Power Questions Are the Wrong Questions

I have always tried to be consistent in my answers: Questions about power are the wrong questions, and excessive interest in power rather than in building an organization that can come to consensus through constructive internal discussion and debate rather than reliance on lines of authority is, to me, an indication of an unhealthy orchestral organization.

Conductors who insist that they must have the "power" to make all programming decisions, choose all guest artists and conductors, control everything even remotely related to music because that is the natural authority of a music director are not, in my view, suited to lead an orchestral organization. (It is also generally these conductors who are the quickest to blame the marketing department or some other aspect of management if the decisions that they single-handedly make don't seem to result in success at the box office.) It should be obvious that there is almost no decision at an orchestra that is purely artistic, or purely fiscal. A board chair who tries to exercise total control because officially he or she is the CEO of the organization, when in fact he or she has no professional experience in the business of running orchestras, is as unsuited to that job as I would be to the job of CEO at a bank or an insurance company.  

Too often in recent years I have encountered orchestras where instead of exploring the development of a healthy governance process that respected all views, encouraged an open culture of debate and consensus-forming, and allowed for an unemotional exploration of the pros and cons of important decisions, the debate instead centered around drawing the lines of authority, the lines of power.

The truth is that almost any question an orchestra faces does not have one right answer. Real life is not black or white--it is gray, many shades of gray. How much contemporary music should we play? What kind of contemporary music? How should we program and present it? What is the right investment in community engagement, and what is its purpose? Should we engage high-priced soloists guaranteed to fill all the seats, but with fees that may not even cover those extra ticket sales? Would those soloists help sell enough season tickets to justify the fee? How do we balance the fee with the artistic experience? How do we present ourselves in our marketing?  This is only the very tip of the tip of the iceberg. Every one of these questions admits of different answers in different orchestras at different times in their histories.

While it is true that ultimately someone has to make a decision on all of those questions, and many others, it is wrong-headed to focus on who is the person with that power. The focus should be on developing an organizational culture and set of processes that allow for such a healthy internal debate that an institutional consensus will develop and make unnecessary the exercise of one person's authority. It is, of course, much easier and far less complicated to focus on developing lines of authority--and sadly, some of our friends from the corporate world favor those lines of authority because they can work in that world (though I'm not sure it is best there either). But nonprofit organizations supported by volunteers and contributions definitely do not work best that way. Spending a lot of time discussing power and authority might be less complicated than developing a healthy internal culture, but it is not in the orchestra's best interest.