Friend and colleague Adrian Ellis received a nice profile in the New York Times yesterday, emphasizing his distrust of organizational growth as a sign of success. Instead, Adrian has focused much of his consultancy on providing a ‘reality check’ to organizations considering new buildings, new projects, or new funding initiatives.
For some organizations, he’s become a ‘party-pooper for hire,’ brought on intentionally to balance the fairy-tale aspirations and ego gratification that often drive bold growth initiatives. Says the article:
One result of successes like Bilbao, Mr. Ellis said, is what has come to be referred to as BHAG: Big Hairy Audacious Goals. But these stars in the eyes can blind institutions to some of the less glamorous considerations, like bigger buildings generally lead to higher operating costs.
”You build them and you’ve got to run the damn things,” Mr. Ellis said. ”Every piece of capital has with it a revenue tail.”
It’s an organization-level version of the overbuilt issue in the entire arts ecosystem (covered in past blogs here and here). If most forces of nature lead us to get bigger (including institutional funders, major donors, internal and external measures of success, and other factors), what’s to pull us back to reality?
And on the flip side, if we really took a rational and dispassionate look at every cultural project, building, or program we hoped to launch, would any of them actually happen? Says Adrian:
”Mission and market always pull you in different directions — the art of running one of these institutions is finding the sweet spot,” Mr. Ellis continued. ”As you turn up the volume, then the market considerations become that much larger, and it requires that much more ingenuity to protect the mission.”
