I am revisiting a couple stories tonight.
The first is some applause for Michael Rice over at Cool As Hell Theatre podcast who has been picked up by station KQED in San Francisco. Michael's podcast is the first, and at this time only podcast broadcast by the station.
I have to confess, I haven't been listening to his podcast as often as I would like. Everytime I do listen, I scold myself for neglecting his work. I appreciate that he asks questions you want to know the answers to that most interviewers avoid.
Case in point, in his most recent interview with Alison Jean White. She is the youngest member of American Conservatory Theater's permanent company, a distinction previously held by Annette Benning. He asks her the requisite questions about feeling pressured to live up to Benning's legacy. But he also asks her if she felt like she was exploited as cheap labor when she was a student at A.C.T. and talks about how he felt that way when he was in a different acting training program.
Given that she is still employed by A.C.T. and probably wouldn't want to malign the organization, he probably didn't expect her to answer negatively if she was disgruntled. I am just always impressed that he asks questions that reveal the inner lives of artists and the struggles and concerns they face. He also makes himself vulnerable to derision by revealing that he felt so exploited and burned out that he turned down offers of employment after a showcase.
Anyhow, I have made up for my past errors by subscribing to his podcast. It will be interesting to see where things go now that he has the potential for greater distribution. (Hopefully those San Francisco Public Radio listeners are hip to podcasts!)
Second issue I wanted to revisit I wrote on a bit more recently. It seems The Independent of London decided to replicate the Joshua Bell experiment the Washington Post conducted a few months ago that I posted about a couple weeks back.
They chose to place violinist Tasmin Little in a station far less appealing than L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. The railway bridge beside Waterloo Station is described as "...amply layered with pigeon shit, blankets belonging to the homeless lie scrunched in a corner, and no doubt the place is used as an impromptu loo by Friday night binge-drinkers. It's also windy, cold and, with the passing trains, a bit noisy."
The article admits the environment isn't conducive to stopping to listen echoing many of the same complaints a French businessman makes as he passes through. In fact, members of the Philharmonia Orchestra are the first to recognize Little and won't stop because they have a train to catch.
While I feel both the Washington Post and The Independent articles got a little melodramatic as they wailed about the poor children being heartlessly yanked away from the musicians, in The Independent story, far more young people stopped and gave money than older folks who pay large amounts to see Little in concert halls.
It makes me wonder if my earlier thoughts about finding appropriate places outside of the concert hall to perform and then studying the who, what, when, where and how of getting people to sincerely stop and listen as a way of discovering a better method of delivery might have some validity.
As a supplement to my entry today, I offer the following handful of links on affordable housing for artists.
Artspace- Developer of Artist Housing across the country. Many of their spaces are in Minnesota where they are based, but are also found in places like Minot, Reno, Buffalo and Mt. Rainier, MD.
(Hat tip to NY Foundation for the Arts)
Chicago Artist Resource has a page on how to find space in an area zoned favorably for artists. Also has a pretty complete looking How To.. resource to help people with the legalities and logistics.
New York City and Boston have space specs if an artist needs to live in the same place he/she works.
Paducah, KY has a very attractive incentive program with low rate loans, opportunity for free lots and even partial payment of architectural fees.
(hat tip to The Law Portal for the Chicago, NY, Boston and Paducah links)
Waterloo, IA has a work and living space in a downtown area designated as an Arts and Culture District.
Riverdam Millyard in Biddeford, ME isn't necessarily a special zoned area but the effort of some developers to bring SoHo to Maine. I note their site because their list of tenants gives you a sense of what type of mix might emerge in such a space. Not too clear if you can live there though. Suspect you can't.
In the last week or so the NY Foundation for the Arts has run some articles about the difficulties artists in NYC face with affordable housing. The biggest problem being that they tend to make neighborhoods such cool places to live that people will pay a premium to do so and the artists can't afford that much.
While the articles are about New York the stories they tell are being repeated across the country.
In the first article, NYFA Executive Director, Michael Royce, recounts his somewhat harrowing experiences with the first five apartments he had when he moved to NYC. For him and many artists, the opportunity to live in a community of artists trumped the squalid conditions and violent surroundings.
At the end of the article he lists people to contact if you are an artist living in NY State and want to participate in focus groups about affordable housing.
The second article is an interview with Paul Nagle who serves as the Director of Communications and Cultural Policy for one of NYC's council members.
He talks about trying to create a sustainable policy for affordable housing. He acknowledges it is difficult to discuss affordable housing for artists when there is such a dearth of cheap housing for everyone but points out that the artistic presence actually enhances the quality of life in whatever neighborhoods it appears in and thus is an effective investment of funds and policy.
He also notes that policies must be created to stem the expulsive influence of gentrification because it impacts more than just the artists.
"But it’s not just the arts. It means all mixed economic activity and all middle-to-low-income activity will be driven out as well. Then you have a luxury neighbourhood, which in New York City basically means that it is completely dependent on the stock market… and I don’t know where the sustainability is in that formula. So this becomes less about being nice to artists and more about maintaining stable communities with character and diversity where people can actually live."
It seems that any municipality hoping to attract Richard Florida's creative class would be wise to watch the issue and fabricate a policy early on so they don't encounter similar problems.
I have written about increasing the interactivity of performances at least twice before. While increasing interactivity is something that may be key to the continued survival of the performing arts, involving the audience more integrally in a show isn't necessarily going to always be constructive and enjoyable.
Via Artsjournal.com comes the story of an incident that occurred while Mike Daisey was performing his one person show at American Repertory Theatre. The show had hardly begun when 86 people stood and exited the theatre with one man going up on stage and dumping water on Daisey's outline for the performance. The whole thing was captured on tape. Daisey includes the video on his blog where he explains what happened.
What is so compelling about the video is that because the show is extemporaneous and has no set script, Daisey goes with the moment and gets up and asks why they are leaving. He mentions that he can regulate his language if that is what offends them and invites them to return so they can have a conversation. The only response he gets is one person saying they are Christian.
After the group has departed, Daisey engages in a conversation with the audience about what has happened and how the destruction of his outline, which he makes small alterations to everyday, means that he will have to spend the next day reconstructing his show.
According to his most recent blog entry he actually got in contact with the group and the man who destroyed his notes. His discussion of his interaction with the man shows sensitivity and empathy in a situation where anger and derision for those who offered insult might be expected. (Though on the night of the show he was quite angry and called those who were departing cowards.)
The quality of the writing and insight he offers is what I have envisioned when I suggested artists keep blogs about the creative process for audiences to access. It is just too bad an incident like this has to be the impetus of it.
Which is not to say that his other entries on the American Repertory Theatre blog don't have value, he does a great job addressing why his extemporaneous performances may appear to be memorized for example. The entries and video on the walk out are just great examples of what the performance experience can be for artist and audience and superb lessons to artists about how to deal with people who are angered by your work in a constructive, non-dismissive manner.
As I noted earlier, my involvement in Take A Friend to The Orchestra Month this year took little effort on my part since the Symphony came to me. For the first time in a long while, the Symphony came to perform a school outreach on my stage. Many of the musicians commented on that fact and hoped they would be returning for future events.
The program certainly had a greater reach than anyone anticipated as mothers showed up with infants in hand while accompanying the older siblings. We had ten strollers parked in the lobby during the first concert. Four people used our stage as a diaper changing area prior to the performance which left us concerned some of the babies would roll off.
I didn't get to watch the whole thing, but the concert started with a short sample of John Williams' "Theme from Superman" and the ended with the full work.
What really stuck out from the whole experience was the audience's reaction to the second piece they performed. Because they were trying to demonstrate varying tempo, they performed Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King."
Before the piece was over the entire audience was clapping along in time with the music. I am guessing this isn't a common response from the way the conductor commented on how the audience had really gotten into the piece. The symphony had sent CDs of the program to the schools in advance so they could prepare so the students could have been introduced to the idea of clapping along in the classroom. Though honestly, if you listen to the music, it doesn't take much impetus to get you clapping.
Some of the volunteer ushers the symphony brought along commented how great it was that the kids enjoyed the music so much that they were getting involved with it.
I couldn't help but wonder how old the kids would have to be before that sort of behavior was no longer tolerated from them. There is already a debate about aplause between movements, clapping during the performance would certainly be sacrilege. Certainly, social conventions require that you stifle such impulses to allow other people the opportunity to listen to the music.
On the other hand, symphonies often talk about how composers were the bad boy rock stars of their day so I suspect that people might have had a less restrained reaction to the music than they do these days. I came across a reference to children following Grieg around the streets of Bergen whistling tunes from his Peer Gynt Suites. If you followed the "In the Hall of the Mountain King"link earlier (or right here) you will see that the popular appeal of Grieg's music lives on today. (Though in some cases, it seems to be a mutant life form.)
I have no idea how I came across it, but I found The Law Portal-Law Primers for the Arts today. As the name implies, the site has links to other sources of information on various laws that apply to the arts. There is also a link to information about how to conduct legal research online.
Some of the topics covered you might expect-free speech, cyberspace law, non-profit law, copyright/fair use, setting up a business, contracts, taxes, visas, etc.
There are some issues covered with which I hadn't anticipated when I visited the site like those surrounding the use of various materials in the creation of art. The site not only links to articles and laws dealing with this subject but a place to find the Material Safety Data Sheets and OSHA regulations surrounding their use.
Something else I hadn't expected was an article on what to do if an artist starts performing in your gallery without permission.
The site is a good resource not only for law regarding many of these issues, but also policy discussions on the topics I have mentioned as well as things like network neutrality, privacy and media consolidation.
Last week, Andrew Taylor linked to the draft of Charles Leadbetter's upcoming book, We-Think. It has taken a week or so, but I have read the entire thing and found much of it thought provoking.
The general theme of the book is that some of the biggest innovations of the recent past have been a result of the cooperative effort of enthusiastic amatuers. Among the examples he cites are familiar like Wikipedia, Craigslist and Linux. But he also reveals that mountain bikes were actually developed by enthusiasts who assembled prototypes from scavenged parts so they could ride off road. Many recent astronomical observations have been made the same way, placing cobbled together telescopes alongside multi-million dollar observatories as contributors to discoveries.
Since I have been on pondering the nature of leadership in the arts of late, one of the dozens of things that caught my eye was the following (my emphasis):
Most important for innovation, leaders will have to be open to challenge and question: they will have to be curious and inquisitive.They cannot afford to be intellectually closed.They will have to be accessible to the people they lead, visible and part of the conversation at work, rather than cut off in the executive suite. Leadership will not longer be the preserve of the people at the top of the organisation: it needs to be exercised in large and small way by many people at all levels. If innovation is going to come from all over the organisation, then so too will leadership.
One of the issues Leadbetter addresses in the book is that so many companies say they want people to come up with creative solutions, but the sentiment is mostly lip service. To be sure, the whole problem of companies not supporting their assertion that they value out of the box thinking is a regular topic of business magazine articles. (And lets not even get into the whole fallacy of the "we're like family here" claim.)
I have a suspicion though that there is a movement afoot that companies will find themselves unable to oppose. As more and more people find some self-actualization in contributing to these collaborative efforts, their desire to feel similar satisfaction at work could end up subverting the organizational culture of their companies. The subtle proliferation of Casual Fridays will be nothing next to this trend!
As people see that they have something of value to contribute to the team laboring on their out of work interest, they may feel that they have something to contribute at work as well. This may lead to some big conflicts as the employee expects things to be restructured to facilitate collaboration or perhaps their expertise doesn't quite translate over to the function they serve at the company.
A smart company may look into giving employees the opportunity to fill the knowledge gaps needed to translate existing expertise or explore reorganizing things if there is some potential in the suggestion.
They may not have a choice. Employees already create informal networks to get things done in many companies. Get enough people together who have participated in highly effective self-organized groups in their private lives, and the company's management may find themselves out of the loop.
As I was re-reading the Knight Foundation Magic of Music report last week as part of my entry and comments on Bill Harris' Facilitated Systems blog, I realized there were a few topics I wanted to address.
Back in November, my entry on the report essentially deferred to my assumption that Drew McManus could provide greater insight than I could on the subject. As I expected, he wrote two entries with some great analysis.
However, it is a long report with plenty to comment on. One part of the report that seemed pertinent to the arts world in general was the "Lessons Learned" section on pages 49-50. The problems facing the orchestra world seemed to be the same faced by all the arts disciplines. In some cases the problem may not be as extreme for other disciplines as it is for orchestras, but is still something that bears scrutiny and effort for improvement.
Though summarizing a summary doesn't do much justice to the material, I wanted to cite the lessons here in the hopes that arts leaders will be inspired to tackle some of the issues in upcoming seasons and set things in motion now with staff before summer vacation dilutes ambition.
As I said, replace "orchestra" with your discipline and see if it doesn't ring true even a little bit.
1) The problems of orchestras stem not from the music they play but from the delivery systems they employ.
For orchestras the problem lies in the fact many people enjoy listening to classical music but don't see any attraction at the concert hall. Part of the problem for all disciplines might be, as Andrew Taylor suggested awhile back, that audiences are less interested in being relegated to a passive role.
2 The mission of an orchestra needs to be clear, focused and achievable. An orchestra can no longer afford to promise all things to all people. A mission statement that promises a world-class touring and recording ensemble, extensive local outreach, broad public-school education,...may be promising far more that it can deliver and end up doing many things badly.3 Orchestras that are not relevant to their communities are increasingly endangered. ...The more orchestras peel off 3 to 4 percent of an economically elite, racially segregated fraction of the community, the less they contribute to the vital life of a community.
4 Transformational change in orchestras is dependent on the joint efforts of all members of the orchestra family – music director, musicians, administration, and volunteer leadership and trustees.
5 No single magic bullet will address the many serious problems that orchestras face.
The next three were pretty fascinating. The implications of Nos. 6 & 7 may cause you to reconsider assumptions you hold about the effectiveness of similar programs you offer.
6 Free programming and outreach do not turn people into ticket buyers. If the Knight program dispelled one myth, it was the long-held axiom that the way to develop new ticket buyers was to give them free tickets or programming. Free and subsidized outreach can be valuable for its own sake and is part of an orchestra’s service to its community. But it is not a technique to market expensive tickets. Similarly, new audiences can be attracted to orchestra programs using various methods. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that significant numbers of them can be retained without more sustained followup strategies.7 Traditional audience education efforts, designed to serve the uninitiated, are often used primarily by those who are most knowledgeable and most involved with orchestras.
Over and over again, Magic of Music orchestras chose to abandon programs designed to attract new audiences because it was the subscribers who took advantage of them.8 There is a lot of evidence that participatory music programs – including instrumental lessons and choral programs – are correlated with later attendance and ticket buying at orchestral concerts. Traditional exposure programs, such as orchestras’ concert hall offerings for children, seem to have little longlasting effect on later behavior.
The meaning of the statistics cited to back this up in a earlier part of the report was the crux behind the questions I posed Bill Harris. I don't believe anyone I have spoken/written with on this point felt that experiential education was going to guarantee increased attendance down the road. My feeling is that this does support the idea that we should have music/dance/theatre in the schools because it makes people more positively disposed toward the arts later in life.
I wouldn't be surprised if this finding meshed exactly with education studies that conclude things learned through experiences are more strongly retained than things learned through more passive methods like pure lecture.
Lastly,
9 Orchestras need to do more research on those who do not attend their concerts. Despite extensive research conducted on audiences and people who have been audience members, orchestras do very little research on nonattenders...
Some logic behind this. You need to not only know why people are attending but why others are not. The report openly admits that this is a costly proposition and really only viable with resources like those possessed by large institutions and foundations.
I have been covering a lot of arts theory lately so I think it is time to share some practical tips. Here is one for your job search process. If you are trying to do a good job in your search, you will attempt to throughly research an organization before you apply so you can craft a cover letter that connects your experiences with their programs and goals.
You also want to know if the organization and environment is for you. What you especially want to know is what those catch all phrases like "competitive compensation" or "salary commiserate with experience and education" really mean.
Web sites are a great place to start, but for more intensive research, one of the places to consult if the organization is a non-profit is its annual 990 filing. If you go to Guidestar, create a free account and search for the organization, you can get access to these documents. There are other sources of information you can peruse as well if you become a paid subscriber to the service.
Organizations have to report the salaries of their highest paid directors and employees making in excess of $50,000/year. You can find out directly what the person in the job you are seeking made if they are listed there. This information either appears around page 5-6 in section V-A or Part I of Schedule A which tends to be page 9-10.
If the position is not listed there it is either because 1-the person doesn't make more than $50,000 a year or 2) There are more than five people making more than that. (Companies are only required to list top 5 employees.)
In this case, you have to extrapolate what the salary for your position might be. If you are going for Marketing Director and the Executive Director isn't even listed as making $50,000, chances are the best you can hope for is low 40s. You might also take a look at page 2 of the 990 where they list total amount paid in salaries. If their website shows 4 employees and the total they paid in salaries is $85,000, chances are the salary for your position won't be very high.
Other than scoping out possible salary range, one can also check out the health of the organization. The form contains a balance sheet that shows how much the company began and ended the year with, what form their assets and liabilities are in and how much grant and donor support the place enjoys. Schedule A has a 4 year financial history of the organization so you can see what the general trend has been.
Often the filing will also include expenses listed by category so you can get a sense what your budget might be as marketing or technical director based on how much was spent for promotion or construction materials.
Finally, there is often a narrative about their recent activities which can give you additional insight into what the organization is all about.
The caveat is that these filings may not provide a complete or truthful picture of the situation. If large corporations can be evasive and creative with their accounting, so can performing arts organizations.
Also, you need to be aware of what the numbers you are looking at really represent. Seeing a listing of assets in the millions may look impressive if you aren't looking to see how much of that is land, equipment, buildings, etc versus liquid assets like cash with which salaries and day to day operation costs are covered. The most gorgeous facility with state of the art equipment doesn't do much good if an organization has poor cash flow management and can't pay anyone to perform.
Apropos of my comment at the end of yesterday's entry that one should look at statistics with a critical eye, the same obviously goes for any news report. What I specifically have in mind in this case is the Washington Post story about how Josh Bell was ignored by rush hour pedestrians at a Washington D.C. train station.
I have seen links to this article from Artsjournal.com and Arts and Letters Daily. There was a response to the article on Salon.com and discussions on the Chronicle of Higher Education's forums.
And I guess I am contributing to the hysteria by mentioning it here. But the whole experiment really perturbed me.
The title of the article, "Pearls Before Breakfast," an allusion to pearls before swine, really says it all. The effort seemed to be biased toward proving that the philistines of D.C. wouldn't recognize talent. It almost seems like they set Bell up to fail. It was more of a stunt to write a provocative article about than a constructive attempt to observe and measure response. I guess I shouldn't expect so disciplined approach from the the author, Gene Weingarten, since he is a columnist rather than a reporter.
They put him in a train station leading up to the 9:00 am hour, a time when people have work commitments they are rushing to satisfy, expecting people to engage in a leisure time activity.
Busking is prohibited in the Metro stations. In a post article discussion, the author admits he had to cajole the transit authority into violating their rules and give him permission. While people might stop because Bell's presence was out of the ordinary, they also might ignore him assuming he was operating illegally and the police would be along to stop him soon.
Weingarten cites Kant's belief that beauty can only be appreciated under optimal conditions. Instead of trying this out in less than optimal conditions, he sets it up in abysmal conditions. Probably the only situation that would have been worse would be stationing Bell in a stadium vomitorium at a Washington Redskins game during half time.
It would have been better to try this experiment in a place where people were in a more leisurely state of mind even if they were in the process of pursuing a goal. Perhaps a shopping mall--or the National Mall.
I mention this more for the benefit of the reader than in any hope of influencing future experiments by newspaper columnists. Studies like the Magic of Music mentioned yesterday have noted people are listening to classical music fairly frequently these days. They just don't do it in a concert hall. The performers, to paraphrase Willie Sutton, may have to go where the people are if they aren't coming to them.
Sure there have been performances in malls and outdoor areas before, but has anyone thought to study before what it is that gets people to stop? It is easy enough to perform with no specific expectation of how many will stop and another to measure the who, what, when, why and how of getting people to sincerely do so. The answers may comprise the basis for the next method of presenting performances.
One last thing in closing that has been long debated in many forms and I won't try to tackle tonight.
I didn't read all the responses people made on the various websites on which the story appeared, but one interesting observation did catch my eye. There was much ado made about the fact that Bell only made $34 and attracted the attention of a handful of people vs. National Symphony music director Leonard Slatkin's projection that a hypothetical World Class musician would make $150 and cause 75-100 to take a meaningful pause. On the Chronicle of Higher Ed forums, a poster named Grupt (comment #17) observed: "But there's an assumption there that there should be a tight relationship between talent and take, and I doubt that relationship exists."
Over at Adaptistration, its Take A Friend to the Orchestra Month (TAFTO). I am not writing this year, but I am participating in a sense. The orchestra will be performing in the theatre I run.
Drew prefaced today's entry with a promise that it would wow readers with the concepts it was presenting. I have to say it certainly did for me. Bill Harris of Facilitated Systems creates a computer model to test if Drew's TAFTO program is beneficial for orchestras in comparison with paid advertising.
Now since he is dealing with statistics and computer programs, it isn't the easiest of reads. On my first read through I absorbed enough to realize it was providing enough valuable insights to read through again a couple hours later. If I understand correctly, one can copy the program he has written and use it in the simulator he suggests to produce results specific to ones organization.
I was intrigued by all this so I followed a link back to Bill's blog and came across an entry on the Knight Foundation's Magic of Music Final Report. Not two weeks ago I had cited a portion of the finding of this report to a group and now I see Mr. Harris telling people to be careful about the conclusions they drew from it.
He quote from page 32 of the report-
In trying to profile the factors that might predict a ticket buyer, one statistic stood out: 74 percent of them had played an instrument or sung in a chorus at some time in their lives.
What he says this appears to be saying is,"the probability of someone having played an instrument or sung in a group, given that they were a ticket purchaser, was 0.74."
But what he says you really want to know is the probability that someone will buy a ticket "given that they played an instrument or sang in a group." That may be what you assumed the report was saying because you hope that people who play instruments and sing (or perform in a play, paint, etc) will patronize your organization.
My assumption about the findings in the Knight report was that people who had music in their background might be inclined to attend later in life, but I didn't see a cause and effect relationship. It merely seemed that people with a musical background shared were an affinity group within symphony attendees.
However, under the suspicion that inclination to attend wasn't any different than cause and effect assumption, I posted a comment to Harris' latest blog entry asking if I was making an erroneous assumption.
We shall see what he says. In the meantime, the lesson here is to read those statistics with a careful, critical eye.
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.
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.
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.