The Artful Manager

Any strategy or plan for future action is essentially a story. It describes the present and coming world, the dynamics of the past that invoked them both, and the actions that will propel an organization toward a desired future.

The Arts Management Program at American University has just posted a full-time contract faculty position for the coming Fall. If you’re interested in joining an amazing learning community in Arts Management, in the global cultural city of Washington, DC, give it a look! And/or pass it along to friends and colleagues who might be a […]

One of the main takeaways from the classic in-depth case study of Steppenwolf Theater is that “self-sufficiency, sustainability, and success pull in different directions.” This tension is a constant balance and bother for arts managers who want to play the long game.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer offers an interesting way to track the popularity of a term over time. The service draws from the scanned contents of tens of millions of books encoded by Google. And it can offer a glimpse at the rise (and fall) of phrases, topics, or subjects over two centuries. A search […]

To imagine and explore other opportunities to support working artists and creative projects, Fractured Atlas commissioned an “Opportunity Scan” of six possible paths forward.

If you and I make a plan to meet for coffee, next Tuesday at 1:00 pm, in a cafe on the second floor of a building downtown, what are we doing exactly? It’s easy to say that “we’re planning to meet for coffee,” but you can’t define a term using the term itself. No fair.

I’m thrilled to announce the public launch of a new experiment, the #ArtsManaged initiative – a series of digital resources exploring and advancing the practice of Arts Management.

Managers of all sorts, including arts managers, frequently have to decide about complexity. When we select technology tools, rent/build/buy buildings, make policy, build teams, or develop work processes, we’re calibrating how complex those things need to be against how much time, attention, and money our audiences and organizations actually have to navigate them. If a […]

The more I learn about cognitive science, the more I realize that our work in purposeful collective action – such as Arts Management – is built on faulty premises. We think, talk, and act in arts organizations as if we’re dominantly rational beings, making sense of the world and the work through conscious and explicit […]

The balance sheet may be a “beast of boredom” for many in the world of the nonprofit arts. But I propose that it’s one of the most essential and evocative lenses on our work. The balance sheet (aka, the Statement of Financial Position) sets the scene that shapes our capacity and constraint. And it describes a foundational difference between for-profit and nonprofit endeavor.