Recent negotiation struggles on Broadway, at the Philadelphia Symphony, and elsewhere raise the complex issue of value in the creative experience. Any negotiation — especially for salary or pay — is an effort to assign value to each party’s contribution to a collaborative process, and to encode that value in cash. Behind that seemingly simple statement, of course, is a full range of other factors — from relative power of each side, to the scarcity of what they have to offer, and the like.
In a creative production process, the value of individual contributions to a final experience is an insanely difficult thing to allocate. In a symphony, for example, musicians are clearly at the core of the performance experience, but the final experience also needs a venue, an infrastructure to find and sell to an audience, a funding support system that covers the process, and a full series of behind-the-scenes activities from musical to technical to administrative.
Any of these elements separate from the rest would have little value to an orchestral audience (a venue without a symphony wouldn’t work, a symphony without a venue wouldn’t work, the both of them together without a way of bringing in an audience wouldn’t work, and on and on).
Worse yet, there are many kinds of value. Some kinds are easy to count (dollars from tickets sold or donations raised), some are impossible (the incremental value of one actor in a company of actors). Often, these many types of value don’t line up in an economic system (which is why equity is such a common issue in our market economy). And as organizations become more economically stressed, they’ll tend to focus their limited money on individuals that make an obvious difference to their bottom line (the conductor and executive director, for example).
There’s a quote attributed to Albert Einstein (which may have just been hanging in his Princeton office). While not specifically on negotiation, the quote should temper any process that attempts to measure value:
Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.
When you’re arguing over the same dollar, it’s easy to forget that point.
