The Artful Manager

I’m on the road today to speak to the Rotary in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The topic is ‘exploring the true benefit of culture to communities,’ and the purpose is to take my arguments out for a public spin, and to stay connected as a university employee. Should be fun. If the speech works out, I’ll post […]

A great interview on Smart City (a radio program out of Memphis) features Paul Schoemaker, co-author of the book Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time. Schoemaker teaches and consults on issues of decision-making strategy, and on developing organizations that learn. His perspective on why we so often make bad decisions: …people don’t spend […]

Cultural productions of all kinds have a rather brutal financial model: there’s a lot of investment of time, money, and energy up front (what economists call ‘sunk’ costs, because they can’t be recovered once expensed), and a huge risk of not paying back those costs in either earned or contributed revenue once the production is […]

Great stuff from Clara Miller (again) on the particular peculiarities of the nonprofit business model, and the underlying dynamics that make our work so difficult. Her piece in The Nonprofit Quarterly on ”The Looking-Glass World of Nonprofit Money: Managing in For-Profits’ Shadow Universe” will baffle most for-profit managers, and surprise many nonprofit leaders, as well. […]

There were some reactions of shock and awe last week as the Milwaukee Public Museum made public its deep deficit, and the draconian cuts and mission-shifting it was making to get out of the hole. The organization is now planning to cut 45 percent (or more) of its payroll, and transition from a research-focused natural […]

One of the baffling qualities of digital media is its liquidity. Once something is encoded in binary code, we have endlessly interesting access to not just single creative works, but multiple works and even databases, along with the ability to search and see the parts and the whole in wonderful and new ways. A new […]

A piece in the New York Times describes two initiatives in Manhattan connecting working artists with vacant commercial office space. Both Chashama’s A.R.E.A. program and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space serve as brokers between landlords with extra space and artists or arts groups in desperate need of the same. Landlords benefit by positive […]

The local canoe and kayak emporium has a great radio spot that describes what they do (I’m paraphrasing): We don’t sell canoes and kayaks. We sell something much more valuable: time on the water. Time on your own. Time with your partner. Time to reconnect. The sales pitch shows that this retailer knows what their […]

Thanks to BoingBoing, an exceptionally ecclectic and seemingly endless collection of strange and wonderful links, I stumbled onto the History of Sampling, a project of software/graphic/data designer Jesse Kriss. The History of Sampling is a web-based software program that provides: …a visualizer for the history of music sampling — a timeline with colored dots represents […]