This one will be no surprise to readers of this blog.  Let’s really work on exploring and then considering organizational designs other than the 501c3.  Yes, the 501c3 offers a number of seductive characteristics, but it is also expensive to operate, cumbersome administratively and has the potential to become insular.  Organizational design, as well as…

Let’s make a commitment to creating and nurturing cooperative ventures, not just within our inner circles, or our comfort zones, but those that stretch us artistically and those that make our entities more efficient. Face it: we’re very, very conservative and unimaginative when it comes to artistic cooperative ventures.  Our first thoughts are to cooperate…

Let’s develop better use of the language within our field.  Our weakness here feeds our weakness in presenting a more effective argument for the arts (Work Task #1).  Our needs in this area are numerous.  One, we tend to misunderstand, and confuse the “languages”  of marketing, development and simple descriptive narrative.  “Market talk” has infused both…

In keeping with the annual spate of Top Ten lists, I offer here a Top Ten list of work items for the arts sector for 2011.  In this blog I will outline the first of these.  Then, on each of the next 9 days I will deliver one each day.  I’ll then take a break for…

Two unrelated incidents in my professional life have me fixated on the issue of government support for arts and culture.  One, the class I’m currently teaching at Drexel took up in discussion and research the topic, and as I had hoped, had strong and intelligent opinions.  And two, I’m presently working on a project involving a…

Every now and then a book in the field of governance and leadership that speaks with almost-alarming clarity and truth comes along.  The Allure of Toxic Leaders by Jean Lipman-Blumen is one of these remarkable works.  It’s almost creepy reading this book, as it describes situations I’ve experienced.  Understandably she focuses primarily on corporate examples…

I’m currently working on a project that involves examination of what organizational and governance structure best provides incentives for success.  What I’m finding is painful, as the 2008 Great Recession has drained so much of the altruistic resource of our noble NFP workers.  They are being expected to do the work of many others, and…

So in order to learn more about administrative design and its impact on output (artistic in this case), I’ve had to jump into literature from the business world.  The closest I can come to study examples is in the health care field, which share our mostly not-for-profit status.  What I have learned is that the…

I’ve been operating under an assumption that there are too many 501c3’s.  I’ve been building a case to support this (popular) notion, and then to suggest alternative organizational models.  And while I still strongly believe that a healthy arts and culture landscape includes a variety of organizational models, I am questioning my initiating assumption. Last…