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We DO NOT Need Another Abraham Lincoln

December 10, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business Models, Leadership, Management Philosophy

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If You Believe In What I Am Doing

December 5, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

Some data on the most successful of President Obama’s fundraising letters is really destroying what I thought I knew about constructing emails. It turns out, the most informal subject lines garnered the biggest donations. His campaign would do extensive testing on dozens of variations in the formatting, amount requested, tone, etc before discovering a winner they would send to the millions.

According to the campaign, the less professional the email looked, the better. They were a little incredulous at how good a response the most ugly emails received (my emphasis)

It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “ ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million.

Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.”

Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild curse words such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks. But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life.

In light of this, I am starting to wonder if perhaps I am working too hard on the monthly newsletters we send out with information about upcoming shows.

Actually, the real lesson here isn’t that the pared down approach works but rather than you will never really be able to predict what will connect with people and you need to be constantly testing.

With as many people sending out as many emails as the Obama campaign had, none of them seemed to be able to accurately predict what approach would work best and even then, the appeal quickly waned. Which I am sure can be partially attributed to the sheer number of emails that people were receiving each day. I suspect a performing arts groups could probably experience success with the same approach over the course of a few emails.

One question I had given that my email list does not measure in the tens of millions was how large a sample size do you need to accurately measure the effectiveness of an approach? Has anyone worked with A-B testing enough to know?

By the way, the title of this entry is stolen directly from Obama’s list of effective subject lines. I will be interested to see what the response rate is.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Fundraising

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Release The Theatre Ninja!

December 4, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

The Boston Globe recently had an article on theatre etiquette listing strategies for audience members to use when attending performances to avoid causing any problems and to deal with those that arise. It ends noting that a cinema in the UK has started to employ lycra clad “ninja” to sneak up on ask patrons to be quiet.

What I found most interesting was a comment on the Globe article made by “jwinboston” who related an experience attending Handel’s Messiah. A family with 4 kids were making quite a fuss in the front rows. When she spoke to the father at intermission, he reacted indignantly feeling that his kids were being attacked. She spoke to an usher and found the family wasn’t there at the end of intermission. Others in the audience thanked her for speaking up.

However, she says,

“Over the years I’ve thought about that incident and I’ve come to the conclusion that I was actually in the wrong. I went to that concert with the same expectations that I have when I attend any classical concert, however, a Christmas season performance of Messiah is not any classical concert. Different people with different expectations attend these concerts and they are the target audience, not serious classical patrons. So at this time of year if you are going to attend one of these performances you need to do it in a relaxed and tolerant frame of mind. You’re there for the event, not the performance.”

I think most people would say she originally handled the situation quite reasonably as it was and wouldn’t have found any fault with her. To have this level of self-reflection is quite commendable. (And in fact another commenter does commend her.)

This is one of those times where theatre and religion have a lot in common in that the performances/services during the respective holidays are often well attended by people who normally don’t participate at other times of the year and aren’t quite familiar with the rituals.

Performing arts groups are probably more aware of the events that will attract these more diverse audiences than their regular patrons are. Since I saw this article, I have been trying to think of a way to beg the tolerance of regular patrons in a way that doesn’t sound condescending to one of the segments. If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them.

(Don’t make your ideas too good though. I really want to fit my ushers with ninja costumes.)

Audience Relations, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts

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Expectations Feed The Disease

December 3, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arts in an Age of Technology, Business Models, State of the Arts

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