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Executives without Direction

March 29, 2004

by:

Joe Patti

Short Aside

Before I begin the main portion of my entry today, I just wanted to call attention to an article about how publishers are wooing top amateur reviewers on Amazon by providing them with free books to read and write about. Quite similiar to the idea I put forth in my entry a week or so ago, Bloggers As the New Arts Critics?

On With the Show

One of the things I have been considering lately is the practice of management in the arts, specifically in terms of the position of executive director. In theory, the CEO of most businesses is supposed to be looking at short and long range planning, trying to determine trends and identify opportunities for the future. In practice this may not be generally true, but from my perspective, it almost didn’t seem true at all as applied to the arts.

I wanted to see if my perception was valid and decided to do some research. I couldn’t really bother a lot of executive directors to ask them how much time they spend on management activities as opposed to leadership activities. (I found two interesting articles about the difference between leadership and managment from Inc magazine and the Small Business Administration) Instead, I decided to look at what executive directors were ideally expected to do in the course of their jobs by looking at position descriptions.

I looked at 26 job descriptions for executive director dating back to August 2003 that were listed on the NY Foundation for the Arts website, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters website, and ArtSEARCH. Some of the jobs are currently listed, others I had copied on to my computer over the course of my job search. There was a fair cross section of theatre, dance, music and visual arts organizations (or organizations which encompassed more than one of these areas).

I tallied the expected tasks executive directors were required to fulfill:

Fundraising-20
Budgeting-16
Rent/Manage Facilities-2
Strategic Planning/Vision/Direction-6
P/R, Marketing-11
Personnel Management-12
Programming/Booking Events-9
Oversee restoration of building-2
Board Development-1
Outreach/Community-Government relations-6
Volunteer Development-2
Partnerships-1
Event Management-1

As I expected fundraising was the most often mentioned job. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that non-profits are expected to raise a fair portion of their budgets through donations and grants. However, in 16 instances it was the first thing listed and just as often seemed to be the specific duty of the executive director rather than a function of a development director that the position oversaw.

I have often read that university presidents are discouraged because an increasing portion of their jobs is fundraising rather than leading their schools. I was likewise discouraged to see that so many organizations listed fundraising as an expectation and so few listed long range vision and strategic planning. The implication is that it is more important that the director keeps things running and much less important that he/she shepherds organizational development.

The majority of the responsibilities listed in these descriptions seemed to be more appropriate for a managing director and artistic director. I didn’t look at the specific staff set up for each organization, but from the listing of duties I would feel confident guessing many didn’t have managing or artistic directors or even general managers. In about five cases, it was pretty clear there also weren’t marketing and development directors. In a couple instances, it was evident that the executive director was just about the only paid employee.

Because the executive director has to take on the responsibilities usually handled by artistic and managing directors (and then some), it is no wonder there are few expectations the the person will employ a cohesive vision for the future–there isn’t any time.

In times of economic hardship, it isn’t unexpected that organizations will seek to save money by consolidating job functions into one position. Something valuable is lost in doing this with a chief executive position. When a CEO gets bogged down in dealing with the day to day concerns of an organization, they lose more than time needed to create a vision that will move the organization forward. If the person doesn’t have the time to get educated and consider the potential negative effects of trends upon the organization, they will find themselves scrambling to find solutions in reaction to the consequences.

The ultimate health of the organization depends on the CEO having the opportunity to act in advance to minimize these negative effects. Being in the position of dealing with the picayune daily concerns of an organization and then being forced to play catch up to deal with situations there was no time to foresee can overwhelm and burn out the executive director.

When disaster strikes, 20/20 hindsight can cause boards of directors and executive directors to say, “It was so evident this would be an important variable! You should have seen it coming!” Indeed, it should have been foreseen–if the director had had the time and opportunity to rise above the day to day concerns cast an uncluttered look over the landscape.

The executive director has to be free to be a leader and leave the management of the organization to other people. Certainly, having more time to survey the situation is no guarantee of success. A bad CEO will be a bad CEO with more time on his/her hands. The good CEO will take the opportunity to emerge from the mines and shine in the sun providing a beacon for others to follow along the new paths the executive director surveys from this new perspective.

State of the Arts

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Observations from Fla.

March 26, 2004

by:

Joe Patti

So I am back from helping my sister move to Florida. The trip brought back some good and bad memories from the nine years I had lived there. There were a number of topics I mulled over discussing here during the long drive, but I want to do background research on some of them before posting. I am eager to get another post on the blog so here we go…

Legacy of a Concerned Man

As I was driving through Florida, I came across the Lawton Chiles Trail. Chiles, a former governor of Florida, died in 1998, less than a month before he was to turn the office over to Jeb Bush. The trail, however, refers to his efforts during his 1970 Senate campaign. It took him more than 90 days to walk 1,003 miles through his home state. During that time, he filled 8 notebooks “with information on our state’s problems and the feelings of the people.” The feat earned him the senate seat and the moniker “Walkin’ Lawton.” (Full Story)

With a presidential campaign in full swing, it is a story like this that reminds me that there are options for running a powerful positive campaign.

It also brings to mind the fact that there are inexpensive (though extremely labor intensive) options for arts organizations to educate the public about themselves and to be educated by the public about their preferences and interests.

Speaking of Wide Range Exposure…

My trip down Interstate 95 exposed me to one of the most famous (and perhaps annoying) examples of advertising by repetition in the country–the South of the Border billboards. Just in case anyone is wondering, there are 48 billboards between NJ and SC. They may be annoying in their ubiquity, but they do create a buzz.

Demon Horses Unleashed!!!

In recent entries of blogs on Artsjournal.com, two different writers discuss an entry by Greg Sandow regarding how boring press releases were killing classical music. The comments on The Artful Manager and Adaptistration give some suggested solutions.

Andrew Taylor’s comments in Artful Manager had some resonance with my time in Florida this past week:

“Even the alternative — full-color, smiling head shots of the artists to come — doesn’t speak to what audiences are buying: a dynamic, compelling, vital, social performance experience (or a night out, a date, or a family celebration anchored by a live performance).”

While I was in Florida, I saw TV ads for the Budweiser American Invitational, an equestrian show jumping event. Perhaps because it is sponsored by Budweiser or because it is taking place in Raymond James Stadium and they needed to fill a lot of seats, the voice over was in the style of “Sunday!, Sunday!, Sunday! Heavy Stock Street Modifieds compete….” In this case though, the announcer talked about “there being no second chances” and the visuals were heavy on horses jumping, tripping and crumpling into a heap or balking before an obstacle and sending the rider flying head over heels across the obstacle.

Now I have attended and watched some of these events and the catastrophes presented rarely occur at all much less in the same event. I know people go to NASCAR races because there is a danger of someone crashing at high speeds. I wonder at the validity of trying to attract crowds of people to this sort of event by teasing them with the promise of death-defying acts. I am sure some people who never heard of the sport will become intently interested in it. The way it was advertised just strikes me as a bit of a misrepresentation.

Certainly, there is a danger inherent to launching yourself and a large animal over obstacles and it is exciting to watch. However, it is exciting in the way Olympic gymnastics is exciting-you know when a landing isn’t stuck or a hoof strikes a pole, points are going to be deducted. It is a bit more sedate than a day at the races.

I don’t imagine that the same tactic would work for arts marketing. What would one do: present an actor suddenly looking lost as they forget a line; show a violinist scratch out a sour note and throw her bow in disgust, barely missing the conductor; show a ballerina slip the grasp of her partner and skitter across the floor?

With few exceptions, the answer is as Andrew Taylor suggests–portray the event dynamically with an honest promise of the true vitality one will experience. The only thing I would add is to make it look real. It is often a tough thing not to make promotional photo look staged. If you try to photograph something in action, you often miss the moment (especially with the time delay of digital cameras). The same is true if you ask people to freeze in a moment, you either say freeze too late or the performers lose their vital spark as they concentrate on maintaining their balance in a mid-stride freeze holding their faces in rictus.

This is one of the reasons a good photographer gets paid so much. They can capture genuine moments or make the staged ones appear thus.

General Musings

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Buying an “A” in Your Creative Classes

March 18, 2004

by:

Joe Patti

Brief Prologue

Before I start the main portion of my entry, I just wanted to state that I will be helping my sister move for the next week and so most likely won’t have time to make any new entries. Those of you who have joined in late or read me occasionally may want to take this opportunity to catch up. I just added a nifty link to a page that neatly lists my entries and categories thus far.

Entry De Jour

I came across an article by Richard Florida in Washington Monthly, entitled “Creative Class War -How the GOP’s anti-elitism could ruin America’s economy”. In the article, Florida basically says cities like Wellington, New Zealand are going to attract the creative folks of the world because the Bush Administration is promoting situations which stifle the creative class in the US. Personally, I was ready to move to NZ some time ago because of what I had heard. Now that Peter Jackson has shown off the country in The Lord of the Rings, I don’t need much of an excuse to take off. (Jackson and LoTR have been credited with essentially setting Wellington on the road to becoming the next Hollywood.)

My dreams of life in the southern hemisphere aside, I am sort of ambivalent about Richard Florida and his book The Rise of the Creative Class. I am sure this is partly due to the frequency that I hear the book and his name mentioned. The incessant radio play of “Mr. Jones” ruined me on The Counting Crows for life. It is starting to get that way for me in regard to Mr. Florida.

I will openly admit that I haven’t read the book and that I should and will. I have read many articles on his website CreativeClass.org and feel that an article featured on Salon, “Be Creative —or die!” does a good job of summing up his theories.

I don’t think he is wrong per se. In fact, I think he is right on. It just seems that people are hailing him as a guru and wildly scrambling to revitalize their cities according to his vision. Certainly, there are detractors to his theories (links here and here). For the most part, it seems people have drank the Kool-Aid when it comes to assessing his suggestions.

Actually, I think the Kool-Aid reference is apt. As I said, I don’t think he is wrong about what he says. He seems to have done a lot of research that backs up his conclusions fairly well. My problem is actually with the way cities are approaching their anticipated transformations.

I can’t put my finger on exact examples, but the impression I get from reading many of these articles is that governments are going a superficial route rather than making an effort toward long term development. It is almost as if they have been watching a miracle diet pill infomercial and making the phones ring off the hook. Again, this is not to say that Florida is selling a “just add water for a creative class” scheme. It just seems like few people are employing their critical thinking skills to make educated decisions.

I think this is what the two detracting articles I cited above are reflecting. Governments seem to think that if they add gay people, high tech jobs, etc., suddenly they will become the hot, new place to be. The thing is, the hot places to be on Florida’s list: San Francisco, Austin and Boston, were hot before the list came out because they made decisions they felt would better the community. They didn’t make decisions because they read a book that listed good decisions to make. That is what this rush to become home to a creative class feels like.

Once place that may never make it to Florida’s list but that I think is making the right decisions for the right reasons is Liberty, NY. It is a little town in the old Borscht Belt of the Catskills that fell on hard times as the resorts went out of business when people from NY City started vacationing elsewhere.

When the local cable franchise was bought out by Time-Warner, the owner decided to invest the proceeds of the sale back into the community. Now different towns in the county compete for improvement grants administered by his foundation. He is also planning on building a performing arts center on the Woodstock ’69 site in Bethel, NY. The towns are improving due to his largesse and the state’s desire to improve the area in anticipation of adding some casinos nearby. (Not sure the casinos fall into the right decision for the right reason, but it is having a positive effect at present.) Wouldn’t you know it, gays are moving into the area and renovating and restoring historical houses and pride in the community.

Cities and states are complex organisms and there are no simple or one size fits all solutions. This is especially true in this day and age when advertisers are trying to collect information on your specific interests and then deliver a customized pitch right to you. Cities have their own personalities so 90% of what works for Seattle probably won’t work for Detroit. Change has to be heartfelt, embraced by all and accentuate the best parts of the locale’s personality.

I wish all these cities and states the best of luck. I have traveled to many parts of the country and would love to live in a lot of places. I am looking for a job and really don’t care where I live. I am all for you governments making wherever I end up a hot place to work. Just please, please, please…do it because it is the right thing to do, not because Richard Florida says it is.

General Musings, State of the Arts

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Bloggers as New Arts Critics?

March 17, 2004

by:

Joe Patti

Yesterday I mentioned the idea that with the reduction of staff and space devoted to the arts in newspapers, bloggers might become the new performance critics. In preparation for holding forth on this idea, I wanted to see if anyone had written on the issue of bloggers and online journals replacing newspapers as information sources.

Some Context

As luck would have it, I came across an excellent article called Blogosphere: the Emerging Media Ecosystem: How Weblogs and Journalists work together to Report, Filter and Break the News . In this and three ancillary articles, (Are Bloggers Journalists?, Borg Journalism, and More on Blogging and Journalism) the author, John Hiler, really does an excellent job discussing how bloggers and journalists differ and how their existences are interrelated.

Among some of the points he made were: “Mainstream” Journalists don’t regard bloggers as journalists because of the subjectivity of their work. Bloggers don’t make any claim to objectivity and regard journalists as hypocrites for claiming they are. Most bloggers feel journalists have their own agenda, don’t adhere to their own code of ethics, and are frequently inaccurate in their reporting.

Some of the strengths and weakness of blogs that Mr. Hiler mentions are: They are good at realizing the implications of points and extending them to their logical conclusions; they are good at debunking stories, but not good at summarizing or correcting errors; there is a built in peer-review system.

To quickly explain-The first point is very encouraging to me since my whole purpose in writing this blog is to study the implications of things I have read on the arts. The second point, Hiler illustrates with some examples of how bloggers have quickly exposed money making scams where people make pleas for money and sympathy for their debilitating diseases. However, he also cites examples of bloggers mischaracterizing what people have said while summarizing articles. (The irony that I might be mischaracterizing him by summarizing his ideas is not lost on me.) He also gives examples of people linking to and citing controversial information like mad, but not doing the same when a correction was made the next day.

The last point about peer review is related to the debunking issue. One of the reasons journalists minimize the value of blogs is because there is no editor present to keep bloggers on course and reined in. However, Hiler cites examples of tens to thousands of bloggers contacting writers to point out errors.

Blogger as the New Arts Critic

Having read all this, I have a better idea of how a blogger could operate as an arts critic. What I envision happening to a lesser or greater extent is a paper really cutting back on coverage and an arts organization gradually becoming aware of people who are writing about their attendance experience. The arts organization contacts the people who write best and probably least critically of them and extend free tickets to them as they do the newspaper critic. (Though many newspaper critics do pay for their tickets) Then the arts organization begins quoting the reviews and directing people to that writer’s website.

There are, of course, benefits and pitfalls to this situation. First of all, the person doing the writing has to be seen as credible. They must write well, have a fair bit of expertise in the subject (rather than having taken an appreciation course in college), and certainly has to have a very limited conflict of interest (perhaps is a long time subscriber, but not on the board or a relative of staff).

Many newspaper critics are mindful of a code of ethics and will avoid any appearance of impropriety such as accepting benefits that the general public don’t receive. An individual who hasn’t been exposed to journalistic training might find themselves on a slippery slope of favor currying if they aren’t careful about what they accept.

Another thing that might detract from a blogging reviewer’s credibility might be the narrow scope of their experience and venue attendance. If the writer only attends one arts organization and has done so for the 15 years, they can only talk about how good the shows are in relation to past shows at the same venue. In the best of worlds, the reviewer would begin to receive invitations to ply their craft at other venues out of recognition of their excellent writing. There is a chance though that organizations will cultivate “pet” reviewers who are sympathetic to them alone.

On the other hand, audiences often crossover to different venues and can create a demand for reviews by the person whose opinion is most aligned with their own. This is where the strength of blogs comes into play. I had cited and article in an earlier entry that talked about how blogs are places where opinion leaders can state their thoughts and people can easily access them. It is the same in this case. If people come to respect a reviewer, a demand to have them review in many places can arise. Also, people who don’t agree with a review have the opportunity to post a review of their own possibly making them an opinion leader for another segment of an audience who shares their tastes. People also have the opportunity to write to the critic and support or disagree with what was written. This may keep the writer honest or it may make them conform to the loudest opinions to keep the hate mail away. Certainly, the blog writer has to have the thick skin of his/her newspaper counterparts.

The biggest danger could be that good writers might find themselves in trouble if a demand for their skilled services takes them away from their family and jeopardizes their positions at their day jobs. They may have a little more leeway than the newspaper reporter who often rushes from curtain call to make a deadline. However, there is certain to be some pressure by arts organizations and readers alike to produce a review quickly so decisions to attend can be made and tickets sold for the most days remaining in a run. Businesses may not look kindly upon their engineers and managers using work time to write reviews.

It certainly isn’t viable for organizations to pay for the reviewers’ time since those with the most money can get more frequent and perhaps better exposure. The solution, ironically might be to have a centralized organization/clearinghouse which insures the quality of writing and then assigns writers to shows on a rotating, as available basis. Hmm, this sounds like a newspaper! Truthfully, since it is doing little more than calling up a pool of reviewers, the clearinghouse could be the local arts council. The clearinghouse could charge a nominal fee to the participating organizations and host a centralized website where the reviews appeared so audiences didn’t have to hunt down the sites of the different reviewers. (Or the central website could link people to those individual’s review sites.)

The upside is that an organization gets well written reviews and stories. The writers aren’t called upon so frequently that they don’t feel the effort they are expending for free exceeds the value of the ticket and experience they are receiving. Since the writers aren’t working for the clearinghouse merely getting a call, they retain their independence.

A huge benefit of having bloggers write about your organization is that they don’t have the space restrictions newspapers have. They can do indepth advance analyzes of every aspect of your show and do a thorough critique of the performance/exhibit. (It would be great if newspaper reviewers could note that more complete versions of their stories appeared on the newspaper website as a number of magazines do.) Since they don’t have as strong a requirement to be objective or detached from what they are viewing, a blog writer may also be more apt to discuss nuances that particularly touched them personally or present an alternative dissenting view offered by a companion or even admit they might be wrong in their view as the audience seemed to enjoy the show where they had not.

It seems to me that a well organized relationship with blogging writer can yield greater rewards than a good relationship with a newspaper writer. I would bet that some variation of what I have suggested here will eventually emerge as the dominant fashion through which people receive information about arts organizations. The players might be different, but I believe the process could be very similar.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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