to open an art museum in the Shanghai Tower. He realized that the high revenues from the Baoku Treasury could fund the museum’s daily operations.

Baoku Treasury clients are given a 15-year membership pass to the Shanghai Guanfu Museum and the Baoku Art Center, allowing free access to exhibits and events. Most of the proceeds from deposit box sales are reinvested in the museum.

Baoku China has already announced plans to expand and build community vaults. According to Zhou, “Community vaults are actually cheaper to build than high-end swimming pools.”

It isn’t cheap to rent a deposit box and the security measures sound like they are from a Mission Impossible movie. The least expensive option is $10,300 for 15 years. I assume since clients get a 15 year membership pass to the museum and art center that must be the standard lease length.

This exact idea probably isn’t viable for everyone and everywhere, but shows a little creative thinking may be worthwhile.

Signals Of Quality In Arts Disciplines

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For the last month or so I have been trying to figure out why, depending on the discipline, different elements of an artist’s background signal quality.

I realized that when people on my board or in my audience talk about a classically trained musician, they orient on what conservatory they attended first and then what ensembles they may have played in.

However, when it comes to actors whether the person appeared on Broadway or TV/movie is the most important. Lacking that, if they are based in NY or LA adds to their cachet. However, no one ever seems to care if they went to NYU or Yale Drama or University of Wisconsin for their training.

With dance it is usually which dance company they have performed with and where. Very seldom does the source of their training get mentioned.

Visual artists it is all about whether you can understand what you are looking at, whether you think it is any good and what the price tag is. Many people can discern whether an artist has had formal training or not, but I don’t think I have ever heard someone express confidence that an artist will be good based on the place they studied.

Scott Walters has long talked about the problem of actors needing move to NY/LA/Chicago so they can get work in their own hometown. I am not going to rehash those lengthy arguments.

But along those lines I wanted to toss the question out there about how and why this range of criteria about what constitutes quality developed.

I have come up with a lot of theories that don’t quite make sense. One idea I had was that while there are people who enjoy the arts in general, just as their are cat people and dog people, people who like the arts have one discipline they focus on. Otherwise, wouldn’t there be a single prime criteria that dominated, especially for the performing arts? Instead it seems people accede to the dominant criteria of each discipline, perhaps feeling they aren’t as qualified to judge as they are in their primary focus.

As I said, that doesn’t quite make sense. I can poke a lot of holes in that idea. I am left wondering where these concepts of quality originated from. Is there something that the music education and performance community did to signal a conservatory education is desired in a musician in a way that isn’t as compelling in the acting and dance community? Or is it that the audiences and communities that participate in each of these disciplines gradually oriented on certain signs they felt insured a quality experience.

Another thought I had is there an unconscious desire to be associated with the strongest name recognition. People on the street may recognize the Julliard name, but if given ten options to choose the Big Five orchestras, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas might appear on the list more often than Cleveland based on general impressions people have of each city.

I am not saying people shouldn’t be getting credit for doing well in a conservatory program, especially if they spend a lot of money in the process. I have a suspicion if the underlying factors informing these concepts of quality were better understood, it might be easier to communicate that artists who don’t possess those specific associations and pedigrees can provide a high quality experience. Inversely, one could suggest an artist does not necessarily need those associations and pedigrees in order to be successful.

Granted, there is a continuum there. This claim is more true of having a NYC address than having formal training. It may be easier to break these conceptions now than it was in the past since the internet allows people to verify that quality and these signifiers don’t go hand in hand. (Though we can also attest that the same forum allows a lot of crap to get recognition while hard work and talent are overlooked.)

Anyone have other insights or theories?

Resources From Unexpected Places-Federal Reserve Banks

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Okay, I know this week I posted a piece that continued my long standing assertion that talking about the economic impact of the arts is not an effective way to garner long term support and investment around arts and cultural activities.

However, while it shouldn’t be the central argument for support, I don’t discount the value of using economic impact as corroborating data.

In that vein, I have recently been wondering if it might not be useful for the arts community to forge closer ties with the various regional Federal Reserve Banks. I have seen some publications coming from them that are valuable to non-profits and make a case for the place cultural organizations have in community development.

Last December, I used a well-written guide on managing Non-Profit Executive succession and transitions produced by the Kansas City Federal Reserve in a post I wrote for ArtsHacker.

Since then I have seen two pieces in a four part series written by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on the importance of cultural organizations in Eastern Kentucky’s transition away coal mining. The first focuses on creative placemaking and the second specifically spotlights the work of Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY.

I am not sure how many may read the articles, but the people and businesses who closely watch the activity of the Federal Reserves are not without influence. Section headers like “The economic impact of creative placemaking;” “A Case for investment: two examples;” “Making Dollars and Sense” can resonate with the interests and concerns of these groups.

It might be worth having state and regional arts councils reach out to make contacts with the respective Reserve Banks in the different regions to explore whether the councils can provide data and stories that might be of interest to the readers of the Federal Reserve publications.

Having the Federal Reserve’s research as an additional source to corroborate statements and statistics about economic impact can help bolster non-profit organization goals.

In return, the Federal Reserve banks may be able to produce publications like the non-profit leadership succession guide that are useful to non-profits. Having issues of finance, taxation, labor law, business relations, etc tailored to the national needs of non-profits could be helpful.

If the Federal Reserve produced case studies about beneficial collaborations between businesses and non-profit organizations, the gravitas they bring could cause groups to consider exploring similar efforts.

Maybe they already produce documents like this and we are just not widely aware of it. It actually took me some time to find the third installment in the series on Eastern KY on the Cleveland Fed website. Had I not had the URL of Part 2 as a guide, I may not have found it.

What Does Waning Trust In Non-Profits Mean For The Future?

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A decision by the OneOrlando fund to distribute money they collected directly to the families and victims impacted by the recent nightclub shooting rather than through charities bears watching. Even while groups are calling for the reducing the use of overhead ratio as a measure of a non-profit’s effectiveness, there is increasing pressure to have money only spent for the purpose for which it was given.

According to the NY Times:

With the move, Orlando is the latest to shift away from established charities and opt for direct donations, a move that has become increasingly common, in part because of questions about how some charities use donations.

[….]

“There have been so many scandals we’ve seen after these sorts of situations, so it is a big deal that they’ve bypassed nonprofits because it shows a distrust in how nonprofits are doing things,” said Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “This sends a big message, too, because other cities might decide to use this as a model in the future.”

Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, said Friday that the group, as well as some family members, had told city officials that they feared donations from OneOrlando would not get to victims if a traditional nonprofit was placed in charge.

While the motivation for donating money following a tragedy like Orlando is different from supporting arts performance or education programs, it isn’t beyond reason to think people will expect the same type of accountability from arts organizations. In a sense, smaller non-profits suffer for the poor decisions and scandals of larger non-profits like the Red Cross and United Way.

An individual has a right to be concerned about how their money is being spent, but those individual concerns aggregated across hundreds of individuals can serve to paralyze a non-profit as illustrated in a post by Vu Le from two years ago.

Non-profit organizations need to provide greater transparency and communication to meet the donor expectations of greater accountability. I am not sure how to communicate that there is a lot more involved in providing 6-8 year old kids with the opportunity to paint than just handing them the paint.

Do you include pictures of staff members joyfully buying paints and materials a the local arts and crafts store in your newsletter and donor report? Pictures of staff meeting with teachers to develop a unified curriculum of enriching activities? Readers may automatically gravitate to the pictures of the cute kids painting and ignore those of staff members, but maybe the fact that every hour of painting is backed by five hours of prep will slowly sink in.

In the meantime, I wonder if the committee Orlando is putting together to decide how to distribute the $7 million they have collected won’t also eventually come to realize that there is a lot of work involved in effectively and transparently giving away that amount of money. If they don’t end up paying a dedicated staff to help administer the money, they may end up either subsiding the effort through long volunteer hours or enlisting office staff paid by their own businesses and organizations.

Emotionally Intelligent Interview Questions

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Back in March, Entrepreneur magazine website had an article listing 7 Interview Questions to measure Emotional Intelligence. (I have no idea why it says it was published on July 20, 2016 at the bottom.)

Emotional Intelligence is one of those qualities you would think an arts organization would be seeking in an employee. Perhaps I have been working too long with the relatively regimented government human resource system for too long, but I haven’t really seen questions like most of those the article lists used during an interview process.

The first one about who inspires you is almost a no-brainer for the arts. I would say that is probably the one conversation that would naturally unfold in an interview for an arts job without any planning.

I like the second question – “2. If you were starting a company tomorrow, what would be its top three values?” because it is so revelatory about the type of person an interviewee is.

More importantly, the interviewers should ask the same question of themselves…and then evaluate if those values are being exhibited in the organization they are running.

The third question about how one handles communicating and execution changing priorities and the fourth question about building lasting friendships are important for people who are going to be part of a team. Given that non-profit arts organizations are often faced with changing their priorities due to funding, the answer can be helpful in learning how people handle change.

I feel like the fifth question, “5. What skill or expertise do you feel like you’re still missing?” might show more emotional intelligence on the part of the interviewer if it were revised to ask “what skills do you feel like you are missing that this job/we can help you develop.”

The question they ask is essentially a rewording of the standard, “what are your weaknesses.” I think the tweak I gave it can help both reveal the candidate’s self-knowledge as well as their perception of (and research about) the type of work the organization does and what the position will require of them.

I liked the sixth and seventh question for the useful qualities the article outlined.

[highlight]Are there any interview questions you have used/encountered or can think of that are particularly useful for illuminating the emotional intelligence of a job candidate?[/highlight]

Congress Won’t Vote To Fund U.S. Department of Arts and Culture

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I was visiting the website of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) today and…

Wait a minute you say, there is no Department of Arts and Culture in the U.S. government, that sort of business is handled by the National Endowment for the Arts.

You would right about that, but even though I know that the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is not a government agency, it takes me a second to remember that. (The first few times I saw it mentioned, it took longer.)

So yes, technically Congress won’t vote to fund the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture.

There is something delightfully subversive about the name because it seems to tap into “lie repeated often enough becomes the truth” aspect of human nature.

Back in 2008/2009 when Barack Obama was first about to take office, there was a lot of conversation about how he should add a Secretary of Arts and Culture to his Cabinet.

While that hasn’t formally manifested within the government, I can’t help but think that USDAC is a fulfillment of that wish and the organizers weren’t going to allow something as pesky as the lack of government imprimatur to be an impediment.

They may not have the name recognition that the National Endowment for the Arts and Americans for the Arts have, (which granted, may not be that widespread either relative to entire population beyond the public television/radio crowd), but there may be more cachet in declaring you are a Agent for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture.

You may be getting tired of me repeatedly talking about the effort the Build Public Will for Arts and Culture, but it occurs to me that part of the path to success may be found in fooling people into thinking a government agency is actively going out and working to promote arts and culture.

If you have been watching NEA Chair Jane Chu’s Twitter feed, you know she has been doing just that. I am not sure she remembers what her office looks like. But she can use a little help.

A lot of people know about the controversy of government funded smut. They haven’t had personal contact with government agents/employees working to bring them art. Perhaps the perception that they have met such people will help cultivate good-will.

In addition to the writings on their blog and press sections, one of the things that caught my eye a few months back was a piece USDAC Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard wrote for Grantmakers in the Arts.

For decades I have had conversations with people I meet in dentists’ waiting rooms and on airplanes…I get around to asking if they care about things like how their communities are depicted on television and in the movies, how their heritage cultures are reflected in their kids’ education, and whether their children’s schools still offer theater and music classes along with math, science, and standardized test prep. So far, everybody has said they care.

Then I get around to asking if they care about cultural policy. That usually brings a puzzled look or an indifferent shrug.

[…]

Yet except for aficionados, the phrase “cultural policy” conjures something so dry, obscure, and removed from daily life that the two questions may seem to have no connection.

In reality, everyone makes cultural policy.

When a local planning commission approves the destruction of a long-standing Latino neighborhood for the construction of a new freeway or sports stadium, cultural policy is being made,…

When parents and teachers introduce students to heritage cultures through classes and holiday celebrations sharing music, stories, and food, schools are making cultural policy, prioritizing the school’s commitment to cultural competency.

When music venues ban hoodies, they are making cultural policy, establishing who is welcome to take part in local cultural life — and who is not.

This reminds me of Jamie Bennett’s TEDx Talk where he mentions people have an easier time identifying themselves on a continuum with Tiger Woods and Serena Williams based on their sports hobbies, but have a harder time seeing themselves as artists even though they have creative hobbies, too.

In Goldbard’s examples, it is easier to see the impacts of these decisions in a variety of contexts, but miss the fact that there is a cultural component present as well.

Overhead Funding May Not Be Expanding, But The Conversation Is

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Something I had meant to mention in my post yesterday was that Priceonomics’ admiration of Yerba Buena’s Dream House Raffle sounded very similar to fund raising philosophy espoused by Dan Pallotta.

Said Priceonomics,

There is something admirable about Yerba Buena’s Dream House Raffle.

Every nonprofit spends a lot of time conducting and worrying about fundraising, and that is time that could be spent on the nonprofit’s mission. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts identified a new revenue stream and has done well at it. It now raises more money from its raffle than it receives from individual donations or from the city of San Francisco.

Dan Pallotta says something similar in his 2013 TED Talk:

Now, if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer, what would make more sense: go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research, or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research?

If you have been following my blog for any period of time, you know that there has been a lot of discussion and examination about overhead ratio as a valid measure of institutional effectiveness.

Of late, the topic has been spilling out of publications focused on non-profit audiences and into the mainstream. This week, FastCompany’s FastCoExist took up the topic in a piece titled, “Demanding That Nonprofits Not Pay For Overhead Is Preventing Them From Doing Good.”

Upon reading the transcript of Dan Pallotta’s talk, I see the FastCoExist article basically says everything he did three years earlier. Except there continues to be more research conducted that is supporting the validity of the claim. FastCo cites a new Bridgespan Group study that shows how uniformly applying a flat rate limit on overhead is undermining non-profit effectiveness.

According to a recent report by Oliver Wyman and Seachange Capital Partners only 30% of New York nonprofits can be considered “financially strong”—and “many trustees do not understand the financial condition of their organization or how it compares to its peers.”

[…]

Part of the problem is that many funders have become obsessed with measuring their impact on a per-dollar basis, which means they’re more eager to give to specific projects than the institutional upkeep that supports them. But the 15% overhead limit doesn’t even parallel what commercial companies shell out. According to Bridgespan’s research, the average S&P 500 firm spends about 34% of their budget on essential behind-the-scenes support. For IT companies it’s more like 78%, the report notes. Some 21st-century nonprofits probably require the same kind of tech firepower.

Similarly Pallotta noted,

So we tell the for-profit sector, “Spend, spend, spend on advertising, until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value.” But we don’t like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity. Our attitude is, “Well, look, if you can get the advertising donated, you know, to air at four o’clock in the morning, I’m okay with that. But I don’t want my donation spent on advertising, I want it go to the needy.” As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy.

What Bridgespan did in their research was segment non-profits into four general areas (U.S.-based direct service, policy and advocacy organizations, international networks, and research organizations) and then broke down expenses into five different categories. It probably isn’t any surprise that different segments of the non-profit sector vary widely in their needs.

There is a graphic in the FastCo article that illustrates this, but for example research organizations spent huge percentages on physical assets compared to policy and advocacy organizations. Policy and advocacy organizations didn’t spend any money on field and network operations, whereas the international and research segments did, but in greatly differing amounts.

They use this research to support their assertion that requiring flat-rate reimbursements for overhead costs across the entire non-profit sector is inappropriate. Not to mention that the percentages they set are restrictively low.

Regardless of whether this research brings about change in the immediate future, at least the scope of those involved in the conversation continues to expand.

Pursuing Better Artist Treatment Through Cultural Shift Rather Than Rules

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Given all the attention recently being paid to the release of Americans for the Arts’ Statement on Cultural Equity, I thought it would be a good time to call attention to the draft of a Code of Conduct for Non-Equity Theatre being developed by a pilot project group in Chicago.

The Code of Conduct seeks to set guidelines for the sexual content/nudity, physical safety, violence and use of cultural representation in non-union performances. Essentially, the creators want artists to be fully informed about any of these issues from the time the audition notices go up through to rehearsals and performances.

There are also some general “be decent to the artists” guidelines like:

[at auditions] Actors will be made aware of people present that are not the casting authority.

[…]

You will not be asked to audition more than 3 times for this production;
You will not be kept at any audition more than 3 hours; or past 11pm;
You will not be asked to disrobe, or perform any intimate contact or violence as a part of your audition;

Even without sexual content and violence, the interminable, anxiety-inducing audition environment has long been a source of complaints by performers. One element of the code that appears frequently is that the performer has the right to refuse to audition or refuse a casting offer without fear of future reprisals.

The code doesn’t just stipulate that you need to tell people that the roles they are auditioning for will include sexual content, staged violence or place them in physically precarious situations, it also insists that a clear plan about how these things will be handled be communicated and provides guidelines about how to address them. (i.e. at what point in the rehearsal process is full nudity implemented and how the environment should be managed.)

Cultural appropriation and stereotypes in performance has been a frequent topic of discussion and the code includes that as well.

“…actors have the right to make inquiries about how the producer plans to use their cultural personhood…

…participants have the right to speak up if…

Costume pieces that can be reasonably understood as culturally demeaning are not disclosed at audition/casting.

Staging (culturally based violence or abuse not disclosed at the time of auditions/casting)

Accents to underscore a cultural presentation not disclosed…

Make up that can be reasonably described as “blackface” or “brown face” not disclosed…

Some elements of the code are attempts to create some parity with union situations. For example, appointing a Non-Equity Deputy as an extra set of eyes too make sure the physical, social and emotional elements of the production are being handled appropriately. Included in this is addressing an environment of harassment or intimidation, be it based on sexual, gender, racial or ethnic identity; age, ability, citizenship, etc.

Again, one of the frequently mentioned aspects of the code is a clearly defined complaint path for any issue that may arise.

Reading the Code of Conduct a number of thoughts struck me. First, there is fair bit in the document that has long been part of the rules Actors’ Equity union contracts. The code is essentially asking that all performers enjoy the same basic level of consideration that union actors have received.

At the same time, there are decades old unaddressed issues here that have long bedeviled the arts community regardless of union affiliation. These are problems that everyone has talked and complained about, but nothing has been done to rectify.

Of late, many of these complaints have been addressed by action thanks to the conversation being picked up by larger constituencies. In this I see some hope that even if this specific code of conduct is not adopted, practices may change to achieve the ends the authors seek.

As they note on the project homepage, they seek to engender a cultural shift, not construct a legal document.

Community Theatre, Beijing Style

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Before traveling to Beijing, I took the opportunity to arrange to meet with Beijing Playhouse Executive Director, Chris Verrill.  Beijing Playhouse describes itself as “China’s English Broadway Theatre.” It is essentially a community theater that casts ex-pats from various English speaking nations. Though anyone with sufficient skill in English can audition. Looking through some of the playbills, I saw people from the U.S., British Commonwealth countries, Africa, Japan, India and China.

While the Beijing Playhouse does conduct kids’ theatre camps and classes, they only just mounted their first children’s theatre performance this Spring. I got to meet up with Chris Verrill after a performance of Rapunzel at a new theater space they were trying out. Unfortunately, the house staff quickly locked the theater up after the performance so I didn’t get an opportunity to see inside.

Verrill has been running the Beijing Playhouse for 10 years now. The Playhouse was founded when he was traveling in Beijing and decided to mount an English language production seeing that no one else was. People were so pleased, they urged him to stay develop a permanent theater company.

As you might imagine, running an English language theater in China has its own set of challenges, not the least of which is the fact that the Beijing Playhouse is categorized as a performing arts consulting entity rather than a theatre and needs business partners to help them produce shows.

Technically, they aren’t supposed to sell tickets so they can’t use China’s online ticketing equivalent of Ticketmaster. (The seat numbers on the ticket samples Verrill gave me need to be filled in by hand.) Nor can they do much marketing via print and broadcast media.

They also have to be careful about the content of the shows they present. Not all of the problematic subjects are political. The ghosts in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol tread a fine line.

This isn’t to say Beijing Playhouse is furtively darting into theaters. Verrill invites Communist Party members to all the productions and events.

Verrill also strives to remain in favor with the merciless powers of Western theater–dramatic and musical rights licensing agents. While it might be easy for a company in China to fly under the radar, the Beijing Playhouse pays all due royalties. As a result, they have run into the same frustrating problems faced by theaters in the US–having rights blocked due to an incipient tour.

Verrill said his request for the rights to Sound of Music were deflected for six years before the tour actually came through Beijing.

Beijing Playhouse supports itself by soliciting corporate support from a variety of sources. They can’t really engage in  fundraising.

One of the interesting things I learned was that the average age of theater audiences in China is about 25 years old. Beijing Playhouse audience tends to be a little older. Theater is viewed as cutting edge given that the Cultural Revolution had sought to eradicate it.

Most of Beijing Playhouse’s performances are presented with projected Chinese supertitles. Verrill says it can get entertaining when the subtitles get a little out of synch because there will be two sets of laughter–the first from those who understand English and the second moments later from those who are just getting the joke in the supertitles.

Verrill noted that Chinese audiences tend to be  poorly behaved by Western standards. They get up and move around, chat with others, potentially climb up on stage from time to time. He said after 10 years they had gotten their audience to modulate their behavior quite a bit. A higher than average ticket price helps to deter some people as well.

However, he said, the Children’s Theater performances of Rapunzel were pretty chaotic between normal kid behavior and a new audience segment that wasn’t familiar with the expectations of live performance attendance.

Now lest you think they are adherents of the philosophy that audiences should watch quietly until it is time to laugh or clap, Beijing Playhouse performs many shows using the British Pantomime style which takes children’s stories, mixes in people in drag, innuendo and double entendre, and audience participation.

Verrill swears by it and encourages theaters in the U.S. to include it in their season. He said the first time around, people might not understand that they are expected to participate, but thereafter they will jump in and participate whole-heartedly.

Verrill is also an advocate for Readers Theater. Beijing Playhouse will frequently engage in an intensive week long rehearsal process to put a show together for a single performance to benefit charity. They use this format to introduce audiences to slightly edgier content than might be found in their main season. For example, this June they are planning to perform One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Since Beijing Playhouse ends up performing in spaces all over the city, we got to talking about the quality of different places both around the city and the country. One thing I had been aware of was that many cities were building big grand performing arts centers without sufficient programming available to fill a calendar even before considering whether the shows are of interest to audiences.

Verrill noted that one of the things that China lacks is the regional development system the US has where shows get developed and refined before going to Broadway. As a result, some times things are mounted in the big houses before they are quite ready for prime time.

I wonder what sort of structure might evolve over time in response to this need. Without a doubt it will be particular to China and may not ever really occupy the spaces currently constructed for performances.

My thanks to Chris Verrill for taking the time to meet with me. Also, for quickly responding with verification and clarifications on the content of this post.

You Probably Don’t Know Just How Good You Are

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Over the years I have read a lot by Peter Drucker on his ideas about leadership and organizational management. I would probably do well to go back and think on what has said again.

With that in mind, I wanted to draw attention back to an entry I wrote about his short essay, Managing Oneself. If you have to choose between them, read Drucker’s piece.

One of the things he says is that people often don’t really know what their strengths and weaknesses really are. The first step one often needs to take is to discover these things for themselves.

As I wrote in my entry a number of years ago,

“Drucker gives a number of interesting examples of how men like Patton, JFK, Eisenhower and Churchill were hampered by situations which emphasized their weaker areas.”

Many tests, especially those administered in schools, measure our skills according to a very narrowly defined set of standards that may not have any relevance to our post-graduate lives.

Knowing that, it really is often incumbent upon ourselves to discover what we are good at, how and in what situations we work best, what our values are and how we can contribute. Managing Oneself strives to teach you how to do just that.

Cleaving The Executive Director In Twain

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In plumbing the old archives to find some entries that might stand the test of time, I found an entry where I cited a suggestion made by The Non-Profiteer that social service non-profits follow the example of arts organization leadership structure.

What she was praising was the practice of having an executive and artistic director focused on different aspects of the organization’s activities. The thing was, even at that time arts organizations were moving in the opposite direction consolidating leadership under a single person in order to save money.

Reading The Non-Profiteer’s post, she presents an argument against using overhead as a measure of effectiveness years before it was the topic of conversation it is today.

Wouldn’t social service agencies operate better with someone at the helm whose expertise was effective service to clients and someone at the rudder whose expertise was squeezing every dime til it shrieked? These are not identical skills–they’re not even complementary–and for charities to insist on combining them into a unitary Executive Director means one part of what they need done will almost inevitably be done badly.

And if donors are serious about wanting to see rigorous metrics of charities’ effectiveness, they’ll recognize that it takes two: one leader to innovate, experiment and rethink client services and another to measure, evaluate and assess the results.

Since evaluation of organizational effectiveness is shifting toward outcomes over time, ensuring the organization is adhering to their planned arc of progress and collecting requisite data will require an investment of greater attention.

Think about your arts organization, are the top executive(s) able to provide the appropriate leadership to accomplish both the programmatic and administrative goals? Are the top people in charge of these areas invested with appropriate authority to accomplish these things? (In other words, does the program manager really need to be at least a director or vice-president?)

Measuring Manager’s Worth In Those Who Don’t Want To Be Left Behind

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Years ago, I wrote about a FastCompany article, Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers.

Even though it was written in the context of a for-profit company, I wrote most of the rules are universal and pretty much common sense – “afraid to make a mistake, keeping too many problems secret from employees, afraid confronting a problem will hurt people’s feelings, focus on picayune details to hide general incompetence, heavy use of consultants and problem with deadlines.”

Of course, one of the big ones for the not-for-profit sector is long hours.

Long hours: In my experience, bad managers work very long hours. They think this is a brand of heroism but it is probably the single biggest hallmark of incompetence. To work effectively, you must prioritize and you must pace yourself. The manager who boasts of late nights, early mornings and no time off cannot manage himself so you’d better not let him manage anyone else.

Though this may just as easily reflect poor prioritization of resources, funding and over commitment to doing more with less by the organization leadership.

The one habit that caught my eye then and still does today -Inability to hire former employees.

The idea here is that if a person has been working in a line of work for a long period of time and hasn’t mentored/collaborated with someone who would be interested in working with them again, you need to beware.

Even though most non-profits are concerned about having the funding to hire one person, never mind fantasize about poaching workers from other companies, this seems like an interesting hiring criteria.

Those doing interviews and hiring generally concentrate on calling supervisors of job candidates, but rarely talk to subordinates. It may be prudent not to.

Supervisors may be concerned about lawsuits if they say something negative and the person doesn’t get a job. Subordinates may fear retribution if their supervisor even suspects they said something that scuttled a job prospect.

Still, a question to a supervisor or even candidate along the lines of “is there anyone with whom you have worked in the last five years that would be interested in changing jobs if it meant continuing to work with you in some capacity,” might provide some interesting results.

On the performance and technical side of the arts it is fairly common for people to bring those they have worked for previously along with them, but I can’t think of too many instances in my experience where that has happened in administration, marketing, development, etc.

The Few Times The Audience Is Too Demonstrative

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Around 9 years ago I wrote about a response someone had gotten from the head of a dance program while trying to revive an annual dance festival.

The head of the program said he didn’t want to expose his students to our audience whom he compared to the crowd at a football game. I had followed up to see if there had been miscommunication or misunderstanding. As I wrote at the time:

He felt the audience, which is generally comprised of family and friends of the dancers, needed to be educated about how to behave. He admitted he didn’t know how that might be accomplished as lecturing folks before a performance on decorum would probably make people resentful.

Reading that, I got to wondering if that type of attitude might have changed in the nearly decade since. Given all the conversations about changing the general environment in performance halls to allow audiences to feel more actively involved and less passive, has anything changed?

This is one of those rare occasions when new audiences aren’t intimidated by the thought of disapproving looks from those more experienced and knowledgeable than themselves.

Since I am not longer working at an arts organization with a dance program or a reputation for presenting dance, I need to throw this question out to the readership. Have there been any changes?

In the situation 9 years ago, the person objecting lead a university based training program conferring graduate and undergraduate degrees. The approach such a program might take to dance is likely to be different from that of a dance company that was started by someone who received their training at Urban Dance Camp.

If you want to respond to this, give us a little context about your practice or the expectations you recently experienced.

There is also the issue that an overly boisterous environment can create an unnerving experience for people who are participating in their first public performance after having just started learning dance. Often the cheering is a much about the audience member calling attention to themselves and their connection to the performer as it is about supporting the performer.

The other question is, how do you communicate the need to keep it dialed back without offending people who are making a rare visit to a performing arts venue whom you want to see more frequently?

Creativity Shouldn’t Be Euphemism For Doing More With Less

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Continuing on the theme of employee turnover that I wrote about last week, I wanted to harken back again to an early post I made about Johns Hopkins study saying that the non-profit sector wasn’t having as big an issue with turnover and recruitment as had been widely reported.

I checked and they haven’t seem to have done a follow up report specifically on this issue since then.

At the time I took a pretty skeptical view of some of the responses collected. I don’t doubt that those were the responses, they received, it was just that the responses themselves seemed a little dishonest.

In particular, I questioned the responses reported in figure 6 on page 5 where those surveyed claimed the largest benefits to employee turn over were to the budget and creativity.

In my post I wrote,

The positives about the budget are obvious. Not having to pay someone helps save money. I am uneasy about the staff creativity result because I think the go to position for so many non-profits when they face staff shortages of any sort is to smile and determine to work harder and smarter.

I suspect creativity claim is actually a ploy to cope with the increased workload and is a facade for the damage to morale and feeling of burnout. Having been in similar situations, I imagine that the creativity manifests itself in penny pinching steps akin to my grandmother washing aluminum foil and hanging it on the line to dry so it can be reused.

Everyone stands around and congratulates each other on how clever they are to be so thrifty. Then go back to their offices and skip lunch so they can get all their work done, their hunger pangs temporary dulled by the recently shared optimism over how creative the staff has become.

Cynical as you may think this is, the same chart seems to provide some support to this idea given the largest negative impacts are to staff productivity, burnout and morale, in that order.

Why People Leave Jobs, It Isn’t What You May Think

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I am going to be on vacation for the next couple weeks. As is my practice, I will be featuring some of the more interesting/thought providing posts from my archives while I am away.

At the risk of making my employer worry that I am not coming back, I wanted to draw attention to an entry I wrote nearly a decade ago about why people leave their jobs.

In that entry I quoted an article by Matthew Kelly where he noted,

“The #1 reason people leave a job is not because they have a dysfunctional relationship with their manager or because they don’t feel appreciated. They leave because they cannot see the connection between the work they are doing today and the future they imagine for themselves.

When employees believe that what they are doing is helping them to accomplish their personal dreams they can tolerate quite a bit. I am not saying that they should, but they can. Without some understanding of the connection between their daily work and their future, employees will leave for the most trivial reasons”

This sentiment is more commonly acknowledged as motivator now than it was back then. In addition to talking about what motivates people to stay or leave, Kelly also lists the costs of employee turnover which include recruitment, training, lost business and productivity.

Values Don’t Come Cheap

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Creativity Post had a good piece last week about simple business rules that complements Vu Le’s recent Nonprofit With Balls post on developing organizational values. Both pieces caution against making facile declarations and assumptions about how you will operate.

For example, Vu relates how he and his staff took months

“…developing a list of five core values and the team agreements associated with each one. Many of these behaviors came at great costs to the organizations, results of lessons learned from terrible experiences, some of which were due to my own leadership failures for not institutionalizing our values.”

He goes on to relate the deliberate process they used to create these values, encouraging others to use it as a model.

On Creativity Post, Greg Satell, address how meaningless it is to declare you are making an effort to “win the war for talent,” “focus on your core competencies” and “enhance shareholder value.”

But by relying on those simple rules and slogans, we often fail to think things through. If we merely say, “we have to win the war for talent,” we are less likely to think about what kind of talent we want to develop. Reducing decisions to “focusing on the core” negates serious analysis of threats and opportunities. Shareholder value is basically a license to do anything.

The truth is that the real world is a confusing place. We have little choice but to walk the earth, pick things up along the way and make the best judgments we can. The decisions we make are highly situational and defy hard and fast rules. There is no algorithm for life. You actually have to live it, see what happens and learn from your mistakes.

Given that last line, it may not be a great coincidence that the “operating rules” that Vu Le and his team created were born of lessons learned from mistakes and mistypes.

Only Those Who Understand Humanity Are Qualified To Sell It

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It recently struck me that when people encourage students to go into STEM or business as careers, they may be underestimating the importance they place on daily human interactions and are taking them for granted.

Last month, there was an article in the Washington Post suggesting that people with liberal arts backgrounds will be hot commodities for technology companies. The value these people bring is their ability to help technology simulate human interactions.

Personal assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa are increasingly becoming an area of focus of development. The personality development teams work on backstories for the assistants and are responsible for evaluating whether flaws in speaking patterns in syntax make them more relate-able or too informal for their purpose.

The personalities for the artificial intelligences can’t be too perfect, but they also can’t be so flawed that you can do things like trick them into cursing. (Of course, people have been tricking kids toys into cursing for years, so nothing is perfect. NSFW)

There are thousands of subtle decisions that go into shaping the “personalities” of these assistants.

At a recent meeting of Microsoft Cortana’s six-person writing team — which includes a poet, a novelist, a playwright and a former TV writer — the group debated how to answer political questions.

To field increasingly common questions about whether Cortana is a fan of Hillary Clinton’s, for instance, or Donald Trump’s, the team dug into the backstory to find an answer that felt “authentic.” The response they developed reflects Cortana’s standing as a “citizen of the Internet,” aware of both good and bad information about the candidates, said Deborah Harrison, senior writer for Cortana, and a movie review blogger on the side. So Cortana says that all politicians are heroes and villains. She declines to say she favors a specific candidate.

The group, which meets every morning at Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, Wash., also brainstorms Cortana’s responses to new issues. Some members who are shaping Cortana’s personality for European and Canadian markets dial in.

Given this context, you can see why so much effort is invested into shaping the personality of the virtual assistants. Whether you use them or not is potentially lost revenue, even if it is just a matter of Apple/Amazon/Microsoft’s ability to sell data about your habits and interests to others.

The importance of whether you use it is definitely more than just a matter of selling aggregated data. Some of the uses mentioned in the article include life coach to lose weight, reminders to take medicine or collect medical data, calm anxieties, poll employees, arrange for meetings, etc.

The value of these applications/programs/whatever is as much about the user experience as it is about accurately identifying the closest Thai restaurant near your location.

But by and large, if you notice something about the user experience, if your experience isn’t seamless, the designers have probably done something wrong. This is also one of the core precepts of design and technical execution for live theater.

I imagine this contributes to the general sense that STEM and business careers are worthwhile versus more arts oriented careers. So much about STEM and business endeavors are quantifiable. You write X lines of code, generate X dollars in billing, run X experiments today.

You wrote jokes to give Cortana a sense of humor and suggested adjustments so people didn’t anthropomorphize the program as a subservient female?  More likely than not, people would slip into the “they pay you to have fun all day, I could do that” mindset.

Except making those decisions and creating plausible results isn’t really as easy as you think.  While the idea of “selling one’s humanity” is a common accusation directed at movie villains, in a very real sense only those who have invested time into understanding humanity are able to generate simulacra of humanity to sell as a commodity.

Let P.T. Barnum Be Your Guide To Business Ethics And Industry

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Via Kotte.org is P.T. Barnum’s short book, Art of Money Getting. If you are like me in thinking Barnum said “there’s a sucker born every minute,” (he didn’t), you may be surprised at how forthright and industrious his advice is.

I was interested to note just how little has changed since 1880. Barnum’s first piece of advice is along the lines of doing what you love.

Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation. Yet we see many who have mistaken their calling, from the blacksmith up (or down) to the clergyman.

His second bit of advice is location, location, location.

Number 6 includes the value of failing early and often.

“…and he will find he will make mistakes nearly every day. And these very mistakes are helps to him in the way of experiences if he but heeds them. He will be like the Yankee tin-peddler, who, having been cheated as to quality in the purchase of his merchandise, said: “All right, there’s a little information to be gained every day; I will never be cheated in that way again.” Thus a man buys his experience, and it is the best kind if not purchased at too dear a rate.

Number 7, Use the Best Tools he applies to investing resources to retain the best employees, but Drew McManus also just talked about the same thing in a recent interview. Drew related it to not trying to skimp and get by on scaled down student or trial version of software

If you think it is difficult get your marketing efforts to connect with people amid all the things vying for their attention, Barnum says in 1880 a person has to be exposed to your ads or mention of your product/service seven times before they buy.

He has 20 rules in all that include many sound bits of advice like treating your customers well; being charitable; not gossiping; not falling prey to get rich quick schemes; preserving your integrity; working hard; being focused; having sound processes but don’t become enslaved to them; and being both hopeful and practical.

Barnum was definitely a showman and hard charging promoter that was eager to perpetrate hoaxes in order to make money. The more I read about him, the less smarmy he appears to be. He did a lot of work in public health and safety, for example.

There seems to be a tendency to blame him for random unattributed cons. The 2001 episode of The West Wing that claims he was able to sell white salmon by claiming it will never go pink in the can may actually be the first time his name is connected with an apparently widely cited, likely apocryphal, 100 year old tale.

Music To Repel, Redeem and Raze By

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You have probably heard stories about how people blast classical music to scare drug dealers out of their neighborhoods, homeless out of train stations and teens away from convenience stores.

There was recently a story in the Wall Street Journal about a town in India that is using drummers to shame people into paying taxes.

Among my first thoughts were that it is pretty awful for a guy who has been playing drums since he was two to have his performance used to punish people. Thinking of my post yesterday, it occurred to me that this may be another manifestation of the disconnect between people who value the arts and those who see little value at all. Assumptions are made about the utility of the arts as well as about how undesirable elements of society will react when exposed to them.

There is a little more nuance to the story than that. The drummers play the same music they are hired to play at weddings and birthday parties. So as the article suggests, the drumming may indeed be more about calling attention to scofflaws than torturing them. (Though the classical music being blared in train stations to scare kids away is the same music chamber groups are hired to perform at weddings, so that isn’t proof in itself.)

Also the inclusion of the musicians is accompanied by an effort to create a safer environment. Often tax collectors are beaten up. The musicians and the collectors are accompanied by security guards bearing a banner with the city coat of arms.

On the other hand, since 1/3 of the population doesn’t pay their taxes, they assume the effectiveness of the drummers will wear off soon. They next plan to send transgender women, who are believed to be able to impose hexes on people, to perform mocking dances in front of houses. Again, using a group to shame others solely on the basis of their identity or practices makes me a little uneasy.

It is difficult to begrudge those who need money for their participation in efforts aimed to force social compliance.

It really does say something about the way the arts are perceived that people think it can be used in a prescriptive way to separate the desirable from the undesirable; improve cognition and behavior and a host of other things.

Would Walter White suddenly find stores and other places he frequented that played classical music repulsive after he started cooking meth and dealing drugs?

Of course not. If we have learned anything, its that every James Bond villain or psychopathic killer is attractive, cultured, loves classical music and wants to watch the world burn.

Clearly then, while classical music keeps riff-raff away from train stations and 7-11s, it attracts megalomaniacs to concert halls in droves.

Gives you second thoughts about Drew McManus looking so suave and sophisticated in the pictures on his orchestra consulting website, doesn’t it?

(Yeah, he only wishes he was filthy rich enough to have sharks with freakin’ laser beams attached to their heads.)

Maybe Art CAN Support Your Retirement

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One of the more intriguing ideas I have written about here is the Artist Pension Trust. It was started 10 years ago with the goal of providing retirement benefits to the 2000 participating artists, each of which commit to “depositing” 20 works in the trust over 20 years. The trust then sells the works to provide benefits to the members.

When I first wrote about it 10 years ago, the plan was to evaluate the state of the trust at this year. According to a recent piece in the NY Times, the Trust decided to start disbursing funds, in part to reassure participants that it works.

Since its founding, the trust has evolved significantly. This month it will make its first distributions, rather than wait to make a large payout at the end of a 25-year period as originally planned, along the lines of a pension fund.

“This was built as a pension, but we decided to pay as we go along so people can see the model works,” said Al Brenner, a board member. “Also, it’s been 10 years, and in some cases it was right to sell. But we’re extremely cautious and don’t want to sell too soon.”

As I wrote two years ago, some of the participants have withdrawn over the years due to needing money, but the trust still has more applicants than it planned to accept and is looking into creating a new global grouping.

To put this in context, there are 8 regional groupings of 250 in which artists’ works are pooled, plus one global group of 628. So they are looking to accommodate more artists in a 10th group.

I was encouraged to learn that the Trust, recognizing that it has the capacity to provide additional services to artists, doesn’t solely see itself as a money making enterprise.

Along with changing its distribution plan, the trust no longer defines itself as a financial product but as a kind of artist cooperative, providing services as varied as free storage and transport, or a loans-and-exhibitions program that promotes the work of artists internationally.

Indeed, some artists have joined more for the community support than the financial advantages.

“I’m aware the ultimate goal is financial security for the future, but it’s not the reason why I joined,” said Alicia Paz, a Mexican artist who lives in London. “I’m more interested in the networking and the support structure for the now.”

Of course, the real validation of the concept won’t come for another 15-20 years when a large number of participants start to depend on the Trust’s distributions to support themselves in retirement.

This Radio Story Sounds Familiar

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There is a really interesting piece on Slate telling an all too familiar story.

Seeing that the median age of its listeners has been creeping slowly up from 45 to 54, NPR is in the throes of trying to make itself relevant to…yes, you know this one…a younger audience.

In some respects NPR’s problem is worse than that of the non-profit arts. In one case, the person telling NPR’s Foundation they need to appeal to a younger demographic had, unbeknownst to them, been hired away by Amazon subsidiary Audible. He is only one of many that were hired away or choose to strike off on their own.

Just as there is a recurring conversation in the arts that they are too beholden to a narrow segment of stakeholders, NPR also finds itself conflicted between innovation and catering to the demands of its funding sources.

The tumult was touched off in late March, when an NPR executive announced that the network’s own digital offerings—most importantly, its marquee iPhone app, NPR One—were not to be promoted during shows airing on terrestrial radio.

The ban was widely viewed as proof that NPR is less interested in reaching young listeners than in placating the managers of local member stations, who pay handsome fees to broadcast NPR shows and tend to react with suspicion when NPR promotes its efforts to distribute those shows digitally. After the gag order was made public, dozens of public radio and podcasting people set about picking at an old scab—discussing, spiritedly, in multiple forums, whether the antiquated economic arrangements that govern NPR’s relationships with its member stations are holding it back from innovation.

I was totally unaware of the NPR One app but according to Slate author Leon Neyfakh, it is pretty awesome and replicates the car based NPR listening experience- “it makes me wish my commute to work was longer.”

If you have read or participated in any conversations about the problems faced by the arts, you will find that NPR is wrestling with many of the same issues: Trying to appeal to too wide an audience versus focusing on specific segments; losing audience to other media channels (podcasts in this case); addressing serious topics vs. providing entertaining content (which is not to say you can’t do both, but there are some serious topics that require a serious approach.)

In other respects, NPR is way ahead of the non-profit arts in general. They may be playing a little catch up with podcasts and losing talent to other companies, but they are gathering valuable data about their audience behavior via the NPR One app. One of the things they have learned is that people skip the serious news content fewer times than anything else. People see value in one of their core activities and they have the data to prove it.

Certainly thanks to the efforts of many research projects, the arts also have data about what audiences value. The data collection method just isn’t as nimble yet.

Since there are a number of NPR and aligned radio shows/podcasts that take to the road for live shows, I wonder if there is any opportunity for adoption/sharing/development of data collection techniques.

Stuff To Ponder: Cultivating Creativity For Corporations

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I frequently advocate for arts organizations to find ways to help for-profit companies instill creativity and energy in their employees. Last month, the Partnership Movement of Americans for the Arts posted an essay with some case studies illustrating how this might be accomplished.

The Partnership Movement post talks about the benefits of partnering with arts organizations in the context of employee retention and engagement, providing statistics about how companies with engaged employees tend to have better revenue growth and lower employee turn over.

In general, the case studies provide some conceptual starting points for identifying a need and designing partnership programs to meet them.

The Arts & Science Council of Charlotte, NC created a Cultural Leadership Training (CLT) program to help cultivate new board leaders for the non-profit organizations in the region. At one point in the year long program, they hold a “speed dating” session to match participants with arts organizations seeking new board members.

Over the last 10 years participation in the program has become highly competitive and is a tool that the businesses themselves have used to identify potential leaders.

This self-selection process sometimes helps companies to identify ambitious and talented employees whom they might otherwise have overlooked. “Firms absolutely use CLT to identify potential leadership candidates,” says Mooring. “We had one law firm tell us that they would not have picked a certain employee as leadership material, but they transformed their opinion of that employee’s potential within the firm after watching that person go through our program and serve successfully on an arts board.”

Alternatively, companies can use CLT as a low-risk way to test whether an employee who is already identified as “leadership material” lives up to his or her potential by watching how that person performs during CLT and post-graduation on an arts board.

This case study helped assuage some of my concerns about how receptive employees of a business might be to participating in a hands-on practical arts experience. It sounds good in theory, but how do you put it into practice with people who may not see themselves as artistically inclined?

“The first time we tried asking the CLT participants to participate in art, we were kind of terrified,” she admits. “The people in our classes are bankers and lawyers and accountants. What if we put violins in their hands and they freaked out and just refused to participate?”

In fact, just the opposite happened. It turned out that everybody not only wanted to play music—they wanted to try every instrument!

Not only did the executives enjoy the participatory and creative elements of the CLT program, it turned out that the experiential aspects of the program actually made the education part “stickier” or more memorable.

Of course, one caveat to remember. The CLT participants were all self-selected. Mandatory or highly encouraged employee participation may result in a different experience.

The other case study, COCAbiz, a program created by Center of Creative Arts (COCA) in St. Louis is more along the lines of what I initially envisioned when I started thinking about how arts organizations can help businesses cultivate creative practices and thinking in their employees. COCAbiz works with teaching artists to help them create and deliver programs businesses find effective for their employees.

Depending on its partners’ needs, COCAbiz uses teaching artists from a variety of artistic disciplines including choreography, set design, theater, and poetry. Working with the business facilitators, these teaching artists help business people discover new skills and approaches in areas such as leadership, collaboration, communication, risk-taking, creativity, and presentation skills.

A number of the participants have found these classes invaluable to shifting their mindset and practices to be more constructive.

One part of the workshop consisted of improvisational theater. “These improv exercises helped me realize that to be an effective influencer, you really have to listen to other people and incorporate their ideas,” says Boland….Rather than just pushing my own agenda, I had to figure out what the other person wanted to get out of the skit and incorporate their ideas, too.”

[…]

“Much of my job involves synthesizing observations and then analyzing data to create strategies,” says Wurth. “Experiencing how actors and directors use the See-Think-Wonder method showed me a really powerful way to communicate and offer suggestions in a way that promotes dialogue rather than shutting it down.”

When people from COCAbiz talk about how they developed and delivered this program, collecting feedback and revising comes up frequently as an important part of their process. There was a sense that the business community with which they worked had high level of expectations of the program so they couldn’t leave any part unexamined.

You Can’t Min-Max Board Membership

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I have a post about board recruitment over on ArtsHacker today where I call attention to a webinar Non-Profit Quarterly recently conducted on the subject.

My focus in that article was on how the webinar is a good resource for thinking about how you recruit for and structure your board. But there are a lot of philosophical issues raised in the webinar that I wanted to call attention to as well.

Presenter Anasuya Sengupta noted that when the responsibilities of board members are listed, duty of care, loyalty, fiduciary stewardship and compliance are standards across the entire non-profit sphere. She opines that this list sounds as if a lawyer wrote it up. This made me realize that while the purpose of a non-profit is generally service to a cause or community, that isn’t among the standard criteria for responsible governance.

Sengupta also suggests legality can be a low bar for ethics and risk aversion and compliance can be a very low bar for decision making. She notes that risk aversion and compliance are largely reactive orientations rather than the proactive approach non-profits should be taking. She says that these things, along with the legalistic list of responsibilities should be considered basic practices rather than best practices.

It occurred to me that this could be one of the results of the “run it like a business” philosophy we have seen espoused lately. Reduce costs, increase revenue, avoid risk, do the least possible for the most gain (aka low overhead ratio) all seem to be symptoms of this idea.

When your purpose is to deal with people on a social level rather than as consumers of goods and services, things are less apt to be neat and tidy.   The whole endeavor of trying to involve under served audiences requires interactions with people who don’t know all the rules of behavior and possess basic knowledge of the usual audiences. Almost by definition, someone is likely to be discomforted in the process.  Additional time and effort may be required to accommodate and educate them, including providing your services in a non-standard time, place and format entirely customized to the needs of the groups with which you are working.

Another presenter, Ruth McCambridge, said that even if you perfectly followed all rules for diversifying your board, your efforts might fail. This is because the underlying premises are flawed, most of which seem to be based on the idea that filling certain slots automatically solves that problem.

I go into a bit more detail in the ArtsHacker post, but briefly the problems are:

-recruiting members of under served communities:  the person you recruit may be a member of that community, but not representative of that community.

-recruiting people who can raise/give money: In Human Service Non-profits, studies show recruiting board members for ability to raise money actually negatively impacted their budgets. In the arts, it does help build the finances.

-recruiting to fill a skill slot (lawyer, accountant): the person assumes they were recruited to provide that skill, doesn’t focus on general governance, working cohesively with entire board

The other bad assumption McCambridge mentions is that fund raising boards and working boards are mutually exclusive and you can only have one or the other.

Put in this context, I got the sneaking suspicion that the concept of a board of directors emerged during the Industrial Revolution because there seems to be an underlying utilitarian philosophy. So much of board composition seems to be based on the idea that if you find the optimal mix of skills or insights to match your institutional mission, you will realize success. If you are not successful, you must have the wrong mix.

Despite optimism about Millennials being more meaning and purpose driven than their predecessors, I don’t see this changing without focused, intentional effort. The prevalence of video gaming and the attendant Min-Maxing approach to gameplay will only serve to perpetuate this as an ideal.

Guest Post: Putting The Wrong Labels On Boxes That Don’t Actually Exist

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[box type=”note” style=”rounded” border=”full”] In my post last week about poorly written job descriptions, Stephen Brown asked if I would address his perception that the title “Development Director” was something of a misnomer. Thinking that he was well along in considering this topic, I invited him to submit a guest post on the subject.

Soon he recognized the trap I had laid for him as his thoughts on the matter took hold and flowed across the page! With his permission, I have broken his post up to appear across the next two days.

Enjoy!

-Joe Patti[/box]

Many of Joe Patti’s articles inspire a moment of contemplation during my hectic days. I am often motivated to contribute to the discussion, and occasionally hit “submit comment” before wishing I hadn’t; two sentences are hardly enough to express myself properly. This time, though, Joe sent a thank-you note and offered the opportunity to expand my thoughts in a guest post. Here goes:

Risky Labels

When making the acquaintance of someone new, “What do you do?” is usually one of the first questions asked. Personally, I prefer the question “How do you make people’s lives better?” because it stimulates the sharing of passions and dreams rather than a job title. How do you respond when a person asks what you do?

Most of the time we use a label we think the inquirer understands: Conductor, Composer, Coach, Musician, Administrator, Performer, Director, Writer, Educator, Marketer, Project Manager, Producer, Leader, Renaissance Man, Jack of All Trades, or Emilie Wapnick’s coinage, “Multipotentialite.”

However, trying to fit your life inside someone else’s box has never worked. As Frank Luntz says in Words that Work, “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.” By using other people’s labels we risk confusion, appear boring, or sound like an unfocused busybody who jumps from one job or box to another (when children do that, we label them as having ADHD and medicate them out of creativity).

Future Negative Impact

Maybe one reason why the Western world struggles to maintain a healthy relationship with live performing arts is because we use misleading language, labels and boxes. This is hardly a revelation, but I have yet to hear about a sensible discussion that explores the issue seriously and recommends prudent alternatives.

By adopting others’ labels and holding on to them, the performing arts industry is becoming dated while serving only its own entrenched addicts. According to Gary Vaynerchuk in Crush it!, we have neglected to “look ahead and see what could negatively impact our businesses.” We have absorbed mid-to-late twentieth century labels we think the “outside world” understands and at no time considered their future negative impact, which is now upon us. For example, let’s look at the USA non-profit world’s common term “Development Director.”

Have We Got It Backwards?

Ask anyone who has contact with non-profit leaders what a Development Director does, and they say “fund-raising.” Ask anyone with no experience in non-profit management, and they say “develops products or services.” In fact, taking the usual responses and listing them, the description sounds remarkably like an ideal Executive Director: Develops the people, programs, finances, operations and strategic planning of an organization. It seems backwards to me. Perhaps both positions have the wrong labels.

Even Board members, who are often unfamiliar with non-profit language even after training, can be confused about a Development Director’s role. Merriam Webster defines Development as an act or process that causes something to grow or become more advanced, and Oxford defines it as a “specified stage of growth or advancement.” Dictionary.com even includes Development definitions for music, construction, chess and mining, but none of them refer to fund-raising, asking for donations, or submitting grant applications.

Disparity of Definition

For the small business or corporate representative on your Board, every product, service and process in their company is being developed, was developed, or will soon be developed. R&D is not an abbreviation for Research and funD-raising. In fact, Development usually results in new and improved ways of achieving the same outcome, which is hardly what fund-raising does.

This disparity of definition is caused by a lack of communication, which Dave Ramsey suggests in EntreLeadership is due either to communication not being a priority, or sufficiently “arrogant or fearful” leaders who are under-communicating on purpose. To a lay non-profit Board member, a Development Director is simply a layer of bureaucracy lean organizations can do without.

What we can do without is putting the wrong label on the wrong box.

A New Condition

Joe’s original article highlights that some organizations believe the Executive Director’s role is primarily (75%) fund-raising, and that their Board members clearly have no appreciation for the ED’s actual function, how their organization functions, or what a Development Director does.

In fact, he thinks his case study “reflects a lot of poor practices that have permeated the non-profit arts,” and I agree. So much so that I, too, am angry enough to share my thoughts about it.

Now throw into the mix my suggestion that the term Development Director is whole-heartedly misapplied and must be dropped, and we can put a new label on the new condition we are in: a mess.

[box type=”note” border=”full”]Tomorrow – What Are The Alternatives?[/box]

Can Non-Profit Arts Orgs Be Better Friends?

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Seth Godin recently posted that it is good to share our “give up goals,” the things we are going to give up in order to improve ourselves. The idea is that if we backslide, our friends will keep us honest.

On the other hand, he says, common wisdom encourages us to keep our “go up” goals a secret:

Don’t tell them you intend to get a promotion, win the race or be elected prom king. That’s because even your friends get jealous, or insecure on your behalf, or afraid of the change your change will bring.

Here’s the thing: If that’s the case, you need better friends.

This came to mind today during a conference call when someone mentioned that while some arts groups are good about collaborating with others on planning to their mutual benefit, many are very proprietary about discussing their performance seasons.

I don’t know why groups would take this approach. I am 90% certain that a comment I made to a colleague last December helped sufficiently firm up the routing of a touring group we are presenting next year. The tour might not have come together or it may have been more expensive had I not discussed what groups we were looking at.

Yesterday, even though it wasn’t covered by the radius clause in our contract, I got an email advising me a group would be performing in the region six months prior to our date and asking if we had any issues. Again, we didn’t really have any basis upon which to object, but the our relationship with the artist and agent is such that they were sincerely ready to take our concerns into consideration.

Right now I am working on a capacity building grant that encompasses two other arts organizations in the community.

I can understand where organizations might feel protective of donors and funding sources. Funders will decide they have invested enough in a certain geographic region. Mergers and shifting priorities among businesses and foundations or even the emergence of more non-profits in the area can result in dwindling funding capacity and willingness.

But in terms of being reticent to talk about your general “go up” goals of growth and doing exciting things, I agree with Godin, we need better friends.

As much as I grind my teeth every time I read about how millennials are wonderful and everyone should devote slavish attention to them, I will say that I would welcome their reputed tendency toward collaboration.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying organizational leadership should leapfrog Gen X.

Clearly, GenXers are wiser, more grounded, intelligent, attractive, funny, capable, sexy, sweeter smelling, awesomer unicorns (get the shirt!) than Millennials. (Not to mention, I think many possess the requisite collaborative mindset.)

I just feel that the presence of Millennials who value collaboration and meaning in the work they do can have a positive influence in shifting the outlook of some arts organizations in a positive direction.

When The Tenors Are Sixers At Best

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My interest was recently piqued when I read a piece in The Economist which reported that two opera conservatories in Sweden declined to admit male singers because they were not up to standard.

The conservatory decided that even though it would make for skewed student productions, it could not admit male singers on the grounds of gender alone. The Gothenburg University College of Opera has found itself in a similar position. Of the 45 singers who auditioned this year, nine were men, but as the Dean of Studies Monica Danielsson tells Prospero, “none of them reached the level of admission”. Consequently, none of them won a place.

As a comparison, the article cited Indiana University Jacobs School of Music which,

…receives a similar ratio of female to male applicants. But unlike Swedish conservatories, the school admits a weighted student body. In effect, sopranos have to score much higher marks to gain admission. “We have to strive for a balance between the voice parts,” explains Professor Mary Ann Hart, chair of the school’s voice department. “You can teach singers repertoire but at an opera school, at some point, they have to act on stage.”

It should be noted that there is no mention about whether the men admitted to Indiana are up to standard or not, only that there is much more competition among women than men due to the ratio of applicants.

I have never really viewed myself as much of an activist when it comes to the subject of the gender imbalance in arts job opportunities. But I feel that whether what is happening in Sweden is isolated or indicative of a trend, it bears attention.

When the argument a male is more highly qualified evaporates and the criteria for admitting or casting a male is based on a piece written hundreds of years ago needing one, it is probably past time to start creating new works with more roles for women.

When it comes to the performing arts, I am always going to lean toward high level of skill as a criteria. Arts careers are difficult to pursue so if someone only has the capacity to be mediocre at the end of their training, they shouldn’t be lead to believe they can compete at a high level. If the guys can’t meet an objective measure of this ability, then it may be for the best if they are cut.

Is it fair to women who entered the conservatory at 8 striving to raise their proficiency 9 if they are forced to perform beside a man who operates at 6 and was admitted so that a performance could be mounted?

Admittedly this is a tricky question. Working alongside others who force you to bring your best everyday is important. Yet as the professor at Indiana says, practical experience, not theory, is the ultimate goal of the training. Right now the male voice is needed for that purpose when it comes to opera.

This isn’t just an issue with opera, musical theater and acting programs, with some exceptions, face a similar ratio of female to male applicants.

I have seen training programs where there are 300 theater majors and you are lucky if you get on stage once in all the years you are there. That type of arrangement sucks. What would be worse is if there were a similar situation where you would be lucky to perform before you graduated if you were female, but averaged a role every other semester if you were male.

If it was just a matter of more women applying to programs than men, that would be one thing, but if there is a large number of very highly skilled women applying to programs (or even just auditioning based on the skill they have been able to cultivate), then there is a demand for challenging roles to suit them.

Ideally, there would be more roles written with built in flexibility so that choosing to produce a good show didn’t have added baggage of the gender mix. I suspect currently there would be a tendency to cast men rather than women in those roles. I can’t see how a blind audition process like orchestras use could be devised that would mask gender and still accurately evaluate ability in singing and acting.

Leading 1.25 Days A Week

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By and large I keep things general and relatively low on direct criticism in my blog posts. However, since the goal of  this blog is to engender better practices in arts organizations, I feel like I need to address a topic that is under discussed –writing effective, accurate job descriptions.

I see a lot of poorly written job descriptions but there was one that came across my Twitter feed last week that was particularly egregious. Even after a weekend, it still bothered me. I won’t name names, but I am going to pull some lines from the description rather than obliquely referencing it.

The job is for an executive director. The one line that left me incredulous was:

Responsible in developing and executing a management plan where within two years the role of Executive Director will spend 75% of time on fundraising.

To put that into context, 75% of your time is 3.75 days a week. Now you may say the executive director wouldn’t be doing this every week, some months would be more focused on fundraising than others but that is still 9 months out of the year. No matter how you slice it, 75% of a person’s time is still a significant amount of time. If the Executive Director takes 2 weeks vacation, that means leadership and other functions get the 2.5 months that are left.

The amazing thing is, this is listed as number 8 of 8 primary responsibilities. How can something that is expected to take up 75% of an executive director’s time be listed last in a list of primary responsibilities?

Now, I will admit if you read the whole description the fact the person will be expected to do a lot of fundraising finds its way into pretty much every line:

• The position works within a team environment and is responsible for ensuring strong working relationships across the arts and grantor community;
• Plays a central role in fundraising including individual donors, corporate sponsorships and writing and obtaining grants;
• Executing a strategic plan including: education and outreach goals; development of a donor engagement plan including annual giving, events, corporate and volunteer relations; establishment of a major gifts program; and execution of a technology initiative including both hardware and software;
• Financial oversight including drafting and meeting a detailed annual budget;
• Ability to create and nurture relationships with new and existing funders, as well as write and secure grants to underwrite new and ongoing initiatives and general operations;

It would be better if the 75% commitment to fundraising was listed first and then what followed illustrated how that would manifest itself.

But this is more than just a matter of poor formatting and organization of ideas. Overall, I felt like there was a misunderstanding of the role of an executive director and a large mismatch in expectations.

Among the qualifications listed of the applicants are:

• Bold and creative thinker to lead a talented staff;
• Demonstrate good governance, financial oversight, and best non-profit management practice;
• Comfortable with traditional and emerging media;
• Proven leadership skills identifying profitable opportunities and growth within the communities we serve;
• Preferred demonstrated passion for the mission of arts, arts education and outreach to all communities;
• Familiar with STEAM and the maker movement;
• Experience and enjoyment in managing multiple challenging initiatives concurrently;

There was one line in the expected qualifications about possessing fundraising skills, but the primary responsibilities are replete with references to fundraising and grant writing. The qualifications and responsibilities don’t seem to be in synch with each other at all.

The expectations outlined in the qualifications are in line with an executive director, the expectations expressed in the responsibilities are generally more appropriate for a development director.

Where is there time in the 1.25 days a week or 3 months not dedicated to fundraising to devote to leading the staff, focusing on good governance, identifying opportunities for increasing revenue and growing the organization, pursuing a mission of arts education and outreach?

One of the primary responsibilities listed does call for “examining and evaluating the role art plays in the communities we serve and subsequently installing new, progressive and sustainable arts initiatives,..”

I have a suspicion that they started with the qualifications list and then started brain storming about responsibilities. As that list came together, whomever was contributing came to the realization this person would have to work on fundraising a lot and may have arrived at the 75% number without thinking about how that really broke down time wise.

That said, if they really do need someone to devote 75% of their time to fundraising, it would be better to hire a separate development person who only focused on that. If there isn’t money to hire two people then either expectations need to change or priorities need to be evaluated. Does the organization have a greater need to raise money or for focused leadership?

If the answer is money, then hire the development person and the board needs to decide on some sort of ad hoc leadership structure shared between the other staff and board members.

An executive director definitely does participate and contribute to fundraising efforts, but theirs is a leadership position. That leadership can not be exercised 25% of the time and still meet the expectations that staff, funders, business people and community partners have for a person with that title.

A person spending 3.75 days a week/9 months of the year soliciting support is going to be making significant commitments on behalf of the organization. Who is going to be setting the standards, researching best practices, creating policies and leading the staff to meet those commitments? The executive director in the other 1.25 days/3 months?

Who is going to make sure those commitments are met, gather supporting data and materials and do the follow up reporting? That is part of the executive director’s 75% time attending to fundraising you say?

Okay, yeah, maybe, but in the process something is going to suffer. These tasks are time consuming and reporting requirements are increasingly out of scale with the funding received.

There are a lot of factors at play here. Many aren’t specific to this job description. The description just reflects a lot of poor practices that have permeated the non-profit arts. If there is an Everyman, much of this description is Everyjob.

The questions I raise are among those that really need to be considered when writing a job description. Every organization is different so it is close to impossible to borrow sections of other company’s job description and do a good job generating your own.

I am willing to give the organization the benefit of the doubt and believe (even hope) that this description (and other like it) doesn’t match the reality of the position and more attention needs to be paid in making it accurate.

If it does reflect reality, bless the person who takes the job.

Artistic Ability Is As Much A Birthright As Language Ability

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Jason Gots, editor and creative producer over at Big Think recently wrote about “The Upside of Amateurism.” He is troubled by the perception that so much value is being placed on expertise that it is stifling curiosity and creativity, a concern shared by many in the arts, business and education world, among others.

…I fear that the present day is a place/time where expertise is so valued and specialties so specialized that people are shamed out of experimentation and curiosity, the only two impulses other than love that (as far as I’m concerned) make life worth living. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin could be a printer, fiction writer, inventor, scientist, and statesman and end up a hero of the age. Today he’d be an eccentric dilettante with branding problems.

Let’s take the example of music. The Japanese educator Shinichi Suzuki (1898-1998), creator of the world-famous Suzuki method of music instruction, believed that we do violence to children when we teach them that music is a “gift” you’re either born with or not. We ought to be teaching music, he believed, the same way we teach language — as a birthright.

[…]

But we don’t teach kids to worry about whether or not they’re “talented” in their native language. Or to give it up by adulthood if they haven’t yet won a scholarship. Yet how many adults do you know who play, sing, or write music on a regular basis? If it’s more than a handful, you and your friends are a cultural anomaly. And that’s a real shame, isn’t it?

I have often heard about the Suzuki Method, but I really wasn’t aware of the philosophy before reading this article.

When Gots pointed out that we don’t worry about whether kids are talented in their native language, (grammar and spelling criticisms on social media notwithstanding), it immediately reminded me of Stephen McCraine’s “Be Friends With Failure” webcomic I wrote about a few years ago.

In one of the panels of that comic, McCraine says we don’t tell kids to give up if they don’t master language immediately so we shouldn’t tell ourselves to give up if we don’t master some artistic form within a short time.

I was also reminded of Jaime Bennett’s TEDx talk where he notes that we easily identify ourselves as tennis players and golfers, but not as having artistic talent.

“why we can so easily see ourselves on a continuum with Serena Williams and Tiger Woods, but we don’t think anything we do has anything in common with Sandy Duncan.”

This all ties back to the general effort by organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to disseminate a message that everyone has the capacity to be creative. In the case of the NEA, one of the steps they have taken toward this is widening the definition and scope of what constitutes participation in an artistic experience.

To a degree, the idea there is too much focus on expertise ties into the Hewlett Foundation study I wrote about yesterday that reported there was a concern that the professionalization of the arts management field may be narrowing access to those jobs.

Arts Leaders Plan To Be Buried With Their Desks

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Today the Hewlett Foundation released the results of a study on a question I have regularly written about over the last 7-8 years– When will non-profit executives retire so the younger generation can move into those leadership roles?

As before, the answer given by the report, Moving Arts Leadership Forward, was: Not any time soon despite all the predictions that mass retirements were upon us.

However, a ray of hope comes in the form of a qualification that hasn’t appeared before (my emphasis)

Sixty percent expected to remain in the paid workforce at least until the age of seventy, and eight percent said they did not expect to ever stop working for pay. Most late-career leaders are Baby Boomers, and the field can expect a durable Boomer presence through at least 2034, when the youngest Boomers will turn seventy. However, these late-career leaders weren’t looking to continue in the same positions indefinitely. Many were looking for capstone projects or positions and wanted to work in ways “where they are less in charge and have more flexibility and less responsibility

That bit of news made me wonder if this desire may have been part of the decision by the executive director of Forecast Public Art to step down after 38 years to take on the role of Director of Community Services for the organization.

The research report mentions that while it was once a concern about whether there were enough qualified people to replace the anticipated mass retirement, now there is a concern about whether enough early and mid-career professionals will patiently wait for executives to retire or if they will move to find careers in other areas beside the arts.

I should mention an important difference between this research report and ones I had previously cited. Where the others encompassed the non-profit field in general, this one specifically focuses on non-profit arts. Rather than trying to make general assumptions about what was likely to happen in the arts based on what was occurring in the non-profit field as a whole, we can get a more accurate picture from the responses of arts professionals.

One of the recent issues that seems to be specific to the arts is the term “emerging leader.” There has been a fair bit of discussion and a little controversy over the term because it has tended to be associated with age rather than career stage. As the report notes:

However, our data also found that the categories tend to associate age with career development needs, which does not reflect the realities of nonprofit arts leaders. And, late-career leaders can feel excluded by the terms, hindering the development of cross-generational connections that are vital to the health of the field.

In the report they use emerging leader to refer to people between the ages of 18 and 40, but in the future they say they will use different terms to delineate between people in early, mid and late career stages of leadership.

Another issue that emerged as fairly arts specific is the growing prevalence of arts management training programs over the last 20 years that have served to professionalize the sector. In the discussion of the consequences, they indirectly reference the ongoing conversation about who has the opportunity to participate in internships.

They also suggest that professionalization may lead to degree inflation that permeates most job descriptions, regardless of industry.

But professionalization of the sector has had unintended consequences. It creates an especially challenging environment for individuals with less formal education, raising questions about who has access and what resources are needed to realize a career in the arts today. Increased competition for positions of authority drives some early-career leaders to seek employment in sectors that offer more immediate opportunities for elevated responsibility, rapid career advancement, leadership status, and better pay. And increased professionalization, combined with a more crowded workforce, means that organizations can demand professional credentials for more mid-career positions, feeding the cycle of professionalization.

A concept I had not really seen discussed before was the necessity of mastering internally facing leadership and externally facing leadership.

“Internally facing” leadership includes the skills and knowledge that are needed to develop and align the resources (including people) within an organization to advance its goals. Professional development for internally facing leadership involves traditional opportunities, such as attending a conference dedicated to one’s field or bolstering one’s fundraising skills. “Externally facing” leadership extends beyond the walls of a single organization. It often focuses on field-level or cross-sector leadership, and embraces working for the good of something larger than one’s own organization.

What I found most appealing about this were the terms “field-level or cross-sector leadership” because I feel that this orientation will be important in helping arts organizations grow and develop.

The report notes that far from covetously grasping at their authority and historical practices, many executive leaders would like to create a more inclusive, cross-generational organizational culture. They “just lack models and the support for doing so.”

In an attempt to provide some useful guidance, starting around page 18 of the document, they make recommendations for moving toward more constructive organizational cultures which encompass everyone from foundations, boards and arts organization staff and leadership.

On page 21 they have a quiz to “help non-profit arts organizations identify and reflect upon the ways in which they currently practice leadership, and structure leadership opportunities across generations.” The quiz asks about adaptability, culture of learning, participation and decision making.

Following the quiz is a conversation guide to help with further reflection.

“If Only…” Only If You Are Committed

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One of the most interesting This American Life shows that I have come across and have listened to a couple times is about an auto manufacturing plant that Toyota and GM built in partnership.

When Japanese cars were outselling American cars by a wide margin, people wanted to know why. What was it about the way the Japanese made their cars that made buying one preferable to American cars.

Toyota told GM everything holding nothing back. (from the episode transcript)

Frank Langfitt Schaefer says when he realized how much of the Japanese system happened off the factory floor, it answered something that had never quite made sense to him. Why had Toyota been so open with GM in showing its operations?

Ernie Schaefer You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people. You know, I’ve often puzzled over that– why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking all the wrong questions.

We didn’t understand this bigger picture thing. All of our questions were focused on the floor, you know? The assembly plant. What’s happening on the line. That’s not the real issue. The issue is, how do you support that system with all the other functions that have to take place in the organization?

If you listen to the episode or read the transcript, you can learn about the exact details. The bottom line was that GM didn’t have the will to implement all the changes to their procedures and corporate culture that would allow them to replicate Toyota’s successes.

The same applies to any effort to effect change in any group, company or organization. The words “If only…” are often uttered implying if a simple change was made, everything else would fall into place. If only we hired/fired a person. If only we had a little more money or a different opportunity.

While a simple change often can change the entire dynamics, the will or natural inclination to reach a certain goal already has to be present. In organizations and groups where there is truly one bad apple souring things among others who are already making positive efforts, a single change may result in an immediate and significant improvement.

Otherwise, you can get rid of a person who is poisoning the work environment, but the environment isn’t going to get any better if there are still 10 other people making disparaging comments and undermining each other. Hiring a charismatic leader who has brought constructive change to other organizations isn’t going to be effective if the board or employees aren’t committed to following the leader’s plan for improvement.

Much like the This American Life episode, the solutions to many of our problems can be found in business journal articles, blog posts and conference sessions, no secrets withheld. Without the will to commit to the full range of changes necessary to implement them, those strategies, procedures and techniques aren’t your solutions.

I do a lot of preaching here on the blog about what people should be doing better, but I don’t necessarily do them myself. I don’t see anything criminally inconsistent or hypocritical in that because I am clearly aware that some of those techniques are not suited for my current situation or is there the will to make them manifest.

It is all worth talking about because it raises awareness for other people and cultivates and evolves the general perspective about the arts. There are things that we weren’t ready to undertake in the past that we started to grow into.

Got Stagefright?

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In the process of trying to convince people of the value of attending a live event, performing arts people will often cite the opportunity for chaos. They will say something along the lines of a recording will be the same every time, but in a live performance, anything can happen.

I wonder if this is really fair to the performers and crew that worked on the show because it essentially tells the audience they should be rooting, just a little, for something to go wrong.

It may seem relatively harmless, especially if you aren’t out there loudly proclaiming the certain death of the lion tamer or acrobat who operates without a net. There are a lot of performers out there who (mostly) quietly suffer from stage fright and even just a little hype can exacerbate their anxiety.

A book review in the New Yorker last August recounts some of the more famous/infamous instances of stage fright suffered by Daniel Day-Lewis,  Laurence Olivier and Glenn Gould, among others. It talks about the different things that weigh on performer’s minds, no matter how hard they try, including whether they can live up to the legend that has been attached to them.

The audience rooting against them or judging them is among the anxieties they suffer:

Some performers displace this cruelty onto the audience. The pianist Charles Rosen believed that the spectators were out there waiting for the performer to slip up: “The silence of the audience is not that of a public that listens but of one that watches—like the dead hush that accompanies the unsteady movement of the tightrope walker poised over his perilous space.”

[…]

Baryshnikov believes that it is the feeling of obligation to the audience that triggers stagefright: “Suddenly the morality kicks in. These people bought a ticket to your show.”

The problem of stage fright may be more widespread than we are generally aware. In addition to silently coping with the problem, the New Yorker article notes that many artists use beta-blockers to help them deal with their fear. This is not without some controversy.

Some people said they resulted in “phoned in” performances. Some raised the ethical question, asking whether the use of beta-blockers by pianists was any different from the use of steroids by athletes. (There is an important distinction, though. Steroids add to the body, increasing muscle mass in order to improve performance. Beta-blockers remove something from the body—the flutist’s lip tremors, the cellist’s hand tremors—in order to permit the person to produce the kind of performance he has already shown himself capable of, outside the auditorium.)

This reminded me that Drew McManus had written about the issue of “performance enhancing drugs” for musicians a dozen years ago for The Partial Observer.

I briefly thought that a more constructive use of the “anything can happen” phrase might be to associate it with idea that you may see a breakthrough performance or a moment of inspiration and synchronicity that transcends the normal experience.

I quickly realized this approach may increase the anxiety for the audience. “Am I witnessing a transcendent moment? How do I really know? I wasn’t really bowled over, but maybe I missed it. I should probably join the standing ovation just to be sure, right?”

The truth is, live performance has the potential for witnessing some crises and participating in moments of transcendence. To ignore that these opportunities exist does a disservice to the experience. Regardless of whether these factors are mentioned, performers are still going to experience stage fright and audiences are still going to wonder if they are missing something everyone else seems to get.

Not to mention, these experiences aren’t unique to the performing arts. Athletes fear they will lose the edge that makes them great and many spectators find themselves unable to figure out what is going on or why anyone gets excited by the sport in the first place.

While it is generally acknowledged that the arts have to be sensitive to the barriers that may exist for audiences, the same isn’t really true for the performers.

In many other fields of employment there are coaches, counselors and human resource personnel available. Granted, many of these resources are less than perfect. A highly paid athlete is going to get a lot more support and guidance from the team’s infrastructure if they fall into rut than a fast food worker will from their company.

How many theater companies, dance companies and orchestras have a program in place to provide coaching for a performer who has lost their edge? (Actually, the dance company practice of having regular classes might count as that.) Or acknowledge that people might have debilitating stage fright, much less provide help for people who are experiencing it?

I am left wondering how prevalent it is since it isn’t often discussed. Given that seven people, (a fairly large number for that column), commenting on Drew’s Partial Observer admitted to using a drug to deal with anxiety, I suspect it is more prevalent than we imagine.

Becoming Queen of Classical Music Culture

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I was listening to an interview with Chattanooga Symphony and Opera Concertmaster Holly Mulcahy today and there were a couple things said that jumped out at me.

(Not the least of which was interviewer Hugh Sung declaring her “Queen of Classical Music Culture.” Tireless dedication, seeking out exciting new works, blogging, awesome themed dinner parties, she has earned the title)

But seriously, when she was talking about the perennial question about what to wear to the symphony, she made me realize just printing “Whatever you are comfortable wearing” on websites and in program books doesn’t really assuage anxieties people have about that subject. She suggests that people who are making an effort to put themselves out and experiment with a new experience may do everything they can to insure they don’t stand out. They really want to know what everyone else is going to be wearing.

Holly has written more detailed guide that still emphasizes “wear what you want,” but goes on to say “but if you are still worried about what everyone else is wearing…”

As she also points out in the podcast interview, often people view attending an event like a symphony performance as an opportunity to strut out in clothes they don’t often get to wear. Telling them jeans are okay is too low a bar in their eyes.

Back in January, Drew McManus posted about a video a woman created showing how she and her friends made an occasion of attending the symphony.

[vimeo 127883928 w=500 h=281]

Holly also talks about the role of the concert master (around the 16:30 mark). I was aware of some of the things she talked about already, but when she mentioned sometimes she had to make up for a lack of numbers in the string section by playing to create a fuller sound, I wanted to know why. Is the lack due to budget cuts? Could they not find enough available substitutes to fill out their numbers?

One of the more compelling things she talks about is why she walked away from a full time position with one orchestra, turned down a similar position with another orchestra and gave up playing for two months, in part due to the unhealthy environment that she experienced. (~34:00). People thought she was crazy for doing so since competition for any position is so fierce, gaining one is akin to a miracle. Giving one up is akin to apostasy.

These are stories that we seldom hear that we need to hear more of in the arts. Nothing is ever wrong unless contentious contract negotiations go public.

There has been more self-examination in the arts of late which I partially attribute to the fact that the Internet allows people to get their stories out, allows others to realize their experience isn’t unique and allows people to have a conversation about it all. There needs to be more conversation and examination. I expect there will be.

One of the stories Holly told that was most interesting to me was how she got her violin. (~46:00) Since violins are often passed down over centuries, they tend to gather interesting tales around themselves. In her case, she had about given up on finding an instrument that suited her when she happened to run into Eugene Fodor at a violin shop as he was coming in to sell some of his violins.

She describes how Fodor urged her to play Brahms on it and then paced between a couple rooms shouting corrections to her. I think I would have been a wreck, but she loved the instrument and walked away satisfied she had purchased the right violin.

But, We Will Be Careful #FamousLastWords

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The one activity related to performances that regularly is a source of frustration for my staff is getting certificates of liability insurance from people.

This is one of those requirements common to both contracts for venues one is renting to mount a performance and contracts venues/promoters send artists requesting they provide some sort of performance.

I wrote a piece covering what liability insurance is and how to go about getting it for ArtsHacker.

Since the goal of ArtsHacker posts is to provide a relatively quick reference about topics, I didn’t really get too deeply into WHY the coverage is important.

Just a quick explanation for those who don’t want soak in more of my genius on ArtsHacker. Liability insurance,

“protects you (and the spaces in which you work) against lawsuits from the public resulting from accidents, injuries, insults etc. Note: this insurance does NOT cover you or your employees.”  (Source: National Performance Network)

People generally accept that they have to pay to use a space and equipment just like they have to pay for costumes, set pieces, props, musical equipment, etc., all these things make for a better experience. Insurance just seems like an extra unwarranted expense that doesn’t contribute to the success of the event so they resist the requirement to obtain coverage.

About 15 years ago when I first started managing a performance hall I insisted every renter carry this insurance. The first group this applied to grumbled that they were never required to carry it before, but complied. In one of the performances one of their stage hands wasn’t paying attention and lowered our rear projection screen on a row of strip lights melting a lovely long gash right across the screen.

Since that day, I have blessed my insistence that they carry the insurance because that is what paid to get the screen replaced.  Neither the renter or my department could have afforded it. Since then I have never wavered in my determination to require that every renter carry it. I have shown up before load-ins on weekends when I could be relaxing if it was necessary to play the bad guy and refuse a group entry due to lack of insurance coverage.

Fortunately, I have never run into another situation that required an insurance claim to be filed. But there have been dozens of instances where renters damaged something they elected to replace out of pocket. There have been plenty of close calls as well.

For many of the same reasons, it is becoming an increasingly common practice to require performers one has contracted in for an event to carry the insurance. They are bringing in equipment that you are not familiar with. You don’t know how well-maintained it is. They may insist that no one else touch certain equipment. While that prevents you from being blamed for breaking it, you also don’t get a chance to inspect it closely.

So what happens when a speaker stack they built falls into the audience? What happens if a singer starts swinging the microphone overhead and it flies off the cable and someone gets hit? If a sword slips out of someone’s hand during a combat scene? If the lead singer elbows someone in the face while crowd surfing? If a member of the stage crew anchors a hammock to the mechanism that releases the fire curtain in an emergency and takes a nap? (true story)

Do you as the venue want to be responsible for things you have no direct control over like poor condition of equipment and poor decision making?

Many artists’ require that the venue or promoter reciprocate and carry various types of insurance to protect against these exact same issues on their part.

Large shows usually have the liability insurance set up because they know it is going to be required. Smaller groups may not be as familiar with it and don’t carry it as a practice. There can be a lot of negotiation and conversations between all parties involved in these situations.

Occasionally we may waive the requirement for groups we contract to perform if we don’t think there will be much danger of damage. But if you are going to do that, my advice is to have a complete understanding of what the performers are going to do. Don’t just blithely assume classical musicians aren’t going to do something extreme. I have had people raise the lid and remove the music rack on a grand piano so they could set glasses of water on the strings or strike/pluck them with various objects.  (If God wanted a piano played with a claw hammer, he would have designed it that way.)

 

The Secret Magic Power Called Repetition

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While I driving around recently, I heard an interview with This American Life creator, Ira Glass, talking about the early days of his career (from about 16:00-20:00 minutes)

The main thrust of that segment was a combination of the brief comments he made in 2009 on storytelling and creativity and the myth that people are essentially born proficient geniuses that I have addressed before.

As in his comments from 2009 (illustrated below in kinetic typography), Glass says when he was first starting out his working at NPR HQ in Washington, DC, the quality of what he was producing was bad to adequate.

As he looked around, he felt like everyone around him had some magical power to know exactly what was needed to make something good- emphasize a point here, edit something out there, etc. He didn’t think he would ever learn that skill. He even resorted to paying people around the office at NPR $50 to look at his work, figuring it was cheaper than going to graduate school.

Ultimately, he realized that obtaining proficiency was a largely a matter of experience, logging the hours and making mistakes.

It may require making mistakes for a long time. In the same 2009 segment that the kinetic type video above is excerpted from, Glass plays a piece he wrote in his eighth year of reporting and critiques it. He admits he doesn’t even understand what his point was and then gives a one sentence description of the situation which is interesting and comprehensible.

I bring up this idea periodically on my blog because I think it is important to be reminded that just because something/someone amazing seems to pop out of nowhere, that success may have been decades in the making.

The interviewer at WOUB was of the same mind. He specifically prefaces his request that Ira Glass talk about this experience “because we have a lot of students that listen…” Glass agrees noting that whenever you see a movie about an artist, they are always depicted as being great and inspired from the beginning, but that isn’t true to life.

In an early part of the interview, Glass notes that they kill around 50% of the stories at This American Life–not the ideas, the actual stories they are in the process of working on or have completed. So even as acclaimed as he and his team are, they are regularly making mistakes or producing work that falls short. Glass says their success is as much attributable to being ruthless about cutting as it is to being capable story tellers.

The idea that you shouldn’t become so emotionally involved with your work that you can’t let it go is not a new one, but it is a lesson that is worth revisiting from slightly different perspectives.

What’s My Personality Got To Do With It?

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Last week I was sent a link to an infographic purporting to list what arts careers were best for what personality types.

I offer this as a bit of fun and entertainment for your Monday. Generally, the Myers-Brigg Personality Type test isn’t viewed as particularly valid. Also, while they list seven personality types associated with arts careers, on average they connect five or six personality types with a job. In the case of art director, they list nine.

There is little danger that you will have to do some soul searching about whether your personality type is suited for your job.

The list is primarily focused on visual artists so you can also entertain yourself hypothesizing the best personalities for classical musician versus jazz musician; ballet dancer vs. contemporary dancer; stage directors vs. choreographers; executive directors vs. artistic directors, etc, etc.

(Yes, I know these distinctions are about as arbitrary as anything else here.)

Art Careers By Personality Type
Source: CollegeMatchup.net

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