Found Magazine is a glorious aggregation of discovered things from the everyday world: to-do lists, photos, cards, ticket stubs, doodled napkins, and on and on. Public radio’s ‘To the Best of Our Knowledge’ featured an interview with Found’s editor Davy Rothbart, with some dark, funny, and sad examples read aloud in the audio stream. Among […]
Value solved: This weblog is worth $4,992.64
BlogShares is a fascinating experiment in valuing something vague and amorphous, in this case the individual ‘value’ of any given weblog (on-line column, like this one). Constructed as a fantasy stock exchange, the BlogShares system analyzes any weblog it can find — over 1.3 million of them so far — with a full range of […]
Finding Forrester
In the search for better management metaphors in arts and culture, and in my work directing an MBA degree program for arts managers, I keep finding myself drawn into the discipline and worldview of system dynamics, or systems thinking, or ecological thinking, or whatever you care to call it. Systems thinking (short definition here) is […]
GETTY: In search of elbow room
NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of entries on a roundtable discussion I attended in June…more details in the first post. When discussing the challenges of for-profit and nonprofit enterprise in the creative industries back in June, there was much talk of ‘elbow room,’ that small amount of extra space (financial space, physical […]
Will dance for cash
The Sunday New York Times went on a bit about the on-going trend of ‘selling’ major ballet stars to donors in an effort to squeeze contributed income. Through individual dancer sponsorships, endowments, auctions, and other means, at least seven of America’s 14 largest ballet companies have put their dancers on the block, with four more […]
GETTY: Fun with Fungibility
One of the clear differences between nonprofit and for-profit creative enterprise is how each can use cash and financial resources to advance its work. This distinction seemed to stick during the GLI/NAS roundtable in June (see my original post for background, also note that the Getty Leadership Institute has now posted a summary of the […]
GETTY: Nonprofit and for-profit
Much of the discussion at the June Getty Leadership Institute/National Arts Strategies convening (introduced in my last post) was focused on the ‘gulf’ between nonprofit and commercial/for-profit creative endeavor. Thankfully, we (mostly) moved beyond the usual assumptions that sandbag most such conversations: Nonprofits make art / For-profits make entertainment Nonprofits serve vision and mission / […]
GETTY: Extending a conversation
This June, I was one of twenty-three participants in a leadership roundtable on a particularly compelling and complex topic. Co-sponsored by the Getty Leadership Institute and National Arts Strategies, and held at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the convening brought together fascinating folks from the nonprofit and for-profit side of cultural enterprise to search […]
More than half the pie
By 2010, according to the U.S. Census folks, about 50.8% of the U.S. population will be female. The majority of those women will be between 20 and 44 (33%) and 45 to 64 (26%). Yet most smart marketers are realizing that 50 percent can be much more than half. There are indications everywhere that women […]
Another take on the org. chart
I’ve written before about the problems of traditional organizational charts. They are collective fictions, really, of how an organization should behave rather than how it does. Earlier, I offered network mapping as one odd alternative. But there’s another that’s less complex and perhaps more fun: the genogram. Genograms are used by family therapists, social workers, […]
