A roundup of tasty tidbits for your weekend:
- Adam Forest Huttler is really smart. The founder of Fractured Atlas delivers a very lengthy, but entirely worth reading analysis of what MBAs can bring to the nonprofit sector, and arts organizations in particular. I am by no means a card-carrying member of the “business skills can save the world!” club, as regular readers will note, but Adam does a great job of boiling down the positive aspects of management education and showing how they’re relevant to day-to-day realities in the arts. Adam also mentions how he met the now-Chair of his organization’s board at business school; as it turns out, she is now a (fantastic) professor at SOM and taught me in two classes last year.
- Speaking of smart people with MBAs, my colleague at the Hewlett Foundation, Jacob Harold, has been guest-starring at Sean Stannard-Stockton’s Tactical Philanthropy blog this week. Jacob is Program Officer with the Hewlett Foundation’s Philanthropy program, which is one of the only ongoing foundation initiatives I know of explicitly dedicated to the meta-work of improving grantmaking outcomes.
- For his part, Stannard-Stockton has written a fair amount recently about the concept of “Philanthrocapitalism,” which can basically be summed up as a form of venture philanthropy. His posts “For-profits vs. Nonprofits” (featuring the punchline, “What I think is most critical is that we begin to understand that the work of producing social impact is just as worthy as the work of producing profit”…it hurts my face that such a thing actually needs to be stated, but it does) and “Philanthropy & Capitalism” are good manifestos (manifesti?) to start with.
- The Boston Globe has an interview with Massachusetts’s new Culture Czar, Jason Schupbach.
- And for a…different kind of art, check out Hats of Meat. (h/t DK)