I’ve been referring lots of friends and colleagues to the fabulous keynote by Russell Willis Taylor at this past summer’s League of American Orchestra’s conference. Now, I’m pleased to discover that talk in video form online (you can download the text and slides from the presentation from the National Arts Strategies website).
In the rather provocative talk, Taylor turns to satire to suggest the 12 steps to assure quick and decisive failure as a cultural nonprofit. If we’re going to make our own lives miserable, she posits, let’s really go for it.
As a crib sheet for those of you anxious to get started making your own organizations dramatically unsustainable, here are her 12 rules of assured destruction.
- Rule 1: Keep fixed costs as high as possible, and variable costs as low as you can.
- Rule 2: Confuse core values with core competencies.
- Rule 3: Believe that growth only means getting bigger and more expensive.
- Rule 4: Never make empirical decisions. Ignore data.
- Rule 5: Create more value for employees than customers.
- Rule 6: Fear new technologies of all kinds.
- Rule 7: Pretend that lliquidity doesn’t matter — a lot.
- Rule 8: Blame your customer.
- Rule 9: Pursue transactions rather than relationships.
- Rule 10: Compete rather than collaborate.
- Rule 11: Ignore the global pro-am revolution.
- Rule 12: Don’t accept that uncertainty is the price of innovation.
Well worth a watch.
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