ARTSblog

Lisa Phillips with Steve Wozniak

There seems to be a major disconnect between how creativity is valued in society and the career advice we give our children. We all know that the arts are a valuable means of expression, a means to share stories across cultures and an uplifting and moving source of entertainment.

We revere our cultural icons, whether they are movie stars, literary authors or artists, but we seem to limit the possibility of careers in the arts to only a talented few.

How many of us arts professionals have heard from family and friends, “When are you going to get a real job?”

So, why do we put our cultural icons on a pedestal but undervalue arts education? I think one of the reasons is that as a society we are preoccupied with the idea that the arts are reserved only for those with talent. However, in the reality of today’s job market, we need to change this idea.

There is a significant gap between what children are told is important for their future career success and what business leaders actually want from the emerging workforce. Creative individuals are actually in demand. Not just for arts careers, but for careers in business as well.

For example, Disney and Apple are two of the most successful companies of our time, largely because of the creativity, innovation, and the leadership they have demonstrated in their respective industries.

In an era when businesses are constantly struggling to find creative ways to stay at the top of their market, arts education can be a powerful tool to nurture the creative abilities of our young people, ensuring they are ready for the skills that are in demand. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Scott

With the recent release of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and several other bios scheduled to come out in the near future, there’s a lot of discussion on what kind of a manager Jobs was.

While the management of a publicly-traded tech company and that of a nonprofit arts organization may seem worlds apart, there are some basic kernels that arts leaders can take from Steve Jobs’ career.

We’ve heard a lot about Jobs’ so-called “reality distortion field.” He pushed his employees to the max, believing that work that normally would take a month could be done in a few days. While the pressure was too much for many employees, others said it caused them to do some of the best work of their careers.

For arts managers working with limited resources in terms of people, time, and money, the notion of a reality distortion field is probably a familiar one. So many times we find ourselves making something out of almost nothing and hopefully that something is a brilliant work of art. But what is perhaps more significant is how Jobs handled his employees. Not only did he believe that a particular task could get done a certain way in a certain time frame, he believed that his people would be able to accomplish it. Read the rest of this entry »

uch has been written, tweeted, Facebooked, and spoken about the passing of Apple genius, Steve Jobs. I remember Apple computers in school. And I remember my first Macintosh computer that my parents bought me.

The computer housing was gray, and the display was gray-scale. But every time I booted it up, there was a smiling computer icon on the screen, and it made me smile.

That may be the greatest legacy of Steve Jobs – he made people smile. With his guidance, computers became accessible and fun and something anyone of any age could use. Today, we are so connected that it’s almost impossible to ever shut down and relax – even for five minutes. And yet as hectic and crazy as our world is, iPhones and iPads make the work fun.

As I began thinking about what the future might be like without Steve Jobs, I started thinking about Jobs the man—an adopted child who built his first computer in his parents’ garage, dropped out of college, would be forced out of the company he founded only to be brought back years later to save it from the brink of irrelevancy, and who would give us such unfathomed realities as iCloud.

This man was about creativity and innovation. Read the rest of this entry »