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Will I Still Love Me Tomorrow?

April 4, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

One of the exercises Peter Drucker suggests in the “Managing Oneself” article I cited yesterday is feedback analysis suggesting that:

“Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.”

If you are thinking of making this a practice, you might check out FutureMe.org. It is a website that allows you to send email messages to your future self anywhere between 3 days and 50 years. You could use the service to aid in feedback analysis, self-reflection or just entertain your future self.

There was a piece on NPR this weekend about the FutureMe website where the founder read off some of the public letters submitted to the site. (You can flag your letters as private or public when you submit them.) Some of them were funny and others, the the story of a man who uses the service to cope with his progressing Alzheimer’s, were quite touching.

Terms and Ideas

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Leader, Manage Thy Self

April 3, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

Are you a listener or a reader? If you don’t have any idea what I am talking about, you may want to take a look at Peter Drucker’s “Managing Oneself,” an article that has been reprinted in the Harvard Business Review a number of times. I first got my hands on it at the Arts Presenters Emerging Leadership Institute in January and have read it about three or four times since then. (It is only 11 pages long.)

As one might imagine from the title, the main thrust of the article deals with self-examination as a way of self-improvement. What he suggests isn’t a “12 Easy Steps to a Better You” program. If anything, he believes trying to adopt another’s practices is likely to make you miserable. He also observes that people often think they know what their strengths and weaknesses are but are usually wrong. (So if you are miserable in your current position, read it!)

In addition to knowing ones strengths and weakness, he feels it is important for people to know how they perform. That is where the whole reader or listener question comes in along with learning how one learns, what environments one thrives most in and what ones values are. Then, given your knowledge about how you best operate in relation to these factors, what is it you can contribute? Drucker gives a number of interesting examples of how men like Patton, JFK, Eisenhower and Churchill were hampered by situations which emphasized their weaker areas.

Once you have obtained this self-knowledge, Drucker urges you to recognize that everyone around you is an individual operating in varying degrees to the same criteria, have different ways of achieving success and therefore need different things from you to realize that success.

“Whenever someone goes to his or her associates and says, “This is what I am good at. This is how I work. These are my values. This is the contribution I plan to concentrate on and the results I should be expected to deliver,” the response is always, “This is most helpful. But why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

And one gets the same reaction – without exception, in my experience-if one continues by asking, “And what do I need to know about your strengths, how you perform, your values, and your proposed contribution?” In fact, knowledge workers should request this of everyone with whom they work, whether as subordinate, superior, colleague, or team member. And again, whenever this is done, the reaction is always, “Thanks for asking me. But why didn’t you ask me earlier?” Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust. The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another.”

Yes, I know there is a certain irony in expecting people who don’t learn best by reading to gain maximum benefit of Drucker’s message through reading.

Management Philosophy

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Resource Guide for Non-Profits

April 2, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

By way for an Arts Presenters newsletter I was directed to a worthwhile resource for non-profits of all kinds put out by Mellon Financial Corp, Discover Total Resources: A Guide for Nonprofits. (Downloadable PDF, by the way.)

Though billed as “a descriptive checklist to be used as a guide, or self-audit, by boards, staff and volunteers to assess the degree to which they are tapping a full range of community resources: people, money, goods and services,” the document is much more than a mere checklist. It provides great ideas and some of the best fundamental guidance about how to run a non-profit I have seen in or out of textbooks.

It does indeed provide a self-discovery audit for your organization, but some of the real value as one might imagine comes in the Money chapter. No coincidence, I am sure, that it is the longest chapter. Though honestly, read them all.

I single out the Money chapter because it is the area of greatest concern for non-profits and it is dense with good guidance about topics like internal financial controls and being wary about earning income outside the purview of your non-profit status. Some of the grant and fundraising notes are familiar, but the summary of options is good.

One option I had never heard of before is a Program Related Investment.

“Stated simply, a PRI is an equity investment, loan or loan guarantee made by a foundation to serve a charitable purpose. It is sometimes called a social investment. Unlike grants, PRIs must be repaid, sometimes with the addition of a low interest rate.”

They seem to be used for social service programs which may be why I hadn’t come across them before. Doesn’t seem to be any reason I can see for them not to be use in the arts. Though their use may be more complicated than the summary can do justice to.

While reading I had a “duh, why didn’t I think of that” moment when it came to the idea of consortia and other cooperative efforts between organizations. One of the suggestions they make is that groups can leverage their pooled resources to obtain higher quality products and services than they could alone. Among the examples they give are purchasing supplies in bulk and perhaps sharing legal and accounting services.

I often talk about how block booking efforts are going to become a financial necessity in the near future for arts organizations, but I lacked the wit at the time to make the logical extension of that idea to other operational areas. Some of the examples the document gives about cooperative efforts might be worth reading to spark ideas and surmount blind spots like mine in ones thinking.

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Cool People Hang Out At The Furniture Store

March 28, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

The newly opened Honolulu Design Center is really trying to change the way people think about the place home and office furnishings has in their lives by positioning this facility as a gathering place.

If you have never considered your furniture store a center of social activity, you aren’t alone. The HDC figures this is the first time anyone has ever tried anything like this. If you look at their plans closely, you can see they have really done some thinking about their target audience.

The three story building has a cafe, a wine bar offering 90 choices and a 90 seat fine dining restaurant which will feature some of the furniture they are selling in their 6 showrooms. There is also an events area where Jazz is performed on Thursday nights and Wednesday and Sundays are film nights.

Just as Home Depot and Lowes offer little classes for the do-it yourselfers, HDC offers seminars that fit the lifestyle of their target clientele. The Small Business Administration held a micro-enterprise workshop for people wanting to start their own small business with monthly seminars on other topics to come. Another workshop offered helps people view home construction as an interconnected system so that all the segments integrate well together and result in low operating costs.

A television show, “Generation X and WhY Inquiring” will be filmed there featuring students

“-ages 9 to 17 – from various schools who will discuss and debate…the dynamics between boys and girls and issues ranging from harmless teasing to more serious topics like safety, drugs and health. Other important areas like global conservation, pollution, oceans, Social and educational issues…”

A number of thoughts passed through my mind. First that it must be nice to have the money to build the place as well as the money to buy from this place. While I am told there are pieces I could afford, $42,000 leather couches are more in line with what they offer.

Still, even though they are in a good position to recoup part of their investment being located next to the construction site of two towers of condos which need to be furnished, they are taking a big chance with this project. People might buy coffee or wine while perusing furniture–but are they going to go to a furniture store, nice as it might be, for dinner and a movie?

I also wondered if all the performing arts centers that have been built in the last few years at costs the exceed those of that Honolulu Design Center by millions have had as good a handle on how to serve their target audiences as the furniture place does.

In some respects, clues about what to offer and how to position themselves already exist. As mentioned earlier, they have upgraded the classes that Home Depot offers. They also seem to have improved on Target Stores’ Design for All campaign. At the prices they are charging, they certainly aren’t offering design for all, of course.

As I observed in an entry two years ago, humans seem to have an intrinsic need for art/beauty/meaning/purpose in their lives. Target Stores aim to bring the semblance of the aesthetic high end stores like HDC possess within the reach of everyone. HDC has moved a step further and is trying to bring many elements of the lifestyle their furniture already represents into one location.

To their credit, this isn’t some new initiative that marketing research indicated was a good idea. It is just another chapter in the company’s long history of sincere investment in local arts and culture. Their weekly print ads feature local visual and performing artists and promote their work and upcoming performances.

Thinking about what lessons could be derived from this for the arts, I came up with a great deal of “if onlys”- If only arts organizations had the kind of money to do market research to develop a great plan for serving the needs of a target audience; if only they could maintain a consistent staff and cohesive vision to see the plan through (Took HDC 8 years to come to fruition); if only they had the funding enabling them to ignore the distracting noise of earned/unearned income woes.

What I ultimately end up thinking is that HDC may serve as an example of what an arts organization should be– an unexpected arrangement that suits the community in which it is located rather than based on a standard set in other places. Somewhere out there may be a mini-van dealership/daycare/athletics field/community arts center catering to dual career-soccer parents.

General Musings

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