NPAC: Day 4

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 17th, 2008

NPAC ended on Saturday with a “21st-century town hall meeting” in the Korbel Ballroom. I hate to say it, but after three days of excitement and promise, this one ended on a down note for me. It wasn’t just because the electronic point-and-click voting toys were the same ones we used in State & Society class at business school, with similar technological bugaboos haunting the process. It was more that for all that, all the time we put in, all the money that was spent, all the hype, the final result was so…pedestrian. It’s three days later and I don’t even remember what the chosen strategies were. I do remember that somehow, nothing about the artists themselves actually made it into the top three “challenges and opportunities” that the rest of the caucus process focused on. And I remember that it was awfully hard to have a real conversation about diversity when everyone at my table was white, which was the case at three of the four meetings. (In contrast, during the actual town meeting on Saturday, I sat at one of the San Francisco tables and was joined by four African Americans. Refreshing, yes, but it also became clear just how much work there is to do.)

Supposedly, all of the comments from all of the sessions (including any “gems” as identified by conference organizers) will be preserved and disseminated, somehow, at some point. In the meantime, I left the conference with profoundly mixed feelings. The potential was no doubt enormous, the ambition sky-high, but it seemed like only a fraction of it was realized. As exhausting as it was, I feel the best solution would have simply been a longer conference. I was just starting to get the lay of the land when it all disappeared through the plane window on the way back to New York. It’s clear that so many things about last week were just a beginning of a very, very long process. And I’m okay with that, in principle. I just wish that we could have taken things farther given the amount of effort that everyone put in.

Update: the NPAC Blog has some of the results from the final session, including the most popular strategies. (Topic 1; Topic 2; Topic 3)

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Reflection

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 15th, 2008

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
NewMusicBox, June 14, 2008.

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Live from NPAC: Day 3

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 15th, 2008

[again, too busy to post this day of...I'll be back with a wrap-up tomorrow!]

One of the major features of the 2008 National Performing Arts Convention is the series of “caucus sessions” designed and implemented by an organization called AmericaSpeaks. At the first session on Wednesday we worked to define an overall vision for the performing arts community, at the second session yesterday we identified three major opportunities and challenges facing the field, and today we discussed strategies associated with those priorities. Tomorrow at the culminating “21st-century town meeting,” we’ll get together in one big room and vote on the strategies we’ve identified.

Obviously, it’s an extraordinarily difficult challenge to achieve any sort of unity and still give 4,000 people an individual voice. The caucus sessions have been explicitly designed to maintain that balance, however, and the method is intriguing. Each caucus room is filled with tables that seat 8-10 people, preferably representing a reasonable cross-section of convention attendees (though since the process is essentially random, we have ended up with all-music tables, for example). A facilitator leads the discussion at each table, being careful to incorporate the views of every participant. At the end of the process, each table comes up with its own answer to the questions of the day, and participants self-select to share these insights with the rest of the room. Afterwards, a “theme team” collects the responses from all of the tables in all of the rooms, and teases out the most common threads. These results are then shared via newsletter format at the next caucus.

To be sure, it’s an imperfect process—cutting off the number of opportunities and challenges at three, for example, seems horribly arbitrary even if some kind of narrowing is absolutely necessary. Now I understand why the mainstream political process in this country is so fraught. But I’m impressed with the amount of thought that went into this. It’s extremely ambitious, and we’ll see tomorrow if it results in anything actionable.

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Live from NPAC: Day 2

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 13th, 2008

I’m writing this from the second general session of the National Performing Arts Convention, which features an address from Jim Collins, author of Good to Great. Collins is a former professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has a book that came out a couple of years ago called Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

  • Who knew, he’s a new music fan! He’s talking about how he was just at the Ojai Music Festival and became totally transfixed by an opera and Steve Reich’s Drumming (strange to think that I have friends who were involved with that performance). Later he name-drops Tan Dun.
  • “An America without great performances would be impoverished, no matter what our GNP.” Jim Collins said it, so it must be true, right? I have to hand it to him, he knows how to give a speech. Feels a little like a stump address, but he’s a performer for sure.
  • Apparently the #1 performing stock among all publicly traded stocks from 1972-2002 is Southwest Airlines. I suspect this might involve some cherry-picking of dates (what’s the best-performing stock from 1972-2008?), but it’s still surprising given the industry. He’s trying to make the point that choices have more significance than circumstances.
  • He says that the answer to the performing arts field’s problems is not to become more like a business. He’s making the point that there’s mediocrity in all fields (yes!) and that just because a practice or habit comes from the corporate world doesn’t mean it’s better. The important difference (as he puts it) is between “good” and “great” and the key factor is a culture of discipline. Momentum takes a long time to build, even for so-called “overnight successes.”
  • Hammering home that we each need to think about our own role in this puzzle, not just sit back and say to ourselves, “yeah, we should totally change the way we do things as a field” and then assume that other people will take care of it. Applicable to any desirable social outcome. That said, his insistence on calling us the “performance arts” is a little grating.
  • Now saying that concentrated executive power, as we seen in companies, is actually the special case, not the general case. In the social sector and in society at large, it’s much more common to see diffuse power maps in which many parties have enough negative power to kill action. So the most effective leader (a “Level 5” leader in his taxonomy) in the social sector is not the one who can just make the right decisions, but the one who can create the conditions in which the right decisions can happen. In other words, a facilitator more than a despot. Man, maybe I need to read this book.
  • Since money is merely a necessary input to the social sector, rather than a signal of success, Collins suggests a hybrid approach to measuring impact in the social sector, particularly in the performing arts. He likens it to a trial: building a case for impact, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative factors. “Thou art guilty of great results!”
  • Points out the differences between values and practices. Practices can change, values cannot. As much as traditions are revered, they are not values, they are practices. The challenge is to adapt by changing practices while holding values constant.

Occasional over-the-top motivational speaker moments aside, a good speech and a good session. Later, I attended seven different panels for about fifteen minutes each thanks to NPAC’s inexplicable decision to pack all of the four-day conference’s dozens of breakout sessions into one three-hour period. My divide-and-conquer strategy wasn’t all that successful, since I only caught little bits of each event and couldn’t manage much context from it. The most interesting sessions I saw were “The Not-So Distant Horizon” featuring Artsjournal.com‘s Douglas McLennan and “futurist” David S. McIntosh and “Stop Taking Attendance and Start Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Your Programs” with WolfBrown and officials from the Clarice Smith Center at the University of Maryland. The former attempted to put in one place all of the broad cultural trends affecting the performing arts, while the latter demonstrated a novel approach to measuring emotional and spiritual impact by borrowing techniques from psychological research.

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Live from NPAC: Day 1

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 13th, 2008

[My apologies for the delay in posting these; it took a bit longer than expected to get consistent internet access here.]

I’m here in Denver for the National Performing Arts Convention, an event bringing 4,000 artists, organizations, businesses, and patrons together for a conversation about collaboration and advocacy. Despite a rather harrowing trip here (my plane was delayed some five-plus hours due to weather conditions around New York), it’s an exciting and somewhat overwhelming feeling to be a part of this. My nametag lists me as being from “Music with a Capital M,” but I am unofficially here as a current business school student and a future grantmaker. So far, I’ve let my anti-social tendencies get the better of me a bit (I already spent an hour catching up on email at lunch), but I’m looking forward to getting into my networking groove as the conference wears on.

Some thoughts from the first few hours thus far:

  • The Colorado Convention Center is enormous. It takes up a double- or triple-size city block, and most of it is being used in some way or other by this conference. Interestingly, the Center is located right across the street from the Performing Arts Complex and has clearly woven art into the permanent design of the space. There’s a giant sculpture of a bear leaning threateningly against the outside of the building, and other sculptures nearby. One of the restaurants in the exhibit hall is called “Sub Culture.” There’s a sound installation of people laughing on the downward escalator that gets louder the further you descend—very subtle and cool. I’m generally not a person who gets caught up in convention center mystique, but I have to admit this is an impressive creation.
  • The exhibit hall has a fun but sort of hokey setup that’s modeled after an actual street map, in an effort to evoke the ideal “Arts Town.” Tables are given “addresses” like “905 West 5th Street” which corresponds to an actual location within the hall. It’s cute, I guess. Some of the exhibitors really went all-out, though, like this lighting company and a two-floor costume/lighting/sound/scenery exhibit that was the United States’ entry into the Prague Quadrennial.
  • The opening convocation featured a speech from Dana Gioia, who reported that the Interior Subcommittee had recommended an NEA budget for next year of $160 million, which if approved would represent an 11% increase from last year. Still way too little, but you have to hand it to Gioia (seemingly one of the few competent appointees from the Bush administration), who despite years of right-wing leadership and economic turmoil will leave the NEA in a much stronger position than when he started. Addresses by Anna Deveare Smith (who is awesome) and Bill Rauch followed, and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper (what a great name!) capped it off with a honkey-tonk piano performance before his speech.
  • There’s a definite political edge to this conference, and a palpable excitement among the attendees about recent developments in the news. Perhaps not surprising given the deep-blue political leanings of most artists, but I’m a bit surprised at how much it’s come up in the opening session. The collectivist worldview in evidence is in stark contrast to the pro-competition ethos in my other life.
  • Still at the opening convocation: in the middle of the Mayor’s presentation, actors come up from the audience and begin a performance of scenes from Shakespeare, in English and Spanish, sandwiched around a modern dance routine juxtaposing ballet-esque moves with two breakdancers, all accompanied by video scenes of Denver in the background. A little cheesy, but…damn, I love that they’re integrating actual art into this thing! Solo trumpet performance? Check. African choral music with hand percussion (sung by middle-aged white men, of course)? You got it. Okay, but now we’ve got more theater and this is starting to drag on a bit. Gotta know when to fold ‘em, guys. Ooh, but serious lesbionic flirtatiousness on stage! Scandalizing! Never mind, carry on. Back to Romeo & Juliet and it ends with the Mayor reciting the closing lines of the play. Wow—not what I expected!
  • Consultant Eric Booth, who played a role in putting the conference together, calls NPAC a “structured improvisation.” Word.

That’s it for now, will have more later!

“Food is always at the intersection of art and community.” – Bill Rauch.

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Saving Our Cultural Capital

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 9th, 2008

On Saturday I had the privilege of attending Saving Our Cultural Capital: The Challenges Facing Independent Artists and Venues in Manhattan, an event co-sponsored by The Tank, Fractured Atlas, and the New School for Management and Urban Policy. This mini-conference focused on the creative sector’s economic challenges and contributions to urban life, something that I’ve studied quite a bit, and served as a nice warm-up to the National Performing Arts Convention this week. The afternoon opened with a speech by Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President. In introducing Stringer, The Tank’s co-director Justin Krebs told of how at the most recent State of the Borough address Stringer invited Sigourney Weaver (whose husband, Jim Simpson, founded the Flea Theater) to speak about the challenges faced by independent venues in New York City. Stringer lived up to his billing as an arts-friendly politician: he echoed the thoughts of many in the field by saying that people come to New York because it’s full of interesting people doing interesting things, not because they want to see a bunch of high-rise buildings that all look the same and have the same kinds of people in them. According to Stringer, the public sector needs to become as savvy as the private sector in the way it approaches sustainable development and affordable housing ends.

Stringer suggested three areas of focus for those seeking to facilitate a more amenable environment for artists in the city of New York. First, he encouraged those present to become activists on a local level, particularly through involvement in community boards. He said it takes surprisingly few people to make a positive difference in this way. Secondly, he asserted that there are thousands of properties owned by private developers that are currently vacant and sitting unused. Stringer proposed conducting an inventory of these spaces so that residents could be aware of them and so that pressure could be put on the owners to sell them or put them to use. Finally, Stringer urged artists to form coalitions with like-minded activist groups that may have shared interests and cut through generational and class barriers.

Ultimately, the themes of activism and alliance seemed to run most strongly through Stringer’s comments, and indeed throughout the afternoon’s events. Artists and arts groups may be feeling a financial pinch, but it’s not because there is no money to go around. Stringer revealed that the Industrial and Commercial Incentive Program (ICIP), which is up for renewal next month, currently gives out $409 million a year in tax breaks to businesses to prevent them from leaving the city. Shockingly, 86% of this money goes to big box retail such as the Toys ‘r Us store in Times Square ($2.4m). Hundreds of thousands of dollars are subsidizing gas stations, McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, and Burger Kings. Arts organizations get none of this money, despite being part of one of the most important industries in New York. And it’s because at the moment, artists’ interests (and in many ways the indirect interests of the community) are being run roughshod over by the interests of others who exercise their power more effectively. Stringer asked why it was that seniors, of all interest groups, seem to wield so much political influence; it is because they are exceptionally well organized and know the political process. Artists and their advocates will need to learn to defend their livelihood with similar passion in order to hope to have a say in determining the city’s priorities.

The second part of the event consisted of a panel discussion with Paul Nagle, Director of Communications and Cultural Policy for New York City Councilman Alan Gerson; Risa Shoup, Performing Arts Director of chashama; Arwen Lowbridge, Managing Director of Fractured Atlas; and Derek Denckla of the Propeller Group. Nagle opened by identifying four challenges standing in the way of effective change: facilitating communications between the for-profit and non-profit halves of the creative sector; understanding and respecting both the quantitative and qualitative contributions that the arts make to urban society; the cooptation of artists into a public and private conception of real estate that judges land values as the sole criterion of success; and encouraging more joint activism among artists with natural allies such as trade unions and environmental groups. He said that public officials need to think of the arts as diversifying their cities’ economic portfolios (in addition to the other benefits they bring), since they are not as dramatically affected by downturns in the stock market as other kinds of businesses. Lowbridge shared her observation that even within the membership pool of Fractured Atlas, artists seem to be operating within small circles without much contact outside of them. (I’ll add as an aside that my own experience matches that of Arwen’s: as someone who had peripheral contact with several musical circles when I was living in NYC, it was rather shocking how little communication there was between each network of, say, 15-40 people. Also, I almost never hung out with artists who were not musicians, and neither did my friends.) Shoup talked for a bit about her work at chashama, which involves matching artists and arts organizations with temporarily vacant spaces—a win for everyone, ideally. Interestingly, Shoup revealed that the private owners of the spaces receive no tax break for working with chashama and usually do not receive rent either—yet they participate anyway. That speaks to the strength of chashama’s common-sense proposition. (It also helps that its founder, Anita Durst, comes from a family that at one time owned 20% of the corporate real estate in Manhattan.) Finally, we heard from Derek Denckla, who has an exceptionally interesting arts, legal, and business background that includes a role in developing the space in which “Room for Creativity” was held in March. He explained that the zoning system currently used by New York City is actually based on a suburban model from Cleveland! He encouraged artists to look at developers through a less hostile lens but instead think about ways in which the interests of the two groups could be aligned. In particular, Denckla pointed out that artists tend to have a certain entrepreneurial mentality that is flush with vision—something that the corporate sector is often lacking (no matter what my business school friends might say). He also pointed out an organization called Where We Are Now which is attempting to serve as an organizing agent for arts and politics in NYC.

In the question and answer period, one of the panelists identified two initiatives that are close to coming to the table in Albany: a business tax incentive for small venues (capacity of 250 and under) to pay performing musicians at the prevailing wage; and a tax abatement for for-profit property owners to rent their space to nonprofits (presumably at a below-market rate). I think these are both fantastic ideas (with the caveat, of course, that the devil is in the details) and will try to find out more about these initiatives for you.

Overall, it was a nice event and one that provided much food for thought. Towards the end of the panel, Nagle quoted a favorite saying of ArtHome founder Esther Robinson that sums up the day and might as well be a motto for this blog given the name I chose: “Every time you make art, you create equity—and if you don’t capture that equity, someone else does.” Indeed.

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Hit it.

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 2nd, 2008

C4 is back with the world premiere of my new piece She Didn’t Mean to Do It, among several other awesome works, this Saturday at St. Joseph’s Church in New York City. Details at the website. I’m actually singing in this concert because the scheduling worked out enough for me to be a part of the Symphonic Chorus. The group sounds great, programming some difficult, rarely heard stuff alongside reliable (but still cutting-edge) favorites like Eric Whitacre’s Cloudburst. Plus, there’s percussion accompaniment to most of the pieces! Hell yeah!

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Professionals vs. Amateurs (part 2)

By Ian David Moss | Published: May 28th, 2008

One of the reasons I’ve found it challenging to keep up with Createquity at times is the sheer volume of material that my RSS reader brings me into contact with every day. Knowing that my colleagues in the blogosphere are generating so much high-quality material themselves makes me feel that much more pressure to make sure that my own contributions live up to their standards and are not overly duplicative. Merely sifting through the dozens (hundreds, if I’ve been away for a while) of posts takes an immense amount of time, and that’s not even considering the comment threads on each of these entries that can become quite lengthy in their own right. The 24-hour nature of the Internet tends to impinge uncomfortably on things like class time and girlfriend time. I certainly don’t earn any remuneration for the effort and time I put into the blog. And yet I keep on, as do many, many others who find themselves in this exact situation and still feel they have something to say.

In my last post, I talked about how suppliers of creative content are (for the most part) declining to exit the industry despite extremely strong competition and unfavorable odds for financial self-sustainability, to say nothing of massive success. The standard explanation of this is that artists, writers and the like are “driven to create”—they can’t imagine doing anything else with their time. That may be true at least in some cases, but a class from my business school core curriculum provides a more interesting way of looking at it. The dean of the school, Joel Podolny, and my Competitor professor Fiona Scott Morton co-authored a study of California wineries and found that hobbyist suppliers—basically, rich people that wanted to run their own winery—concentrated so heavily on the high end of the wine market that they collectively made it less profitable for businesses that were interested in maximizing profit. As a result, businesses that wanted to make money would concentrate more on lower-end wines. Podolny and Scott Morton called these hobbyist suppliers utility maximizers and suggested that these winery owners consumed the quality of their own wines (in other words, were willing to accept a lower profit level in order to possess the identity of a high-quality wine producer). Another study found that investment banks with the best reputations actually did not need to pay top dollar relative to their competitors to attract their targeted employees, because the employees to some degree consumed the status of their employer (and were willing to accept less money in exchange for the prestige of working for a top firm).

Basically, I think that the reason we don’t see more exit from creative industries is because most creative content producers are also consumers of their own status as such, and are therefore willing to put up with a boatload of bullshit—including a very high likelihood of making next to no money—in order to be able to call themselves composers or directors or actors or artists. Because, let’s face it, being a creative professional is fun. It’s virtually guaranteed to get people’s ears perked up at parties, and can serve various aphrodisiac functions (though the whole poverty thing can just as easily kill the mood). The undercurrent of ego is strong, particularly for something like composing—you’re getting other people to pay their own money for the privilege of experiencing something that you created for the fun of it. Not only that, many creative professionals retain a massive degree of control over the final feel and execution of their vision, making the satisfaction level at the end of the process that much higher.

There’s a cultural shift going on in which more and more young people are graduating from high school and college and wanting to do interesting things with their lives, something that reflects who they are and what they think about the world. In previous generations, most young adults would end up working in agriculture, manufacturing, or other labor-intensive mega-industries and form their professional identities around a career that might have been set in stone before the child was even born. Now, having been weaned on a Baby Boomer-influenced education emphasizing self-expression and -actualization, Millennials want creativity to be a part of their professional identity, and more and more that means working in some kind of creative industry.

That leads in to the other side effect of this shift: as more and more people decide that it’s not enough to be an audience member or a reader or a listener and decide to express themselves as well, they have less time to consume the work of others. In other words, as the number of suppliers of creative content increases, their average audience decreases (even if the total audience might be increasing dramatically). Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes is proving ever more prescient in the Internet age. As universal awareness becomes more and more difficult to achieve and a minimal level of awareness easier and easier, the lines between amateur and professional content creators are becoming increasingly blurred. It may be that we are all pursuing vanity projects to some degree.

Some kind of massive aggregating system will undoubtedly pop up to organize all of this content for us and keep it manageable. What I’m less sure of right now is what it will look like. Until then, I’ll try to keep up with my RSS reader.

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Professionals vs. Amateurs

By Ian David Moss | Published: May 25th, 2008

Back when I was working for the American Music Center, one of the most common and maddening riddles that would come up with respect to our members was “what does it mean to be a professional composer?” The normal sense of “professional” implies earning one’s living from one’s work in that field; but only a tiny percentage of concert music composers are actually able to do this from year to year on the strength of commissions and royalties alone. Similarly, most jazz musicians do not earn a living from gigs and record sales; many of them teach for supplemental income or hold odd jobs. Yet qualitatively, there is no doubt that many of these musicians are highly capable, extensively trained professionals who take their artistry very seriously. I consider myself a professional composer, even though I spend relatively little time composing compared to other things and earn barely enough money from it to cover my textbook budget for the year. The majority of composers out there fit a similar profile, including some of the most ingenuous creators today.

Let’s think for a moment about why this might be the case. There aren’t a lot of full-time, salaried staff positions for composers—essentially none, unless you count the advertising industry (and even then it’s heavily commission-based) and university faculty positions. What little money organizations do have available to pay musicians for creating new work tends to be concentrated in the hands of a very few highly successful individuals, because only those with established names and reputations can really help drive sales or put butts in seats. To put it another way, the market—even taking subsidization from charitable sources into account—only really supports a limited number of serious musicians, i.e., the ones at the very top. It supports those few quite generously, to be perfectly honest (I’m sure Lorin Maazel isn’t complaining about taking home $2.5 million a year), but once you get past the very top of the ladder, the pickings become very slim indeed. Barriers to entry for new artists are low; competition is so fierce as to practically commoditize the music, making a middle-class existence as a non-superstar composer an extremely difficult goal to achieve and highly vulnerable once it has been attained.

In an industry with so many undesirable attributes, an economist would expect suppliers (i.e., the composers) to exit—stop composing and do something else with their lives—until the overall supply was reduced enough to affect the overall dynamics of the field. This is especially the case since the costs of stopping (barriers to exit) are essentially zero. And yet, what we see is the exact opposite. It’s an accepted truth in the new music world that there are more composers today than at any previous point in history. Music schools are churning out graduates at record rates, and new departments and conservatories are established on a regular basis. Not only are there more artists than ever before, but because of the intense competition and extensive training available, the quality of those artists (or at least those at the top of their field) is arguably at an all-time high as well. Meanwhile, technology and the Internet have combined to make it very easy not only to create content like this, but also to ensure its ongoing survival in the public sphere even at an extremely low level of visibility. Thus, new content not only competes with all of the other material newly created by this unprecedented population of artists, but also the entire back catalogue of recorded material created in the past—a collection that can only increase in size and scope over time. Which is all to say that it’s a completely amazing time to be a composer, as long as you don’t care about making any money or getting more than a few dozen people to listen to your music.

One thing that’s become clear to me since starting business school is that composition is far from the only industry that is experiencing some variation of this phenomenon. I blogged last month about commonalities between symphony orchestras and the newspaper industry: the Internet is driving an explosion of interest in “citizen journalism,” yet full-time, salaried journalist positions are steadily disappearing across the country. Meanwhile, journalism schools are thriving, dutifully preparing students for jobs that don’t exist. We see similar patterns across all of the arts, including dance, theater, visual arts, literature, film, and so on, not to mention commercial analogues of these fields (such as the mainstream music industry). Generally speaking, it’s a good bet that almost any endeavor involving content creation is experiencing more freelancing, lower average salaries, and an intense level of competition for the good jobs.

That’s why I expect that we are going to start seeing more and more of the kind of “semi-professional” approach and cost structure that Fractured Atlas is using in its RFP for online courses. Such an approach is aimed squarely at the middle of the long tail of content creators in a given field: bypassing the superstars and their reputation-inflated price tags/egos, while employing incentive and filtering systems to identify the best of the rest and secure their services at a considerable savings. It sounds coldly capitalistic, but I actually think it could be a very good thing for the field in that it fights the increasing stratification between the superstars and the nobodies. It helps to create a middle ground where it’s possible to make something doing what you love even if you’re not famous. Given the realities discussed above, would that not be preferable for those who don’t already have it made?

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Around the horn

By Ian David Moss | Published: May 20th, 2008

And now for our semi-regular trip around the blogosphere:

  • So this is what I’m up against in the philanthropy job market? How very, very sad. It’s hard to tell whether the writer of the column (who prefers to remain anonymous) is just feeling sour grapes or actually speaking truth to power, but I’m inclined to believe the latter. If true, it highlights the need for parties that work with multiple foundations (such as philanthropic advisors, community foundations, and executive search firms) to take more of a leadership role on behalf of the field. The 2008 SOM Philanthropy Conference, which I’m spending much of my time right now planning, will seek to address these issues in depth. (h/t Tactical Philanthropy)
  • Around the same time as discovering the link above, I saw this post on Philanthromedia entitled “Overcoming Board Inertia” as well as a Philanthropy News Digest piece reporting that “a significant number of CEOs at midsize nonprofits are dissatisfied with the performance of their boards.” My rant last week defending the nonprofit sector notwithstanding, board dysfunction is one of the huge factors holding nonprofits back from their true potential. This difficulty is not surprising given that most nonprofits tend to identify extremely busy people with their own projects and priorities as prime board candidates. I would be curious to find out if any countries have explored non-board-based governance schemes for their equivalent of nonprofit organizations.
  • Fractured Atlas wants to pick your brain. I find this project interesting, not so much for the idea itself (several arts service orgs are already developing this type of content), but for the way in which FA has gone about pursuing it. Specifically, I love the fact that they’ve issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the content. Most nonprofits I know of would have simply chosen a content provider based on reputation alone, or at the most invited a small group of organizations with established track records to submit bids privately. By opening up the process to the public, Fractured Atlas casts its net a lot wider, with potentially much more to show for it. (I also like the idea of giving providers a cut of the profits for advanced courses–way to align incentives there!) The compensation levels, interestingly, are significantly below what a typical consulting firm would charge to create an interactive course, but significant enough that a freelancer or interested amateur would no doubt consider it. I expect we’ll see a lot more of this kind of “semi-pro” pricing/compensation structure in content creation fields in the future. More about that later this week.
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