The Artful Manager

Hollywood studios are in a bit of a spin over a lawsuit filed by unpaid interns. Although it dates back to September 2011, the suit is coming to a ruling later this year, and may reshape policy and practice far beyond the Hollywood Hills. … [Read more...]

Hacker/artist Evan Roth offers a compelling TEDx presentation on both hackers and artists, and the ideals the two communities share. Hackers are individuals who strive for clever, shared, and often playful solutions to problems through computer code or resourceful intervention. Their work abducts or adapts existing systems toward purposes for which they weren't designed. … [Read more...]

Author and reformed management consultant Matthew Stewart once wrote in The Atlantic that ''management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.'' He wasn't deriding philosophers (which is usually what happens). Rather, he was labeling management consultants and theorists as bloated, undisciplined, and unworthy stepchildren of philosophy, who also deny their lineage. … [Read more...]

When you hope to be a successful and high-impact professional in your field, it helps to understand deeply the process or product you seek to serve. If you run a retail store, you understand supply chains and consumer behavior. If you run a bank, you understand financial systems and the financial lives and needs of your clients. And if you're an arts manager, you understand how the human brain constructs meaning from its sensory environment … [Read more...]

Author/graphic novelist Neil Gaiman's commencement speech last year to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia has many great moments about life as an artist and the art of life, which made it a much-referred and much-watched video online. But his insight that keeps coming back to me is not about how artists make or get work, but about they keep getting work over time. Says he: … [Read more...]

Over the past decade, we've seen an evolution in how we talk about and engage 'value' in the arts. Whether exploring intrinsic, extrinsic, social, public, personal, spiritual, economic, or other forms of value, we've built a better language and a productive conversation about the ways expressive acts and artifacts connect to individuals and communities. And thank goodness for that. But it may be time to focus similar enthusiasm and effort on a less warm and welcoming element of arts organizations: expense. … [Read more...]

NPR offers a fun little tidbit on the "Ikea Effect," the tendency for each of us to ascribe extra value to the things we have created ourselves. Described and tested in a 2011 academic whitepaper, the Ikea Effect is not limited to products from the Swedish megastore, but to any object of personal labor. Says the NPR correspondent: Once people finish building their table or their bookshelf - and they may have built it very badly and done a terrible job - they think that table is now much more valuable than a table that was assembled by a … [Read more...]

I'm a bit of a sucker for old books, particularly small old books, which is why I make every effort to avoid establishments that offer small old books for sale. But I just HAD to make the significant capital investment ($5, US) to purchase Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal and Other Poems by James Russell Lowell, edited by Herbert Bates, teacher of English, Manual Training High School, Brooklyn, NY, 1919. … [Read more...]

Long before people poked and liked and friended each other on-line, they nudged and prodded and provoked each other in person. And a new exhibit at MoMA maps a particular social network that invented the Abstraction movement in modern art. … [Read more...]

In the for-profit world, there's a category of expense called ''carrying costs,'' which includes all costs involved in holding an asset (inventory, for example, which costs money even when it's sitting in the stock room...insurance, security, spoilage, storage, finance, and such). The game in inventory-based businesses is to balance your carrying costs against the cost of not having that thing available when you need it. … [Read more...]