The Music & Media Forum, a convening I attended and reported on back in January, has just released its summary report (available for download from the project web site). The forum gathered about 60 leaders from the worlds of music performance, presenting, and electronic media for five primary tasks: Share current ideas about the issues […]
Archives for March 2006
The board-of-directors disconnect
CompassPoint’s new report on nonprofit leadership trends (Daring to Lead 2006, available for download here) has lots of great insights for cultural leaders and their boards. Among the most striking of their summary conclusions is this one: Boards of directors and funders contribute to executive burnout Negative perception of the board of directors is strongly […]
The physics of friendship
Physics, by at least one definition, is the science of matter and energy and their interactions. So nobody should be surprised when that particular science strays into social analysis, as well. One particularly cool application of this physics crossover is this effort to model social interactions based on laws of the physical world. The physicists […]
Access vs. excellence
A passionate essay in the UK Times rails against the emerging emphasis on access and public palatability among museums, claiming that it distracts and destroys the true purpose of the institutions. According to novelist/journalist James Delingpole, that true purpose is this: They exist today, just as they did 250 years ago, for the preservation, collection, […]
Measuring progress in ”smiles per hour”
Let’s assume you wanted to foster a sustainable and vibrant community over time, and you wanted to be publicly accountable to that goal along the way. What would you do? The city of Port Phillip, Victoria, Australia, came up with 13 indicators of what they believed to be a sustainable community, and then dared to […]
And you thought you had a youth marketing problem
A recent consumer product survey asked me what I thought of the product concept shown here, with the following marketing text: Natural spring water in the Aquapod bottle is the cool new kid on the block — Aquapod makes drinking water fun. Its unique bottle style is intriguing enough to get kids excited to drink […]
Feeling the squeeze
Grant Thornton just released its 12th annual ”Survey of U.S. Business Leaders,” which seeks to capture the tone and strategy of for-profit business decision-makers and their sense of the current business climate. A few of their major trend discoveries should sound strangely familiar to nonprofit cultural managers, and the corresponding strategies seem handy, as well […]
Economic impact: strike two
More trouble is bubbling for those who hope to make economic arguments for major public/private capital projects — for sports specifically, but also by proxy for the arts. This article in the Boston Globe suggests that the equation linking major facilities to major economic return is losing believers, if not losing steam: This new skepticism […]
What does a ”great organization” look like?
Jim Collins’ business best-seller, Good to Great, is an inspiring read for cultural managers. But even better is his specific monograph on the application of his thinking to the social sectors. It’s only 35 pages, but it contains volumes of insight and action steps.
The next generation
I’m off blogging in another part of the ether this week (although I will still be posting here, as well), with another iteration of the ”Hessenius Group,” a hosted conversation curated by arts policy wonk Barry Hessenius. This week, the topic is young professionals in nonprofit and public cultural institutions, and the questions in play […]