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Barry Hessenius

What Many Of Us Have Learned

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Awhile back Barry Hessenius asked me to write a “What I Have Learned” essay for his blog. He noted that in the past he often featured similar pieces written by people who were approaching the end of their career. This time around he wanted to feature the voices of people who were on the upward arc of their careers.

This past Sunday he posted the collection of essays. I should warn you, the post is L-O-O-O-N-N-G. I wasn’t given a word limit and I would guess none of the other 17 people whose contributions appear were either.

True to Barry’s purpose of providing a forum to some lesser known people, there were names a recognized but many I didn’t and ended up Googling. I had originally intended to provide a list of the contributors with links to bios or websites as a reference, but after opening 10 tabs in my web browers, I realized my entire post was going to end up being a list of names.

So read the post and if you see someone you like, Google them to learn more.

There is a lot to read but there is a lot worth reading. Over a couple days I made note of the next person on the list and performed a Find on the page when I came back to continue reading.

To give a small sample of what people submitted, I was really struck by this advice from EMC Arts’ Karina Mangu-Ward:

Accept offers of support, even if it makes you feel vulnerable:  Early in my work at EmcArts, a more experienced colleague of mine approached me and said that if I was ever interested in developing my practice as a facilitator he’d be willing to mentor me.  I brushed it off at the time, unsure of how to accept the support.  But I kept in the back of my mind.  Four years I later, when I was in a difficult moment of growth, I called him up and asked him if he’d be willing to to set aside two hours a month to talk with me about the big questions I was wrestling with.  Now, he’s one of the most important people in my professional life.

A few contributors mentioned issues of Power, but Ian David Moss from Factured Atlas & Createquity made it his central topic. After a lengthy admonition about abuse of power which included the first sentence below, he suggests people are often unaware of the power they possess and the effective, if seemingly mundane ways, in which it can be exercised.

Power is like a precious, poisonous metal: it requires care and professionalism in handling or people are going to get hurt.

[…]

Know that speaking up is always, always an exercise of power – no matter who you are. Know that asking uncomfortable questions is a way to change the course of a meeting, a policy discussion, a decision. Know that sharing your experience in a forum where it will be heard is an exercise of power. Know that doing so again and again is more powerful than doing so once, as tedious as that may seem to you.

Know that doing your job well, maybe even better than anyone else, is an exercise of power. Know that understanding what you’re good at is an exercise of power. Know that vacuums of leadership mean more power for you. You never need to let your title and salary have the final say on what you’re capable of.

[…]

Know that charging yourself to gain more knowledge, particularly knowledge that most people around you don’t have, is one of the most valuable and impressive forms of power you can exercise. And absolutely no one is stopping you from exercising that particular power starting right now.

Taken out of context, any one paragraph might come off as advice for ruthless ambition, but he figuratively starts and literally ends his contribution with the reminder that “…with power comes responsibility.”

Each of the contributors comes from a different place with their “lessons learned” essay, but generally offer insight of a similarly high quality. Bookmark it and allow yourself to read through it over time.

Is Anyone Really Reading This? Three Foundations Want To Know

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A guest post today. Barry Hessenius asked if I would spread the word about study being conducted by the Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and WESTAF who are looking into the ways in which the non-profit arts field communicates.

They are seeking answers to many of the basic questions we all ask like, “Is anyone really reading any of this and is it useful to them?”

Those who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing for an Apple Watch and a separate drawing for a $500 cash award to your organization. Read on to learn more.

The Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and WESTAF are sponsoring a preliminary study on Communications within the nonprofit arts field, and have invited our members to join them by taking a brief national survey.

They want to make absolutely sure that the grantmaking community within our field is adequately represented in this survey.

This study seeks to gain valuable information on:

• How we communicate internally with each other
• How we communicate externally within the sector
• How we manage the growth in all communications
• What the impact is on our organizations of that growth in communications.

No one disputes that communication is at the core of every business, including the arts nonprofit sector. If we don’t communicate effectively success is problematic.

Oddly enough there has never been any comprehensive survey of how we in the nonprofit arts field communicate – internally or externally.

As a field, we have virtually no data at all as to:

• which means and methods we prefer to use to communicate,
• whether or not the means we do choose are effective,
• how we manage our communications
• where we get our information from, and
• which sources we trust.

Moreover, we have no information as to how we are coping with the dramatically increased information that flows from, and to, us on a daily basis.

Do you know if people read the reports, studies, and just general information you send them? Do they scan it or read it all, or do they ignore it if you are not one of their trusted sources?

Do you know if your staff considers the onslaught of information a positive or a negative in doing their jobs?

Do you know how many emails your staff deals with each day and how many hours a week they spend on different types of communications?

They have designed a basic, simple online survey that will give us all some base information on our communications behaviors, habits and perceptions.

The survey is 100% check off answers, with no open ended, narrative responses required or asked for.

It is completely anonymous and designed to take less than 20 minutes to complete.

While they cannot pay a fee nor provide a premium to every person / organization that takes the survey, they will, at the request of each survey responder, enter their name into a random drawing for an Apple Watch. We will also enter the name of the responder’s organization into a separate random drawing for a $500 cash award payable to that organization.

The survey seeks to establish a base line of data and information about communications within our sector, on which can be built further research. The aim is to
gain knowledge that will help us all to communicate more effectively, more efficiently and with a greater awareness of the issues and challenges inherent in all our communications decisions.

To that end they will disseminate as widely as possible the analysis of the results of the survey.
Here is the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Knight-Hewlett-Survey

The survey is open from September 28th to October 16th.

Hey Did You Hear About…

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I was really surprised to find my name tucked at the bottom of Barry Hessenius’ 2014’s Top 50 Most Powerful and Influential People in the Nonprofit Arts (USA) In fact, since I read his blog via Feedly and had caught up with my subscriptions on Saturday, I might not have read the post for another week if it weren’t for someone tweeting that Robert Bush from Charlotte’s Arts and Science Council made the list.

It’s not that I don’t think what I produce is worthwhile, it is just that I don’t perceive the old blog here as having that high a profile.

Now, of course, there is pressure to meet the standard set by the company I am listed in.

But Barry’s list dovetails nicely with the subject I intended to address today: cooperation and competition in the arts. Last month, Seth Godin observed that authors don’t compete with each other.

Yet, not only do authors get along, they spend time and energy blurbing each other’s books. Authors don’t try to eliminate others from the shelf, in fact, they seek out the most crowded shelves they can find to place their books. They eagerly pay to read what everyone else is writing…

Can you imagine Tim Cook at Apple giving a generous, positive blurb to an Android phone?

And yet authors do it all the time.

It’s one of the things I’ve always liked best about being a professional writer. The universal recognition that there’s plenty of room for more authors, and that more reading is better than less reading, even if what’s getting read isn’t ours.

It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an infinite game, one where we each seek to help ideas spread and lives change.

Even though the limits of funding, revenue generation opportunities and audience free time make existence as an arts organization or artist seem like a zero sum game, my experience starting about 15 years or so has been that arts people are generally pretty supportive of the work of colleagues in both word and action. They will tell their friends about interesting events and invite them along when they attend.

That hasn’t always been my experience. About 20 years ago, I feel like there was a lot more “us vs. them, we do the real art in this town” attitude. It has seemed over time the people I have worked with have espoused this view less and less.

Which isn’t to say that people aren’t envious of other organizations’ funding base; think other organization’s programming needs to be more diverse; think the annual awards ceremony for their community is all political; and aren’t befuddled by the more abstract and conceptual extremes of artistic expression.

Godin cites the intense rivalry of Pepsi and Coke as the antithesis of the relationship authors share. I mean, be honest. Haven’t you held your breath a moment when pouring Coke into a cup printed with a Pepsi logo, imagining the cup will melt? Have you ever mixed Pepsi and Coke together, standing at arm’s length expecting a reaction similar to dropping Mentos into a bottle of diet Coke, if not an explosion? That is how apparent the rivalry of the two companies is to the general public.

It would be hard to imagine Pepsi or Coke tweeting about members of other companies showing up on a list of the most influential and powerful people in the beverage industry.

But watch who calls attention to Barry Hessenius’ list over the next couple days. I bet you will find that the majority of those who do, don’t work for the same companies and organizations as those named. There may even be former employers and co-workers celebrating the attention someone has received. As Godin noted, there is a recognition that the success of one enhances the prestige and fortunes of the many.

Hey did you hear that Nina Simon, Laura Zabel and Donna Collins made the list?

I’m My Own Idea Czar

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La Piana Consulting blog had a post a few weeks ago about how the dynamics of non-profits can crush new ideas and creative approaches to problems.

Their last suggested solution to avoid this is to appoint an “Idea Czar”:

“Appoint an “Idea Czar” from outside the senior management ranks. This person becomes a human suggestion box, an ombudsman for creativity. Anyone with a novel idea that might answer a current challenge is invited to share it with the Idea Czar, who periodically reports on what he or she has learned at management team or board meetings. Then use those reports to dive deeply into a specific question that piques the particular group’s interest or that the CEO would really like the board’s or management team’s best thinking on.”

I walked around most of today pondering whether this could actually work. I mean, it would require someone with enough seniority and experience to be taken seriously by management, but who also hasn’t been around so long that they are cynical about the viability of ideas. Even if the didn’t discount them immediately, they would need to be idealistic and energetic enough to effectively advocate for the idea in the face of a resistant board and senior management.

I recognized fairly early on that in my venue the idea czar would be our assistant theatre manager. (I am fairly idealistic, but she tops me.) This made me realize that it isn’t enough to appoint someone on staff into the position, if you really want to break out of a status quo, the hiring process has to involve actively recruiting people who possess idealism and strength of character to advocate in the face of a tendency to say No.

Apropos of this, Barry Hessenius posted this week about how one can be their own best/worst gatekeepers in terms of openness to “good ideas, new thinking and ways to actually be better managers, administrators and leaders; opportunities for new projects, collaborations and ways of seeing our world.”

Just as this problem of gatekeeping can manifest on both a personal and organizational level, the solution can probably be implemented on a personal and organizational level.

It probably isn’t enough to appoint a person to be the company idea czar if the board and administration are going to perpetuate an environment that is hostile to new ideas. Management and leadership should practice self-advocacy by setting aside time each week to entertain new ideas in the same way 3M, Google and Hewlett-Packard give employees time each week to develop new ideas and products.

Management and leadership might use this time to read websites they bookmarked, jot down what interesting ideas they have and then go back to ideas they jotted down in previous sessions. I think this last step is important because realizing you had forgotten some of the great ideas you had had weeks before serves to reinforce that fact you have the capacity to have good ideas.

Even if none of those ideas ever travel from the idea journal into practice within the company, the very act of engaging with new ideas, looking at them, turning them over a little, before putting them away, helps the mind practice accepting and handling new ideas rather than simply rejecting them.

Grouse: What You Do When Your Salary Is Too Meager To Afford It

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It looks like it was a weekend for griping about performing arts. Ken Davenport at Producer’s Perspective opened the floor on an atypical Saturday post asking people to share their gripes. He promised to make it a monthly ritual if he got more than 10 responses and he easily passed that mark. A summary of the comments in one sentence would be – “How can they charge such high prices for tickets, yet pay me so little if I can shoehorn my way into a position at all.” There are a few complaints about audiences thrown in for good measure. The general source of the comments seem to be people living in and around New York City with a few people coming form other places. The tenor of most of the comments will be familiar to you if you work in the arts at all and are familiar with the New York City scene. Those aspiring to careers are following the same path those before them followed. This includes tales of people both inside and outside the business wanting them to work for fun or for experience.

My initial thought was that Broadway won’t change because it doesn’t have to and that people need to look elsewhere for their experience. While a similar situation is just about as institutionalized outside of New York City, those organizations are at least marginally aware that they need to find a better way to run their business and interact with their employees.

Which brings us to the second post I came across. Barry Hessenius posted an entry on his blog noting that essentially every job description for an executive director and senior management of an arts organization seems to be taken from the same template without any effort to acknowledge the actual specific needs of their organization.

He provides a tongue in cheek translation of this:

“The successful candidate will be a strong leader with excellent management and interpersonal skills. S/he will have the proven ability to build productive relationships with a broad range of internal and external constituencies, and have the demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with the various segments of the community. S/he will be an experienced supervisor with the ability and willingness to mentor staff and encourage staff development. S/he will foster an atmosphere of teamwork and collaboration among staff and volunteers throughout the organization. S/he will have a strong working knowledge of programs, production, board relations and operations. S/he will have excellent financial management skills and a track record for achieving budget goals…”

Into this:

“We want someone smart enough to help us figure out a cool vision for our future (that one is stumping us); someone who will attract great talent to the staff (though we can’t pay the staff very much) and whom the staff (despite working conditions that are hardly ideal) will love and follow anyway (someone who will hopefully get them to perform above their potential, because actually we’re understaffed by all reasonable criteria). We want someone who can make various factions of the board (currently somewhat dysfunctional and at each other’s throats) work harmoniously together and take on an ever greater workload (or in the alternative someone who will assume the board’s workload for them because it’s highly unlikely they will do much more than they are doing right now – which isn’t that much). We try not to micromanage, but we still do. We’re looking for someone who can get the best out of us, but someone enough like us so we are comfortable with them; someone who will push themselves, but not necessarily push us too hard. Did we mention that we want someone who can raise a lot of money? “

I have only excerpted a small portion of his translation so you will want to visit the entry to read the whole thing. I have also excerpted a portion of his sample job description. Trust me when I say you don’t need to go to the entry to read that. You have seen it many times before. I did a verbatim Google search on a couple phrases from Barry’s sample and found a number of job listings using them. I understand a desire not to reinvent the wheel, but if you are looking for the same person as everyone else, most organizations are bound to be disappointed. There are only so many of those paradigms to go around. The truth is, most organizations are indeed looking for someone a little different from the rest.

Little More About Politics and Art

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I finally got around to reading an interview I bookmarked where Barry Hessenius conducted with Adam Huttler, Executive Director of Fractured Atlas. There was a lot of interesting things said, but I thought I would focus in on some sections related to some recent posts I made.

At one point Huttler touches on the topic I discussed yesterday. The NEA doesn’t get much funding and what it does get is subject to contentious scrutiny. Huttler points out however there are other areas in which people can advocate which can greatly impact the arts.

“Meanwhile, policymakers – on both a local and national level – have countless other levers for impacting cultural vitality. Zoning laws can determine whether urban cultural enclaves remain dynamic hubs of creativity or gentrify into sterile swaths of Starbucks and bank branches. Immigration rules can facilitate or inhibit international cultural exchange…We need to take a more holistic view in which the arts play a role in projects funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Transportation, or the Department of Homeland Security.”

Hessenius points out that the NEA is not the only source of funding for the arts and in addition to those departments Huttler mentioned, there is also the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian. The conversation moves toward the idea that the arts need to exercise their political clout a lot more if they expect better results. There is a discussion of 501 (c) (4)s and political action committees as a tool and some of the complications relative to those structures.

As conversation in this area continues, Hessnius talks about an option I had mentioned as a possible consequence of people turning their back on NEA funding and perhaps 501 c 3 status–performance to benefit political ends. I actually didn’t know that it was permitted under current status as apparently many don’t.

“Some have argued (me included) that the nonprofit arts sector (by taking advantage of its ability to do performance benefits to fund its political activities) ought to be one of the most powerful special interest groups on the playing field – with real political clout that might not only help us to obtain more funding, but pass diverse legislation on all the levels as you suggest – from tax laws to zoning regulations. Yet we do not.”

Huttler notes that laws governing political lobbying and activity make things a little more involved than that, but still an under utilized option that Fractured Atlas will be exploring.

What If They DO End Up Loving The Arts?

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Barry Hessenius is conducting a massive six week conversation about the future of the National Endowment over at Barry’s Art Blog. When I say massive, I mean it. This week’s entry is so large (and won’t be complete until tomorrow’s Q&A) that I feel guilty about addressing such a comparatively small section of it.

Truthfully, it may be too large an entry for its own good. Few that could benefit from it may take the time to read it. There were many people whose thoughts I value contributing to the entry, (even with Andrew Taylor’s absence), so I did take the time to digest it.

On the topic of arts education, Ian David Moss who blogs at Createquity.com fleshed out the recently oft repeated question about the long term value of an arts education in a way that seemed very compelling to me. (my emphasis)

Before you call me out as the Grinch who stole music classes, let me explain. I think that the conversation about arts education is inseparable from the conversation about the professional arts infrastructure in America. The reason is simple: the kids who fall in love with learning to play the tuba or do a pirouette today are the adults who are going to be competing with each other for gigs and grant money tomorrow. If we are successful in our efforts and ensure that every child has the opportunity to experience all the arts they want to during their formative years, what happens to them once they get to college? The arts are a powerful drug, as addictive as nicotine for some. The arts encourage people to dream big, and we’ve developed a post-Baby Boomer culture in America that tells children to follow their dreams no matter what obstacles they encounter. That’s fine so far as it goes, but there needs to be a pot of gold on the other side of that rainbow. When music conservatories, playwriting programs, schools of art—institutions whose ranks and capital budgets have been swelling apace in recent years—blithely charge marginal students tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and fail to offer them even the pretense of “real life” entrepreneurship skills, that’s as close to third-sector malpractice as it gets in my opinion.

[…]

Much of the literature that advocates arts education as a strategy for cultivating demand for the arts assumes that students who have invested thousands of hours of their lives in perfecting a craft during their formative years will happily set all of that aside as soon as they turn 18 and 21, become productive members of society with skills that they somehow picked up while practicing piano for four hours a day, and donate all of their expendable income to their local arts organizations. Really? Don’t you think that some of them might be a little bitter about having to leave their dream behind? Don’t you think some of them might continue on and spend their parents’ life savings on three graduate degrees in a quixotic quest for fame and glory that never materializes? Is this the best use of our collective human capital?

[…]

N.B. Upon visiting Ian’s blog, I happily found that he posted the above material with supporting links not available on Barry’s Blog.

I have discussed the idea of arts training programs graduating students into a glut market before. I certainly have to acknowledge Scott Walters and Tom Loughlin, theatre professors who often question their part contributing to this state. Scott Walters was part of the conversation on Barry’s Blog and alluded to Tony Kushner’s 1998 “Modest Proposal” to eliminate undergraduate arts degrees which he included at some length in a 2006 entry on his blog.

What I never really thought about was what the arts world would do if they realized their ambitions to engender an appreciation of the arts in a large number of young people. I don’t think his suggestion that the push for arts education is motivated by a desire to have more consumers rather than artists is completely fair.

Or rather, I don’t think operating on the assumption that not everyone will become an arts practitioner completely nefarious. No one expects every kid who participates in Little League, Pop Warner Football and various soccer leagues will go on to become a professional athlete after all the time they have invested in practicing. Though certainly a situation where a college athlete isn’t expected to devote themselves to their studies is not something to be emulated. And in fact, as Ian points out, lacking large scholarships to keep their debt down, artists have it worse if they leave college without any “real” skills to fall back upon. The purpose of all these youth athletic activities is to cultivate an appreciation of the various sports which translates into audiences for athletic teams throughout life. (Not to mention a lot of athletic apparel purchases if the national sponsorships by sneaker companies are any indication.)

Still, if we have trouble employing artists now with really crappy arts education, what will happen when we ignite kids’ imaginations and convince them the arts have value in their lives. Yes, there may be an increase in arts consumers if more people grow up valuing the arts, but young artists will be graduating and trying to practice their craft long before their fellow graduates acquire enough disposable income to support them. The one saving grace might be if the economy is moving toward creativity. In that case, the graduates would likely need much different training than they are receiving right now.

Not that it is okay, but the arts are not alone in misrepresenting opportunities. In the last year, I read an article that cautioned people about believing ads that say things like there are plenty of jobs in nursing*, computer programming, tractor trailer driving, etc. The piece evoked the Grapes of Wrath in noting that it was in the best interest of many industries to flood the market with many qualified applicants so they can keep wages low due to competition.

I am not suggesting that this is a situation the arts attempt to cultivate. Other than Hollywood or some of the old Broadway syndicates, I can’t think of any entities who would have both the perspective to recognize this and the influence to bring the situation about. If lower costs were a goal, regional theatres would try to attract more people to their areas instead of casting out of NYC and having to pay to house people locally. Though I suppose high concentrations of actors in NYC does keep prices down in its own way. In any case, given that Baumol’s Cost Disease makes producing art increasingly more expensive, the arts do benefit from having a surplus of talented people.

*Don’t mean to imply nursing doesn’t have the need given all the aging baby boomers. It is just one of those areas for which you hear there will be a lot of demand.

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