• The NEA has unveiled a new four-point plan for its arts education program, and Kristen Engebretsen has the details.
  
• Yo-Yo Ma gave this year’s Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy at Arts Advocacy Day, and you can watch the video here.
• Fascinating account of the Norwegian jazz scene and how government funding for the arts, at its best, can create an environment rich in experimentation and possibility: “Ambitious ideas aren’t crushed under the weight of impracticality before they can grow and take shape.”
• Wise words from Charlie Jensen about the many forms of arts advocacy:
  

  While it’s true that responding to threats to arts and culture funding, unfavorable legislation, or moves to otherwise impede our ability to serve our communities is a true emergency, it is about 5% of work we need done. Let me say it again: it’s a critical 5%. But it’s 5%. The real work of advocacy—to extend the metaphor, the verses of our song—is already happening, every day, in each of our organizations. It’s happening on Facebook and Twitter, when your staff answer phones, when the curtains go up or the lights come down or the performers take their places or the doors open or the first words are sung or spoken. It’s happening when your patron or audience member has a positive interaction with a member of your staff.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation president Thomas C. Layton is retiring after serving at the helm for 38 years. Stacie Ma’a, a fresh face at only 14 years of service, will replace him. The Gerbode Foundation supports the arts and other causes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Hawaii.
• The Foundation Center is expanding Lisa Philp’s Stategic Philanthropy team, hiring Viviana Bianchi as director of partnerships and Jen Bokoff (a self-described “data nerd”) as director of GrantCraft.

IN THE FIELD

• RIP Gainesville (GA) Symphony Orchestra.
• Did you know that some hotels have artist in residence programs? Britain’s Telegraph offers a round-up; they range from the earnest (two months of free space for artists selected by peer panel at the Gershwin Hotel in New York) to the self-congratulatory (fashion illustrator David Downton painting celebrities at Claridge’s in London).
• In an op-ed for the New York Times, Authors Guild president Scott Turow chronicles the industry disruption that has buffeted professional authors thanks to the advent of ebooks and digital technology more generally. It’s strikingly similar to the story of the music industry.
• Is Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood (recipient of an ArtPlace grant) an example of creative placemaking run amok?

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Bill Gates does an Ask Me Anything (AMA) over at Reddit.
• Just when I thought the academic publishing model couldn’t be any more perverted, I learn that they charge authors like Michael Rushton (who already contribute their work without payment or royalties) nearly $3000 for the “privilege” of making their articles available in an open-access journal. Holy crap!
• Wow, no one can say Colleen Dilenschneider isn’t audacious. The Gen Y social media and museum marketing consultant reveals that she has made “a few five-figure gifts this year, as well as several four-figure and three-figure gifts” but recounts an array of frustrating experiences she’s had dealing with the organizations who have been the recipients of her largesse. A worthwhile, if slightly maddening, read.

BIG IDEAS

• DC’s National Building Museum is hosting a series of programs under the banner of “Culture as Catalyst.” The museum’s Scott Kratz and Martin Moeller provide background for the series and video of the first two sessions at this ArtsBlog post.
• In a long post for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson considers New Orleans’s attempt to reinvent itself as America’s next great innovation hub. His comments about the grand experiment in public education made possible by Katrina’s destruction may be of particular interest to arts educators.
  
• Fascinating article on BuzzFeed, a website best known for hyper-shareable content like “The 40 Best Animal Cuddlers of All Time” but which also features a crack political and investigative reporting team led by former POLITICO blogger Ben Smith. Founded by Jonah Peretti (who was previously responsible for much of The Huffington Post’s success as well as the infamous blackpeopleloveus.com), Buzzfeed eschews the usual banner ads and subscription fees in favor of viral advertorials that are all but indistinguishable from the virtual candy normally on offer. It is news source and ad agency in one, and doesn’t apologize for blending the two. It’s undeniably a new model for supporting journalism, but can it work? One clue might be found in this paragraph:
  

  Peretti rejects the notion that the news operation he has built is, as he has put it, “a hood ornament to lend the site prestige.” It was a business calculation that, somewhat to his surprise, pushed BuzzFeed in the same old-media editorial direction he once chafed at during his time at the Huffington Post. Journalism has clickable appeal on Twitter and brings the kind of readers preferred by premium advertisers. He likes to say that journalism works best on social networks with “scoops and quality reporting,” not aggregation. But the head of BuzzFeed’s data-science department frankly told me that the company has found it to be extremely difficult to make a news item go viral.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new meta-analysis from Chinese researchers suggests that listening to music can counteract insomnia.
• UNESCO has a new monograph out on measuring cultural participation.
• Arts Diplomacy Network is “gathering financial, program, and other information from diverse sources to…enable researchers to analyze how much money is invested in international arts exchange by U.S. organizations and in what regions they are working.”
• NYC Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Kate Levin dishes about her department’s use of data in a short video at the NCAR blog.
• Sunil Iyengar summarizes a research study looking at the effect of music-making on “gene expression pathways” in heart disease patients.
• Why you don’t need a Ph.D. in statistics to be a data scientist.

For this post, my thoughts were further informed by my own experience, albeit more limited in scope, managing others. Managing employees is a skill in and of itself, and one that is seldom taught, not even (surprisingly) in business school. After all, most people who ascend to management positions, particularly at smaller organizations, do so because they are good at their previous jobs—jobs that often don’t involve managing others—not necessarily because they are good managers. So, I offer the following ten suggestions with a deep respect for how difficult the art of managing, especially in an under-resourced environment, can be. My hope is that those who read them will find therein ideas and inspiration for forging stronger, deeper ties with the young employees who represent the future of their organizations, and of the sector as a whole.

Ten Strategies for Engaging Generation Y in the Nonprofit Workplace

1. Have things for them to do on day one. There is no surer or quicker way to turn young, fresh-faced, enthusiastic Gen Y social citizens away from the nonprofit sector forever than to suffocate them with boredom in their first job. All too often, employers fall into the trap of being underprepared for their new team member’s first day, hurriedly throwing a heap of random tasks into their laps or simply telling them to spend a few days (or weeks, or months) “getting to know” the organization’s internal files. Much better to prepare an orientation of sorts for them, at least a day in length, during which they’ll have the undivided attention of their manager as they are introduced to the rest of the staff, briefed on the overall strategic direction of the organization and how their job fits into it, shown the major functions of their job, and offered specific training on the initial tasks to which they’ve been assigned. Managers should have at least several weeks’ worth of projects determined in advance of the new hire’s first day, with realistic targets for completion set and regular check-ins planned.
2. Take their intelligence seriously. If your new employee is just graduating from college, she is coming from an environment in which demonstrations of her intelligence and individuality are valued, celebrated, encouraged, and expected, and she will be looking for the same from you. If she comes from a school with a well-recognized name, it’s also entirely possible that she went through a selection process that was more competitive and rigorous than anything you’ve been through, even if you graduated from the same school. The increasing numbers of Americans going to college, combined with an increasingly competitive talent pool as need-blind admissions become more and more common and international students vie for slots, have made getting into top colleges a grueling affair. Even if she graduated from somewhere else, she probably is one sharp cookie to have made it through the even more grueling selection process that led to her being hired by your organization. After all, it’s not unheard of these days for organizations to get hundreds of applications for a single entry-level job. So recognize that you may have a rock star in your midst, and instead of feeling threatened by it…
3. Give them challenging work that matters. …take advantage of it! Look, whatever they tell you during the interview, no eager young grad comes to a nonprofit organization dreaming about organizing your tax records! or telemarketing ticket sales! or sucking up to rich people! They’re there because they believe in the mission of the organization and because they WANT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Now, that’s not to say that any entry-level job will necessarily be free of boring busywork. But to the extent possible, try to find projects for them to work on, even for only part of the time, that stretch their abilities and represent new frontiers for the organization. Small organizations, especially, should have plenty of material to work with in this regard, since no one ever has enough time to do all the things they’d like to do. The work will excite them and serve as an energizing counterbalance to the aspects of the job they may not enjoy as much.
4. Don’t squash initiative. Does your new employee have lots of ideas about how to improve the way things work around here? Is he eager, maybe a little too eager, to share them with you? Does that kind of piss you off, and make you think it would be better if he just shut up and did his job? Does it make you want to shoot him down, just a little bit? Don’t give in to the temptation! This is a natural reaction whenever anyone who hasn’t “paid their dues” presumes to judge the hard work that you and your colleagues have put in. But though it may be natural, it’s not productive. What your new employee thinks about organization or departmental practices is valuable information. His perspective as a quasi-outsider and, perhaps, a member of a generation your programs are trying to reach, is difficult for you to replicate. If his opinions bother you, rather than rejecting them outright, see if you can corroborate them from other sources. He may be telling you something you need to hear. (Oh, and by the way, squashing initiative is another great way to kill a young person’s affection for the nonprofit sector.)
5. Don’t be a slave to the job description. Your new hire brings with him a unique package of abilities and interests that may or may not have all that much to do with the job that he was hired for. Sure, you wouldn’t have hired him if you didn’t think he could do the work. Nevertheless, it’s quite possible and even likely that your employee is much more passionate about the mission of your organization than he is about the details of his day-to-day job. So, as you and your employee become more familiar with each other, figure out what kinds of work really get him excited and draw his engagement. If you come across a situation in which he seems much more interested in working on something other than what you thought you needed him to be working on, especially if he is showing initiative in seeking out that work, don’t get frustrated! See it as an opportunity to forge a better match between employee and function, and try to find ways to get more of that work onto his plate. Sometimes, employees enjoy having a number of different projects to juggle; Gen Y workers, having grown up on instant messaging and cell phones and using laptops in class, tend to be particularly comfortable with this type of multitasking. If you can, you might even consider structuring (or restructuring) your organization to take advantage of this. Private sector consulting firms, for example, recruit college and MBA grads to be “Analysts” and “Associates” respectively. There’s no function or industry designation in the title. The expectation is that employees will be generalists, applying their talents wherever they’re needed. It’s then up to the managers to identify those talents and use them wisely on behalf of the company’s clients. Similarly, nonprofits could develop rotational programs for their entry-level employees that provide experience in a number of functional areas, or simply maintain a more informal workplace environment in which responsibilities are carried out by teams of workers or task forces rather than individuals. The more effectively a manager can tie an employee’s work to his abilities and interests, the more that employee’s productivity and loyalty will increase.
6. Invest in their professional growth. This one is hard for smaller nonprofits, because in most people’s minds, “investing in professional growth” means hiring expensive professional development consultants or helping employees pay for graduate degrees. While I think such programs can be quite valuable and should absolutely be explored by wealthier organizations, there are simple steps that even cash-poor nonprofits can take to develop their emerging leaders. First, by following the advice above and regularly adjusting job responsibilities, organizations will give their young employees experience in a variety of different functional areas, all of which can come in handy later. Secondly, an effective performance review system, with appropriate feedback mechanisms for the employee, can do wonders to add helpful structure to a working relationship. What are your goals for them for the next year? What are their goals for themselves for the next year? What can you do to make their work more enjoyable and effective? Finally, work to fill in the expertise gaps the employee might have that are relevant to the job at hand. Let’s say you need her to maintain the organization website. If you can teach her what she needs to know yourself, great. If not? Maybe there’s someone else connected to the organization who can help. Failing that, enroll her in a class or workshop. Expecting her to pick up these skills herself, without any further guidance, should only be a last resort.
7. Reward talent and hard work. Given that there are hordes of contenders for even entry-level nonprofit jobs, from an economic standpoint, it’s probably not necessary or wise to try to compete with private sector firms on starting salary. After all, every new hire carries with it a certain risk that things won’t work out, and that risk is more substantial when the employee has very little or no full-time work experience. Nonprofit starting salaries thus can, and probably should, reflect that risk. But once the employee has had a chance to prove herself—and, really, it shouldn’t take that long—that starting salary is no longer necessarily a fair indicator of the value she brings to the organization. So if she’s been working her tail off for six months or a year, bringing new ideas to the table and volunteering for extra tasks that interest her, and realizes that she would have achieved the exact same result for herself by slacking off and doing the minimum necessary to keep from being fired, it’s not surprising that she might begin to lose energy at that point. It’s not surprising that she might start looking around for another job at that point, or thinking about grad school. Because if she finds herself in a place where her contributions are neither acknowledged nor seemingly even noticed, she’ll want to put herself in a place where they are. So my recommendation is this: establish a probationary period of, say, three months for all new entry-level employees as they train to do their jobs. Make sure they know what the expectations are, hold them accountable to those expectations, and don’t be afraid to let them go if they’re clearly not measuring up. If they show themselves to be as competent as you thought they were when you hired them, give them a raise. If they continue to distinguish themselves after that period is over, give them another raise. If raises are a problem because of finances, change their title. Give them more responsibility. Give them ownership, autonomy. If someone else leaves, consider giving them that job. It doesn’t have to be a lot at any given time, but workers need to feel like they’re progressing and that they’re appreciated. A steady diet of recognition that’s based on actual accomplishments is the best way to do this.
8. Give them face time with leadership. When was the last time your entry-level staffers were invited to a board meeting? Doesn’t it make sense, if you want them to be invested in the organization, for them to know what’s going on with it? I was invited to be the note-taker at board meetings at one of my early jobs, and I was glad to do it. It was exciting for me to be a fly on the wall, see what a board meeting was like. Have a large staff? You could still let people participate on a rotating or lottery basis. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you could even let entry-level employees make presentations to the board. This idea of face time applies to executive leadership no less than it does to the board. I was at one of my previous jobs for months before I got to spend more than a couple of minutes with the organization’s executive director. Remember that until such interactions take place, top leadership will seem distant and inaccessible to an entry-level employee. A lunch date or a meeting in the office can quickly solve that problem.
9. Give them face time with the public. Does your organization ever send people to sit on panels? Hold public workshops? Maintain a blog, or a Twitter account? Why not give your emerging leader a shot at one of these? Remember, Generation Y is accustomed to expressing their individuality and sees it as an integral part of their existence. Many will reap a fair bit of excitement and intrinsic satisfaction from the opportunity to represent their organization before the public, and get their name out there in the process. It doesn’t have to be a big deal—for example, you could add the employee as a contributor to the blog and allot him a couple of posts a month, rather than having him run the thing entirely—but even little gestures will go a long way in this regard.
10. Incorporate their voices into organizational decision-making. One of the reasons that many nonprofit organizations now find themselves struggling to connect with younger generations is because they didn’t take full enough advantage of that generation’s presence among their employees. Today’s twentysomethings’ experience of childhood is completely different from that of their parents, due to the technologies that have emerged in the meantime. Their social networks are totally different, their relationship to information is totally different, and their cultural preferences may be totally different as well. It’s valuable, incredibly valuable, to have those voices represented at the table when making decisions that affect the organization’s future direction. Not to mention that if you have an employee who is sharp as a nail, who works hard, who believes in the mission of the organization, why wouldn’t you want that person involved in decision-making, no matter what her age?

As you can see, the above suggestions follow a certain order: certainly, you wouldn’t necessarily want to give a fresh-from-college hire a golden key to your organization’s Twitter account on his first day. But it doesn’t take that long to tell whether an employee has a future with the organization that’s hired him. And if it’s determined that he does, the above steps will help ensure that his talents and ideas are leveraged for the organization’s maximum benefit, rather than left to die on the vine. It should always be an organization’s ambition, whenever possible, to turn an entry-level employee into an emerging leader.

Further (recent) reading:

• The Entrepreneurial Generation, Inc.
• Lose the department borders and territorialism! Assign tasks by expertise!, off-stage right
• Rosetta Thurman’s From Entry Level to Leadership and Next Generation Leadership series

• Not surprising, but still worrisome: Nonprofit Finance Fund says America’s nonprofits are in trouble. More than half of respondents expect the current situation to have a long-term (2+ years) or permanent economic impairment to their organizations.
• NFF (whose Renee Jacob, a Yale SOM grad, gave an excellent presentation here over the weekend covering some of these topics) is also quoted in this NY Times story indicating that many arts organizations with fancy new spaces are now having trouble paying the bills.
• Easy to pay the bills when they’re free, though! smArts & Culture alerts Philly artists to a great opportunity for free space on South Street. (Incidentally, I lived half a block away on Rodman for about nine months right after college.)
• Future of Music Coalition just published some principles for compensation of musicians in new business models.
• Nate Silver takes on unimaginative neoclassical economist thinking like a pro. It amazes me that there are well-respected social “scientists” out there that continue to insist on this kind of ex-post-facto, non-empirically-based logical reasoning.
• Hey, why am I not on this list? In all seriousness, it’s unfortunate that all of the “art” blogs are actually about visual arts and not other kinds of art, but two of the sites on the Createquity blogroll are represented (Tactical Philanthropy and the GiveWell Blog), along with Give & Take (the Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s blog) and soon-to-be-added Seth’s Blog.
• Great post from Lucy Bernholz celebrating how far the conversation about shared metrics and platforms has moved forward and giving specific examples of projects of note.
• The IRS is supposedly going to rule on the L3C before the year is out. (thanks @tactphil)
• Say what you want about Bloomberg, but he gets nonprofits (and the arts). Behold his thorough prescription for helping NYC nonprofit organizations get through the recession.
• Check out these new “buzz maps” from researchers at UCLA and Columbia University. It looks like they’ve kind of backed into creating an interesting cultural asset map, though the accompanying article jumps to some conclusions that aren’t warranted (just because activity at high-profile cultural and entertainment institutions is more visible doesn’t make it hipper). Not to mention that using photographs from Getty Images as your primary data source is likely to introduce certain biases in that direction.
• Really fine quality piece here from David Brewster dissecting Seattle’s arts scene and its current budget troubles. He goes at it from an ecosystem perspective and doesn’t shy away from the numbers or the politics. More fodder for my New Haven analysis to come at the end of the semester.

I should have known the very first weekend.

We were all gathered in a huge hockey rink in late August. As part of orientation, the school had hired a team of consultants to come in and train us in the physical embodiment of leadership—in other words, how to act (and feel) the part of a leader in your body—using techniques borrowed from dance, aikido, and other sources. We spent the better part of three days in small groups practicing a basic aikido sequence (complete with jos and everything), applying the randori concept to management practice, and doing two-steps with each other in an attempt to communicate intuitively through body language with people we didn’t know.

I’m not going to claim all of this was perfectly executed, because it wasn’t. The hockey rink was an unfortunate choice of venue for the middle of summer; the various exercises were sequenced oddly and provided with little context; the relentless focus on articulating our “commitments” felt more than a little forced for those who hadn’t figured such things out yet. Nevertheless, I remember being energized by the experience. The physical embodiment of leadership is something I’ve been thinking about ever since studying conducting during my junior year of college. Seemingly minor things like posture, stance, and mindset make a huge difference in how others perceive you and the authority they attach to your presence. The fact that the school recognized this and devoted such a significant portion of orientation to it seemed like quite a bold move to me, and it made me feel proud to be at SOM. Plus, I loved the fact that our first experience at business school was so deeply infused with the arts. Here we were, dancing, practicing yoga-esque movements, watching The Karate Kid, and it was all being integrated into the process of thinking about management. I came out of it wanting to take a class in aikido.

But the rest of my class didn’t feel the way I did. At all. By the end of the weekend, it was already open season on these consultants, and a few weeks into the semester the experiment was almost universally regarded as a disaster. The most common themes were “how does this relate to anything?” and “why are we doing this?” Anyone even the slightest bit familiar with East Asian martial arts is aware of the symbolism and life lessons associated with them, but apparently trying to draw a connection between such concepts and business was a gigantic no-no. The exercises that required us to come into physical contact with a stranger rubbed many the wrong way as well. I frequently found myself in the awkward position of having to either go along with the mocking in order to fit in, or defend the program and get blank stares in return. I felt like I was on another planet from my classmates with regard to this issue. It wasn’t going to be the last time.

As the school year wore on, I found myself running afoul of some entrenched assumptions about economics and other philosophies for how the world works. Time and again I would hear arguments treating rational self-interest as almost a philosophy of life, fitting very well with what game theory tells us about best responses and Nash equilibria (and ignoring all of psychological evidence that non-rational thinking, including altruism, plays a major role in the behavior one can expect from others). I would find myself resenting the knee-jerk hero-worship afforded to leaders of large multinational corporations simply because of the position they held. The times when I felt the most like a fish out of water, perhaps, was when discussion of the nonprofit sector—my past, present, and future—would come up. I cannot tell you how many comments I heard tying tired old stereotypes around the neck of my nonprofit sector: stereotypes of inefficiency, waste, laziness (because employees aren’t properly incentivized, you know), hopelessness (because everyone knows that a model that involves asking people for money is not sustainable), fraud, even moral turpitude. And then people would go around and share war stories at parties about sinister office politics in the banking industry and how long hours in law firms were just for show. Riiiiight. Even allowing that there are problems in the nonprofit sector, instead of thinking about how these issues could be solved, all too often it felt like people were using them as an excuse to dismiss the sector entirely, as if it had nothing to do with them. And, hello! This was all taking place in the halls of a major nonprofit institution!

So, don’t get me wrong. I learned a lot my first year of business school, and I’m grateful. It’s broadened my horizons considerably, helped put my career on the right track, given me much in the way of practical, real-world skills, and forced me to re-evaluate many of my ideas about the intrinsic value that corporations provide to society. What frustrates me is not what I haven’t learned, but what I haven’t taught. I haven’t been an effective enough advocate for the things I dearly believe to be true in class discussions, in casual conversations, in public events with guests. Yale is often lauded, and rightly so, for its strength in teaching nonprofit management relative to its peers and for its unique stated commitment to educating leaders for both business and society. It’s easy to forget, then, that even this most pious of business schools sends less than a tenth of its graduating class to the nonprofit sector every year, and that most students end up taking jobs in large, established corporations.

So my second year’s resolution is to live in my skin as a nonprofit person in business school more effectively. I am working with the Net Impact executive committee; I will try to get people to attend the Philanthropy Conference that wouldn’t otherwise; I will question and assert and communicate.

The nonprofit sector may have its problems, but its effect on my own life has been considerable. I have attended some of the finest schools in the world from 7th grade until today thanks to the financial generosity of others, opportunities that never would have been available to me had market forces had their way. I was able to receive performances of my own creative work and produce a recording for my band because of grants from government, private, and individual sources. And now, I will be able to pursue the career I want instead of a career of convenience because of SOM’s Loan Forgiveness Program. Maybe some equation in a book says that I would be more valuable to society if I were some drone working for Goldman Sachs, but I know it’s not true. And, in a way, I have my first year of business school to thank for that.