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Wishing You Were A Famous Actor, Tenured Professor Or A Drug Kingpin

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This weekend I was reading an piece on Slate that likened new Ph.Ds seeking tenured positions in higher ed to drug dealers hoping to become drug kingpins.

“If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at McDonald’s. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and-file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing,” wrote Alexandre Afonso, a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London.

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“The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless you mark student papers very harshly), one can observe similar dynamics,” he writes. “Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labor markets virtually everywhere… Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of ‘outsiders’ ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail.”

Since I work in higher education, I thought this theory was interesting and entertaining and then moved on. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized this pretty much describes the same situation faced by people who want to be actors (as well a orchestra musicians, I imagine). I don’t know why it didn’t strike me earlier, I have been reading Scott Walters’ thoughts on the subject of too many acting students being graduated for the available jobs for years.

Just like the rank and file drug dealers and doctoral program graduates, thousands of actors graduate a training program at some level hoping to become a big star, or at least steadily employed at a livable wage, each year.

The problem is, the only opportunities are on the periphery as either a low level drug dealer or adjunct, while the available spots at the core as a kingpin or tenured professor are increasingly few. (Though I will confess that other than increased pressure from law enforcement and internecine conflicts, I am not sure what is limiting the number of kingpin slots.)

It may be much worse for actors because it appears there are fewer and fewer paid opportunities even on the periphery for them to pick up, much less achieve a reasonable career and income. (Though it is difficult to gauge because the surveys aren’t able to comprehensively measure all paid opportunities.)

But I have long known about all these factors that conspire against practicing artists and that students are undeterred and pursue the career path anyway. My realization that the comparison of Phds to drug dealers was apt for actors was pretty much just that– a realization that arts people don’t really diverge too far from the norm in their aspirations.

Not that desiring to be a drug kingpin is normal, but the act of aspiring to achieve a severely limited status is widely shared by all humans and not specific to artists.

This may seem like common sense, but when you hear students urged to pursue practical majors in Business and STEM fields, you might get the impression that aspiring to the unobtainable is embraced by only the margins of society. As the Slate article notes, the similar conditions exist across all areas of the labor market. It may only be pursued to greater extremes by the margins, but the impulse is deep seated in us all.

Thanks For The Virtual Relationship

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I started my current job in May, however I came to interview for the position right before Thanksgiving last year. As you might imagine, I count that date as an important milestone. Given the proximity of this “anniversary” to Thanksgiving, there were a number of cards and loaves of pumpkin bread being distributed to those who welcomed and assisted me in the transition to my new job.

I probably missed a number of people in the process. One person I whose participation in my job search I did want to recognize is Drew McManus. I use the term “participation” because while Drew did directly contribute to my getting this job, he also more indirectly helped with a little experiment I was running.

So this entry is actually less about saying how wonderful Drew is (though he is), as reflecting on what it is we actually value about employees and coworkers.

I actually started my job search a few years back and I asked Drew if I could use him as a reference. At the time, we had never met in person. And as of right now, our only in person meeting was a couple hours for dinner during a lay over I had in Chicago when I was returning from a job interview.

I wanted to see if it was actually possible to get a job based on the recommendation of someone whom you had never met or worked with directly. I listed Drew about third or fourth on my reference list behind people who had actually supervised my work directly on a daily basis.

While it is true to say that we never really met, we have communicated quite often over the years via email and a number of times on the phone, soliciting each other’s advice and discussing the arts environment. We would coordinate on cross-blog projects. I would frequently alert Drew to problems with the website hosting the blog and there were a few times I expressed criticism of some of the changes he was proposing.

So in many respects, our relationship was similar to that of many workplaces where coworkers assist and comment on each other’s work and labor to advance the interests of the company, in this case the Inside the Arts page.

The Adaptistration blog has passed its decade mark and Butts in the Seats will reach that point in February. In some respects, Drew is more familiar with the quality of my work and thoughts on arts administration than my previous four work supervisors. Since I am faithful about scheduling blog posts to cover my absences during vacations, he knows a bit about my work ethic.

Yet we work in a field that emphasizes in-person interactions with our customer base. We want people experiencing the arts in close physical proximity with the performer or actual piece of visual art.

There is a 10 year section of my life’s work that does not exist physically. There are people who have published fewer pages of incoherent ramblings than I have who are recognized poets and authors (or gotten tenure). I can’t quite say for sure if those 10 years of effort even helped me get this job or not.

Do you really want to hire someone who values interactions and creative content that are generated virtually for a job that is so much about the physical experience?

I think most everyone would agree this is pretty much indicative of the new normal and has been for awhile. Even the novelty of this story has waned from what it might have been four or five years back. I have interacted with Drew and others so frequently and so regularly it is difficult to remember or even believe that we have only met physically for two hours.

To some degree, the situation was almost akin to the blind auditions orchestras hold. My value was being discussed based largely on the quality of my work for the benefit of the project and not colored by office politics, personal affiliations or the size of the tip I leave when we go to lunch.

The common joke is that you never really know if the person on the other end of the computer is who they represent themselves to be, but this is also the stuff upon which relationships and trust are, and will be developed.

Even though Drew was last on my list, he received a surprising number of calls and apparently carried on fairly decent length conversations. And I actually got called out for some in-person interviews afterward. I don’t know whether his conversations helped my case, but they clearly didn’t hurt.

One thing I take from this is that while the opportunity to view performances online can undermine the value of live attendance in people’s minds, this experience has shown me that it is possible to develop a seemingly deep relationship with them as well. All the information you put out there on your website and all the interactions you have on social media can make people feel as if they have visited your performance space and experienced an event there, even if they haven’t.

I won’t argue that it isn’t a shallow, illusory relationship which may crumble quickly upon contact with the real life situation. But I think half the barriers to participation audiences encounter are mental and anything that removes or diminishes those perceptions and makes people feel as if they have the ease of a longstanding relationship with you is helpful.

Though again, the image that you put out there has to match the reality fairly closely. You can’t promote yourself as Disney if the reality is the Jersey Boardwalk after a hurricane.

Process Knows Its Limits

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A post on Drucker Exchange, When Process Is a Prison, got me thinking about ticket office operations. I am sure the content of the entry could be applied to a hundred things that happen every day in arts organizations, but that is what bubbled to the top in my mind.

“Procedures can only work where judgment is no longer required, that is, in the repetitive situation for whose handling the judgment has already been supplied and tested,” Drucker wrote in The Practice of Management. “In fact, it is the test of a good procedure that it quickly identifies the situations that, even in the most routine of processes, do not fit the pattern but require special handling and decision based on judgment.”

I pretty much started the trajectory of my arts management career in the box office a couple decades ago. Since then the rules governing exchanges, returns and other transactions have seemed to move from matters of policy and procedure to matters of judgement. These days having a ticket office manager you can trust to make good judgments on behalf of the organization is as, if not more, important than their technical ability to troubleshoot the computer system you are using to sell your tickets.

Granted, box office operations are probably technically more a matter of policy than procedure, but Drucker’s general sentiment applies.

The ticket office has always been viewed as the first place of contact with customers where good manners and efficient processing of orders is prized. But now customer service interactions are almost more important than the product being sold, given customer expectations and their ability to almost instantly report their disappointment to 1000 of their closest friends.

Consistently providing good service doesn’t necessarily mean treating everyone equally because everyone views their situation as special and may expect you to have some degree of awareness of those circumstances. This is why customer relationship management (CRM) software is viewed as so important by businesses at large (though you wouldn’t know it when you call your cable or cell phone provider). Many arts organizations don’t have the resources to support sophisticated CRM software so human judgment and good note keeping becomes all the more important for them.

Perhaps my perception of the change is based on the fact that I have gradually moved into a position of generating the policy rather than enforcing it and I am a big softy. But I suspect there are many others who will confirm that things have changed from the 70s and 80s when it was “No Refunds, No Exchanges, No Exceptions” for non-subscribers. Now it is more akin to “No Refunds, No Exchanges, Except for the Exceptions.”

As Drucker is quoted, the best procedure recognizes those times that are exceptions to the procedure. I think that some times changing environment requires you to recognize that it is no longer useful to maintain set policies and procedures in favor of general guidelines and good judgment.

How Long Before You Lose Patience?

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Ah, truer words were never spoken!

Maybe I am reading the wrong blogs, but I am surprised none of my usual sources haven’t already quoted this recent post by Seth Godin, “Who is this marketing for?”

-Who, precisely, are you trying to reach?
-What change are you trying to make?
-How will you know if it’s working?
-How long before you will lose patience?
-How long before someone on your team gets to change the mission?
-How much time and money are you prepared to spend?
-Who gets to approve this work?
-Who are you trying to please or impress?

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about how true these are. He suggests asking these before you embark on a marketing campaign in order to save time and money.

All are valid questions, but some are created more valid than others. The first three and how much time and money, are smart to ask. The rest need to be asked, but usually aren’t.

“-How long before you will lose patience?” was the one that jumped out at me because even when there isn’t any ego involved, that ends up being the biggest failing of any marketing campaign. In fact, most people will say if you aren’t taking the long, holistic view, you are probably engaged in advertising rather than marketing.

Marketing is a long term game usually involving multiple parts, aimed at shifting perception as much as selling product. If you are ending it because your patience has run out due to lack of sales rather than lack of shift in perception over the course of months, then you are probably doing it wrong.

But even when you are doing advertising just to sell product, a degree of patience to allow sufficient exposure is definitely required and I will certainly cop to not investing enough time and resources into let advertising permeate the public consciousness.

Arts In Schools Is Only Half The Battle

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Over the last couple months, I have been enjoying Jon Silpayamanant’s series on the WPA Music Project. After reading his entries, I have begun to think that the push to put more arts in schools is may only be half the effort required to really spark an interest and sense of value in the arts.

The WPA projects involved a lot of direct and personal contact with concerts and free classes, each project involving hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of people in a single region each year.

According to the latest statistics released by the Federal Music Project, 2,399,446 students unable to pay for private musical instruction attended the free classes of the project in its 140 music centers throughout Greater New York during the year ending June 30. The number of classes held reached the enormous total of 145,133. (New York Times 1936)

When the federal will and funds were aligned behind the arts, a great deal of activity occurred. But my intent is not to get into the very politicized discussion of why there should be more federal support of the arts.

One thing that struck me from a post suggesting the Depression had a far more devastating effect on classical music and orchestras than seen in current times, is just how integrated into daily life live music performance once was.

Even if you manage to convince large swaths of people to take music lessons and put a piano in their living rooms, our current lifestyles almost guarantee that we will never have such as large proportion of the population that possesses some degree of musical training as we once did. Nor will we likely return to the frequency of exposure to live music people once enjoyed.

In the early 1900s musicians weren’t just performing in concert halls, they were providing music in movie theaters, restaurants, pubs, hotels and even funeral homes. As radio and recorded music become more available, (not to mention Prohibition closing down pubs) thousands of musicians were put out of work.

From the research Silpayamanant cites, it appears that even though live music was no longer as present in everyday life as before, during the 1930s the Federal Music Project brought live performance and practice back into people’s lives pretty personally and directly.

So people of my grandmother’s generation who were born in the early 1900s were exposed to live music on all sides and then had the Federal government validate the value of the arts through myriad WPA programs. They passed these values on to my mother’s generation. My parents passed these values on to my generation, though they were further diluted by the times.

You probably see where I am going with this: these first two generations are dying off as audiences right now.

I am not suggesting that returning arts to the schools won’t be helpful. When I was a kid, it reinforced the perception of value my parents and grandparents passed on to me. Reading Silpayamanant’s posts have just reminded me that not only do arts organizations need to change the way they operate in order to acknowledge changing times, arts education has to do the same.

It is so easy to say, if only we have more of a certain type of activity, things will turn around. It is easy to forget the larger social dynamics have changed. People are no longer surrounded by the same sort of artistic exemplars in their every day life to normalize the pursuit of an artistic discipline. Celebration of those who can create in an electronic medium is more prevalent and likely provides a more familiar touchstone for today’s fledgling creatives.

Quirky Little Trick For Monetizing Creativity

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A post yesterday on the Drucker Exchange blog caught my eye instantly. How could it not when it started (my emphasis),

The story is told that when Peter Drucker was asked how to become a better manager, he replied: “Learn how to play the violin.”

This was, apparently, Drucker’s way of saying that the best managers and knowledge workers are excellent critical thinkers, creative and open to learning new things—just a few of the attributes that, according to a recent article in Time, seem to be in increasingly short supply among recent college graduates.

…The magazine cited several surveys showing that large and growing numbers of job applicants lack “communication and interpersonal skills” or are weak when it comes to “communication, critical thinking, creativity and collaboration.”

The article goes on to cite Peter Drucker saying that lack of social skills shouldn’t be the biggest disqualifier for a position because you are hiring them for their brains, not to act as a social director. It goes on to quote Drucker encouraging companies to hire someone based on the strengths they bring where the company is lacking rather than trying to hire to the job description.

But the entry later quotes a talk Drucker gave where he says the employee needs to be responsible for managing themselves. (this link isn’t the talk, but an article Drucker wrote on the topic.)

“For the first time in human history, we will have to take responsibility for managing ourselves,” Drucker declared during a 1999 talk he gave in Los Angeles. “This is probably a much bigger change than any technology, this change in the human condition. Nobody teaches it—no school, no college—and it will probably be another hundred years before anybody does teach it. In the meantime, the achievers . . . will have to learn to manage themselves, to build on their strengths, to build on their values.”

Drucker may be right that these skills are not taught directly in schools, but some part of them are required in the practical activities of performing arts classes. Teamwork, goal setting, communication, vision, deadlines, it is all there and is ultimately tested when the curtain goes up. All these things can be learned in a classroom or by participating in activities of your local theatre/dance/music ensemble.

(Though certainly recognition of and building your own strengths and values is always going to be something you have to develop on your own.)

There is a question of whether performing arts students are being properly prepared to perform and work in the new modes of expression and communication that will emerge in the future. Because we don’t know what those modes will be, the question is really more about instilling flexibility and creativity of thinking as well as a degree of entrepreneurship.

But is it enough? We keep seeing articles like the one in Time magazine cited on The Drucker Exchange or whenever people reference the IBM study where CEO valued creativity as crucial to ensure the future of their companies.

And yet an ever increasing number of standardized tests are administered every year despite the fact that the only standardized test you are regularly required to pass as an adult is your tax return. And they have software and people that will help you out by soliciting information from you.

The arts aren’t the sole source of creativity in the world, and the CEOs in the IBM study weren’t specifically looking for creativity as it manifests in the arts, but it seems like there is a huge unmet need out there and maybe arts people need to sit down and figure out how package it for Fortune 500 companies if they are so desperate for it.

It probably can’t be done in the same fashion as in college art classes. Drucker is right when he suggests that there is no formal way to teach soft skills. You can’t put together a 40 hour course on being creative and issue certificates confident at having instilled the ability in your pupils.

And yet, people commit acts of creativity every day. Some times with as much effort as it takes the grass to grow, other times with much angst, but with the knowledge and confidence that they are capable of it.

But it seems that finding a method to monetize effectively teaching/instilling creativity is about the only way these days to convince people not to dismiss liberal arts as a pursuit and that there is a Way of learning that does not embrace standardize testing.

Info You Can Use: Examining The Critical Path

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Yesterday, Seth Godin made a post that seemed aimed at a few of the companies and organizations I have volunteered or worked for/with throughout my life. He addressed the importance of understanding the critical path to achieving a goal. He defined critical path as “The longest string of dependent, non-compressible tasks.”

He uses wanting to create a garden as an example.

“For example, in your mind’s eye, the garden has a nice sign in front. The nice sign takes about a week to get made by the sign guy, and it depends on nothing. You can order the sign any time until a week before you need it. On the other hand, you can’t plant until you grade and you can’t grade until you get the delivery of soil and you can’t get the delivery until you’ve got a permit from the local town.”

He notes the logical step is to take care of that permit first. “And yet most organizations focus on shiny objectives or contentious discussions or get sidetracked by emergencies instead of honoring the critical path.”

He discusses how important it is to identify the parts of a process that end up being the choke points of the critical path. He gives an example of how a company he worked for used color coded buttons to identify the people who were important points along that path for a project upon which the success of the company hinged. Everyone not identified as part of that potential choke point, including the president of the company, knew not to impede the progress of those who were.

This resonated with me because I recently discovered that the piece of software I use for tracking my task list has a pull down menu with “Waiting on Someone Else” as an option. When I started using that option to keep the list from periodically squawking that those tasks were overdue, I realized that nearly every task was waiting on action from the same two offices. At least in terms of the functions of my operations, those offices were part of my critical path.

As I read Godin’s post, I was reminded of the oft heard statement: fast, cheap, quality, choose any two. There are staff members that are frequently given tasks with competing priorities and are left to ask which of the crucial tasks are slightly less crucial.

Analyzing the critical paths by general project types would assist decision making about resource and time management within the organization. One notable thing about Godin’s example is that the project, rather than the organization chart, determined who were the most important staff members. If it took the president fetching coffee for the graphic designer to make the project succeed, that is what happened.

The president does play a crucial role in the organization and can’t be spending all their time fetching coffee, but their work may not represent a crucial juncture in the overall process upon which other activities depend. (Except for signing payroll, of course!)

Think about the critical paths in your organization. It may surprise you to learn what your critical paths are and may reveal some awkward truths about where resources really need to be allocated to meet the mission of your organization.

Though remember that this is more than just needing a lot of hands to help out with a process, it is about a chain of events that definitely depend on the prior step being completed. Needing 10 people to stuff envelopes on Wednesday isn’t part of the critical path if having six people start on Monday will accomplish the same goal of getting it all out by Friday. It is, however, if you are mailing out W-2 tax forms which, by law, need to go out by January 31 and the forms can’t be printed out until Tuesday because the payroll data isn’t available until Monday, because…

The Tao of Kermit the Frog (Be At Ease Making Green)

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Over the last two months, I have found myself returning and pondering a review written by Maria Popova of the book, Make Art, Make Money, by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens. The book uses the example of Jim Henson to inform people’s creative careers.

Popova discusses Elizabeth Hyde Stevens’ use of Jim Henson as an example of a person who balanced himself between artistic and commercial success. In particular to “debunk this toxic myth” [that] …tells us art is necessarily bad if commercially successful, and commercial success necessarily unattainable if the art is any good.”

The book apparently start out talking about Henson’s 1968 Muppet appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that sets muppets chanting business jargon against those chanting idealist credos. The idealists knock the business muppets down, but soon begin to take up their jargon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97iZQvyPinQ

Stevens notes that in 1968 Henson was doing commercial work for Getty Oil, IBM, Oscar Mayer and owned a print making business. He started working for Sesame Street in 1968, but didn’t decide to stop making commercials until 1969.

I didn’t take much from the stories about Henson being a capitalist who also walked around barefoot and got together to “sing, laugh, and play with puppets in the kind of collectivism that hippies celebrated.” The social dynamics of that era have passed and there is nothing to be gained by artificially trying to recreate that environment for yourself.

What did catch my attention was a comment made by a collaborator that Henson never saw the money as an end.

“..Fraggle Rock producer Larry Mirkin, who worked with Henson:

He viewed money as energy, the energy that makes concrete things happen out of worthy ideas. Money was not an end in itself. It could provide physical infrastructure or it could help him hire other artists and technicians to realize a nascent idea. I don’t ever recall him being the least bit concerned or afraid of money or obsessed by it, which many people are. It just wasn’t what drove him — at all.

Apparently an artist’s inability to disregard money as an end and find the balance between creative freedom and commercial success is where the perception of art being tainted by money originates, according to Stevens. Finding that balance and resisting the fear or obsession with money is a difficult skill to master.

It didn’t initially occur to me as I wrote this entry, but the Muppet Show might have reflected Henson’s outlook. It was set in an old dingy theater and there were occasionally plotlines where Kermit was worrying about paying the rent, but it wasn’t a constant plot point and the Muppets never seemed to be starving artists. (Granted, they didn’t have to worry about “being stuffed” at the end of the day.)

It always just seemed like a place Kermit was running to give his friends a place to express themselves, from the borderline inept Fozzie Bear and Gonzo to the hard rocking, enthusiastic Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.

What I appreciated was Popova’s closing paragraph,

“…concept of “selling out” is just as oppressive as the very commercial ideology which it purports to defy, and that pitting doing good work against doing well robs culture of its dimension, flattening both art and financial stability into mere caricatures of real life.”

I liked the thought that extreme devotion to any ideal, whether it be art, money, fame, justice, education, becomes a “caricature of real life,” despite the frequent insistence that we are living authentically.

Do U.S. Arts Suffer From A Lack of Working Class Voices?

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Earlier this month, The Independent asked “Are drama schools just for the middle classes?” The question lead a story about a youth program in England that seeks to provide training regardless of social class. The article cites:

“The domination of public school accents on stage and screen was already raising concerns about a thinning of the acting profession’s social spectrum…”

and later

“Dominic Dromgoole, the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, describes the lack of working-class children in the industry as a “real worry”, arguing that English theatre’s portrayal of the proletariat is what makes it distinct from its French and German counterparts.”

I tried to think about whether there is a similar concern in the U.S. about a lack of representation from all social strata in the arts.

There is an ongoing conversation that all children be exposed to the arts and be taught creative expression in school. While affluent communities are no guarantee of arts education in schools, there is a better chance of experiencing the arts in an affluent school district.

There has been concern expressed that only those with means of support are able to participate in a career enhancing internship experience. Certainly, living in certain cities provides more opportunities for employment and ability to contend with the higher cost of living may be a function of social class.

What I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about is whether there are enough actors, dancers, musicians and visual artists emerging from an appropriate cross-section of social strata. I am not sure if it is a problem, much less if anyone feels the situation is a detriment to our cultural landscape.

My first inclination is to think that the environment in the U.S. is inadvertently democratic. It is so difficult to be able to support yourself as an artist, those privileged with an extensive arts education may not enjoy a significant advantage in becoming employed in their area of study over someone with less training. As a result, few people mutter about opportunities lost to someone with a prep school education.

Is this something to examine and be concerned about? When we talk about programming not connecting with today’s audiences, could it be a result of training too many artists who come from the same narrow social strata as the audiences?

Or are people from a good cross section of society being trained and the problem is, as we often say, that those with the money have had the greatest influence on what new artists are being taught to perform?

The Kids Are All Right

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I am currently attending the Ohio Arts Presenters Network conference so I don’t have the time to write a lengthy post tonight.

However, one thing that impressed me (other than the fact they do the best job of feeding the attendees than any other conference I have attended). I have been to a number of conferences where the artists’ showcases were either only attended by conference attendees and showcases that admitted a public audience as well as the conference attendees.

This morning however, the conference scheduled all the youth/school performers back to back in a single block and then invited about 100 or so school kids to attend. The theatre director explained to the kids that they were going to see a new performer every 12 minutes and that their reaction would help people decide what performers were really good.

One of the agents commented how smart a move this was because these artists needed an audience of kids. Many of their high energy frantic performances would likely fall flat on an entirely all adult audience.

I will admit, the kids’ presence was helpful and from the comments we overheard while left, their evaluation about which performer was the best matched that of most of the agents and presenters I spoke with throughout the day.

With a lot of family shows, you have to ultimately convince the parents or teachers that the show is worth seeing because they control the money and transportation. However, the kids have both the power to influence the parents, and in this case, performing arts presenters, that something is worth seeing.

Little Points of Pride

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I didn’t know what to write about today. I have a bunch of articles bookmarked, but I haven’t read enough of any of of them to do them justice. I have a bunch of stories I want to draw instructive points from, but they involve people who work with me or rent from me so if I talk about them at all, it will be after some time has past.

What I have decided to do is talk about something I am not responsible for but I feel a great deal of investment and pride in. Talking about what other arts people are doing well seems like a good topic for a Wednesday.

Last week the gallery in my building opened a show by the artist Jimi Jones, and I have really been pleased with the whole experience.

The artist was great at the opening, taking people around to talk about the pieces, asking them questions about what different elements made them think about, telling them that their feedback would help guide his future work. I appreciated that he introduced the concept of interactivity between the artist and the viewer since many of the attendees were students.

He also showed up early the next day to talk to another class before running off to his next show. I got a chance to speak with him and ask him questions about his work and he was just as gracious and engaging as he had been the night before.

I got a little bit of an ego boost the evening of the opening when the directors of the local museum commented that they had tried to get the very show our gallery was presenting at a museum they previously worked at but met a lot of resistance from the board and staff.

You have to admit, there is always a little thrill with even the illusion that you are a bit more progressive than someone else.

What I also appreciated was that despite the reputation that young people today aren’t really engaged with the arts as much as they are with their phones, there were a large number of students who walked around with the artist for the better part of 90 minutes while he moved to and fro between the different works. I think he tired out before they did.

One of the visual arts faculty has brought at least five different classes into the gallery that I have seen and gotten her students engaged in a conversation about the art.

There is furniture made from a lightning struck tree in the lobby just outside the gallery and I often sit there and read during lunch. The best conversation I have heard the classes in the gallery have so far included the students’ disbelief that the artist is in his mid-50s rather than a 20 year old based on the contemporary subject matter and feel of the works.

None of this may seem like a big deal to some of you, but I have never worked in an arts center with an active gallery and so many interesting pieces of permanently installed visual art. We don’t have a large gallery, but its presence contributes to the vibrancy of the whole building.

As I said, other than unlocking the door and making sure audiences to our shows could see the sign directing them upstairs to the gallery, I haven’t been involved with any of the decisions that lead to the presence of this work. But I do take a lot of pride and ownership in it being here.

Passion vs. Engagement

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The Drucker Exchange quotes an article in Bloomberg Businessweek claiming “truly passionate U.S. employees” make up “a scant 11% of the workforce.”

My first reaction was to wonder if the arts had a higher percentage of passionate employees than most sectors. The Drucker Institute piece mentions the responsibility of the employee to essentially manage their own careers because companies won’t do it for you.

But it also mentions the need for companies to provide an environment which allow passionate people to thrive. This has been a frequent topic recently in respect to the work-life balance employees at arts organizations seek in addition to their desire to make a difference.

“And yet, for all this, Drucker also recognized that it wasn’t simply a matter of employees seizing responsibility. It’s up to their employers to provide the systems and processes and culture for them to be able to do so. Heavy-handed, top-down organizations—those that “rest on command authority,” in Drucker’s words—don’t create the right dynamics for passion.”

When I looked at the Bloomberg article, I was intrigued by the distinction they made between a passion and engagement.

What’s the difference between passion and engagement? Employee engagement is typically used by organizations to figure out if workers buy into the company’s goals, if they like working for their manager, if they find the company sensitive to work/life balance issues, etc. That serves companies well when they want to scale and have workers “engaged” in the task necessary to expand their particular corporate silo.

The passionate worker—the metaphor Deloitte employs is “the passion of the explorer”—are those who view new challenges as opportunities to learn additional skills. That attitude becomes essential, the consulting firm maintains, because the typical work skill will be outdated within five years. “These people are driven to develop new skills at an ever rapid pace and are thrilled by it,” Hagel says. “Passionate people are the most agile.”

Once you think about it, engagement is a different aspect of employment from passion. You can feel engaged by your company and the environment and opportunities you find in your work, but not necessarily be passionate about advancing your skills and knowledge.

An engaged person could advance within the company by performing excellently, but not necessarily advance the company the way a passionate person will.

But a passionate person may not necessarily advance in the company hierarchy. Bloomberg cites the Andon Cord on the Toyota assembly line which any line worker can pull to stop the line and gather the workers when there is a problem.

Like Toyota though, a company needs to create an environment and culture in which passion is valued.

The end of the Bloomberg article notes that those in marketing and management were more passionate than those in accounting and customer service, as were those making more than $150,000.

However, the Toyota example shows that it can be cultivated at all levels of an organization. (And, one hopes, at arts salaries.)

Info You Can Use: The Writing On The Walk

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So tonight is the first event in the season at my new job, a concert by a group called Cordis which bills their music as chamber-rock.

Now if you are asking, “what the heck is chamber-rock?” thank you very much. I actually used that question as the basis of my advertising campaign for the show because I figured nearly 100% of our audience, including our subscriber base, would be wondering the same thing.

That question was posed at the start of our press releases. I bought time on an electronic sign at the intersection of two major roads that flashed the “What the Heck” question on one screen and then provided contact and web information on the next screen.

A couple weeks before the show we distributed posters around campus and town. Then a week prior to the show, I went out early in the morning with sidewalk chalk to write the “What The Heck..” question, and a web address that contained information and videos, around campus and around town near the businesses that accepted our posters.

I didn’t write it directly in front of the businesses’ doors out of concern that they might find it annoying. (I was more direct on campus.) But I did put it on a general area close enough to the business that anyone entering the business had an opportunity make a connection between the sidewalk chalk and the poster.

Near the museum and the library, I took a slightly different tack and included a suggestion that people go in to find out more. My intent being to send people in to explore those organizations when the might not normally do so.

Here is a sample:

What The Heck Is Chamber Rock

I know this is hardly a groundbreaking idea and it isn’t suited to all performances. But the content of this performance lent itself well to having a little fun.

I will admit that it didn’t seem to spur much increase in advance single ticket sales. I suspect there are a number of other issues at play like price and timing that factor into that.

Walking around campus, I did see students looking down at lot, but it was mostly at their phones rather than the sidewalk writing. Though I did catch a couple stopping to read, there is a decrease in situational awareness to contend with these days.

So I am happy to (pun intended) chalk this up to generating awareness and good will in the community than anything else.

Old School Community Engagement

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Apropos of my post yesterday about community engagement, the term has so recently been bandied about as something arts organizations should aspire to, it is easy to forget that it isn’t a new idea.

Bread and Puppet, for example, turns 50 this year. They started out in the streets, in the community giving people bread alongside the performances and involving members of the community in their performance.

They may be viewed as agitprop rabble rousers, but the philosophy founder Peter Shumann espouses about his work pretty much parallels the current thought about how the arts should be integral to a community:

“We give you a piece of bread with the puppet show because our bread and theater belong together. For a long time the theater arts have been separated from the stomach. Theater was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. The old rites of baking, eating and offering bread were forgotten. The bread became mush. We would like you to take your shoes off when you come to our puppet show or we would like to bless you with the fiddle bow. The bread shall remind you of the sacrament of eating.

We want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It preaches sermons and builds a self-sufficient ritual.

Bread and Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto, written 20 years ago, further echoes current sentiments about the value of art.

Cheap Art is not an easy life style though. While the group has endured for 50 years, they haven’t amassed a fortune in the process. From what I have read over the years, their work is fueled as much by passion and sweat today as it was 50 years ago.

The article I link to about the 50th anniversary, suggests Schumann doesn’t feel he has made the impact he had hoped.

While it probably isn’t in the direction Schumann had hoped, his work did have an impact on me. When I was an undergraduate in the late 80s, Bread and Puppet was invited to work with the students to create a performance. If I recall correctly, the piece was protesting the destruction brought about by damming a river to build a hydroelectric plant.

But what impressed me was Schumann’s ability to improvise his show according to the facilities and number of people he had available. My conception of plays to that point was based in the execution of concrete set of lines, stage directions and set pieces.

I recall that the school hadn’t been able to recruit the number of students he had asked for. I thought Schumann would be angry—again based on the idea that shows required a specific number of people. But he and his team just made do and we got an opportunity to work with those great larger than life puppets. The result was pretty visually interesting. (Yeah, I know he didn’t invent improvised performance and the revelation would have certainly come at some point.)

I didn’t go on to protest the construction of environmentally unfriendly projects, but I do still have a poster and the experience has informed programming decisions I have made.

I presented long time Bread and Puppet collaborator, Paul Zaloom at one point. And my college experience with Bread and Puppet was the basic inspiration for a site specific work I commissioned in conjunction with another performance group to provide a similar experience to another set of students. A fair bit of the work I have done in recent years has been about providing a venue for local artists to give voice to elements of their community.

I am sure the memory of that one weekend working with Bread and Puppets has contributed to my conviction about the value of the arts as practice and experience.

At some point in our lives, maybe we all need an encounter with a madman with wild hair who comes with challenging ideas in one hand and a loaf of bread offered in the other.

I was about to suggest that it would be good to sometimes be that madman for our communities, but I realized it takes experience to make the product in both hands palatable.

Info You Can Use: Resources For Developing Community Engagement

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I have been reading a fair bit lately accusing arts organizations of paying lip service to the concepts of connecting and building relationships with the community. The suggestion is this is something of a euphemism for “what is the least I have to do to convince people to see my show?”

While there may be some truth to this, there are a number of arts organizations who sincerely wish to forge stronger bonds with their communities.

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters recently released a resource for those wishing to develop community engagement activities.

The 14 members of the Leadership Development Institute, comprised of presenters from across the country developed the content for “A Cooperative Inquiry: How Can Performing Arts Organizations Build and Sustain Meaningful Relationships with Their Communities?”

They organize the content into the following areas:

Making the Case – Why is it important to know and connect with community?

Building an Organizational Culture – Why is it important to integrate community engagement into a presenter’s mission/strategic plan?

Connecting with Your Community – How should geographic, socioeconomic and political realities of the community inform an organization’s approach?

Involving Artists – How should artists – who are key stakeholders in the arts ecology – be involved in connecting their work with communities?

Evaluating Impact – How can evaluation serve internal learning and enhanced community engagement?

The material gets the old Butts in the Seats seal of approval because it offers practical solutions. Being part of the Leadership Development Institute requires that you discuss the theories, go back and try to implement what you discussed within the context of your organization and then come back and report to the whole group.

As a result, most of the five areas listed above ends with a “How It Works In Practice” section discussing what did and didn’t work for some of the participants. Each area also has a worksheet associated with it to help guide discussions and planning.

The areas that I read with the greatest interest were the first two, making the case and building organizational culture. It seems to me that if you don’t have a clear understanding of your goals and investment by the staff, all your efforts are likely to come to naught.

I liked the five sample generic case statements they provided because they ran the gamut from invoking Aristotelian ideals to the short and practical,

“Unless our arts organizations continually evaluate our missions and evolve our programming to reflect the communities in which we serve, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant and impotent as a force for social and cultural change in our cities.”

I also appreciated that there was one specifically geared to university campus based art organizations.

When it came to making statements about who the community you served was and who you would like to connect to, I liked their suggestion that an arts organization work a little backwards and start by examining a performance or event that you deemed culturally successful and determine what made it important and relevant.

This appealed to me because so often statements about mission and who you serve are very aspirational. That is how it should be.

But often looking at these statements in the context of an event you feel was successful might contradict some of that self-image if the community you think you are serving well isn’t participating in your greatest successes.

On the other hand, you may discover that you have made greater strides in serving a community than you imagined when you recognize that what you identify as the culturally successful event, while not the best attended or financially rewarding, has had the deepest impact in the community. This may manifest in a hundred small ways that aren’t directly recorded on a balance sheet.

When it comes time to try to build organizational culture around the idea of community engagement, that culturally successful event can provide a great starting point.

Staff can be dubious when new initiatives are introduced so having an example of an event that everyone is proud of provides a set of shared values from which to start a conversation about other efforts in which everyone can feel some degree of investment.

Drama Is A Choice

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You may have heard the phrase, “He who yells first, loses.” This is a rule that is often used in beginning acting classes because anger is an easy emotion to go to when faced by the obstacles presented by the other people in your scene or exercise. In order to force the student to explore and exercise all the options available in human interactions, anger is often removed as a choice.

In many instances in real life, this is also the case. Exploding with anger often indicates that a person feels they have lost control of the situation and are trying to reassert control by overwhelming everyone with an exhibition of rage.

Sometimes, people use crying to achieve the same effect. In either case, there is some degree of drama involved.

Seth Godin reminded me of all these things in a recent post where he essentially says people can only process so much drama before a sense of equilibrium is established that allows them to continue to function in the face of it all. (And unfortunately, as we know, if it is a slow news day, people will create a high sense of drama to fill the vacuum.)

The last line is what really drove it home to me.

“But understand that drama is a choice.”

Arts organizations often operate in a sense of crisis and impending doom. It is easy to forget that some of it is of our own making and a result of the way we choose to perceive and process the world around us.

In fact, there was a recent segment on This American Life that dealt with the personal narrative a Bosnia refugee told himself about all the lucky breaks he had received which lead to his current success.

The high school teacher he credits with giving him the one critical break that allowed him to become a renowned economist says his perception of the entire situation and the seminal incident are almost wholly incorrect. However, it isn’t long before he starts to reweave his narrative to support his belief he has benefited from a long series of lucky breaks.

You Wanna Come Upstairs And See My New Etchings?

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There are days like today when I simultaneously feel invigorated to be working in the arts and grossly inadequate for having been remiss in forging relationships and participating in other arts disciplines.

I went to the local museum today to ask them to put up a poster for a show we are going to be presenting in a couple weeks.

I ended up in the executive director’s office briefly chatting about an email I had sent suggesting possibly collaborating on a grant, though I only had a vague idea for a project.

The artistic director  burst out asking if I had wanted to see some pieces they had brought back from New Orleans for a show they were going to put together. Suddenly I found myself in an area of the museum I didn’t know existed looking at African ritual masks and other works.

Apparently a university in New Orleans (I believe it was Southern University of New Orleans) has long been the beneficiary of doctors at various hospitals around New Orleans who have brought back works from research trips to Africa.

The university campus was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and now the building which housed these works was about to be renovated. Rather than store the works in a warehouse for the next few years, the university is placing the pieces in the custody of our local museum. The museum in turn is going to organize the works into shows that will be lent out to other museums.

Most of the pieces are still boxed up, but I was fascinated by the stories of the pieces conveniently at hand they were showing me. In my excitement at having the opportunity, I also felt some regret that I had neglected to really explore the visual arts until the last five years or so.

Granted, I recognize that the experience I was having was as much a confluence of personalities and opportunity as my having taken the initiative to make that first visit to the museum. Not every performing arts facility manager is going to be able to walk into a museum and establish a relationship with the directors that results in an exclaimed invitation to explore the contents of shipping boxes.

(Though I had the romantic Indiana Jones-esque notation of wooden crates with artifacts nestled in excelsior versus the rather mundane Uhaul shipping boxes and bubble wrap.)

The dynamics may not exist where a performing arts director can walk into the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and get a backstage tour of the conservators’ workshops.

Still, the overtures for these relationships probably don’t happen enough. I bet Nina Simon would be all over the right opportunity to collaborate with a performing arts organization around Santa Cruz. Maybe this sort of thing hasn’t happened as a result of a sense of rivalry, perhaps out of disinterest, or maybe like everyone else, a sense of intimidation of an unfamiliar art form.

I think we are all getting the sense that the time when we can comfortably work isolated from each other is coming to a close. At the very least, an improved understanding of the flora and fauna of the greater arts ecology is going to be necessary.

Even if they never find a project to work on with each other, arts people from different disciplines can provide useful feedback to one another.

For example, after hearing the interesting story about each of the pieces, I told the directors I hoped they would include that in the display rather than a small plaque saying “Female Rite of Passage Mask, Ibo Society.”

They already intended to have a much more descriptive display, but I think it is valuable to have someone else reinforce the idea that the story is interesting and important to the enjoyment of a piece. Seeing someone enthusiastic about their work can be infectious and energize you about your own.

And if your colleague is excitedly babbling about something that seems entirely obscure and arcane to you, a close relationship can allow you to point that out and guide them to a more accessible discussion of what is interesting about the piece. You are enough of an outsider to be confused by challenging terminology a colleague in their discipline might not catch, but enough of an insider to know where to start providing guidance.

And of course, you can get a new perspective on your own practices. I implied not liking the sparse plaques in museums, but there is a debate in visual arts circles about how much and what type of information to provide and how much to leave up to the viewer.

Have you ever thought about whether your performances are helped or harmed by the amount of information you provide audiences?  As an audience member/viewer does it affect your enjoyment to learn that your interpretation of a work is diametrically opposed to that of the creator? Would you be happier not knowing?

What Will You Do If You Win?

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Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes and other preventative measures so municipalities are finding additional tasks for fire fighters to perform.

What caught my eye was his comments:

“…explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”

This immediately brought two things to mind. First, that this was a good illustration of the value of embracing the idea of building an expiration date into your organization at the time of formation.

The other thing it evoked was the oft expressed warning against chasing funding for projects outside the scope of your core purpose just because the funding exists. Not only does it cause an organization to lose focus, but as Tabarrok notes, it is difficult to evaluate if your work is really effective any more.

It occurred to me that one of the benefits of building a planned expiration into your organization is the ability to declare a win. That is something that non-profits don’t often get the opportunity to do given the way they are often structured.

If you read about the vision behind arts organizations with expiration dates, achieving the expiration condition doesn’t necessarily need to result in an absolute dissolution.

In many cases, it can just be an opportunity to reorganize a similar group of people to address a new project without feeling an obligation to perpetuate anything from the previous entity. In many respects, it contributes to organization evolution by discarding what didn’t work or is no longer relevant and allowing experimentation with some new ideas.

Stuff To Ponder: Quantifiable Data Is For Other People

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I recently got a little lesson in how easy it is to apply criteria to other people that you resist having applied to yourself.

This weekend I was listening to a recent episode of This American Life which was covering the efforts of an organization called Give Directly which gives money directly to the poorest people in a country, in this case, Kenya, on the belief that they know best how to spend it.

Despite all the problems you might assume might arise, things seem to be going very well with the program.

Still, the founders were all grad students at MIT and Harvard so they are all about hard data. They weren’t satisfied with the anecdotal evidence of outcomes they found in their research. The organization is doing exhaustive research conducting surveys that take an entire day to administer to measure the differences in outcomes between those who receive funds and those who don’t.

This American Life also talked to people from Heifer International who give cows and training raising and caring for them, to people in developing countries. Their program sound incredibly beneficial. The cows are so big and healthy, the reporters talked about how intimidated they were by them.

The reporters mentioned that the people at Give Directly would like charities like Heifer International to do studies to determine what program design was most effective. The reporter asks a Heifer representative (around 30 minute mark) if they would consider giving cows and training to one village and then give the money they would spend on cows and training, to another village to see what was more effective.

The woman representing Heifer said that sounded too much like an experiment and you can’t do that with the lives of real people.

The reporter says he imagines the Give Directly people would respond “that we have to do experiments because that is the only way to figure out the very best way to help people.”

The Heifer representative spoke about it not being that linear and that there are some elements that are not easily quantified by the limits of data.

I immediately found myself siding with the Give Directly people. You are never going to be able to serve everyone who needs help. So if you are providing cows to one village and money to another, at least you aren’t setting up a control group that doesn’t get anything beneficial which is the case with most experiments. (control group getting sugar pills, other group getting the medicine).

And actually, that is how Give Directly is conducting their study–with a control group that doesn’t receive any support at all.

However, it only took about 15 seconds to realize that I was hearing very familiar language being used. How often have people in the arts talked about the benefits of what they do not being easily measured and provided anecdotes about smiling faces and lives changed? I know one acting teacher who yelled at a curriculum committee for trying to apply concrete measures to his classes.

Just recently GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the Wise Giving Alliance got together to ask that overhead not be used as a metric for deciding what charities to support.

Yet with the increased focus on quantifiable results with things like K12 test scores and college four year graduation rates, Give Directly’s model may become a more prevalent one in the future.

The good news is that they give money without any application process or strings attached. The bad news is that it is according to their own criteria.

A grass roof on your house qualified you to receive support from Give Directly in Kenya. If you had a better roof, you didn’t receive any money. A very slim distinction the story admits, between the very poorest and the slightly less poor.

I think we can all admit there are inefficiencies in the way non-profit arts organizations are run that could benefit from good evidence based criteria. However, I don’t think it is a self-deceptive rationalization to believe that what is effective for an art organization in Chicago will be quite different from one in the rural southwest.

This is not to say groups like Give Directly will formulate a one-size-fits-all giving formula. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if hard number results become viewed as an increasingly more important measure of success.

As I wrote about two years ago, Warren Buffett’s grandson, Howard Warren Buffett, has been talking about non-profits merging to become more efficient and solution oriented instead of problem oriented.

Warren Buffett’s son, (Howard Warren Buffett’s uncle), recently derided what he called “The Charitable-Industrial Complex” which criticized transplanting solutions with “little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.” He too calls for a better way of doing things.

Both are more directly referring to work that is being done in the developing world, but criteria applied in one sector will inevitably migrate to another. Talking about the unmeasurable benefits of the arts is only going to so convincing. It would be wise to acknowledge problems, pay attention and participate in the conversation so that others are not proposing solutions for you in your absence.

Of Blogs and Boards

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So Minnesota Orchestra Association CEO Michael Henson declared that “blogs are senseless and must be ignored,” and he is right.

At least in the same sense that people think Congress is ineffectual but approve of their own representative. People don’t value blogs themselves, they value the people behind them.

Lynn Harrell hardly posts on his blog, but because of his stature when he posted about Delta taking both his cello’s and his frequent flyer miles, it raised such a ruckus there were newspaper articles about the situation and a segment on the Colbert Report.

The same is true for Bill Eddins, he doesn’t post often, but when he does, people respond.

Drew McManus doesn’t get cited as an expert solely by sitting in front of his computer typing away, he is out there consulting, speaking at conferences, giving interviews…and writing interesting things on his blog.

Emily Hogstad wouldn’t have garnered so much attention about MOA’s pre-emptive domain squatting if she hadn’t developed trust with years productive and interesting work.

Were blogs not to exist, these people wouldn’t be any less smart, talented and worth listening to. The blog medium just makes it easier to do so.

In the same vein, people don’t give to organizations, they give to people. Michael Henson seems to have either forgotten or been unaware of that fact.

Except in this case it is the reverse of the situation with Congress. People don’t value the individual musicians, but they value their relationship with the assemblage of musicians as a whole.

And perhaps unfortunately for Michael Henson and the MOA board, people don’t just value their relationship with the current musicians, but those of the past as well. Henson and the board may think they are bringing a recalcitrant bunch of musicians to heel, but by shutting down the season, they are interfering with a Minnesotan sense of pride in their historical support of arts and culture, including the Minnesota Orchestras of the past.

Now you even have Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton making a statement about the window closing on the two parties after having remained voluntarily quiet on the subject for months.Since there have been calls for the orchestra to return state monies, this may be a harbinger of things to come.

It is heartening that when we have had so many government officials telling artists and organizations what sort of art they should create, the subtext of Gov. Dayton’s remarks is basically to just get back to making art.

There is a conceit expressed by theatre technical staff where they say about actors, “without us, they would be performing naked in the dark.” This ignores the fact that theatrical performances don’t have to occur in a dark room outfitted in fancy costumes.

Sure, audiences LOVE the spectacle, but give them the option of a sun lit live performance in the middle of a cow pasture or an opportunity to listen to a recording of that same group in a 2000 seat concert hall accompanied by a spectacular light show and see where they go. Even if the tickets to the cow pasture are more expensive, people are going to choose the live show over the light show.

Orchestra boards are making the same mistake. They think their job is to get a musical performance for as cheap as possible, but people prefer the substance over the reasonable facsimile.

Now the question of whether people prefer orchestra music over something else is one of programming rather than labor and organizational existence.

Orchestra board members may be important people individually, but as a group they are subsidiary to the musicians themselves. Just as people only come to see the light and costumes in the context of a performance, no one comes to an orchestra concert for the board members.

When board members are feted for the great work they did for the orchestra, it is due to the delight the orchestra brought. The board made it possible for the musicians to deliver that delight, but the board is not the source of that delight.

Boards are praised for helping to construct, support and build arts organizations. Not for making them less. No board has ever been praised for their courage in cutting the oboes.

Boards, like blogs are meaningless of themselves and only gain value by dint of the talent of the people behind them.

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The Minnesota Orchestra cross-blog event is a collection of more than a dozen bloggers, musicians, patrons, and administrators writing about the orchestra’s devastating work stoppage. You can find all of the contributions in the following list and the authors encourage everyone to participate by sharing, commenting, or publishing something at your own culture blog.

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Founder or Flounder? Being An Employee Is Okay

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Hat tip to Jari-Pekka Raitamaa who tweeted an article about mistakes people make when considering founding a tech start up. It occurred to me that the same basic advice could be given to people thinking about founding an arts company of some sort.

The basic premise of article by Jolie O’Dell, Stop founding! 10 signs you’re ‘employee material’ is that many would be founders need to get some significant experience working in a company before they decide to start one. And even then, they may be better suited staying as an employee.

You’ve never tried a real job
[…]
If all you’ve tried so far is freelancing, consulting, or agency work, founding is a pretty big leap. You don’t know about how companies run from the inside, about different management styles. You might have trouble forming and functioning in teams.

Why this is bad for founders: Founding requires commitment and longevity. Regardless of your C-suite title, in day-to-day operations, you’re functioning as a team lead responsible for managing a small crew of professionals. Experience in management with a corporate safety net is a boon.

Along the same lines, if you have only worked as a performer or only done short term administrative work for an arts organization, you may not have the skills and endurance to lead a small group through the rough formative years of the company.

You’ve already failed at one or more startups
We fetishize failure in the startup community, and we especially fetishize failing quickly. But regardless of the lessons you learn or the network you build, failure is still a bad thing.

In and of itself, failure is the universe telling you that your idea wasn’t good enough.
And it’s got nothing to do with execution. It’s your idea. Twitter was really poorly executed at first. It succeeded. Ditto for Facebook and lots of other consumer software. Ditto for a lot of programming languages. You can have wiggle room in execution for a truly great idea.

Why this is bad for founders: A string of bad ideas is more than just “throwing [stuff] at a wall and seeing what sticks.” It might be a sign that you’re jumping in too deep, too quickly. Fail at a few side projects, if you must. But be cautious about rushing into a new venture with nothing but failure under your belt.

The bit about fetishizing failure and failing quickly and often caught my eye (so my emphasis) because non-profit arts organizations are often criticized for their conservative approach and unwillingness to take chances and flirt with failure. To some extent, it may be to your credit to have embarked on a new endeavor and failed.

Still it is easy to fail as a result of ill-informed and conceived choices. The article makes good points about making sure you have learned from your mistakes before proceeding.

You can’t design or code (Translate as “You Can’t Directly Contribute To The Product”)

Lean startup culture says you need three archetypes for a startup: a developer, a designer, and a hustler. Traditionally, the hustler does biz dev, sales, hiring, and management tasks.

But what does a hustler do at a founding-stage startup, really? It often turns into long hours for long hours’ sake, lots of meetings with few outcomes, and boatloads of cheerleading and enthusiasm for a business that’s generating no income and has few or no users.

If you can’t pinpoint your exact skill set — and if your skill set isn’t unique, valuable, and directly related to product creation — you might want to take an employee position at a later stage company.

Why this is bad for founders: Creating a minimum viable product is often Task Number One at a lean startup. Your salary shortens the runway for such a nascent company, and you can’t sell, aka “hustle,” against a product that doesn’t exist yet.

While it might have been good to trim this one down, the bit about the hustler putting in long hours for long hours sake and doing a lot of cheerleading struck a chord.

True, the crucial function in an arts organization ends up being fundraising. But I am pretty sure the time is coming soon if it hasn’t arrive yet, given the expectations created by Kickstarter and its ilk, where it will be difficult to raise any sort of funding without some sort of interesting product example.

I suspect people won’t be as willing to give based only on the idea of a promising group creating good art. Unless you are in a position to pitch in and produce from the get go, your presence may be a hindrance rather than a help.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates didn’t bring Steve Ballmer on to run the business side of Microsoft until five years after the company had been founded and provided its first piece of software.

The arts are already full of people working unnecessarily long hours, don’t add yourself to their number.

Which leads to the next point:

Your big idea is unoriginal

[…]
If the market is saturated with variations on your idea, back slowly away from your drawing board and wait for your next big idea.

Why this is bad for founders: With too many competitors come too many problems. You might not be able to wedge your way into a crowded marketplace. Or you might get suddenly squashed by a drawn-out patent or other IP lawsuit.

Along the same theory that people probably won’t give to groups without a demonstrable product, new funding for old ideas and methods of producing art is probably not long for this world either.

Again, along those lines…

You don’t know what you want

Why do you want to be a founder? This is brutally difficult territory and requires immense passion and Herculean dedication.

Scratch that: It requires Odyssean dedication. You’re on a quest with no end in sight. Every task seems impossible. There are new difficulties around every corner.

So why the heck would you want to do that?

If you don’t have a clear vision, if you’re only running on the heady fumes of startup mania, you will most certainly fail.

Why this is bad for founders: Enthusiasm only goes so far. Only a heart and mind obsessed with a specific mission will be able to sustain you through the hard times that await you.

Again, founding an organization out of simple rejection of the current choices isn’t enough. Your vision can’t be predicated on, “We will different from them and do it better.”

What does that look like in practical terms? It isn’t enough to say you will be nimble and more responsive to change, you have to have an idea of what practices and infrastructure you need to have in place to make it happen.

The other signs Jolie O’Dell lists that I haven’t expounded upon are pretty apparent or closely related to the points I have already made: “You’re young and/or inexperienced”; “You have no network”; “You get bored really quickly”; “You have no net worth”; “You’re the primary breadwinner of a multiperson household.”

I am not saying people shouldn’t found new organizations. It seems pretty clear we need new ideas and new methods. These are just some important things to consider before you undertake such an endeavor.

The Long Arc Of Artistic Growth

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A few weeks ago the directors of the local museum invited me to an after hours talk by an artist whose work was showing in one of the galleries. Apparently the artist had floated the idea of doing a powerpoint presentation, but ended up talking about her work while walking around the gallery.

I am glad she opted for that because listening to her talk about how her process has evolved while referencing the different pieces in the gallery was much more engaging. Once she was done, everyone went scurrying back to the walls to look at the pieces in the context of her commentary.

For the last few weeks I have been wondering if a performing artist could be as effective and engaging talking about their process. A visual artist has a bit of a benefit in this regard.

When the artist I saw speak noted that she got more comfortable with the idea that she didn’t have to include the limbs in great detail when she was really interested in a person’s head and torso, the evidence was right before you as she compared an early work to a later work.

When an actor or musician says they did something one way in the past and now they do it this way and demonstrates the differences, you never know, they could be lying. Also the way they depict their style of performance in the past is informed (and perhaps infected) with everything they have learned since. They can’t perfectly reproduce their past imperfections.

This dynamism is what makes live performance interesting so we certainly don’t want people trying to ossify their abilities. It just doesn’t have the verifiable elements that visual arts have.

Ultimately, primary qualification for successfully talking about your process is being skilled at talking about your process in an interesting way. The artist I saw could have been just as terminally boring without a powerpoint as with.

I was reading an article in Boston Magazine about the incredible lengths to which a musician was going in order to audition for a percussionist spot on the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Every night he was sending excerpts of his practice to Christopher Lamb, the principal percussionist of the New York Philharmonic. At one point Lamb responds,

“in the case of Ravel’s Boléro, a piece with a famously repetitive snare-drum part — “You’re too young, this is too fast for this old guy … relax, be more inviting.’”

After reading that, I wanted to know what did too young sound like, what does relaxing and more inviting sound like?

Would I, as a layman, actually be able to discern the difference or would I need to be a percussionist practicing 20 hours a day as this auditioner was, to even perceive the nuance?

What is the impact on the rest of the musicians if he is playing too young versus more relaxed, and does it have an impact on the enjoyment of the audience? Or is it just the other musicians who will really notice?

If there was a demonstrable difference between the week before and the week after he got the note, (versus comparing how he played when he was 15 versus today), it might be interesting to audiences to learn about “the change that landed me the job on the BSO.” (Well, he isn’t listed as a BSO musician, but you get the idea.)

In regard to theatre performances, they are often intentionally directed in opposition to previous productions so an actor could be equally brilliant at the same role in entirely different ways simply because the productions had different focuses. There can be both maturation of skill as well as an increased flexibility of approach that an actor can talk about.

All this got me wondering if artists conducting performance talks should move beyond talking about what they did to create the present work and talk about that evolution. The frustrations, mistakes and choices that had been made over time might help break down the perception of talent and inspiration being absolute things that are doled out to some and not to others.

People may be better able to identify and connect with artists who talk about a process of misses, self-criticism and evolution that parallels their own experience. Not to mention realizing that careers are not usually made on reality television shows.

Again it wouldn’t work for everyone. Some people won’t be skilled at keeping the conversation from crossing from self-examination and deprecation over to self-pity and recrimination, alienating their audience.

Anyone have examples of artist talks that they thought were done very well?

SoHo On Erie

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In the wake of Richard Florida’s advocacy for the creative class as harbingers of vitality in a city, a number of locales subscribed to the notation with mixed results.

Things aren’t as simple as providing fallow ground for artists, adding a little water and standing back to watch prosperity grow.

That said, I have been watching an effort in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood with some interest. Maybe the long term plan is to spur gentrification and economic vitality, but right now it looks like they are looking to create an artist colony and inject some vitality into a neighborhood.

They adopted the most aggressive approach I have seen in getting artists there.

What initially caught my eye was their offer of assistance with transportation, hotels and meals to artists across the country to help them attend a Welcome to Collinwood weekend earlier this month.

When artists arrived, there were all sorts of tours and activities for them, including an opportunity to check out houses they could buy for $6500 and fix up.

“Our $6,500 house program is a perfect opportunity for artists who want to create their own live/work space and don’t mind putting a little rehab and TLC into their property. We select houses that are in moderate to good condition, houses where rehab costs will be relatively low, and then give artists 6 months to make any necessary repairs to the property. After those repairs are complete, you own the house outright.”

If you aren’t in to rehabbing a house, they will do it for you at a cost that is less than market price–with a $1500 allowance for appliances.

And it appears they may even give you some work to do via grants for community art projects.

I am not sure how many people attended the weekend and it is far to early to know if anything positive will develop since it only occurred a few weeks ago. Anyone who is interested can contact them to get involved.

Obviously I would like to see this succeed. There are Weed and Seed programs where they offer housing to police officers at low prices and mortgages in order to help stabilize communities. I have no idea whether Collinwood is a high crime area or not, I just draw the parallel in order to express a hope that the introduction of artists to communities is shown to contribute to a similar state.

It isn’t enough to feel secure in your community, pride and excitement are important as well.

Breaking Hearts Away From Broadway

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Broadway Producer Ken Davenport wonders why Broadway doesn’t do an American Idol type audition either having open auditions or putting casting directors on a bus to tour the country.

The basis for this suggestion is that it would get a lot of people engaged in the process–not only the people who auditioned, but all their friends and family as well. And they would remain engaged over a longer period of time, keeping the show present in their mind during the rehearsal period, leaving them primed to want to attend once it opened.

“You don’t think all those people that audition in the coming months will be more enthused about watching Season 13 when it rolls around? They’ll tune in to say, “Who beat me?” And they’ll be proud to tell their friends, “I auditioned for that.” By involving people in the process, they expand their audience.

[…]

Why doesn’t every Broadway show have open calls, allowing anyone and their brother, Equity or not, a chance at Broadway stardom? We did it for Godspell, and we had lines around the block (and collected emails). So many people said it was their dream just to be seen for a Broadway show, and they would never forget it, even if they went back to their day job the next morning. Sure it’s a cost, but you don’t think you’d make that back in press and tickets? And just imagine if you found a cast member from that casting net. Oh the articles!”

One of first thoughts was about all those experienced actors that have been honing their craft and hitting the pavement for years. Where does this leave them? What message does it send about the performing arts?

There is a long tradition of unknowns being “discovered” so I am not put off by the prospect of someone getting a lead role with little effort. It has been known to happen. Much the rest of the cast would probably be comprised of experienced people and the producers probably shouldn’t be looking for the lead parts like “You’re The One That I Want” did for the revival of Grease.

My biggest concern is that in an environment where people think orchestra musicians shouldn’t want to get paid for “having fun” performing, an American Idol type process for casting Broadway shows would send the message that just about anyone could circumvent the hard work involved with performance and just walk into a part.

Where most performers work to become suitable to be cast in a variety of roles and shows, the only thing you could say for sure about a person cast in this manner is that they are suited to play this character in the dynamics of this particular production.

Certainly, they might have the ability to do a credible job in many roles. My concern is that the general public would believe that success in this specific endeavor validated their ability to perform well in multiple roles. There is a big difference between what you need to bring to each role. But it will appear that anyone can be a performer after a few hours of competition and coaching.

Best situation would be if the process wasn’t televised because the meat of the casting and coaching process would be edited out leaving people with the wrong impression of the process. After watching someone get asked about the character choices they have made, why they reacted to another person in the manner they did and if they understood the time period in which the show was set, people would get the sense that there is work involved in preparing for a production.

As part of coaching, this makes for boring television. As the basis of biting criticism from a panel of judges, it might be very exciting, but it is rather far from the mind numbing reality of a real audition process. I am not sure anyone is well served in the long term by injecting that sort of unrealistic melodrama into an audition process.

But an untelevised national casting tour that mixed competitive drama with an emphasis on the fact that this was the exception rather than the rule to having a performance career could be productive.

The title of this entry comes from the old saying “There’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway.” I do agree with Davenport’s perception that people would be happy just to have the opportunity to try out for a Broadway show. That could be turned to a constructive end if an effort was made in conjunction with the auditions to encourage people to become more involved with their local performing arts organizations, reinforced the value of a liberal arts education and disseminated the idea that talented people didn’t/shouldn’t need to go to New York, Chicago or LA in order to work.

Of course, my agenda and that of television and Broadway producers probably don’t intersect in a lot of places.

Of Resumes and Job Applications

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I have only been at work for three months, but already they have me on a search committee. When we were meeting to talk about interview questions before human resources gave us the application packets, I took advantage of the opportunity of working with a new group of people to take a quick poll about a pet peeve of mine that I have referenced before– the resume objective statement.

Like me the other people on the committee found it really unhelpful, thought it often felt stilted and unnatural on an already heavily formalized document, were uninteresting, unhelpful to the process and took up too much room on a document that was supposed to be limited to one page.

And this was from people in a cross section of areas from graphic design, finance, athletics and accounting.

I have come to the conclusion that all those guides that tell you to include objective statements on your resume are doing so at the behest of big corporations who use software to screen applicants based on key phrases in the resume. I suspect there are a lot of employers that don’t find the format really enhances their impression of applicants.

In the arts, a little divergence from the standard suggested format can definitely be an asset.

A long time friend recently asked me to look at his resume and it occurred to me that like so many things that involve selling a product, service or idea, it is the story you tell about yourself that really matters.

Because what you will emphasize differs from employer to employer, I generally provide that narrative in my cover letter and leave my resume to provide the supporting details. Often those details need to be tweaked a bit, but the big variation in applications is in the cover letter based on the job requirements and information about the organization my research has turned up.

Still it is important that your resume be able to tell your story on a stand alone basis. A person should get an idea about what things ignite your passion while they determine how accomplished and suitable you are for the position based on your work history.

What sort of frustrates me as a person working in the arts is that the process I often need to follow suppresses the usefulness of 95% of the expressive tools available these days. You often have the option of submitting materials by email now, but the distribution to search and audition committees is generally by printed hard copies which eliminates the usefulness of links to videos and other materials.

From my own recent searches, I know that committee members will definitely check out blogs and webpages. I would see a surge in visits on Google Analytics and have a sense that I would get a call days, and sometimes weeks, before it was made. It is more difficult for a committee member to accurately type in the URL for a YouTube video.

Sure you can set up a webpage with appropriate links and direct people there. But it is much more organic to be able to cite a project and immediately provide a link to it.

It is also difficult to set up a custom website with an easy to enter URL for every job application you send out. You don’t want to apply to a Children’s Theatre and send them to a site that includes so many links to other types of projects that the employer gets the impression your passion really lies elsewhere.

I am vaguely aware that visual arts organizations make more direct use of digital portfolio review in hiring. I wondered if anyone in the performing arts was conducting their searches in a way that really took advantage of all the available technological opportunities.

Likewise, I wondered if anyone that had recently applied for a job had managed to leverage technology to their benefit as part of their initial application.

One option that just occurred to me would be to create a personal URL for each job search so that each employer only saw the materials you wanted them to see.

Embracing The Feedback Loop

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A few months back, Seattle based artist Clayton Weller, wrote a piece addressing what he feels is a self-limiting outlook held by many artists that theatre is dying and there is no money out there. He confesses to having embraced the same outlook until he worked for a start up company.

Now he advocates for every artist to work for a start up in order to adopt their more nimble outlook. (my emphasis)

When you say the word “business” to someone, especially an artist, they automatically assume you’re talking about something stuffy, rigid, uncompromising, and [insert horrible adjective].

You say “business” but they hear “bureaucracy.” THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING!…

To eschew something because it can be done poorly, is a disservice to yourself, and might rival einsteins famous definition of insanity (look it up plebes!).

[…]

Talking directly to people, iterating ideas before execution, creating a feedback loop with measurable data; it all makes perfect sense.

By doing this you create a real connection with your customer (audience) and develop a product (art) people will not only tolerate, but will clamor for. In terms that an artist would use: your art becomes relevant.

That’s a big deal.

The average artist does NONE of these things. Not only that, they intentionally avoid them. They lock themselves away to pursue their secret “vision.” When they receive negative criticism, they blame their audience (customer). WHAT?!?

For me this addresses some age old debates about artists being more business minded and selling out vs. thinking you know what audiences/customers should like. (the most negative extremes of the spectrum)

Obviously, I like his point about not dismissing options because other people don’t do it well.

I think the complicating factor is the fear is that you too won’t do it well and the process will dominate your time and take you away from your creative work. Or worse, make you resent your creative work for making it necessary to become involved in the business side. For some it may not be a wholly irrational fear.

Still, I think regardless of your fears and regardless of your views about what constitutes selling out and remaining true to your art, the feedback loop Weller mentions is a useful process.

Failure and missteps are things you will face, especially when you are working in the arts. Proper feedback can help minimize this over time. If nothing else, the process can help you identify the proper people to solicit for feedback.

If you start a flow chart from the simple proposition that you want to support yourself with your art. You can ask, do people say nice things about my art? If the answer is yes but they don’t pay for it, you either need to find other people to get feedback from or figure out a different way to monetize your art from the people giving you feedback.

Likewise, if there are a lot of people who criticize your work, but still won’t buy it after you make the changes to the areas in which they say you fell short, then you may need to find other people to solicit feedback from.

Obviously it isn’t as completely clear cut as that. The problem may lie in your execution not being very good. My point is that you can’t depend entirely on your family and friends or trolls for feedback. It is necessary to identify people with the level of discernment you seek whose feedback you can trust and work from there.

You just need to recognize and own the potential implications of appealing to 1,000 versus 100,000. You can make a lot of money from those 1,000, but you need to be producing to a certain standard. Meeting the expectations of 1,000 can be just as burdensome as that of 100,000.

Have A Fulfilling Experience Being An Artist

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Earlier this week, Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group listed an artist residency program that really appealed to me.

Only Australians are eligible to apply, but I just really liked the way the Asialink program at the University of Melbourne listed the expectations for their program.

You can’t use the residency for research or academic study. Instead, (my emphasis)

Each resident is offered a specific amount of funding and initial contacts in the host country. It is then up to the individual to make as much of the experience as possible and to plan and manage their own program.

Key attributes are the ability to cope with sometimes unusual or difficult situations, and to work successfully in a challenging environment while maintaining good working relationships.

That is basically it. The criteria is to have a plan, take advantage of the opportunity, be able to cope with strange situations you may encounter. You have to show that you worked on your project when you return and submit an accounting about how the money is used.

Coming from a higher education environment which emphasizes research and publishing in order to keep your job and an arts environment which has lengthy grant proposal and reporting requirements, this is refreshingly brief and liberating.

Applying will take some work and preparation, and certainly the opportunity isn’t for everyone, but the process doesn’t seem terribly onerous.

I am sure there are other grant programs like this, but I have come across few which state they expect you to have a fulfilling experience.

It makes me a little envious and wish I lived in Australia since the program includes Arts Management experiences.

I offer this in hopes it will inspire others to emulate them. And if some entity is offering something similar and Americans are eligible, I hope someone tells me about it!

What Should I Talk About?

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Now that I am back living in the lower 48, I have begun thinking a little more seriously about possibly presenting at some of the national or regional conferences. I had actually thought about it a bit when I was in Hawaii, but distance limited my opportunity to attend many conferences and hampered collaboration opportunities.

That gave me the idea to ask my readers–what do you think I should do a session on? This is actually a double duty question because I am also essentially asking what topic would you want me to write blog entries on to.

I understand that many people can’t attend conferences so I would ultimately be planning on posting whatever I talked about on the blog. And readers might see bits and pieces of what I was working on emerge on the blog as my research brought me in contact with new information.

Rather than to ask what topics I should blog about, I wanted to frame in the context of what do you want to know about so badly that you would seriously consider undertaking the expense of travel, hotel, food, etc to attend a conference where someone was talking about it?

I also suspect I take for granted people’s familiarity with many topics I come across in my daily reading. The reality might be that people are desperate for information. So even if I didn’t do a conference session on it, your feedback will help determine topics I blog about in the future.

Just as examples of conferences sessions to get you started, Arts Presenters is looking for session proposals on Catalyzing Communities around the arts, Making the Case for the Arts and The Art of Transition. That last one seems like it could encompass everything from leadership transition to changing your organizational approach to programming and marketing.

I just found out that I probably will be attending APAP conference this year. Though I am not sure I would get a proposal together by the deadline next Thursday so I am not necessarily looking for a topic that would fit that conference.

I figure I can either lead or contribute to a conversation about:

-contract negotiations, submitting offers, reading contract riders
-closely partnering with multiple arts presenters to organize a tour as a consortium
-partnering with artists to create performance works reflecting stories/values of indigenous cultures

Of course, I can talk about many other topics like marketing, social media, presenting in higher education environments (and bureaucracies) but I feel like a lot of other conference presenters can and have done so before. Though I am certainly happy to produce blog posts on these topics

I feel what I have listed are areas in which I have more specialized knowledge than many others. It is also likely that I am forgetting some too. If there is a subject area which you have come to value my expertise, let me know.

Thanks.

Info You Can Use: Generating Interview Questions

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I have only been at my new job for six weeks and already they have me on a search committee. Some may groan at the thought, but the position being hired will likely impact my area pretty significantly so I was actually relieved when I was asked to serve.

We had our first committee meeting today which was preceded by a training session on interviewing. In addition to reminding us about the usual forbidden subjects of age, race, religion, martial status, etc, the human resource director talked a little about a new approach the university was using with searches.

It is a little difficult to explain clearly here, but essentially it starts with the committee prioritizing the most important areas of the job (e.g. leadership, communication, experience, strategic vision, collegiality etc).

This would help us determine what questions should be asked at what stage of the process. If leadership and experience are top priorities and were going to make or break a candidate for us, we would ask questions that related to those areas during the phone interview phase rather than exploring collegiality.

At later stages we might have more questions touching on leadership and experience since they are high priorities, add in questions dealing with middling priorities to help us expand our impression of the candidates, but choose to only ask a few questions on low priority items or omit them altogether.

What really impressed me about this approach is that it keeps the early interview rounds focused and theoretically dictates how long latter phases of the interview process actually need to be.

Instead of saying, we should have the candidate meet with Bob because it just seems like a good idea, looking at the prioritization you may realize there isn’t any reason for an official meeting with Bob. If there is, a low prioritization might point to a 20 minute meeting or a meal alongside others rather than an hour long one on one meeting in Bob’s office.

Now, notice I say theoretically. Politics may dictate the candidates meet with Bob even in the absence of a compelling reason. That could be detrimental to the search. The HR director mentioned that searches often fail because highly qualified candidates can identify weak processes like undue focus in irrelevant areas.

There was one slide in the HR director’s presentation that I immediately knew I wanted to feature here on the blog. After the committee had finished its discussions, I ran down to the human resource office to ask her permission to share it with you.

It is a general template for the interview questions.  Clicking on the image will open a new window so you can refer to it and my commentary on it without having to back arrow.

Interview Guide Template. Used with permission. © Shawnee State University
Interview Guide Template.
Used with permission. © Shawnee State University

The bullet points on the left under “Leadership” note general activities the university has identified that person possessing leadership qualities will have/need to engage in.

The italicized text in the center is how these qualities are specifically exhibited in relation to this job. (This being an example document, they are exceedingly general.) Under that are the questions that are derived from this.

The Situation/Obstacle/Action/Results at the bottom allow the committee member to make notes about how the candidate’s answer touched upon these different phases during the situation being described.

What I really like about this format is that it places the elements from which the questions emerged on the same page with the question. There are always going to be answers you never anticipated when you envisioned the qualities of the person fulfilling the job. It is easy to become confused about whether the response illustrates that they are qualified or not.

But if you gaze down and see the answer being given touches upon all the qualities that comprise the foundation of the question, you can feel more confident about their qualifications.

I am looking forward to continuing in this process. I may end up with a different impression later on, though the search chair has used it in a few searches before and speaks highly of it.

Giving, Rather Than Sacrificing

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I was thinking last week about the growing sentiment that non-profit organizations should resist the impulse to do “more with less.” The idea being that it gives funders, boards, government entities and the public an unrealistic view of what the real costs of programs actually are and is likely to cause burnout among employees.

The quality of all programs will probably suffer in an effort to make up for the loss of funding to one, as well.

Although it would really hurt organizational pride and morale, the suggestion is to eliminate the program rather than stretching and stressing yourself even more trying to maintain it. That way, at least the consequences of low funding are unambiguous.

A cynical thought crept into my mind that some organization of younger workers unfettered by concerns of good pay and work-life balance might come along and belie your insistence that the program couldn’t be supported, by happily suffering through its execution.

But soon I got to thinking, why not let them? Not that you should welcome an under-captialized organization with unrealistic expectations, but if there was someone qualified who thought they could do a better job, maybe your organization should hand over your files to them.

I started to wonder if many non-profits had really ever thought of this. Most organizations are aware of people doing similar work in their region, whether they are viewed as competitors or providing parallel services. If you are being faced with having to eliminate a program, but are conflicted and a little guilty thinking about all those whom you serve losing something they valued, perhaps it is best to give your program materials to a group that possesses better resources or sees that program as one of their core competencies.

Once you no longer view each other as competitors, there may be room for constructive partnerships. For example, a performance venue who is seeing their K12 school show program flounder due to decreasing availability of bus money might direct their clients to a group that performs in schools, but doesn’t have their own facility.

The traveling group may benefit from the additional contact list, as well as costumes and props that the venue will no longer be using. In return, however, the traveling group may still do an occasional school show for the venue or may produce a series of weekend family matinees at the venue, allowing the venue to continue offering family programming without having to bankroll the development.

Or perhaps both groups wanted to do an after school program, but neither had all the resources they needed to pull it off. Yet as partners, they do.

By the end of my musing, I started to think that trying to do more with less and hold on all your programs might not only be harmful to your organization, it might also impede constructive partnerships.

Instead of looking around at other groups as competitors for the same pie, which granted is increasingly becoming the case, it may be more productive to evaluate what other people are doing as well, if not better than you, with an eye to possibly having to cede that to them.

Times when things are going well are probably best to consider these issues because it also allows the time to evaluate potential partnership options while free of financial panic.

Perhaps you will decide to transition things away before a critical decision ever needs to be made, when your program still remains vibrant and is a worthwhile addition to another company.

No organization should be in a mode of constantly contemplating its demise. I know many elderly start mentally ear marking who will get what when they die, if they haven’t already started actively giving things away. I don’t think that is a healthy way for a non-profit to operate.

It should know where its strengths lay, what its core functions are and what things occupy a more secondary role. Strive for excellence in everything and shine in the community, but be consistently clear about what the priorities of the organization are.

Boards and staff members are likely to have strong emotional attachments to the work that your organization is doing, and probably rightfully so. An open and ongoing conversation about what another organization is doing well can help to motivate your organization to step their game up and do a little better.

But having an open conversation about the organizational priorities as well as what other organizations are doing well may ease the decision to cede/transition a program away if the staff and board has regularly acknowledged the worthiness of another organization to do the work that is being set aside.

Being Goldilocks

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My hair like Jesus wore it
Hallelujah I adore it
Hallelujah Mary loved her son
Why don’t my mother love me?

These lyrics from the eponymous song of the musical Hair has always struck me as a great expression of the conflict an artist faces.

On one hand, you have to dress and appear professionally enough that you gain the confidence of potential employers, donors and granters.

On the other hand, you have to possess enough of an artistic aura, either in dress or behavior, that people will believe you are an artist. Appear too conventional and you cast doubt on your artistic abilities.

Working on a university campus, I been feeling a little tug of this conflict. It wasn’t a big problem in Hawaii where even bank presidents wear aloha shirts, albeit tasteful $200 silk aloha shirts.

But now I look out across campus seeing administrators running around in dresses, suit jackets and ties (not simultaneously) and I am reminded of these cultural expectations.

Because at the same time, I am out walking down the street every day to get lunch and how I dress as the director of the performing arts center contributes to the perception of what sort of people are welcome as audience members.

Probably nothing to be done to relieve folks in the arts world of this Goldilocks requirement of avoiding extremes.

So don’t neglect to wave those golden locks!

http://youtu.be/7dyl0j3WU6Y

No, Humanities Don’t Suck

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Some of you may be aware that there is a fairly active debate about the utility of humanities degrees in progress. Some governors are proposing students pursuing STEM majors pay a lower tuition than those pursuing humanities degrees.

There are studies that show while humanities majors make less than business and science majors right out of graduation, they end up making more 10-15 years down the road.

“Undergraduate professional degrees frequently lead to relatively high starting salaries and relatively flat pay scales thereafter. Humanities undergraduates may struggle more in the first few years after graduation, but in the long run they frequently find career paths with greater long-term growth potential; the skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking that we all talk about turn out to have real-world uses. Students and the general public legitimately worry about employability, but there’s no reason for us to surrender to the mistaken belief that humanities degrees are a poor investment.”

Studies like this and the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) are helping to collect data to refute the idea that humanities majors are useless.

The technical director for my performing arts center and I were talking last week when the conversation turned quickly to the value of the performing arts as a major that confers real world skills.

If you are reading this blog, you are likely already aware of most of them: You learn to plan a project invested with your own personal vision; research your portion of the project; present and execute your part of the project as part of a team.

Some arts disciplines require you to cross train in both technical and performance roles. All performing arts disciplines require the practitioner to possess some degree of empathy.

These are all skills that pretty much every business desires in an employee.

Then there is the big benefit–the unambiguous deadline.

One of the things I know drives college professors crazy is when a student says they can’t finish the paper and can they hand it in on Monday. If this option is denied, the student often enlists parents and administrators on their behalf. For all the good reasons the professor may have for not allowing this exception, a Friday versus Monday deadline appears to be somewhat arbitrary.

But when the performance time comes, that is the inescapable deadline. Well, I suppose it is escapable, but the time to “hand in” your assignment comes and passes with or without you. Whether it is submitted and what the quality of the work is apparent as are the consequences, if any.

One can always fake it and one’s parents will frequently speak praises regardless of whether they are earned. There is no guarantee a student will graduate with good organizational skills.

However, performance is an area where practical skills applicable to the real world are taught because the end product is meant to be consumed in the real world.

These are all skills that clearly do matter and have real world applications. The message that the humanities don’t matter undermines the teaching of these skills.

In the process of getting someone ready to give a public performance, there are many smaller scale performances conducted in more private environments. The stakes are much lower so it is easier to be irresponsible about handling your contribution.

But each one of these times instills the abilities needed for that big public performance. For many people that culminating event may not be on stage, but pitching an idea in the boardroom of Johnson & Johnson.

Info You Can Use: Is This A Bully I See Before Me?

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With the recent ruling about unpaid internships being illegal kicking up a conversation about the necessity of internships to secure a job, the topic of bullying in the workplace is apropos. Especially for the arts.

Situations like this can bring on a lot of pressure to those trying to cultivate a career. No place more so than in the arts. In fact, unpaid is more often the situation regardless of whether you are in an internship or not. Even if you are getting paid, you might be subject to all sorts of pressure and abuse in the highly competitive arts industry.

A researcher from Chapman University is conducting a survey of people’s experience of bullying in the performing arts.

Those who have an interest in the subject might want to check the survey out. It is being conducted with formal research protocols including informed consent statements.

The only really explicit incidence of bullying I can remember is someone using the cliched line that they would ruin my career before it even started.

There are probably opportunities for conversations about these and more subtle issues. For instance, when does cajoling to stay late, be a team player and help with strike go from group camaraderie to bullying?

Researcher Anne-Marie Quigg has studied this issue, focused primarily on the UK and wrote a book on the subject. There were a number of conversation sessions held in London last month on bullying that occurs in the arts. Some brief notes were posted online for each, including the question “Who looks after the ones who aren’t “artistic?”

I Will Fear No Photoshop

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Last December Seth Godin made an entry on his blog, True professionals don’t fear amateurs in which he says,

“A few years ago, typesetting, wedding photography, graphic design and other endeavors that were previously off limits to all but the most passionate amateurs started to become more common. The insecure careerists fought off the amateurs at the gate, insisting that it was both a degradation of their art as well as a waste of time for the amateurs. The professionals, though, those with real talent, used the technological shift to move up the food chain. It was easy to encourage amateurs to go ahead and explore and experiment… professionals bring more than just good tools to their work as professionals.”

I wrote briefly about creativity on Monday and how different cultures may have different definitions of creative work, some of which may encompass activities that don’t take a lot of thought and effort.

I think Godin’s comment wraps up a lot of the concerns shared by people in the arts. Among those concerns are not only that people are creating things of little value and degrading their work by association, but that people would eventually be unable to discern what real quality was and seek out professionals when the time came as Godin suggests.

I had a conversation recently that illustrates both this fear and Godin’s assertion that there is still a place for work by experienced professionals in this world.

I was in a cafe for lunch and stopped by the table of the muralist who has done all of the floodwall murals in town. I commented that I saw a story in the paper that there was a guy who was also from Louisiana doing a mural in town and wondered if it wasn’t some state industry I wasn’t aware of.

He told me the other guy was actually someone who grew up here locally, joined him in working on the murals and then eventually moved to Louisiana to work for him. It was only in the last few years the other guy had struck out on his own.

He went on to say that murals are getting to be a popular thing these days and there were a lot of people who were selling themselves as muralists. The problem is, not only is it a much bigger undertaking than you realize to work in such a large scale, you also have to know your materials, medium and siting as well as work with the community. As a result, there are a lot of angry communities out there with murals no one visits that are peeling off the walls after a few years.

I had actually been to a talk he had given about painting the murals a few weeks earlier and quickly realized that I had no idea about all the engineering and site and materials preparation that went into creating a mural.

It is also pretty interesting to hear how helpful iPads are in providing research and reference assistance without having to leave the scaffolding.

But as I said, his comments illustrated the value of experience and professionalism in artists. It also showed how difficult it is for people to discern the value of a skilled practitioner.

I guess that is true across all professions. The high visibility and reputation of skilled doctors has never really prevented people touting bottled miracle cures.

Still it may be worth exploring, as Godin suggests, where you can position yourself in the spectrum of practitioners in order to be available when someone of your skills is really needed.

What’s Your Culture?

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When I assumed my current position, I had hoped that I had escaped the need to complete long annual reports. I was leaving a region whose higher ed accrediting body has the reputation for being the toughest. So I thought, if I did end up having to do an annual report, it wouldn’t be too onerous.

Well, I was wrong. Under the guise of a lunch invitation to meet the rest of the university leadership, I discovered that I would indeed need to do an annual report. And it seems to be more extensive than the one I used to have to do.

In addition, the reporting protocol this year seems to be entirely new, giving rise to thoughts that this is a conspiracy against me by a universe that just won’t let me escape doing annual reports!!!!

While I am not looking forward to the task, one section of the report that I must admit met my approval inquired by department culture:

3. Please answer the questions below addressing departmental culture. As you answer the questions, please include examples from the past year illustrating your points.

a. Describe your department culture?
b. What influences your culture?
c. What theories or practices inform your culture?
d. How do you assess if your departmental culture is impacting the continuous improvement of your department and the institution as a whole?

 

I think reflection on organizational and departmental culture in this way can be important. Even within a performing arts organization, the culture of the tech, marketing, front of house and artistic areas are distinct from each other.

Discerning what influences your culture and how your departmental culture contributes to the organization as a whole can be contribute toward bolstering the positive and making a constructive effort to repair the negative.

It can help recognize the truth of dysfunctional dynamics if a department realizes a prime influence on their culture is acting as a buffer between two other departments to prevent them from throttling each other.

Yeah, acting as a peacemaker is a positive thing, but if the result is to delay or deflect conflict rather than effect a continuous improvement, it isn’t ultimately a constructive contribution.

The Apprenticeship Option

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Recently Marginal Revolution blogger and economist Alex Tabbarok linked to an article he wrote a year ago suggesting that the United States would be well served by adding a focus on putting students into technical apprenticeships to the current push to get kids into college.

He starts out by applauding the now familiar push by governors in many states to provide incentives to students pursuing STEM fields over Liberal Arts. “We should focus higher-education dollars on the fields most likely to benefit everyone, not just the students who earn the degrees.”

I particularly oriented in on the part of the article where he notes,

“In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.”

Wow, that is pretty great, huh? But he goes on,

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and those graduates don’t get a big income boost from having gone to college.

Most important, graduates in the arts, psychology, and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth.

I initially felt a little indignant at the idea that graduates in the arts aren’t spurring innovation. But then I started wondering if the arts sector needs to take a little responsibility for this. It seems this might be a result of a lack of training and good public relations.

There is an on going conservation about training arts students to take a more entrepreneurial approach to their work so there is already an acknowledgment that this is an area to be improved. Perhaps part of that training should emphasize not undervaluing your work so that people don’t undervalue the work that artists do.

In terms of public relations, I think there is a lack of circulation of stories about successful creatives like those I recently cited about the winners of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Competition (one with a BA in East Asian Studies and Chinese Lit., the other with a BA in Aerospace Engineering) and the Rotman School of Management’s design competition.

The main thrust of Tabbarok’s argument isn’t so much to diminish the liberal arts degree as to advocate for apprenticeships. He notes that some people are simply not suited for college but vocational education programs have a stigma of being the dumping ground for high risk kids. He points to the model of Germany (among other European countries) where students normally opt for technical training and apprenticeships that provide real world work experience while the students are in high school.

What appealed to me about this was the idea that if there is room in the day for a high school student to receive vocational training, then you have to allow that there is time in the day for arts classes.

But I am not suggesting that some kids be allowed to paint while the other kids go learn to weld. I think high school vocational training should seek to provide opportunities for students to train and apprentice at local arts organizations as well. Who says you can’t take some of your welding classes in a scene shop or art studio or that you have to do your apprenticeship in a shipyard?

Apprenticeship programs like this could strengthen ties between schools and arts organizations and reinforce the idea that vocational skills don’t have to be applied in purely practical ways.

On the other side of the coin, I have a vague recollection of reading an article that suggested many visual artists today don’t have a good understanding of the materials they use because they haven’t had a lengthy exposure working/playing with them. Even if my recollection isn’t correct, the opportunity to work with materials still exists.

The reality is, four years of college isn’t the entire key to becoming an artist either.

You Wanna Be Where Everybody Knows Your Name

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As I have stated before, I grew up in a rural setting in upstate NY and just before I started blogging, I worked at a rural arts and music center. But now that I am paying much closer attention to the lives of arts organizations and the communities they try to serve, moving to work in a rural environment has given much greater insight into the impetus behind Scott Walters’ efforts on behalf of rural arts organizations that lead to the creation of the Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education (CRADLE).

There may not be the financial support or audience attendance in numbers that larger cities and communities enjoy, but the impact of arts programs and opportunities can be much more immediate and apparent. This is not to say there isn’t just as profound an impact in other places, just that the feedback loop is that much smaller. Because everyone knows everyone, even if a person doesn’t make a comment about their experience to you, you are likely to hear about it from someone else.

Case in point, I met an administrator at the university early one Friday, later that day he got his haircut. That night his hairdresser, whom I had never met before, said he made positive remarks about me.

What has been interesting to me is to have confirmation of many of the benefits we in the arts claim we bring to the community.

People from the local hospital told me my arts center is important to the health of their organization because they generally don’t have problems attracting doctors to the area, but after a year or two pressure from their families often sees them moving away due to lack of activities. The better a job I do, the better it is for them.

The community board which helps us fund the bulk of our presenting was invited to have a fund raiser at a local wine store. The board had a band playing and the store owner had wine and beer tasting. The community board made quite a respectable amount of money that night so they were happy.

The owner of the shop said the arts people attracted the type of clientele he was looking for. They came, they chatted, they browsed, they bought. He was happy. I think everyone hopes there will be another opportunity to do that again.

Yeah, you can say this only reinforces the stereotype of arts people as effete wine drinkers, but you can grab a six pack of Bud in the supermarket. This business owner is focused on attracting people who drink wine and craft brewed beer and smoke cigars and the arts board helped to deliver them.

On the other hand, there were many people to just stopped in to grab a six pack and bottles who picked up performance season information and bought raffle tickets so the store potentially delivered new audiences to the theatre.

The last incident falls into the “big impact/change of life” category. This past weekend the local arts council had its first ever community arts awards event in my theatre. It was actually pretty well put together for a first attempt. Each award was interspersed with performances by youth performers.

I was surprised to learn that not only does this small town have an organization that teaches kids to do aerial acrobatics, but that the school is under the umbrella of the local museum. I am going to have to check it out. It may give Nina Simon and her Museum 2.0 a run for her money.

Probably the most conspicuous example of the arts impacting lives was the honoree who had been teaching piano for 60 years and so had a legion of people, from music teachers to kids attending top music conservatories, speaking her praises.

Among the other honorees were the Irish owners of the local pub who declared “what good is a pub without stories and music to fill it?” and the owners of a plumbing supply house who between them have sat on the boards of just about every arts organization in town.

There was a visual artist who had moved from Seattle and was instrumental in the founding of the local visual arts center. Known to be something of a recluse, the awards organizers went to his studio and made a really nice video of him talking about his art and his process. I wondered if the reception the film received from the audience emboldened him a little because he spoke a fair bit when he went on stage to accept the award.

Granted, there is a big fish in a small pond element to all of this. In terms of reaching numbers, a performer doing a show in Tampa impacts the lives of more people in one night than one of those honorees might in a year. Many times that is what foundations and granting organization are looking for.

But as I sat there Saturday night, I couldn’t help but think that what was happening in this town was what many arts organizations dreamed of. The results of an interaction with the arts, both positive and negative, and the bonds it creates between people are so easy to observe.

Person A and Person B may leave an event and separately speak about their experience with Persons C and D, respectively. No only is there a high chance that C and D will meet and speak about the experience related to them second hand, there is a good chance C will meet B, another person who actually attended, and get their view on the experience. All four then share a common bond around the experience.

Unless all four travel in the same circles, what is the chance that this interaction will happen often in a city of 300,000? Here it happens many times every day.

Obviously, there is a downside to this lack of anonymity. I was both amused and a little uneasy about having the an opinion of me by someone I just met come back to me via their hair stylist at a wine tasting that same afternoon. I am certainly going to have to step carefully at times.

But it also strikes me that for those willing to listen, it can be very easy to collect a fairly accurate view of the community without the need to resort to a lot of guess work.

Speaking of drinking wine and beer, this entry title brought to you by Cheers, of course

They Call Me…The Stabilizer

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A couple weeks ago a job listing from Springboard for the Arts’ job board came across my Twitter feed simply listed as “Stabilizer.”

Intrigued, I followed the link and discovered that it was for the job as Climb Theatre’s accountant.

As you might imagine, many of the staff at Climb Theatre have non-traditional titles. While I wonder if “Leader of the Pack…Vroom, Vroom” might be a little too whimsical for the executive director and question how confident people might be at giving money to an organization with a “Gambling Manager” on the executive staff (Managing Director? CFO? Artistic Director?), I immediately liked most of the connotations associated with “Stabilizer.”

The only negative association I had was that the organization wasn’t fiscally stable and they were looking for someone to save them. But in the job description they say, “Happily, CLIMB’s financial position is quite solid and cash flow is not an issue.”

What I liked about the title was that it implied if you took the job, you would be an important part of the organization’s life rather than a functionary in the back office. The job description says that too, but that was the first impression I got directly from the job title.

The job title also hints that there is an attempt to make the job environment an interesting and enjoyable place to work.

Changing job title terminology may seem like an empty gesture in place of real change, and granted it often is intended to manipulate. However, there can be a difference in the way you feel about yourself as a result.

Would you rather be a sales clerk or sales associate even though the job is exactly the same? As a customer, do you think you would treat one a little differently than the other? The difference may be small, but they can accumulate over time to result in better esteem.

I am not advising a mass change of titles to make people feel better about their jobs. In performing arts organizations especially the performers and technicians get recognition and praise for executing a performance well. Directors, both administrative and artistic, get interviewed and asked to speak before crowds.

The back office people may know they are doing work that is important to the organization, but can easily feel they are interchangeable with any other accountant, human resource officer or receptionist in an organization where so many are recognized for specific and often unique contributions.

In small non-profits where rewards of any sort are especially hard to come by, it can be especially important to make everyone feel like they are an integral part of the staff who would be difficult to replace.

Crazy titles will certainly come across as disingenuous if it isn’t part of the existing organizational culture. Besides, something unique to your own business culture will go further in making someone feel they are unique.

And by the way, if the job sounds appealing to you, you have until June 10 to apply

Modulating the Flow

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A few years back I was reflecting on a study that found arts administrators sought online data and learning opportunities that were relevant to the challenges they face. The problem, as you might imagine, is that they didn’t feel there was enough time in the day to sit down and read articles, much less seek them out. They wanted some sort of information delivery system, but didn’t quite know what those tools looked like.

At the time, I had the insight that this was the same challenge many potential audience members faced. People who may not have participated or attended arts events, upon maturing personally and financially, might desire to start becoming involved but don’t know where to learn about doing so.

At the time my suspicion was that whatever delivery system solved the arts administrators’ problem could probably be used to provide information to audiences.

But now, 6-7 years on, I am not sure a solution as arrived for either group. If anything, the situation has become even more difficult due to need to choose from among a greater proliferation of choices. There is far more information flowing from arts bloggers, forum discussion groups and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. But there are no consolidated, dependable sources of information to tap into. The individual must attempt to curate their own information.

Even though I am judicious in who I follow on Twitter and via my news reader, it is often all I can do to keep up with the flow of information coming to me. If I weren’t motivated both by a desire for professional development and material to blog about, I think I might give up on making a serious effort to stay current.

But your mileage may vary as they say. If anyone has found a method to gain the professional guidance and information they seek and not become overwhelmed by the experience, please share it.

Likewise, if you know of a good resource for audiences seeking orientation about the arts that doesn’t condescend, let me know as well.

It Only Appears A Mockery of Reality

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If you look around at all the negotiations between the boards of symphony orchestras and their musicians and wonder how it can all go bad so quickly, some entries in which Drew McManus recounted mock negotiation exercises he conducted might give some insight.

While I was looking back at old posts for topics to revisit while I moved jobs, I came across an entry that reminded me about the exercises Drew had run. It all seemed so timely that I knew I had to call attention back to them.

Drew recounted his experiences running mock negotiations with Andrew Taylor’s graduate students at UW-Madison in two parts.

The first part was pretty fascinating to read about as the students immediately identify problems with the accuracy of the financials they, as the musicians negotiating committee, were given by the orchestra management.

“students seemed to expect that this was all some mistake and they would receive the “correct” figures at some point. In several cases, students claimed that an organization’s figures simply couldn’t be this messed up but I helped them along with relating a number of real life examples so they could begin to establish a useable frame of reference.”

Upon realizing that Drew hadn’t misunderstood the “mock” part of the exercise to mean he mocked them with absurd scenarios, those playing the part of the musician negotiation committee begin to get very angry. They accused the management of incompetence in the face of what Drew notes are no-win proposals orchestra musicians are often faced with.

Drew had previously run the same exercise with music students at the Eastman School of Music. What happens next may be illustrative of the difference in outlooks between music students and management students.

Instead of coming back to the table with a counteroffer,

With a certain sense of smug satisfaction, they informed management that they believe the organization is being mismanaged and unless they were presented with a better offer, they were going to break away from SimOrchestra and form their own, musician run, ensemble. In a sense, they were going to take their ball and go home.

… I then inquired if they put together a counter-offer that would provide the board with a better idea of what the musicians found acceptable. They informed me that they did not have such an offer and, furthermore, they refused to craft a counter-offer and reiterated that they felt confident that they could create an organization that had an annual budget equal in size, compared to what the board was currently offering them all while creating a better artistic product than is currently produced.

That pretty much brought the exercise to a close. Drew discusses the debrief in the second entry on the exercise. The students were eager to learn how they, as managers of the future, could avoid the mistakes and problems they perceived in the management’s offer, including the error filled financial statements.

Another student was curious how musicians could come back with a counter-offer at all given that the management’s initial offer was so egregious. They said it would be extremely frustrating to present a counter-offer that management would perhaps perceive as ridiculous as the musicians found management’s offer. “So what happens then, do we just keep going back and forth until we meet in the middle?” the student asked.

Unfortunately, the answer is both yes and no. Nevertheless, this question opened the door to another core component of the mock negotiation session: the environment of collective bargaining agreement negotiations isn’t black and white. Instead, there’s an inherent political dynamic which increases proportionally based on the severity of the negotiating atmosphere.

[…]

Based on conversations with some of the students later that afternoon and the next day, I observed that they were beginning to understand that, as the managers of tomorrow, they need to be prepared to enter into an administrative world that is neither perfect nor cut and dry. They also learned that they can’t rely exclusively on their academic management skills to get them through the woodshed experiences all organizations face at some point in their development.

Drew also wrote up a comparison between the UW-Madison session and the Eastman School of Music sessions for those who are curious.

As I went back to re-read these these entries in the context of all the contentious contract negotiations that have occurred in the intervening seven years, I wonder if administration and musicians both found themselves in situations as impossible, if not more, than the scenario presented to the students.

Even in the face of an unfair labor practice complaint that Drew notes would have resulted from the musicians walking away from the table as the students did, I am surprised we haven’t seen at least one group of musicians stand up and decide to form their own new organization.

The fact that they haven’t may be a testament to the difficult operating environment orchestras face and a recognition that it isn’t so simple to avoid the ridiculous set of circumstances with which the students were presented.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

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I had a “where are they now” moment looking back at an entry from 2006 where I mentioned the MacArthur Foundation had given a $250,000 grant to Edward Castronova to develop Arden: The World of Shakespeare.

The idea was to create the environments out of Shakespeare’s plays and allow people to play in as realistic as possible an environment. At the time I commented,

“I wonder if playing the game might not provide good research for actors. Find out how a peasant might have really felt after spending hours of drudgery online. Want to discover real motivation for delivering Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day speech? Get ye to the Battle of Agincourt. (Of course, you might be felled by dysentery on the way if the game keeps things realistic.)”

So I wondered what ever happened to the game because I hadn’t heard of its release. Turns out, it never got released. The ambitions and motivations didn’t align with player values.

For example, one of the lessons Castronova says he derived from the experience was,

Think About Your Audience
“We put Arden in front of Shakespeare experts and they loved it. We put it in front of play testers and they yawned. We’d get feedback like, ‘I talked to that Falstaff guy for a while and got a quest to go repair something. I logged out and never came back.’ Too much reading, not enough fighting. Arden II will be more of a hack-and-slash Dungeons and Dragons type of game.”

There are probably a ton of audience relations lessons here for arts organizations, but I also saw some common incorrect assumptions shared by amateurs and other inexperienced parties about what it takes to do things full time.

I often have people who rent our theatre complain that the amount of hours we estimate their event will take is inflated, protesting that theirs is a simple show. People don’t realize that even with all the technology available to us, it is not easy to maintain the illusion that things are proceeding seamlessly without a number of people running around backstage communicating with various parties and executing a dozen tasks a minute.

Among Castronova’s other tips are not to be overly ambitious and to have appropriate staffing for the job. The thing is, even experienced groups are just as apt to underestimate requirements.

Performing arts organizations are well aware of the time and resources they need to invest in projects having done them many times over the years, yet they will often create new programs and assign them to already overburdened departments with the assumption that it won’t require too much more effort to take it on.

And that is often true, unless, you know, you want it to look half way decent.

(Title of this entry comes from an epigram to W.B. Yeats’ book, Responsibilities.)

Training Handbook That People Always Have On Hand

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Ten years ago, Inc.com anointed the employee handbook for Ann Arbor, MI’s Zingerman’s Deli as the World’s Best Employee Manual.

In all likelihood they have anointed other handbooks as the “best” since then, but from the sample pages from the handbook they have on the website, you can see that the fun handbook is something an employee would pay attention to. According to the article, Zingerman employees often carry the handbook around with them.

Since then, Zingerman’s has grown to a whole “community of businesses” run by managing partners whose vision the deli’s founders have supported. One of the businesses is actually a training arm that trains employees and conducts seminars for other businesses looking to learn about their methods.

Even if you aren’t interested in the training, the sample pages provide some good examples to emulate for your own staff and volunteer manuals to help keep the training in their minds and hands.

Expanding The Company To Make It Smaller

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About seven years ago, I wrote about a friend who incorporated the company he founded in order to gain the assistance of a board to help him expand operations, only to find that they were moving to contract the operations to a place where the organization was doing less than when he was running it alone.

Now he is mainly employed by another company altogether (happily, exercising his artistic talents) and the company he founded is largely inactive. I have a somewhat better sense now than I did when I wrote the entry what the causes of this situation were.

I wondered though if anyone else had come across a similar situation where an organization ended up worse off soon after the addition of a board. Did you have a sense of what the causes were? How can that be avoided in the future?

What Happens When We Lock 12 Artists In A House And Make Them…Draw!

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I am a long time reader of the web comic, Penny Arcade (sometimes NSFW) which is focused on gaming culture (online, console, tabletop) The creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, have been among the few people to actually make a living at it, though they have said it was a near thing a few times in their careers.

They have used their success to found charity that mobilizes the gaming industry to benefit kids and a successful series of conventions started in response to what they felt were inequities in gaming conventions.

They recently started an online reality competition, Strip Search, to find the next great web comic artist. The competition basically seems to be an attempt to give web comic artists exposure while making fun of the whole reality competition format.

They have them do goofy challenges like remembering trivia from a tour of Seattle and a drawing version of the telephone game in return for prizes. The elimination challenges are more focused toward an artist’s professional life- designing t-shirts and skateboard art to a client’s specs, interviews by the media and cultivating your brand by responding to social media praise and criticism.

The winner of the elimination challenge has to go before Holkins and Krahulik to draw a comic strip based on randomly drawn topics. The one drawing the worst strip has to leave the show.

This is where things really veer from the traditional format. While the artists draw, Holkins and Krahulik ask them all sorts of questions looking to unnerve them a little. Krahulik especially likes to say stuff like “CONTESTANTS 10 MINUTES! is what you will have in 30 minutes.” Then they make the contestants sit in the “shame hole” which is an SUV parked outside, while they judge the strips.

This may sound a bit torturous, but my view is that it is an attempt to satirize many elements of format. At the end of each episode, Holkins and Krahulik jump into the SUV with the loser and really encourage them to keep working and talk about their own experiences trying to get their careers off the ground. In a recent episode, Holkins gave one of the guys his contact information and encouraged him to contact him at any time for advice.

I think their aim is to both encourage the artist to continue and encourage their fans to support the artist. When I visited some of the artists’ sites, it appears they all got invited to the Penny Arcade Exchange conventions to speak on panels and gain more exposure.

Compared to most reality competitions, you might find this one a bit amateurish and unpolished. The production values aren’t high and Holkins and Krahulik aren’t the poised panel of judges you find on most shows. The result is some honest moments like a recent episode with audio of Krahulik cursing off camera at the prospect of having to choose between two well-executed pieces.

Ultimately, they do send someone home, but Krahulik refuses to enact the ritual destruction of the losing piece and instead gives it back to the artist to keep.

While manipulation of events and environment are the hallmarks of reality competitions, it seems like there are places Penny Arcade doesn’t want to go. For instance, while I have been watching, I found myself thinking that the contestants were being too nice to each other and complimenting their competitors’ skills.

It got me to thinking about why I thought it was necessary for them to less supportive of each other –or at least be edited to appear that way. Isn’t it tough enough to be in a competition that is broadcast all over the internet for everyone to comment on?

Heck, isn’t it tough enough just trying to make a living from being a visual artist?

It may not bring the prestige of a cable show like Top Chef, but in terms of artists using their success and following to help other artists, I think there is something there worth emulating.

Info You Can Use: Kickstarting Your Taxes

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Salon has an important article to read if you are an artist trying to use Kickstarter to fund a project. Apparently people don’t realize the money they receive via Kickstarter is considered taxable income by the IRS.

In short, money raised from Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms is considered to be taxable income. Amazon Payments, which handles the credit card transactions for Kickstarter, disburses the funds to the project creator and sends them a 1099-K, a tax form that reports “Merchant Card and Third Party Network Payments” to the IRS. In this particular case, a pledge made by a fan to a project would be considered a third-party network payment.

[..]

“Although musicians may not necessarily be selling something via Kickstarter, they are still entering into a transaction with their backers,” he noted. “If they reach their goal of ‘X’ amount of dollars, they have certain conditions they’ve agreed to make. They should consider the money as income because the IRS defines gross income from ‘whatever source derived,’ unless specially excluded.”

The article also notes that artists often underestimate the cost and logistics of making good on their promises. One woman promised her supporters tickets to a show so when she exceeded her allocation of comp tickets, she had to buy the rest herself. Another ended up spending $10,000 in postage mailing out the items she promised.

Kickstarter also brings an issue artists have faced with their patrons since time immemorial–their desire to be involved in all the decisions.

The issue for Dawn was intensified by her raising five times the amount of her set goal. Suddenly, fans were complaining that she didn’t really need the whole $104,000 to record the album. Dawn countered by noting that not only did she use all of her Kickstarter funds, but she also opened four separate credit cards and dipped into her life savings to cover the difference.

One of those interviewed for the article suggested that anyone thinking of launching a campaign consult with an accountant or business manager first to plan for the tax liabilities and expenses the campaign will entail.

Info You Can Use: Pixar Pitch

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Yesterday I linked to a recent post by Barry Hessenius about gatekeepers and he mentioned that Hollywood had developed a pitch system where people without the connections to get a real meeting were afforded a short time to pitch an idea.

Apropos to this, Daniel Pink made a short video about six new pitches for selling yourself, ideas, etc.

He talks a little bit about how email subject lines are really pitches and makes some suggestions about rhyming pitches (which I can see will be effective you if you don’t go full Seuss). He also notes that questions are much more active and engaging than making statements.

He uses the example of Ronald Reagan who famously asked if his listeners were better off now than they were four years prior. Pink notes that this can get listeners filling in the blanks to convince themselves in ways your statements can’t connect with them.

He takes pains to make the point that the word pitch may imply something is traveling in a single direction, but in reality pitches today are interactive. You invite someone else to have a conversation about something with you.

The pitch I liked the best was the first one he introduces, The Pixar Pitch. This one is most suited for the arts because it is all about storytelling. Pink says this is the formula Pixar uses while planning and plotting their movies.

It runs something like this:

ONCE UPON A TIME____________, EVERY DAY___________, ONE DAY____________, BECAUSE OF THIS_____________, BECAUSE OF THIS_________________,
UNTIL FINALLY_____________________.

He notes that we don’t see life as a series of logical propositions, but rather a series of episodes and so making your case in this manner can create a powerful connection with your listeners.

This formula can be the basis for press releases and marketing materials. I took a look at the trailer for Pixar’s Finding Nemo and it follows this formula pretty closely. You don’t even need to know the formula to have your inner narrator describe the scene to you “Once upon a time there was a fish named Nemo and his dad, everyday they happily swam together under the sea until one day…..”

Obviously, newspapers would get a little tired of you if your press releases explicitly used this formula for every show, and if you can clearly see a more compelling approach to use, go with that, but the formula can under gird what you are trying to communicate about events.

If you are having difficulty getting your ideas to connect with people, don’t you think it is a good idea to check out Pink’s short video and see what might resonate with you?

I’m My Own Idea Czar

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La Piana Consulting blog had a post a few weeks ago about how the dynamics of non-profits can crush new ideas and creative approaches to problems.

Their last suggested solution to avoid this is to appoint an “Idea Czar”:

“Appoint an “Idea Czar” from outside the senior management ranks. This person becomes a human suggestion box, an ombudsman for creativity. Anyone with a novel idea that might answer a current challenge is invited to share it with the Idea Czar, who periodically reports on what he or she has learned at management team or board meetings. Then use those reports to dive deeply into a specific question that piques the particular group’s interest or that the CEO would really like the board’s or management team’s best thinking on.”

I walked around most of today pondering whether this could actually work. I mean, it would require someone with enough seniority and experience to be taken seriously by management, but who also hasn’t been around so long that they are cynical about the viability of ideas. Even if the didn’t discount them immediately, they would need to be idealistic and energetic enough to effectively advocate for the idea in the face of a resistant board and senior management.

I recognized fairly early on that in my venue the idea czar would be our assistant theatre manager. (I am fairly idealistic, but she tops me.) This made me realize that it isn’t enough to appoint someone on staff into the position, if you really want to break out of a status quo, the hiring process has to involve actively recruiting people who possess idealism and strength of character to advocate in the face of a tendency to say No.

Apropos of this, Barry Hessenius posted this week about how one can be their own best/worst gatekeepers in terms of openness to “good ideas, new thinking and ways to actually be better managers, administrators and leaders; opportunities for new projects, collaborations and ways of seeing our world.”

Just as this problem of gatekeeping can manifest on both a personal and organizational level, the solution can probably be implemented on a personal and organizational level.

It probably isn’t enough to appoint a person to be the company idea czar if the board and administration are going to perpetuate an environment that is hostile to new ideas. Management and leadership should practice self-advocacy by setting aside time each week to entertain new ideas in the same way 3M, Google and Hewlett-Packard give employees time each week to develop new ideas and products.

Management and leadership might use this time to read websites they bookmarked, jot down what interesting ideas they have and then go back to ideas they jotted down in previous sessions. I think this last step is important because realizing you had forgotten some of the great ideas you had had weeks before serves to reinforce that fact you have the capacity to have good ideas.

Even if none of those ideas ever travel from the idea journal into practice within the company, the very act of engaging with new ideas, looking at them, turning them over a little, before putting them away, helps the mind practice accepting and handling new ideas rather than simply rejecting them.

Toward Better Organizational Self-Evaluation

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I have been thinking a bit more on my post about when you get your first hint that things aren’t going well for your organization. I haven’t thought up any more interesting warning signs, but I have been thinking about the “after action” conversations between staff members I mentioned.

It isn’t necessarily a sign that things are going downhill, but I do think at least a semi-formal post mortem discussion that leads to action is necessary for the health of the organization. If people gather around the water cooler, talk about how great the show was, sigh “if only more people were in the audience” and then go back to their desks leaving it to the marketing department to fix or hoping things are better next time around, that isn’t really constructive.

I have worked for companies where a post mortem discussion focused on the technical issues that needed to be fixed/learned from the next time around, but I have come to realize that development, marketing and audience services need to be given equal time. And they need to be at the same meeting with the technicians.

I will be the first to admit I don’t do this to the extent I am envisioning it should be done as I write this.

There may be smaller meetings prior to the post mortem where each department collects their thoughts so they can summarize their victories and challenges and keep the meeting short. But if you are going to embrace the idea that responsibility for marketing and development are shared across the organization, then every department probably needs to be largely present.

It is too easy otherwise for those who are not present to feel disconnected and uninvested in the central goals of the organization, inhibiting long term progress.

It can be easy to address concrete technical problems like broken equipment and missed cues. It is more difficult to figure out intangible things like how to attract audiences and motivate volunteers. When the decision is made to have a cabaret in the lobby prior shows in order to engage audiences as they arrive, it is better that the tech people were in on that entire discussion and know the motivation rather than being told they now needs to support a cabaret before every show.

Probably annually there should be a discussion about whether what the organization is doing is working. The ultimate decision will be up to the board, but the staff are all experts in their respective fields. They may be best positioned to say whether what the organization is doing is working. If the season is programmed out of a sense of obligation (seven shows, Shakespeare in the Fall, Musical in the Spring) rather than as an acknowledgement of the current operating environment and community, then the impetus for change and the supporting evidence may need to come from the organization’s staff.

Admittedly, it is difficult to move against the inertia of an organization’s history and business model for both staff and board. I don’t know that a staff would initiate a radical change. On the other hand, if they were regularly involved with providing feedback and saw it was often acted up, who know what people might feel empowered to suggest.

The impetus for this post came not only from thinking about the warning signs post from last month, but also thinking about a post I did from a year about about founding arts organizations with planned expiration dates. Though I thought expiration dates are a great idea, I wondered if anyone would have the fortitude to do it.

From there my thoughts turned to the concept that any business should always strive to do things a little better the next time around. I figure there is a better chance of arts organizations putting a self-evaluation process in place than planning for their own demise. Given that, I started thinking about what practices need to be in place to allow an arts organization to be responsive to changing times?

What I would really be interested in is knowing if anyone works for any sort of organization or business that has institutionalized a really effective self-reflective process like this. What about the corporate/organizational culture has made it so effective?

People will avoid the mechanical imposition of this sort of structure so there needs to be some whole hearted investment by the employees. I would bet that any organization that does a good job examining themselves also has a highly effective personnel review process.

Brush Up Your Suetonius

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The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace recently commissioned a study about the value placed on higher education by employers.

I initially only scanned the article, but listening to the Marketplace report on the radio on the way home brought me back to read it again when I heard the president of a technology company talk about how they make their new hires read Cato the Elder and Suetonius. He mentioned they were looking for people who could talk about the process of putting an idea forward, supporting it and problem solving.

“We do that because we ask them to look at the process – the abstract process – of organizing ideas,” Boyes says.

Sounds a lot like an argument for liberal arts education, at a time when more students are being told to study science and technology as a path to a career. Maguire Associates, the firm that conducted the survey, says the findings suggest colleges should break down the “false dichotomy of liberal arts and career development,” saying they’re “intrinsically linked.”

Or, as Boyes puts it: “We don’t need mono-focused people. We need well-rounded people.” And that’s from a tech employer.”

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about how college students need to focus on practical majors like business and STEM fields rather than wasting their time on Liberal Arts. But businesses keep saying they need well rounded problem solvers, not just people with technical knowledge.

Yet that technical knowledge and specific experience is becoming ever more important, predominantly in the form of internships. The Chronicle of Higher Education addresses that specifically in a separate section of their report. What I really liked about it is that it starts by relating a story about a student failing in her internship and learning from it. I think that is a hallmark of a good internship experience.

What I was a little taken aback by was the fact this woman had six internships. My concern is based on the fact that it takes considerable resources to support oneself while they are participating in an internship. Cost of college and the necessity of attending is certainly revealing the gap between the wealthy and those with fewer means. Now to learn that incurring the cost of internships is increasingly important for employment and to see that one woman has worked six of them presumably to make herself more marketable, is somewhat disheartening to someone like myself whose family didn’t have a lot.

I have written about internships a fair bit over the course of this blog discussing the laws that apply to them as well as some interesting ideas for giving arts majors more practical skills through the design of their training programs.

As I read and listened to the sections of this report, it occurred to me that arts training programs need to insure their education and internship opportunities are providing is relevant and valuable. But it also occurred to me that arts organizations offering the internship opportunities would benefit by marketing them to students outside the arts.

The interns from other disciplines can gain the practical experience and educational “leavening” they need to become more well-rounded. The arts organization can benefit in turn by having someone with a non-arts perspective working for their company.

True, this may reduce the number of internships available for people pursuing arts careers, but those students can also benefit from working for a non-arts company to become well rounded in other areas and pick up skills they can bring back to the arts.

Let me tell you, I wouldn’t have thought doing semi-farm work as a teenager would have translated into anything useful for the arts until it came time to drive a farm tractor around while setting up the grounds for an outdoor arts and music festival.

The Chronicle article mentions much the same thing:

Such exercises don’t always ensure connections, at least at first. Jacquelyn M. Lomp, who graduated from UConn last May with a B.A. in English, initially wasn’t sure how her internship, in which she wrote newsletters for the university’s pharmacy department, related to her studies. “I’d go from dissecting different pharmaceutical research,” she says, “to studying Norse mythology.”

Only after college did she come to recognize that both her academic work and her internship required intense focus and the ability to analyze language for deeper meaning.

The title of this post, inspired of course, by the song from Kiss Me Kate:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIpp2Jj8AQ&w=420&h=315]

Caring, Rather Than Money, Makes The World Go Round

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There was a Slate article today covering research on motivating employees that seemed well-aligned with the non-profit work environment. The research essentially verifies the importance of providing recognition and a sense of meaning to employees.

Researchers found that small gifts, rather than money, motivated people to work harder. They told one group of workers they would receive 7 euros more in pay than they had been promised when they were recruited. Another group was given a gift wrapped water bottle worth 7 euros and the control group was given no bonus. The cash bonus didn’t inspire any improvement, but those receiving the bottle were 25% more productive than those in the other two groups. The article notes that this increase in productivity more than paid for the 7 euro expenditure.

(my emphasis)

It’s not that the workers particularly loved their bottles—in fact, in a separate experiment in which catalogers were offered the choice between a bottle versus 7 euros, 80 percent took the cash (and still worked a lot harder). Rather, it was the thought that counted, and simply handing out a few more euros hardly takes much thought. Even offering the option of a gift showed that the employer cared.

An intriguing final version of the experiment underscored the importance, in the eyes of the employees, of the thought and effort bosses put into their gifts. This time, the cash was delivered as a 5-euro note folded into an origami shirt and a 2-euro coin with a smiley face painted on it. The origami money-gift generated the highest increase in productivity of all…

The study isn’t without its limitations. It’s hard to imagine that the average Wall Street trader would work harder for a pink Cadillac than a six-figure bonus. The motivational effects of cash surely become more important when the stakes get higher, and gifts probably work best when tailored to the particular set of employees. That’s how you really show you care.

And that, more than gifts versus cash, is really the study’s takeaway. Many employees toiling away in stores, factories, and cubicles are desperate for a sense of meaning in their work lives. Even the smallest gesture of kindness that shows they’re part of an organization that actually cares can give them purpose—and that leads to motivation.

It is widely recognized that people who work in non-profits do so because they valued the purpose and meaning they find in their work. Invoking the obvious disclaimer that it shouldn’t be a substitute for paying people a living wage, a boss providing some validation that what motivates that employee is valued and recognized can keep that person energized.

It probably isn’t a coincidence that the gifts that exhibited the most effort on the bosses’ part elicited the strongest effort on the employees’ part. For all the technology that may separate us, the work environment is still a communal experience and each person wants to know that the others are expending effort and thought on their behalf.

In many respects, this goes back to the post I made last week about the early warning signs that things are amiss with your company. When the board, upper management and lower echelons are each convinced the others are invested and working hard to keep the organization viable, that knowledge permeates that whole organization without anyone giving voice to that fact.

And the absence of that unity will begin to manifest itself in some intangible way as well.

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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