Working In The Arts

The Tao of Data

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Following a little on the theme of my post last week about being well-rounded, The Drucker Exchange recently had a post about balancing quantitative and qualitative mindsets.

Because there is such a focus on the quantitative these days with people encouraged to enter STEM fields and schools’ value being judged on the basis of test results, the arts community has been pushing back by touting the value of the arts. Though often it is in the context of these same quantitative measures: test scores, economic impact and earnings.

The Drucker Exchange post, as well as the Wall Street Journal column by Thomas Davenport that inspired it, note that like the peanut butter and chocolate of a Reese’s cup (my metaphor), quantitative and qualitative are most effective together.

Despite years of work at providing both knowledge and quantitative analysis to decision-makers, there is scant evidence that we have really improved decisions—so we have our work cut out for us.

At heart I think the historical separation of knowledge and numbers people is a “Two Culture” problem, made famous by C.P. Snow. Knowledge management people are humanities/liberal arts types, and analytics people are math/science types. We need to get them together, however. Almost all key domains of business–including customer insights, understanding the broader business and economic climate, and various approaches to performance improvement—involve both qualitative and quantitative content. The best decisions and the best organizations will make effective use of both.

In my post last week, I suggested that the scientists quoted in the Salon article felt their scientific investigations were enhance by their artistic pursuits. Peter Drucker apparently said much the same thing, but observed the same is true for someone in the humanities in relation to science.

“We will have to demand of the scientifically trained man that he again become a humanist; otherwise he will lack the knowledge and perception needed to make his science effective, indeed to make it truly scientific,” Drucker warned. “We will have to demand of the humanist that he acquire an understanding of science, or else his humanities will be irrelevant and ineffectual.”

From time to time, I also write about what value arts organizations might bring to businesses. Thomas Davenport talks about how people with the qualitative mindset can help the analytically minded tell a clearer story about their data.

Knowledge people are good at dealing with text, and some would probably be able to extend their skills into text mining and analytics. Knowledge management practitioners are also good at capturing insights, and there are many analytical assumptions and results that are never recorded. It’s also likely that some good knowledge analysts could help quants “tell a story with data,” which is something almost every organization is looking for these days.

The companies Davenport is talking about would employ such people full time so it wouldn’t be an opportunity an arts organization could do on the side. Though it certainly points to possible career opportunities for those with a liberal or fine arts background.

Something along these lines could provide a coaching/advisory opportunity on a smaller scale for arts organizations. Ultimately, thinking about how you can help a business tell the story of their data will probably help a non-profit organization do a better job telling the story of their own data on grant applications and marketing materials.

Arts organizations are probably all too close to their own data and tend to see grant reports as a chore. Helping a company in an unrelated field tell their story for an entirely different purpose could cause a shift in perspective that increases their effectiveness in talking about themselves.

Impressive Debut (a.k.a Draft #250)

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Seth Godin had a post today about origin stories, noting that each of the successes he cites has a different origin story. They didn’t follow the same path as someone else to achieve wide spread recognition.

That reminded me of a similar passage in one of Joseph Campbell’s books where he recalls a particular story about King Arthur and his knights setting out on their Grail Quest.

“‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’

“No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”

I have actually used this quote before, but it has been about 7 years. It is far overdue to be mentioned again.

One of the toughest things about running a business of any sort is being able to balance between embracing best practices and slavishly replicating case studies in success.

Following best practices prevents you from wasting valuable time and energy developing processes and repeating the mistakes someone else has already encountered and overcome.

On the other hand, attempting to replicate someone else’s wild success by imposing their apparent development framework/pathway upon your own company will probably have the same uncomfortable, non-productive results as trying to wedge your feet into their custom built shoes.

Part of the problem is that even when the founders of the wildly successful company talk about their path to prosperity, they aren’t telling you the full story of all the dynamics at play. They may not be entirely aware of all the factors that fed into their success, or they are ignoring and omitting some details that don’t make for a good founding mythology.

In the opening segment of a This American Life episode titled, Origin Story, they discuss the “started in a garage” mythology for companies like Hewlett-Packard (whose origin Godin cites) and Apple.

Ira Glass
This is from a promotional video that Hewlett-Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started what is now the largest technology firm in the world.

Dan Heath
In 1938, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company. They had a few hand-operated punches, a used Sears Roebuck drill press that had just made the trip west in the back of one of their cars, and they had a rented flat with a garage.

[…]

Ira Glass
Even Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard weren’t exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and at Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Litton Engineering. He let them use equipment that they didn’t own themselves yet. Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett-Packard when they started Apple in Job’s garage.

Pino Audia
And, for example, in the case of Steve Jobs, he benefited greatly from the support that he got from the Atari people, because they introduced him to investors.

If you listen to those first few minutes of the episode or read the transcript, you’ll see that a bit of romance gets injected into the founding stories of a lot of companies.

This is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of sweat and creativity invested in getting these companies off the ground. Just like the hot new artist that explodes on the scene, no one really talks about the years of testing, revision, hustle and lucky breaks that went into the impressive debut (a.k.a Draft #250).

There is a lot of valuable advice you can take by paying attention to someone else’s process- performing due diligence, avoiding undesireable contract stipulations, generating appropriate plans and budgets and being bold with marketing plans.

Just don’t expect to achieve the same results by following exactly the same steps as someone else. You have no idea who or what conditions may have been helping mount those steps. Ultimately, you might be better off carving your own steps or even rappelling down an entirely different mountain instead of trying to climb behind someone else. (Or simply ignore vague metaphors about achieving things altogether.)

Being Great No Matter Where You Are

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When it comes to stimulating your creativity to create new work, is it better to live in a place that bustling with other creative activity or working alone outside of the influence of others?

This is something I have been thinking about for the last month or so, spurred by some contradictory observations I encountered lately.

When I was in NYC last January for the Arts Presenters conference, a person I was wandering around with observed that the work of NYC based artists, even relatively unknown ones, was more innovative than in other areas of the country. He attributed this to the fact that the artists are surrounded by so many others who were experimenting and striving with new ideas.

When I was living in Hawaii, someone who moved back from NYC made a similar observation that ideas that were new in NYC seven or eight years before were just gaining currency in Hawaii.

But earlier this month, in an interview choreographer Trey McIntyre noted that basing his company in Boise, ID had

…bolstered his creativity.

“Being surrounded by other artists and companies is more of a challenge than being away,” he says. “As a choreographer when you watch someone else’s work, especially if you respond to it … that’s the culprit for how a lot of work gets to look the same. I’m appreciative of being cut off that way. There are so many other things to be inspired by.”

Certainly, there are a number of non-mutually exclusive scenarios that can be true. You can be an artist in NYC that is doing exciting work that looks a lot like the exciting work everyone else is doing. Below a certain level of saturation, you can be both exciting and derivative.

Another plausible explanation is that people of talent can and will be creative anywhere. It is just that you get a lot more recognition of your genius in larger cities. Being a groundbreaking genius in Spokane doesn’t make you any less of a genius. It is just that only the residents of Spokane know about it.

I have started wondering if exposure to new influences via internet and social media channels can replace the need for traveling and living in the cultural centers. Especially if you are mindful about exposing yourself to work you feel is outside your taste. Because really, you run the same risk of having a blinkered approach to your art form whether you only view videos that appeal to you and your friends taste or only attend performances that appeal to those same tastes.

Granted, you have a better chance of receiving unsought ideas from street corner/subway performers as you travel about the city and meet new people than if you get all your ideas from your laptop in your bedroom.

My hope is that technology will allow interesting and innovative work to be developed in smaller cities and towns around the country. I confess that my interest in seeing this happen was redoubled this morning by a cynical reading of the news that theater companies in New York City’s five boroughs are now eligible to receive the Regional Tony Award.

The regional Tony was “created to honor theaters that did outstanding work outside of the unofficial industry capital of New York City…” My first reaction was that now the judges no longer have to bother looking at anything outside the city. Instead of rolling these theaters in with the Broadway houses or creating a new category, they put them in competition with every other theater in the country.

(This said, the American Theatre Critics Association members which vote on the award are dispersed throughout the country and NYC based critic Terry Teachout regularly sends out a call for suggestions of theaters around the country that he should visit.)

I will also admit that my first reading of the phrase “widen the pool” in the sentence: “administration committee changed the rules for the regional theater Tony to widen the pool of candidates and give Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway companies a shot at the recognition, which can help with fund-raising and publicity,” was that there were insufficient candidates in the rest of the country to give the award to.

Knowing that there are many theaters that are struggling across the country, my reaction to that was that there needs to be a reversal of that trend and a cultivation of theaters on a more local level. I later realized that I may have been reading too much into that, but maybe I wasn’t.

Ultimately, whether another theater outside NYC wins the regional Tony award doesn’t matter to me as much as investigating and hopefully perpetuating evidence that you can consistently produce creative, innovative, work in interesting, livable communities across the country and attract attention (and hopefully visitors) to your work there.

Being Well Rounded Is Not A Back Up Plan

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Last week Drew McManus wrote a post about the value society places on arts practitioners. He referenced an article he saw in a You’ve Cott Mail newsletter about a teacher who urged kids who wanted to pursue creative careers to have a back-up plan and asked if anyone could provide a link.

I did remember the article and tried my darnedest to find it again. I didn’t have it bookmarked as I had thought, but had done so with a similar article on Salon that started with an anecdote of a parent who was panicked when her son said his favorite subject in school was art.

That article noted that while people assume innovation comes from the science lab, it is the artistic habit which often fuels that innovation.

The external binaries of right and wrong don’t exist in art as they do in most subjects. In math, the answer to the problem is correct or incorrect. In history, a sequence of events is true or false. In art, only the student can decide what critique to listen to and what to ignore. Art is the arena of activity where we develop the skill most required to innovate — the ability to harness our own agency.

Artist and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard P. Feynman put it this way as he distinguished between teaching science and art: in physics, Feynman said, “we have so many techniques — so many mathematical methods — that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can’t say, ‘Your lines are too heavy,’ because some artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines.” In that moment, the art student is learning the validity of their choices, their own direction, and innovative results.

This particular section resonated for me because it seems that education is promulgating the idea of answers being right or wrong as testing becomes more prevalent and valued.

The Salon article goes on to cite a number of scientists who have artistic avocations which they credit with contributing to their scientific accomplishments. This isn’t new, we have often heard about how Einstein played the violin. Probably the biggest failing of the arts community is constantly going to Einstein as their example rather than citing a wider variety of scientists like astronaut Mae Jemison who is quoted in the article saying that the imagination that fueled the creation of sculpture and dance got the space shuttle flying.

To my mind, saying artists need a back up plan is really just an indelicate way of saying they need to be well rounded. I am not trying to inject some political correctness here because the truth is, everyone needs to be well rounded. I think it is Sir Ken Robinson who points out we have no idea what skills people will need 30 years in the future so it is best to teach everyone to be curious and teach themselves.

While there are plenty of artists who engage in a myopic pursuit of their discipline, in my view, the liberal and fine arts education community on the whole does a better job of making its members well rounded than science and business disciplines. Perhaps because few people tell science and business students they need to broaden their experience by having a back up plan.

Just last week a student was sitting in the lobby telling her music professor that she wanted to go to a conservatory so she wouldn’t have to take English and Philosophy courses. He informed her that wasn’t necessarily so since he attended a conservatory and had to take those classes. There was also the issue that as an acting student, those courses would actually inform her work down the road.

Only a week or so earlier, this same student listened to a pianist who had performed a concert for us talk about how she double majored when she was at the Peabody Institute both because she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be a pianist and she had many other interests. While she ultimately committed to the piano, she said she felt that her other course work gave her an advantage over her other classmates in terms of the opportunities she had available.

But last week our student was thinking about the difficult time she was having in class, not about this bigger career picture. Students need to be pushed to take a wide variety of classes rather than taking the path of least resistance. Framing this in terms of “a back up plan” does a disservice to their interests because it diminishes their passion for the arts.

But it also diminishes the “back up plan” by playing into that binary sense of right and wrong. If you think the arts taste sweet, then setting up anything else as the “back up” option when you fail at being an artist makes it the bitter pill that has to be swallowed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea that an interest in the arts results in a zero-sum outcome is what feeds the purist idealism that allowing yourself to be interested in anything else is a sign of lack of seriousness about your art or selling out.

If you really wanted to be an artist but were told you needed a back up plan, wouldn’t you perhaps unconsciously redouble your efforts toward your art and avoid any involvement with any possible back up option?

Then when you succeed, it is your single minded passion and talent in the face of nay sayers that won out. If you fail, then I guess they were right all the time. You meet their expectation of being a failed artist since you never allowed yourself to exercise your other interests.

When you are young, there often is no conflict between an interest in reading Popular Science, making plays to entertain your family, playing baseball, running a lemonade stand and learning to program a computer. But then you are asked to choose…

If you “correctly” choose law, medicine, business or science, there probably won’t be a societal perceived conflict in continuing with your interests. It is only when you choose the arts that you may be pressured to choose one of your other interests instead.

The truth is, interest in the arts is not a zero sum game. If there are physicists who feel their artistic pursuits enhance their practice of science, there are certainly artists who can find their pursuit of science and technology will enhance their creative output.

I am sure there are accountants who also feel their professional practice is informed by their artistic hobbies. Its just that no one believes accounting can be made more interesting. (Though there are unfortunately too many stories of accountants getting creative in the wrong ways.)

If anything, Drew McManus is great example of being able to cultivate interests and strengths in multiple areas as a musician who has built an arts related business on an understanding of technology and analysis of business practices, including financial filings.