Home Page

Care and Feeding of Arts Workers

April 21, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

There was a good example of the importance of good leadership and management in the context of orchestras in a recent post on The Drucker Exchange.

Although the post starts out using the example of basketball teams, it ends up citing Peter Drucker’s observation that as a knowledge based institution,

“A great orchestra is not composed of great instrumentalists but of adequate ones who produce at their peak,” he wrote in Managing in the Next Society. “When a new conductor is hired to turn around an orchestra that has suffered years of drifting and neglect, he cannot, as a rule, fire any but a few of the sloppiest of most superannuated players. He also cannot as a rule hire many new orchestra members. He has to make productive what he has inherited.”

The passage in Managing the Next Society that is quoted is preceded a few paragraphs earlier with “In a traditional workforce, the worker serves the system; in a knowledge workforce, the system must serve the worker.”

Orchestra musicians may not appreciate being characterized as “adequate,” but they all know that their ensemble thrives as a group, not on the specific talents of each individual. It is the music director or similar leader who often creates the environment which allows the whole to thrive.

This is much the case in arts administration staffs. There are very few superstars that multiple organizations engage in a bidding war to woo away. (Though I grant it might be helpful to have more exemplars people strive to be. Drew McManus can’t bear the adulation by himself.)

Most arts organizations are staffed by adequately skilled employees who are on the cusp of becoming great with the help of the right management of their talents and work environment. Some of that management is probably going to require better pay and professional development opportunities. It may also require scrutinizing organizational culture, shifting job responsibilities and revamping the physical work environment.

While the focus of all this seems to be on identifying good leaders and managers who will point the way to success, recall that Drucker points out that the workforce has to generally be left intact. They are the core resource of the organization with which the leader must work.

Knowledge workers aren’t like gold fish which will thrive if fed and put in a bigger, cleaner fish bowl. Dealing with them is far more complicated. It is by their will and agreement that success occurs.

A good leader or manager is merely one who perceives how to best structure the system to serve the workers. A leader shouldn’t conflate their ability with the value of the organization. Ultimately, audiences will come to see a bad orchestra before they come to see a music director in an empty room.

Leadership, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

No Comments

Info You Can Use: Evidence vs. Emotion In Fundraising

April 16, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

This week Marginal Revolution blog linked to a study addressing the claim of many donors that they are motivated to give by the effectiveness of the charity.

The researchers worked with the charity, Freedom from Hunger, to send out two nearly identical letters.

In the first experimental wave, the control group received an emotional appeal focused on a specific beneficiary, along with a narrative explaining how FFH ultimately helped the individual. The treatment group received a similar emotional appeal (trimmed by one paragraph), with an added paragraph about scientific research on FFH’s impact. The second wave was identical in design, except that the treatment group narrative included more specifics on the research, and briefly discussed randomized trials and their value as impact assessment tools.

They found that adding the scientific data didn’t have an impact on whether someone donated and how much they donated in the full sample. However, the full sample includes previous donors as well as those who had never donated before.

There was a significant difference when they looked at just those who had previously made a donation. (I have inserted a paragraph break to the original text to provide easier reading)

We find that presenting positive information about charitable effectiveness increases the likelihood of giving to a major U.S. charity for large prior donors, but turned off small prior donors. This heterogeneity is important, we believe, and is consistent with a model in which large donors (holding all else equal, including income and wealth) are more driven by altruism and small donors more driven by warm glow motives.

Altruistic donors, we posit, are more driven by the actual impact of their donation, and thus information to reinforce or enhance perceived impacts will drive higher donations. On the other hand, for warm glow donors, information on impacts may actually deter giving by distracting the letter recipient from the emotionally powerful messages that typically trigger warm glow and instead put forward a more deliberative, analytical appeal which simply does not work for such individuals.

Now whether the results for a large national human services charity will be consistent for a smaller, regional cultural charity, is uncertain. The fact that larger donors may be motivated by evidence of effectiveness and smaller donors by emotional appeal and turned off by effectiveness data is definitely something to think about.

Fundraising, Info You Can Use

No Comments

Classical Music, Out standing In The Field

April 15, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

I wanted to call attention to John Luther Adams today. It may have escaped your notice that he won a Pulitzer Prize for Music yesterday for his composition, “Become Ocean.” (sample here). It certainly escaped my notice.

I had a faculty member come to my door talking about how he spoke to Adams today and how he has known the composer for awhile and Adams had played his music on his radio station in Alaska. I think the faculty member assumed I knew about the Pulitzer, which I didn’t. I thought he was just going on about a buddy of his.

It was only after the faculty member left my office and I Googled Adams’ name on a lark, that I discovered he was a big deal. Adams’ work was much more accessible than the faculty member’s comments lead me to believe. (Especially in the context of some of the music samples he has given me in the past.)

As I looked around for some other samples of Adams’ work, I found this video of his “Inuksuit” at Park Avenue Armory which really excited me. As Alex Ross mentions in his article on the performance, Adams never intended for the work to be performed indoors, but saw a lot of possibility in the cavernous armory. He set up 76 musicians throughout the drill field, catwalks and adjoining rooms and encouraged the audience of 1300 to wander among and with them.

What excited me was that we so often talk about getting orchestral music out of the concert hall and here was a piece that was never envisioned to be indoors.

There was the recent question of whether American orchestras are ignoring American music. Between Adams’ Pulitzer win and his willingness to have his music played under the sky, there is incentive to pay some attention.

Concerts like this will generate a clear dividing line between those who yearn to listen in acoustically perfect halls and those who don’t. Symphonic and chamber music wasn’t written for warehouse spaces so I don’t advocate trying to impose the “Inuksuit” format on them.

“Inuksuit” seemed to be much more about experiencing the music than listening to it. I would guess concerns about coughing, opening cellophane candy wrappers and cellphones ringing in the middle of the show never emerged. For all the people who were up and walking around, it seemed like at any one time the majority actually sat/laid quietly and let it all wash over them. And the audience definitely did experience and respond. If you look at the last 2 minutes of the video, as the sound produced decreases, so does the physical movement in the room and nearly everyone stands still.

I don’t think anything about this negates the value and need for quiet moments in music found in conventional orchestral pieces. Listening to “Become Ocean,” Adams definitely has an appreciation of silence, as you might expect of a composer who takes nature as his inspiration.

In fact, there seems to be an impulse for “Become Ocean” to escape the room.

From his NPR interview it almost sounds like the walls are a hindrance (my emphasis):

“It’s scored for large symphony orchestra, a bunch of percussionists, a large string section, full woodwinds and brass and even four — count them, four — harps. The orchestra is deployed as three separate ensembles. It’s really a piece for three orchestras. The different instrumental choirs are separated as widely as possible in the performance space.”

Info You Can Use, New Initiatives, State of the Arts

No Comments

X Degree + Y Experience = Happy Employer?

April 14, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

Over at Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen draws attention to two studies, one that suggests that internships are more valuable than business degrees when it comes to finding a job. The researchers sent out over 9000 fictitious resumes to jobs in banking, finance, management, marketing, insurance and sales. Some applicants had business field degrees, others had arts and sciences degrees like history, English, biology and psychology. As a liberal arts major, I am encouraged by the first sentence.

Despite applying exclusively to business-related job openings, we found no evidence that employers prefer to interview job seekers with business degrees over applicants with nonbusiness degrees. In addition, there is no advantage, in terms of job opportunities, associated with a particular degree; that is, students with particular business degrees (e.g., finance, marketing) fare no better than students with particular non-business degrees (e.g., english, psychology). However, we find strong evidence that internship experience improves employment prospects in economically and statistically signicant ways. Applicants who were assigned a three-month internship (Summer 2009) before they graduated with their Bachelor’s degrees (May 2010) receive about 14 percent more interview requests than those who were not assigned internship experience. The “return” to internship experience is quite large for both business and non-business majors, but it is economically larger for non-business degree holders than that for business-degree holders…More research is needed to better understand the channels through which college degrees and internship experience affect employment prospects.”

There has been a lot of discussion about unpaid internships in the arts, including one last week on HowlRound. These discussions often raise the point that the internship system favors those with the financial and familial support to survive while making little to no income.

The question I wanted to address in the context of this study, however, is whether a degree or experience is more important for the practice of arts management.

A good number of job listings out there require an MFA. If they will accept experience in the place of an MFA, it is as much, if not more, time than would have been required to complete the MFA.

For instance, a recent job posting for the Executive Director of Buffalo Studio Arts requires “Master’s Degree, plus 2 or more years experience at a not-for-profit organization, preferred; Bachelor’s Degree, plus 5 or more years experience at a not-for-profit organization, acceptable”

Another for the Executive Director of the Graham Center at Florida International University required “Master’s degree in an appropriate area of specialization and eight years of experience; or a bachelor’s degree in an appropriate area of specialization and ten years of experience. ”

Now given that a Master’s degree can take 1-3 years to earn, with an MFA being 2-3 years, these jobs can be viewed as requiring slightly more or equivalent experience from a person without a Master’s. With the first description only deeming a Bachelors and experience as acceptable, it seems you are at an immediate disadvantage without that Master’s. This verbiage is not at all uncommon.

As for the second description, if a person with a BA has 8 years experience, there probably isn’t much more to be gained in those additional two years to bring them on par with a person with a Master’s degree. They are either as good or better at year 8, or they aren’t.

In the Buffalo example, I think the determining factor comes down to opportunities which translates to experience. A person with a Master’s and two years of good opportunities is going to be preferable to a person with a BA and five years of poor opportunities. But a person with a BA and three years of good opportunities is easily going to be preferable to a person with a Master’s and three years devoid of practical experience.

But is that how arts employers approaching hiring? Perhaps they do and just use that Master’s = Bachelor’s + Experience to signal expectations and encourage people to self select out of applying. Not that it keeps 50 unqualified people from applying for every qualified person.

My suspicion is that many arts employers adhere closely to that equation to make it easier to sort through the 100s of resumes by preemptively tossing whatever doesn’t neatly fit.

It isn’t fair to single arts employers out in this regard. Any degree serves as a imprimatur for a job applicant in any field. It is a shortcut people use as a guarantee of quality which is why so many people seek to get a college degree even though they may not be suited for college.

Does this bring about the best result for the organization? That is something each has to answer.

Now, it should obviously be acknowledged that I have an MFA so I tend to pass that initial test of fitting into the equation.

I have hired people who didn’t fit neatly in to the equation and benefited from it. Some times there was a large element of faith involved, but that is true in all cases regardless of degree attained.

Again we come back to that first question, how much do the degrees matter versus experience? When I go to conferences and interact with agents, artists and other presenters, I don’t care about the degree anyone has attained. I don’t get better service from people with master’s degrees than those without.

However, I do care and can tell if someone is inexperienced. Experience does have bearing on the quality of service received.

Of course, I am only interacting with people for a short period of time. Degree earned may have a significant impact on the experiences of boards of directors, organization staff and audience base who have to live with them.

As a person who has earned a Master’s degree, I could point to how my degree had a positive impact on the organizations I have worked for. I can also point out how my lack of experience had a negative impact on the organizations I have worked for, even after earning the degree.

Thoughts?

Info You Can Use, Working In The Arts

No Comments