ARTSblog

Mary Wright

In preparation for writing this post, I came across this:

“Don’t hire intelligent, creative people. Creative employees are nothing but trouble. Don’t hire them, I tell you. Let the intelligent people go back to college or start their own business or bother someone else with their constant ideas and questions and high energy. You can live without that trouble.”

This was written by Fred W. Spannaus, principal of Spannaus Consulting. He proceeds to give a list of reasons (they talk back; they never listen; they can be right frequently; you need to earn their respect, etc.) all of which of course takes time and effort on the part of supervisors and colleagues.

As I read this tongue-in-cheek piece (at least I hoped so!), I realized that many of us have worked at organizations where we probably were convinced that the managers didn’t want any new ideas, or to be challenged on existing protocols, or to have to continue to prove their worth — because if we hadn’t, where would the phrase “think outside the box” have come from?

Yet, we are also pretty sure that there isn’t a company who would admit to wanting to crush every new idea, make their employees feel constrained at every turn. In fact, most companies, regardless of industry, probably use the word “creative” or “innovative” to describe their products, offerings, or staff. Read the rest of this entry »

Krista Lang Blackwood

This past summer I sat in a room at the Americans for Arts Annual Convention on a beautiful afternoon and listened to folks from Memphis talk about how art and business have created a partnership that works (you can find a longer blog post about it here).

The conversation wasn’t what I expected to hear.

I expected to hear the tired old platitudes about the ROI arts can provide; pie graphs, bar graphs, numbers galore. Bottom line revenue creation. Profit points. Cost projections. Economic development. Blah, blah, blah…

But as I stiffened my spine to sit through another pile of accounting  buzzwords, the corporate guy got up and said, “When we’re trying to hire quality people, the town’s cultural footprint is important in attracting the right kind of people.” In short, “I don’t really care about the arts themselves or the money the arts can make;  I only use them as a tool to make sure we get quality employees.”

There was a palpable, audible, unified grumble that cascaded across the room. However, I leaned forward in my chair, newly in love with this guy who cut through the bull and told it like it is. Read the rest of this entry »

Michelle Mann

As the former Director of Corporate Social Responsibility at Adobe, employees often shared with me their passion for giving back. More than just helping at the food bank once in awhile, they sought to spend time in the nonprofit sector, to make a difference.

Recently, I’ve had an opportunity to do exactly that and I’d like to share with you my experiences and view of the arts from a corporate perspective.

For the past six months, I have been a loaned executive to 1st ACT Silicon Valley, a catalytic organization whose mission is to inspire leadership, participation, and investment at the intersection of art, creativity, and technology.

Adobe’s former CEO, Bruce Chizen, had been a founding board member of 1st ACT in 2007 and the Adobe Foundation has supported the organization’s efforts to increase the vibrancy of Downtown San Jose (Adobe’s headquarters) and support the arts ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »

Neil McKenzie

For years the arts have received the support of patrons in order to grow and prosper. Today the role of the patron is increasingly being replaced by support from the business community.

To many in the art world, this trend is a welcome sight in an era of strained sources of traditional funding.

Ironically, even while businesses are viewed as a source of arts funding these same businesses are faced with shrinking budgets. One of the challenges that businesses face is that they are being asked to support a multitude of organizations and worthy causes including the arts.

As the competition for corporate support increases, arts organizations must be able to prove that they provide measureable benefits. Businesses are in their comfort zone when they can quantify the outcomes or benefits associated with an expenditure or investment.

The problem is that many of the benefits associated with the arts are “soft” or intangible and thus difficult to measure — this is a major challenge for both business and the arts as they seek to develop partnerships. Read the rest of this entry »

Have American business schools failed America? I think they have.

Have these very expensive and prestigious institutions taught our best and brightest the wrong things? Have they placed too much emphasis and focused our appreciation of value in the wrong place? I think they have.

But it’s not just me. Harvard Business School scholars Srikat Datar, David Garvin, and Patrick Cullen have written a book, Rethinking the M.B.A.: Business Education At A Crossroads. And the conclusions are grim.

Here’s how Paul Barrett, an an assistant managing editor at Bloomberg BusinessWeek interpreted their findings:

“After studying the nation’s most prestigious business schools, the authors conclude that an excessive emphasis on quantitative and theoretical analysis has contributed to the making of too many wonky wizards.” Read the rest of this entry »

Christine Harris

For much of our recent history, the arts have been considered a ‘nice to have,’ a quality of life amenity that certainly helps make a difference in the community, but expendable when there are tough budget or resource choices.

We are painfully aware of being excluded as serious priority from the public funding and the arts education conversations. But, there is a new table that we can join with a strong and purposeful voice — and that is the ‘economic development’ table.

I’m not just talking about economic impact (which many development specialists eschew), or community/quality of life, but measured, quantifiable economic development in the same manner as biotech, healthcare, or construction industries.

While many in the arts community believe that anything connecting us with the same tools to business somehow ‘taints’ our value or impact or role, the truth is — if you are not at the economic development table these days, you are just not part of the conversation — period — like it or not.

But the reality today is that we can demonstrate the value of being seated at that table, perhaps for the very first time. Read the rest of this entry »

Donald Brinkman

I am pleased to have the opportunity to blog about art and its relationship to the corporate world — it is a topic of significant interest to me.

I make no claims at being an expert on some of the subjects I touch on in this short essay. I am sharing opinions gleaned from my personal experience. I welcome your comments and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Art and commercial products are often considered separately and are often even considered mutually exclusive. ‘Fine art’ is upheld as the antithesis of ‘crass commercialism’. I propose that this assumption fails under inspection.

Humans are aesthetic creatures and we rarely separate the aesthetic choices from our commercial choices. The forms of some of our most basic agricultural products and domesticated animals are quite literally shaped by generations of aesthetic decisions – farmers breed animal and vegetable species for attractive characteristics, pruning the genetic tree and imposing human aesthetic onto Darwinian processes. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Gold

As an arts-based practitioner I have participated in events sponsored and promoted by The Arts and Business Councils of both New York City and Chicago.

Over the past decade these civic organizations have partnered with interested corporations like Metropolitan Life and McGraw Hill to present examples of arts-based learning for business that were open to the public.

The impact was palpable especially in the nature of questions asked by participants in the Q&A portion of the program.

People immediately grasped the relevance. They asked questions about trust, ambiguity, autonomy and empathy- all aspects that fall outside the “dehydrated language” (thank you Nancy Adler) of the corporate boardroom culture. Read the rest of this entry »

Janet Brown

“It’s déjà vu all over again.” I stumbled across a speech I gave to a Rotary Club in 1998 on why business should support arts education. Here’s a condensed version. Twenty years later, same arguments apply and the situation is worse for workers and arts in education.

For many years, American business got what it wanted from schools; people suited to work in factories or, more commonly in our area, people suited to work the land.

Over the past two decades, however, business has changed drastically from an industrial to an information orientation with fierce global competition. Today, a skilled, creative workforce is key to competitive success.

What the business community of the 21st century needs for success and what the arts have to offer in educating the workforce are these five things: (there are really more than five but…)

Imagination
Teamwork
Flexibility
Communication
Excellence Read the rest of this entry »

The Conference Board's "Ready to Innovate" report.

A few years ago, The Conference Board, an international non-profit business research organization, released Ready to Innovate, a study that unequivocally says, “U.S. employers rate creativity and innovation among the top five skills that will increase in importance over the next five years, and rank it among the top challenges facing CEOs.”

But as The Conference Board cautioned, “educators and executives must be aligned” and that is happening much too slowly. I think what the study was suggesting was that somebody has to take the lead.

So who’s going to align the educators and the executives and how? Where is the leadership?

The problem, I fear, is with businessmen and women…and with the educators, and the artists too, who are best suited to play the lead.

John Hagel III, co-author, along with John Seely Brown, of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, made a rather telling observation that business recruiters are always looking for creative people. Then noted that they look again at these creative people on their “exit interview.” So be it for too many corporations. Read the rest of this entry »

Founded by Steve Orr back in 1994, a former Wall Street dude and co-founder of his own consulting firm Orr Associates, Inc. (OAI); he saw the critical need for infrastructure support for New York City’s youth organizations. Since its’ creation, Steve has helped raise over $37 million for NYC youth!

How do they do it?

“By applying best practices from the corporate and nonprofit sectors we empower our partner nonprofits with the tools to achieve sustainable growth.”

It’s a multi-layered board structure at Youth, I.N.C. which includes a formal Board of Directors (governs the organization, providing financial oversight and strategic direction); the Consulting Advisory Board (recruits corporate professionals to serve on the boards of our nonprofit partners); the Sustaining Board (designed to leverage the experiences, insight, and expertise of former board members still committed to building and investing in the future of Youth, I.N.C.); and the Young Professionals Committee (organizes fundraising events, learning opportunities, and volunteer projects for young professionals). Read the rest of this entry »

Giovanni Schiuma

Today’s business organizations are challenged to deeply transform themselves and find new ways to create value in a more sustainable way.

The traditional management systems and business models need to be reinvented acknowledging the fundamental human-based nature of the organizations and of the economic ecosystem

In the new business age the capacity of an organization to survive and growth is increasingly tied to its ability to engage and inspire workforce.

Business issues such as productivity, adaptability, and innovativeness are more and more affected by how people within organizations are motivated to give the best of themselves in their daily working activities and are moved to exercise their imagination and creativity to face and solve emergent and unpredictable problems.

In addition, today’s economic recession and tension for continuous change are creating organizational contexts in which stress and negative feeling proliferate. This prompts managers to identify new ways to handle emotional- and experiential-based dimensions in order to shape organizational atmosphere which can be conducive of positive and energizing experiences for improving business performance.  Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Gold

Integrating the arts with business fundamentally questions the siloed position of the arts as a cultural function that takes place outside the mainstream of everyday life.

This opens a new “space” that challenges us to integrate our collective artistic intelligence in new ways. But it’s also an ancient space for there have always been cultures that have not distinguished between the experience of the arts and that of other types of social interaction.

The fact that the arts “have relied on patrons for thousands of years” points to the source of an enduring cultural and spiritual ennui that has gone unquestioned in the social fabric of western culture for far too long.

The arts are a gift of human nature that holds the source of insight into the depth and nuance of “being” together in the world. It is ironic that existential changes in the world of business bring us to this realization about the value of the arts. But perhaps business is, itself, every bit an art form as any other form of artistic expression? Read the rest of this entry »

Kelly Lamb Pollock

It’s no secret that innovation is valued, even revered, in today’s society. The recent passing of Steve Jobs put into perspective the deep impact even one individual’s revolutionary creativity can have on our world.

Some say Steve Jobs, thankfully for us, was a pioneer.

No matter what you call him, if he is the ideal, shouldn’t we determine how to inject his brand of thinking into that of more of our business leaders?

Yes, becoming more innovative can, and should, begin with arts education and access to the arts at an early age, as my colleague Ken Busby said in his blog post in honor of Jobs.

However, I’m such an optimist that I believe that all is not lost for those GenXers or even, gasp, the Baby Boomers already in the workforce.

It was this thinking that led COCA (Center of Creative Arts) in St. Louis to explore how we could help to foster productive innovation in business through the arts. Read the rest of this entry »

Valerie Beaman

As arts organizations and businesses continue to face a recession coupled with rapid changes in demographics and technology, everyone is scrambling to rethink their strategies.

Many businesses are focusing their corporate giving on initiatives that demonstrate shared values and can also provide a return on investment. Arts organizations are exploring opportunities to partner with businesses that can be mutually beneficial and trying to figure out the messages that resonate with the business world.

All of these changes have provided an opportunity for the arts and business to explore new ways of working together.

For this Blog Salon, we’ve invited a select group of bloggers to tackle some of these questions and others, as they come up including:

How can the arts best demonstrate their benefit to the business world?
How will arts service organizations help foster these new partnerships between arts and business?
How have discipline based arts organizations embraced these strategies?
How will partnerships with business change arts participation?
Whatever happened to art for art’s sake? Read the rest of this entry »