Info You Can Use: Examining The Critical Path

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)

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?

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

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.