Archive for the 'People' 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.
Enterprise Systems: Centralized control or Let genuine expertise flourish
Friday, November 16th, 2007
Despite the evidence to the contrary, some people still believe that leadership means giving direction rather than putting in place the processes which encourage above average performance by staff.
Centralized control is based on the proposition that people generally can’t be trusted and that only those at the top of the hierarchy have the knowledge and experience to make the right decisions. However, those at the top frequently do not have the most up-to-date information and what information they do have may not be relevant to the local situation at all. It turns out that co-ordination is most successfully achieved, not by managers enforcing rules and regulations, but by managers attending to building the organization’s culture, by emphasizing trust and seeking above average performance. Increasingly, flexible teams are recognized as necessary, indeed as the only workable proposition The standards in such groups are set by the members of the group themselves on the basis of what they understand to be best practice from their own observations. Remember the exhortation from James Collins and Gerry Porras that successful organizations build strong cultures.
In recent discussions I had with museum people in Australia about relations between museums and indigenous peoples the issue of centralized control – the unreasonable expectations of politicians and senior bureaucrats – was brought to the fore. Government representatives expect that once material like human remains is returned, the job has been completed and the responsibility of the museum has been met but indigenous people consider this to be the start of a relationship which stretches into the future. Governments obsessed about control rather than values will never succeed!
These issues are dealt with by Simon Head, Senior Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. His most recent book is The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age. (August 2003).
(The audio of an interview on the Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio with Simon Head can be heard here.)
In the New York Review of Books for August 16, 2007 (“They’re Micromanaging Your Every Move”) Head reviews three books, The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (Harvard Business School), Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich (Owl Books) and The Culture of the New Capitalism by Richard Sennett (Yale University Press).
Head reminds us of issues dealt with in his book which centres on the use of what are called “Enterprise Systems” or ES to control the work even of professionals such as computer specialists and doctors. ES is the method used to run call centres and retail stores like Walmart. (There are numerous articles about Walmart and its management practices.) Continue to essay.
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.
More on “Quality”
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
In the previous post on “Quality” I mentioned a number of orchestras and museums which I thought represented an exceptional level of excellence and suggested that this had a lot to do with the way people worked with each other and the attention given to recruitment. There is another issue and that is the assertion one hears from time to time that involvement of young people in various branches of the arts such as learning music has spin-off effects in improving other abilities such as math and analytical skills. The jury is still out on this particular issue as I understand it. But the points which emerge are of general signficance.
Here are three items which are about young people and the arts. And there is a fourth item which is not about young people but the Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Philippe de Montebello.
The first item is an interview with British producer/director Michael Waldman and work with disadvantaged, troubled young people aged between 15 and 19, and their involvement in the ballet based on Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet”. Through this they achieved amazing performances and advanced their personal development as well. “A young black woman who was aged 15 who was in a rehearsal session early on, was asked to talk about herself… She said, ‘I’m told that when I was 2 my Dad murdered my Mum’. In rehearsal she showed herself to be focused, energetic, disciplined, with abilities to put her feet in front of each other, musically, and was cast in the character role of Lady Capulet, the mother of Juliet. And when it came to the final performance, the ballet reviewers who came to this said she was as good as the Bolshoi’s Lady Capulet.” (Professors Milbrey W. McLaughlin and Shirley Brice Heath of Stanford University have stories of a similar nature; see the page on museum issues)
The second item concerns the astonishing orchestral project for young people in Caracas, Venezuela, El Sistema - a remarkable project which uses Beethoven and Brahms to “save” the children of the barrios. Earlier this year, the musical directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic - arguably among the best orchestras in America - became vacant. The orchestra chose 26 year old El Sistema trained Gustavo Dudamel after a couple of guest appearances during which the Venezuelan shot what the orchestra’s president Deborah Borda called ‘contagious joy’ through the seasoned musicians. ‘We had combustion,’ she said. ‘We knew something remarkable had happened.’
The third is about partnerships at American art museums which seek to find whether art appreciation has spin-offs in other areas. The US Department of Education offers a grant program to support local education agencies and “organisations with arts expertise in replicating or adapting ways to integrate arts disciplines with a key goal to improve students’ academic performance, including their skills in creating, performing and responding to the arts”. A number of museums involved in the project have shown significant improvements in critical skills.
The last item concens the “Met” in New York. (By the way, fifty percent of all private money for the arts is raised in New York!) There are many rumours, denied, of the impending retirement of Philippe de Montebello, 71 year old director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the last 30 years. In “Twilight of the Sun King” by Charles McGrath (New York Times July 29, 2007) there are some comments about de Montebello and what I think makes museums outstanding. We are enlightened about some of the ways in which the Met distinguishes itself. It has a lot to do with the culture de Montebello promotes.
Continue to essay