A successful manager of an arts and cultural organization has to be a good storyteller. Not fiction, mind you (leave that to the Enron executives), but compelling stories of mission, action, money, and goals. They tell these stories to donors, to board members, to staff, to artists, to audiences. And they tell them in several different languages — the most common being spoken word, written word, spreadsheet, chart, and graph.
I meet many managers who are exceptional storytellers by spoken or written word — probably because those abilities have brought them to where they are. I meet fewer that have the same facility with spreadsheets, charts, and graphs.
Those hoping to balance out their skills might do well to look to Edward Tufte, the annointed king of the country’s data visualizers (did you know they had a king?). Tufte is a professor at Yale, and author of the gold standard in data visualization (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information…now THAT sounds like good beach reading, I hear you say).
Tufte is a master of storytelling through graphs, charts, and infopictures…and a wonderful lampooner of lame attempts to do so (he’s also behind the recent journalistic flurry about how Microsoft’s Powerpoint is Evil).
For those with less time on their hands, here’s an article on Tufte and his work from Fortune, and another from Metropolis Enterprise.
