Part of ‘basic training’ in any business school is understanding opportunity cost, the measure of lost opportunities (or opportunities forgone) when you choose one strategy or path or project over others. Calculating your opportunity cost is essentially an exercise in pre-emptive regret — if I spend my money, or time, or attention on this particular thing, […]
Attack of the Skeuomorphs
I’ve admitted before my strange fascination with computer and digital interface design. (Remember “progressive disclosure“? Of course you do.) There’s something intriguing about designing environments that help human users work with highly abstract digital machinery in useful and meaningful ways. In some part, it strikes me as a metaphor for what arts and cultural managers […]
Auditing the obvious
One of the oddities of moving to a new job in a new city after two decades elsewhere is that so many usually obvious things are suddenly unfamiliar.
Good morning, from DC
Greetings all. After a rather long and eventful hiatus from the Artful Manager, I’m stumbling back into blogging from a new city with a new job. Today, I begin orientation as a new faculty member at American University, in Washington, DC, teaching and researching in their Arts Management program.
A necessary hiatus
I’m making my transition this summer from my long-time appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to a faculty position at American University’s Arts Management Program. The logistics and variables involved are too great to continue regular blogging in the meanwhile, so I’ll be taking a summer blogging break through August. I’ll see you toward the […]
So much depends
Author/educator/teaching artist Eric Booth delivered a fantastic commencement address to New England Conservatory graduates, family, and friends this week, which has been posted online. In it, he offers many essential points about the role and work of an artist or an arts organization, and the ways they help create meaning in the world. He offers […]
What’s our uniform?
I can’t explain why, exactly, but I’ve been thinking about uniforms lately — particularly careers that require a uniform like the military, the judiciary, the priesthood, the police. At first glance, these mandated outfits might seem like costumes, like some relic of a previous age of status and class and credential. But uniforms actually serve […]
Give me your talented, your profound, your inspired masses
The arts experience is a global experience, where expressions and perspectives from across cultures and around the world can find each other and celebrate what’s different and what’s the same. And yet, since America locked its borders in so many ways following 9/11, the global arts experience in the United States has been dramatically less […]
Functional fixedness and the business of art
Sometimes dramatic innovation comes not from inventing a whole new thing, but rather from rethinking how to use an old thing in a new way. Better still, sometimes the solution to a nagging problem is embedded in the problem itself — again, if we can consider the problem’s components in a different way.
Carefully managed chaos
Grant McCracken offers a fascinating glimpse at an emerging type of vacation experience, contrary to the ‘everything-planned-down-to-the-minute’ vacations of the past. He points to American Express Travel’s Nextpedition, where the destination, the itineraries, the meals, and the activities are all unfurled as you’re traveling — with each day bringing a next surprise.
