The Artful Manager

Everyone's a critic, or collector, or joiner, or...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:30:19 -0600

I'm in Maine at the moment, preparing for a week-long visit to Colby College to think about and talk about audiences and the arts. At conferences and other arts conversations, there's certainly a lot of talk about how audiences are changing. The assumed contract between artist, audience, and community seems under renegotiation -- pushed in part by the power shift of digital and network technologies. And since our cultural organizations and business models are built upon the older contract, cultural managers are concerned.

But one of my premises while here in Maine is that technology for the most part doesn't change things, it only reveals what was already there. The urge to participate, to create, to connect, and to interpret was likely always a part of the audience experience. But the channels available to deliver the arts experience weren't accommodating to that urge (darkened theater, one-directional broadcast media, curated exhibition). That's where Lynne Conner's fabulous work on the history of audience behavior backs me up.

Arts audiences certainly still want to receive and observe, but they also want to play other roles in the experience from time to time. And as the Groundswell work from Forrester Research suggests (see below), consumers seek different roles in different measures, and not just in the arts.

How does your audience want to engage your work? And are you providing the path, and the invitation, for them to do so?

My Maine events

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:12:02 -0600

I'll be in Waterville, Maine, most of next week, in residency (kinda) at Colby College, discussing issues of art, audience, and business with students, faculty, and cultural leaders. Should be an interesting visit, graciously hosted by the fabulous Lynne Conner, who's research on the history of audience behavior has opened wonderful conversations from coast to coast.

Details to come as the week unfolds.

If you happen to be in or around Waterville, catch our collaborative public talk on Monday, February 8, at 4:00 pm, on the Colby campus.

The cumulative value of stories

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:30:15 -0600

Social anthropologist and ''chief culture officer'' Grant McCracken has some great thoughts bubbling in his recent blog posts. He's wondering out loud about finding ways to capture and share the narratives and histories of the objects we wear, use, and pass along. His most recent post wonders if attaching such stories would make recycling and reusing things more compelling and even more valued. Says he:

What if objects straight from the factory seemed somehow orphaned, smaller and less interesting for the fact of their pristine condition. If we care about recycling, we want objects to be better at absorbing and recording and reporting their histories. Of course, some objects will be incapable of telling stories: bottles and newspapers for instance. But clothing, furniture, technology, these could be storyful. And they could spared the landfill for one or more cycles of ownership by the stories they bring us.

The idea brings to mind social experiments that do just this, like Where's George, that lets you track the travels and experiences of the dollar bill in your wallet (assuming someone logged it in and its various owners continued the story); or like Bookcrossing, which lets you release your favorite books into the wild and track where and with whom they make their impact (which I blogged about way back when).

But now I'm thinking about a different bits of physical symbolism in arts and culture, and how we might bring narrative into their life: The physical ticket and the theater seat. When you think about it, a single theater seat is the stage for a growing narrative of the shows experienced, the people sharing that experience, and the thoughts and emotions that found their home there. And yet, when we issue tickets, we print a fresh one that ignores and denies any such history or extended narrative. Who sat in this seat before you? What did they see? How did the experience effect them? How does your experience conflict or resonate with that narrative? What did YOU think when you were sitting there a year, or a decade, or two decades ago?

What if each seat in a theater space had its own story, written by each occupant over time? What if the tenant of that seat could learn about a previous tenant and their experiences, then add their own to the narrative, and pass it along to the next person who happens to sit there? This could be accomplished through a web site, like Where's George or Bookcrossing. Or it could be attached to the object of a re-envisioned ticket that gets used over and over, and encourages little notes or scraps, or photos (a passport book, perhaps). I'm even guessing there could be "an app for that," accessible through your mobile device while sitting in the seat.

I'm fond of the bed and breakfast establishments that leave a journal in each room, where occupants can share some portion of their experiences there. Sometimes, the same room is a family tradition, and those narratives can stretch years or decades. The room and the journal become the stewards of those intertwining stories, and the medium through which those stories are shared.

The theater ticket, and the theater seat, seem ripe for similar opportunity.

A useful question about nonprofit status

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:52:46 -0600

I'm pleased to notice a new blogger among the ArtsJournal crew, James Undercofler, who recently joined the faculty at Drexel University's Arts Administration program after an illustrious career in symphonies, conservatories, and cultural nonprofits. His State of the Art blog will focus on the particular challenges of the nonprofit structure in supporting and advancing artistic intent. And his opening question sets the tone for that essential conversation:

Is the traditional not-for-profit, 501(c)3 (NFP) so cumbersome in its structure as to actually impede the very promise of its original intention?

His answer is a qualified, ''Yes.'' Suggesting that particularly at the small, startup phase and the large, institutional phase, the nonprofit model can distract and distort an organization's artistic vision or mission.

It's certainly time for a fresh set of eyes and a refreshed public conversation on the subject. And I've often thought we need a national rapid-response team to swoop in on artists and arts enthusiasts at the moment they're pondering nonprofit status (mostly to talk them down from the precipice). But I've come to believe it's not the nonprofit structure itself, but rather our interpretation and application of it that create the problem.

Nonprofits don't kill artistic intent, people kill artistic intent. That said, the structure they've chosen certainly ranks as an accomplice to the crime.

Rumination on ''expressive life''

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:49:51 -0600

I'll be blogging elsewhere on ArtsJournal this week, as part of the ''Expressive Life'' week-long blog discussion convened by Bill Ivey and featuring a ragtag bunch of big thinkers.

Since his work as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill had been increasingly frustrated with the public and policy discourse about arts and culture. He eventually decided that the phrase and frame itself, ''arts and culture,'' was partially to blame. The two anchors of that phrase were both impossible to define and easy to dismiss by those who defined their future.

So his concept of ''expressive life'' was born, intending to restart the conversation with a clean slate and a bigger circle of human activity in the mix -- from the most extraordinary artist to community arts to fashion to handicraft to political speech to songs around the family piano.

But does the phrase have potential? Is it only semantic shuffling? Does it change the game or just rename the players? That's the focus of the roundtable happening all this week. Hope you join the conversation.

Broken

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:40:28 -0600

One of the more metaphorical moments of my two-performing-arts-conference visit to New York City this month is captured in this photo. I took it in the Times Center during the first day of the International Society for the Performing Arts congress after several days at the Arts Presenters conference.

The symbolism? Something's broken in the professional, corporate, nonprofit arts. And while I heard lots of smart people exploring lots of thoughtful answers, I heard very few conversations seeking to define, describe, and detail the problem we were trying to solve.

The Arts Ripple Effect

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:43:38 -0600

The folks at the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati were clearly getting tired of the standard public conversation about arts and culture, particularly as it relates to the public responsibility to support the arts. So, they decided to look deeply, listen deeply, and reframe the way they were going to talk about it. Better yet, they decided to share that process with the world through their new report, The Arts Ripple Effect: A Research-Based Strategy to Build Shared Responsibility for the Arts. Said they:

After a year of investigation into the topic, this research finds that public responsibility for the arts is undermined by deeply entrenched perceptions that have nothing to do with government and everything to do with understanding of the arts. Members of the public typically have positive feelings toward the arts, some quite strong, but how they think about the arts is shaped by a number of common default patterns that obscure a sense of public responsibility in this area.

Among those 'default patterns' are the assumption that the arts are a private matter about individual experience and expression, that the arts are 'goods' to be consumed and therefore subject to the same marketplace rules as any other product (the winners sustain themselves), that the arts provide a passive experience that is 'delivered' to the community, and that the arts are a lower priority.

In response, the report suggests a different message as the foundation of public arts discourse. In a nutshell:

The arts create ''ripple effects'' of benefits throughout our community. Among these, two seem particularly resonant:

A vibrant, thriving economy, where neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists and residents are attracted, and so on.
A more connected population, where diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better, and such.

There are lots of connections between this report's approach and the earlier work of Alan Brown (where he reframed the Architecture of Value back in 2006, and suggested a ripple effect emanating from the personal engagement with artistic experience that flows out to social and civic value). But there's plenty of room for bigger, broader, and more public conversation about how the arts engage our community life, and how we talk about that engagement with those who don't see it.

Artists, businesses, and other mythological beasts

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:25:21 -0600

The rhetorical power of similes lives in their connection of dissimilar things (through 'like' or 'as'...remember your grade school grammar?). They infuse meaning and nuance into a conversation or communication by changing our frame of reference in intriguing and surprising ways. For example, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes ''Holmes looked at him thoughtfully like a master chess-player who meditates his crowning move,'' he captures the flavor of the moment with an elegant paucity of words.

But it's that thoughtful and powerful use of simile that makes one particularly persistent argument in the arts seem as dull and pointless as the Home Shopping Network (see how I used a simile there...). Should an arts organization behave like a business or like an artist?

I know I've raised the issue before in many forms, but in my recent week at the Arts Presenters conference in New York it rose again, and again, and again. As an example, the similes play a central role in Kenneth Foster's otherwise fantastic piece on the past, present, and future of the performing arts which was discussed at the conference (available in PDF here), where he frames his conclusions like this:

Behave like an artist, not like a business.
We have a moment right now in which we can remake our organizations into arts organizations that navigate the business world rather than organizations that are ''in the art business.'' All of the suggestions that follow emanate from the idea that the creative process followed by artists is the appropriate ''management tool'' for arts organizations. From planning to implementation to evaluation we need to let go of the rigid businesslike approach that so many of us have adopted (strategic planning, systems of efficiency, linear thinking, quantitative evaluation) in favor of creativity, experimentation, flexible organizational structures and systems that respond more easily and more quickly to a changing environment, intuitive thinking and qualitative evaluation.

While there's lots to commend in the recommendations -- we should certainly strive to be more elegant, expressive, innovative, creative, and curious in our management practices -- the false comparison between ''business'' and ''artist'' inevitably leaves us swinging and flailing like a novice golfer in a sand trap (another simile...just try to stop me). We all get the subtext: ''Business'' is a proxy for an anal-retentive CPA obsessed with the bottom line; ''artist'' is a placeholder for an idealized expressive individual who has healthy relationships, productive artistic practices, and cares little about food or shelter. But subtext, especially such vague and clumsy subtext, is insufficient for such an important conversation.

Arts organizations ARE businesses, so whatever they do is LIKE a business. Arts organizations are also ARTISTIC endeavors, so whatever they do is LIKE an artist. Whether they fulfill either of those explicit roles well is another question. Are they effective businesses? Do they offer a compelling artistic voice? These are the more focused questions that might actually get us somewhere.

If we hope to be extraordinary in either role (stipulating for the moment that they're separate things), we might begin by striving for qualities common to the best examples of them both: focus, clarity, curiosity, passion, purpose, context, competence. All of those qualities would lead us to banish bad similes from our public conversations, when there are so many fabulous similes to be constructed that actually bring insight and nuance to what we say.

And don't get me started about metaphor.

I'll be back eventually...

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:30:37 -0600

Sorry to all who keep coming back to the blog or checking your feeds. My New York trip was busier than expected, and the arrival home found many projects waiting eagerly. I'll work to get back to the blogging next week. Lots to explore from my experiences in the big city.

Off to NYC

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:05:52 -0600

I'm traveling to New York tonight to participate in both the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference and the International Society for the Performing Arts conference. Both promise different perspectives on the state of the live performing arts. And both offer the glorious opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and friends from around the world.

A team of my MBA students will be presenting again this year at Arts Presenters, as part of the annual Bill Dawson Research Initiative. Their topic is access for the performing arts -- how leading organizations are striving to connect audiences with artists, even when there are significant barriers blocking that connection (physical, economic, cultural, and so on). This will be our fifth Dawson presentation. And they always forge a fabulous conversation in the room. The session is on Sunday, January 10, at 9:00 am.

If you're around Arts Presenters and/or ISPA, flag me down. It's always nice to meet my blogger brethren in the physical world.

Free tools for teaching (and talking)

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:48:29 -0600

A core service for most arts organizations is the connection of artists and audience. Hope that's not a shock. But if you were to create a time diary for most organizations, tracking how they spent the minutes available in a single year, you'd likely find that the actual connection (face to face, voice to voice, thought to thought) represents only a small fraction of what gets done.

There's good reason for this, of course. For performing arts organizations, as an example, the requirements of connecting artists to audiences are huge. Planning, budgeting, human resources, contracting, fundraising, production, technical services, marketing, and on and on -- just for a single live event. The greater the cost and technical requirements, the larger the ratio of preparing to connecting.

But it strikes me that even as we work hard to prepare and present the most engaging and transformative experiences, we miss opportunities all along the way to encourage more and better connections. Because of time, resource, and human constraints, we bunker ourselves away until the experience is ready to unleash, then we fling open the doors to start the connections we've been working toward.

If social media tools bring us anything (beside continual distraction), it's this: They dramatically lower the cost and complexity of connecting people. If we could find the most efficient and effective ways of plugging in (not always, but when it makes a difference), we could take more of our year connecting artists to audiences and audiences to artists.

Blissfully, the arts are not alone in seeking out these tools, or innovating in their application to learning, discussion, and connection. Case in point is Free Technology for Teachers, which gathers and assesses social media tools to enhance learning -- such as backchannel discussion systems, alternatives to YouTube, or resources to learn about copyright and fair use.

Of course, there are also mavens sharing such informations specifically for nonprofit or cultural managers, such as TechSoup, Beth Kanter, Technology in the Arts, or Nina Simon, among others. But there's real value in lurking in other domains to gain different perspectives on connecting online.

When the money gets tight, the moneyed get metrics

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:26:16 -0600

One major emerging trend in formal philanthropy over the past decade has been the increasing effort to quantify social return. As philanthropic dollars are fewer, and competition for contributed income grows more intense, it's only natural for boards and big philanthropists to seek observable evidence that they're making the right choices, and that the choices they continue to make are moving their missions forward.

As much as we might moan about bringing metrics to social causes and aesthetic endeavors, we might as well admit that they've long been among us. When a donor selects one organization over another, when a foundation funds a small set of those who apply, there are metrics involved. We're just used to those metrics being squishy and silent, rather than involving math.

If you want a fast-track education in some of the more prevalent social return metrics, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offers this summary of eight ''integrated cost approaches'' already in use by major foundations -- from standard cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness metrics to full-on ''social return on investment'' tools. The report is from a year ago December, but still a great resource for the language, the intent, and the context of the various approaches defined.

If you can bear the intense intermingling of investment language with social purpose (if you can't bear it, it might be time to learn to bear it), it's well worth a reading.

And if I might offer a ninth approach to measuring social return on investment, what about adapting those pain-level indicator charts used in children's hospitals? After you consider the full cost of each of your projects, measured against the probable returns in mission, in impact, in difference, which of the following will best describe your mood as you present the program results to your board?

I'd shoot for an average of 3.5. But you can pick your own target.

Off for the holidays

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 07:42:00 -0600

I'll be on a blogging break until the new year. But I wish all of you out there in the ether a joyous and recuperative holiday season. See you in 2010!

Considering the Arts Administration degree

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:44:32 -0600

There are plenty of opinions about the place, purpose, benefit, or consequence of graduate study in Arts Administration. I'm of a certain opinion, as you might guess, since I direct an MBA degree in that very thing. But I'll be first to claim it's a complex question.

To engage the question, Ron Evans invited me to be a guest panelist for his National Arts Marketing Project NAMPRadio podcast, which is now on-line. Give a listen.

If you haven't got time to listen all the way through, here's the gist: Graduate study in Arts Administration can be a powerful learning/networking/advancing experience when it fits what you need, and you find the program that fits how you learn. It's not the only path to a successful career in arts and cultural management. But it's a path with particular utility for people who want to rethink and reframe the way the business works.

Thanks to Ron and his co-panelists Matt Campbell and Maris Smith for the opportunity to talk it through.

The intention economy

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:30:30 -0600

There has been a bunch of conversation about how the on-line worlds are changing the nature of the traditional marketplace. Some have suggested we're now in an experience economy, where people are buying an immersive experience surrounding a good or service rather than just the good or service itself (aka, Starbucks). Others have focused on the new currency of these new markets, suggesting that an attention economy is now in play, where people's focus and interest is more scarce and more valuable than cash for maximizing business success (although, I imagine that cash is still pretty handy for paying the electricity bill).

Given my recent blathering about ticketing systems, however, I'm increasingly intrigued by a concept framed by journalist/blogger/tech maven Doc Searls back in 2006: The Intention Economy. Searls was feeling that the ''attention economy'' wave building momentum back then was missing an essential point -- attention might be the beginning of something, but it's not sufficient to forge an economy. Rather, he thought, it's an individual's intention to do something that provides the essential stuff of markets. Says he:

The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them. The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that.

While it may sound like just a twist on other iterations, the Intention Economy is actually upside-down, particularly when we think about the arts. In the traditional approach, a bunch of individual arts organizations prepare and present content, and try to 'capture' the attention and commitment of some portion of the market. In an Intention Economy, 'intent to act' is the commodity up for sale. The consumer signals their interest in something (through a behavior or a specific statement out loud or online), and they receive offers to satisfy that intent. Think of it as a Lending Tree for everything else.

Searls original musing has evolved since then, in part into Project VRM (an inversion of CRM - customer relationship management - systems, letting customers manage their vendor relationships instead of vendors manage their customer relationships). More recent developments in the online world make it even more powerful. For example, in 2006, Searls suggested that a consumer would need to broadcast specifics:

''I'll be skiing in Park City from March 20-25. I want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget FastBreak and Hertz 1 Club. I don't want to pay up front for gas or get any insurance. What can any of you companies do for me?''

Now that most of those specifics are already swirling around our on-line profiles, and swimming through our media choices (our Pandora radio stations, iTunes lists, Amazon purchases, Netflix rentals, restaurant preferences, and the like), the signal of intent can be much more succinct:

''I've got a few open spots in my Google Calendar this week and some friends in town. Fill them with stuff I'll like.''

or, more simply: ''I'm bored. I intend not to be.''

There are all sorts of creepy privacy issues embedded in that exchange, but it's already coming (SonicLiving already makes event recommendations based on your iTunes and Pandora choices, your location, and a database of available performances). And people are increasingly willing to share bits of their behavior online in order to access better filters and recommendations on what to read, what to do, and who to meet.

The larger point is this: Arts and cultural experiences are among the most personal and complex goods on offer. It might be time to embrace an upside-down view of the marketplace that begins with the person primed for action rather than our separate (though desperate) organizational needs to fill our spaces.

RANDOM ADDITIONAL THOUGHT: Some smart programmer could build an autobot that scans Twitter and Facebook for statements of intent, and builds the actual marketplace where intent could meet provider. A simple hashtag could be the first attempt. Twitter example: ''I #intend to eat out tonight.'' Your Twitter geotag provides your location. Your preference profile suggests your particular interests (discounts, adventurous food, social spaces, quiet dining, funky bars), and the bidding would begin.