Archive for the 'Australia' Category
Advancing Museums and Organisational Change
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
There are several new items on museums as organizations and achieving change. Firstly, I have recently come across some excellent pieces relating to teamwork.
A Peter Day program on the BBC (which incidentally includes stuff about the Cambridge Boat Race team) featured amongst other people Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School. On her website there is a link to a podcast by her dealing with teams. The BBC piece is extremely interesting. Of course one of the reasons I liked it is that yet again it demonstrates what we can learn from other people and other organisations, in this case from the mobile phone giant Nokia and the University boat races on the Thames.
By the way, a recently broadcast piece on the ABC Radio National program “All in the Mind” dealt with apes and it would be a challenge to work out what one can conclude from that about how human groups work.
In the recently started ‘ning’ (an online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network) deals amongst other things with achieving organisational change and there is a post there which may be of interest.
Before finishing, a recent appointment to directorship of a large museum in Australia and the reaction to it highlights some of the challenges museums face. This is also dealt with in Museum 3.0.
Last, A paper entitled “Advancing Museums” has just been published in Museum Management and Curatorship.
Here is an extended abstract of the paper.
In the last 40 or so years museums, like many other nonprofit organizations, have focused to a greater extent on the demands of a market (or “rational”) economic model, adopted by most developed western countries – business and government alike - as a governing paradigm. Financial efficiency, restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing and fixed term contracts for senior staff have been major corporate developments. Boards have come to see their main role as oversight of executive management. Museum executives have been encouraged to be more entrepreneurial. Performance indicators have been introduced to show that museums contribute value for money.
Simultaneously, there have been substantial and vitally important advances in understanding of the learning experience in the museum environment, an experience which depends significantly on prior knowledge and contributes to individual identity and. Dramatic developments in information technology have also led to a great increase in public accessibility to knowledge about the collections.
A review of high performance forprofits and nonprofits and the most effective museums shows that best practice involves understanding the ‘industry’, a challenging work environment and attention to recruitment. Strategy for the executive leader means creating and communicating a vision encompasing unique deliverable value and appropriate organizational values. In all high performing organizations there is great attention to recruitment and to training and development.
A revised agenda for museum boards and executive leadership is developed and some other challenges are identified. Boards and executive leaders must seek advances in strategic issues which only they are responsible for; performance indicators must reflect that focus, not operational issues.
Future Leaders
Saturday, August 18th, 2007
In the last couple of months, directors of at least four museums have resigned or announced their impending retirement and there is ongoing speculation about the possibility of Philippe de Montebello retiring from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (There is an interesting post on this by culturegrrl [Who Should Succeed Philippe at the Met? November 13, 2006 ) and I mentioned another article on this in a previous post.
In the USA Timothy Potts will leave the Kimbell Art Museum in September. Lisa Dennison (a 29-year veteran of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who became its director less than two years ago), has resigned to join Sotheby’s auction house. In Australia, Kevin Fewster resigned in July from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney to take the directorship of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in Britain and Alan Dodge announced his intention to retire from the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In Britain Charles Saumarez Smith has resigned from the National Gallery in London to go to the Royal Academy. And all that follows of course the announcement some time ago of the resignation of Lawrence Small as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (though some would not consider that a museum position, relevant thought it is).
In The New York Times for July 29, 2007, Jori Finkel (“Impossible Job. Here’s What You Need for It”) noted that 24 of the 200 or so members of the Association of Art Museum Directors were in search of leaders in July, including the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The AAMD’s executive director observed that this was as great a number as some 20 years ago!
In the normal course of events this would be regarded as not unusual. The trouble is that not only is the museum community (or profession) not doing very much about succession, except for a few places where there are courses on leadership development, the nature of the job and the expectations for it have not varied in 20 years except that the demands placed on incumbents have grown. And the attitudes of boards and governments have not developed in the light of events. It is still a matter of wanting someone who will raise money and behave like a business person as well as be an expert on the content area of the museum, such as art history. And board members are no more inclined to understand what genuine support of executive staff means or even of what being a director of a non profit board is. Of course there are exceptions, or perhaps the troubling instances are exceptions. But they are sufficient to be a great worry.
One person who has studied this tells me that boards often appoint someone completely different from the previous incumbent; some museums continue to make the same kind of mistakes, others having to open the search process several times. As I have said, many boards simply do not understand what support of the CEO means.
Continue to essay.
Aboriginal Remains: An update
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
This post summarises some of the background to the decision in early May 2007 by The Natural History Museum in London to return remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The decision followed months of wrangling and argument and an appeal to the High Court. The decision follows the handing down of the Report from the Working Group on Human Remains. The strong disagreement of some people remains. The claim for return was lodged by the Australian Government in November 2005 on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC).
Matthew Denholm & Peter Wilson (Museum bones legal fight ‘a waste’ of $1m in The Australian February 24, 2007) reported that an Aboriginal group had broken ranks to oppose costly legal action aimed at stopping a British museum conducting tests on indigenous remains. Tasmania’s Lia Pootah community yesterday attacked the case against London’s Natural History Museum as a waste of money, as lawyers predicted legal fees could top $1 million.
Lia Pootah spokeswoman Kaye McPherson said taxpayers’ money would be better directed to indigenous education and cultural programs. She said the DNA and other tests proposed by the museum might have benefits for Aboriginal Australians, a point backed by Mr Mundine. “There is a very emotional balancing act,” Mr Mundine said. “What was done ( taking of Aboriginal remains) is nothing short of horrible. At the same time, there has been some research that has come out of this which could have been good.”
Recently Professor Richard Lane, Director of Science at the Museum said (on ABC Radio National’s “Science Show” 7 July 2007), “These are the first [remains] that we have actually returned. I think both parties started in one place and have ended up somewhere different, quite a learning [sic] for both sides. For the museum community I think it’s about articulating more clearly the scientific benefits to the claimant communities, as opposed to the scientific benefits to all of us.”
Earlier Julia May (in the Sydney Morning Herald, May 12 2007), reported Richard Lane as praising the mediation process and said that this decision would set a precedent. “I think it does change the arena; we’re finding ways that we can balance the needs of the scientific community with the various Australian Aboriginal communities.”
There are, and have been for many decades, widely different views on these kinds of issue. Jocelyn Nettlefold (ABC TV’s 7.30 Report on 21 February) reported the. Michael Mansell (Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre), “They [the remains] were effectively grave-robbed. People dug them up so that they could donate them to institutions overseas.” Professor Robert Foley, Evolutionary Anthropologist (Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, Department of Biological Anthropology, University of Cambridge), “To see any of it lost and gone forever is, to my mind, a very sad and tragic event.” Mark Stephens, Solicitor: “It may enable one scientist at the Natural History Museum to write an extra paper, but it’s not going to contribute to sum total of human knowledge, it’s not going to prevent disease. It’s not going to do anything which is going to be otherwise irreplaceable to science and, in those circumstances, there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for this mawkish examination by scientists.”
Natural History Museum director Dr Michael Dixon, said, “They tell a very interesting story about human evolution and the evolution of Tasmanian Aboriginals themselves.”
Continue to article.
Quality, Where do you Get it?
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Everyone has their own idea of whether a particular musical performance, play, exhibition, artwork or organisation or enterprise is good, bad or indifferent. Some argue that it is not worthwhile trying to work out what criteria one would use to judge something. Particularly jazz: some performers have been heard to say that if you have to analyse a performance there is something wrong with you, you shouldn’t be listening to it at all. Others will talk not of reading a book but of “experiencing” it. But there are outstanding performances and so on, ones of supreme, even sublime, quality.
The fact is then that quality is a very difficult issue to come to grips with. Our own personal preferences are to an extent a part of our identity. The arts management writer Paul DiMaggio put it well when he said that differences in quality, in both execution and presentation, “are apparent to almost everyone; discerning others is better left to experts… nearly everyone agrees support … should encourage excellence.” He made the point strongly that a diversity of sources of funding is essential where the audience is part of a pluralistic society.
Critics are people who seek to define quality. They are frequently reviled. Oscar Wilde observed. “Once upon a time man had the lash, now he has the pen.” Emily Bronte, in a recently discovered letter of 9 November 1849 to W[illiam] S[mith] Williams, wrote that while allowing that the critics writing for the Spectator and Athenaeum (about the recently published Shirley) are ‘acute men in their way’, she feels that ‘when called on to criticise works of imagination — they stand in the position of deaf men required to listen to music — or blind men to judge of painting. The Practical their minds can grasp — of the Ideal they know nothing.’” (The Telegraph). Cate Blanchett, Oscar winning Australian actor and now co-artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company (and Australian Museum Trustee) recently observed that she ceased reading critics’ reviews five years ago!
Continue to the essay.
One example of high quality performance is the Australian Youth Orchestra, currently on tour in Europe. A link specifically to an extract from a report about its first concert in Paris in July 2007 is here.
Australian Values and a Human Rights Bill
Monday, February 5th, 2007
The Online magazine New Matilda initiated a discussion in mid 2006 on policies and values. At the launch of the discussion, John Medadue pointed out that “Our Common Wealth “is not about policies and programs. It is about the values and principles which should underpin policies and programs. It is a statement of where New Matilda stands. We have spelled out the values driving our own policy development and we are calling on all political parties, both state and federal, to do likewise.”
My contribution to this was an article suggesting that values which united us as human were not obvious to all. Many distinguished people have contributed views to this proposition. Some have pointed out that the “Australian” values promoted by the Howard Government are common and universal values. One of those was Geoffrey Robertson QC speaking at the “Cornerstones” Conference on Public Education in September 2006 on “Human Rights and Public Education”
My article The Common Wealth - Vision and Values: Are they enough right now? New Matilda 9 January 2006
“New Matilda has embarked on a project to articulate a set of values that should underpin policy development in Australia. The Common Wealth is the first articulation of these values.
“Vision and values matter. Policies and programs are driven – given expression – by vision and values. We imagine that if we share the same values we will act the same way. Some people can sign up to values but when put to the test find they don’t agree with them after all. The larger and more diverse the group the more difficult it is to gain commitment to common values. Achieving agreement on values requires commitment, political will.
“In a civilised society everyone builds relationships with others and works consciously to reinforce those relationships as part of a community. A community shares common values. Citizens take responsibility for the consequences of their actions and respect other people and their dignity as human beings; these matters are codified in laws along with rules which preserve safety and ensure contractual arrangements are honoured and so on.
“It seems obvious but apparently it isn’t!”