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| June 2005 | Special Edition | ||
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| This is a special edition of the LPA Newsletter, featuring the contents of the May, 2005 presentation of Ben Cameron and Bruce Thibodeau |
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Features: Text of the presentation Ben Cameron Bio Bruce Thibodeau Bio Tatman Group |
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Louisiana ValuesI’ve been charged today with untangling the V word. While for you at the LPA, that’s Veronique, for New Orleans it’s Vieux Carre; for W. its victory while for John Kerry it’s vanquished; for Bob Dole it’s Viagra and for Eve Ensler, it’s something else entirely: in fact, in homage to her, I hereby entitle today’s presentation The V Monologue or What I Learned at Target. Today’s V word, though, is one that has been seized by the Moral Majority as the Centerpiece of their agenda (modified by the ubiquitous—and to them, at least—mysteriously intolerant and paranoid American Family); derided by anti-corporate liberals; embraced as a foundation of retail; in short, defended as spiritual, distorted as demagoguery, derided as mercenary; but ultimately central to the challenges ahead for us as a field. Value. Value. It’s precisely the imprecision—or rather the many conflicting precisions—of what we mean with this word that threatens to make it collapse under its own weight. What are my core values? Do I value our friendship? Is that meal a good value? Did the Right win the election because of values? Does cause marketing add value? Look at that price tag—what a value! Like an Escher painting, a conversation about value is likely to twist and turn on itself, confounding the listener, entangling the speaker, a snare of spirit, soul and commerce that nonetheless are inter-related, and are critical to us if we are to survive for the long term. My task today is perhaps to untangle this nest. Yes, the meaning evanesces and shifts according to context but ultimately each of these value-facets inform one another—and, I think, must inform us in our attempt to raise the profile of arts in America. To begin: How do we individually clarify and identify our values? Every organization, whether the arts or not, is, I would suggest, guided by core values—as is each of us in our personal lives. Core values in my mind are those two or at most three things that you or your organization will go to the mat for every single time—not most times, but every single time, beacons of sorts, manifest principles that guide us—consciously and explicitly, or subconsciously and implicitly—every time we face a hard set of decisions. Financial stability? Risk? Innovation? Honoring of tradition? Even family? Power? Independence? The list goes on and on—and indeed, the potential for these values to come into opposition increases with each additional value—hence, the limit to two or three. How do we define and clarify these values? Core values have two salient characteristics: Core values are something that everyone in the organization can attach themselves to, can manifest and pursue. At Target Stores, for example, fun was a core value (as incidentally were speed and friendliness): the shopping experience was supposed to be fun—bright lights, high sensory visual experience, animated and pleasant staff, to be sure. But a sense of fun became characteristic of the irreverent advertising; it manifested itself in the frequently arresting juxtaposition of color in the copy; it guided images of models, always seen romping and laughing and avoiding the suck in your cheeks and give me attitude approach to high fashion—unless that was evoked with conscious irony. And as a manager, I knew that it was my job for my staff to have fun—to find ways to celebrate their achievements through excursions for pizza or breaks midday to go to a movie, through the weekly staff meeting where an horrific statue was awarded to the staff member who had done the stupidest thing during the week—an award begun with self-nomination, not castigation, and which I won more times that I like to remember. I knew at my performance review that if my staff had not had fun during the year, I would be hauled onto the carpet as a poor manager. A value for the team member in the stock room, for the Vice-President, for the guest. A surprising core value, perhaps, for one of the most successful and serious minded corporations in American, but a core value with a precise meaning nonetheless. Not frivolity, not carelessness, not lack of purpose. But Fun. Additionally, core values have a consciously rejected viable opposite. Excellence—a principle frequently cited as a core value by many arts organizations, is simply not a useful value for me in this context: who among us would wish to commit ourselves to mediocrity or inferiority? In this world, excellence must be a given, not a consciously chosen value. At TCG, one of our core values is diversity. Certainly, it would be viable and perhaps even easier to stake our a particular segment of our field or of our population to serve. We could choose to serve only Shakespeare theatres, for example, or only actors; we could opt for a particular region or budget size. But while it certainly presents some huge challenges to provide services for such a disparate membership, I firmly believe that our diversity as a field is our greatest cause for celebration—diversity of aesthetic and geography, diversity of organizational structure and size, diversity of race and ethnicity, of gender and sexual orientation, of approaches to problem solving and thinking. It is a value that guides our hiring practices, our publications list, the grants panels we assemble to arbitrate grant selections, the composition of our fantastic Board of directors. A core value. Especially in a time of austerity, a time when hard decisions are being made, when questions are being called, clarity around our core values is increasingly urgent. In the absence of identifying and deeply understanding our core values, how can we know if a decision we make keeps our organizations and our lives on course—or throws them disastrously awry? How else can we build organizations and lives of purpose, rather than of randomness or mere opportunism? Figuring out core values involves listening—listening to the heart, listening deeply to the soul, listening to others. Core values identification begins with ruthless self analysis—not of theoretical ennobling tenets that we want to believe, but rigorous analysis of how we behave. For it is in behavior, not in aspiration, that our true core values reveal themselves. Diversity as a core value, but an entirely white staff and Board? Not likely. Risk as a constant value but a frequent default to palatable large scale musicals and commercial fare to balance the budget? Not likely. Financial stability but a choice to produce only provocative new plays? Not likely. Each of these values can have positive resonance, each can guide, but how we behave is the useful barometer here. Unclear about your core values? Ask your audiences—trust me, they will know, as every focus group will tell you. As a side note, identifying such values has individual, personal resonance—not merely group resonance. Just as our organizations are guided by core values, our lives—whether we consciously recognize them or not—are similarly guided. Identifying these individual values has led to professional enrichment, to satisfaction and clarity in examining choices, to the avoidance of burnout—for really, what is burnout? Not hours on the clock—give me 18 hours a day on something I love and I hunger for more; two hours on something not central and I cry to make it stop. Burnout is disconnect from core values. But I think we’re really talking about something more: we’re talking about what is our Value? What is the value we offer our community? Why is doing the work important in the first place? This imperative was made clear to me upon my arrival at Target. As many of you know, I had spent the four years immediately prior at the National Endowment for the Arts, a tenure that coincided with the days of Mapplethorpe and Serrano: indeed, having joined the Theatre Program originally on a Fellowship, I watched two directors leave the agency for less stressful employment, leaving me as Theatre Program director—a process I likened to an odd variation on the fifth act of KING LEAR, with the stage strewn with bodies and somehow the fool left on the throne. That said, the full folly of our method of defending the NEA was made clear to me in subsequent conversations with Target executives. “You just never got it, did you?” they’d say. “While you want to talk only about quality, the rest of the country has moved on. It’s not quality that determines where people spend time, money and energy: it’s value. You can have the best toilet paper in the world on the shelves; if people don’t see the value of coming into the store in the first place, they never get to see what you have. And PS- you better have the best if that’s what you’ve promised; otherwise they won’t be back a second time.” In other words, in the heat of arts controversy, we answered value based questions with quality based answers—an inherent disconnect. We could not still our critics by saying, “Look at the juxtaposition of light and dark. Look at the eloquence of the male nude, etc.” –especially when their questions were not about the quality of the photography but of the value of having the photographs in the community in the first place. Building value begins with speaking to where your audience is listening from—by addressing the sense of benefit that accrues to a community through our presence. As arts fields, we must be far better about conveying, not only the quality of our work, but its value. Every arts organization must be able to answer three basic questions:
If you can’t answer those three question, the only likely supporters you will find are those already seated in your seats. Every arts organization must be able to answer these questions clearly, succinctly, memorably—a value statement that goes beyond the values that we evince in our behavior and at our core. Target’s values are fast fun and friendly: its value statement is “Expect More. Pay Less.” WalMart, AKA the Evil Empire, says “Always the low price. Always.” Two contrasting statements—one emphasizing economic value, the other superior quality within a lower price point—that nevertheless encapsulate the very value of choosing that site for transaction. In the arts community, we struggle to find that comparable value. Our arguments of late, in the theatre at least, have centered in three terrains: the economic stimulus argument, with its now expansive variant of Richard Florida; the education value, with the role of the arts in enhancing academic performance; and the social value, the role of the arts in encouraging empathy, social tolerance and healthier cross-cultural relations. The economic, the educational, the social—each of these is relevant, powerful and especially apt if talking to the chamber of commerce, the school board or the community center respectively, remembering again value creation based in the ability to speak to where the audience is listening from. Yet, for those of us in the theatre at least and who LOVE words, our volubility, our passion, our frustration at not being more roundly appreciated, lead us towards long eloquent statements of purpose, flowery oratory rather than succinct conveyance of value. But the shorter statement—the ennobling, animating purpose that impels us, not merely the description of what we do—can galvanize supporters that may now perceive they have little to do with us, a statement that, ideally, references the arts not at all. A number of theatres, for example, try to articulate their value by saying, “We produce high quality theatre…” a beginning that immediately disaffects those who perceive theatre in general to be a less than pressing priority. Why is doing theatre at all of value, they would ask. In contrast, consider how the Red Cross describes itself. While it would be comparably easy to say, “Our mission is to gather bandages and administer food to disaster victims,” they instead say, “Our mission is to serve the most vulnerable”—a statement of value that can be adorned by “We do that through distribution of bandages and food.” The Salvation Army says, “We make citizens of the rejected”—a value statement that can be comparably with explanations of distributing clothing and education programs. And in Mark Moore’s celebrated must-read Creating Public Value, he notes the shift—and the consequent resurgence in public confidence in the police force of Houston TX—when they began talking about their value, not through the filter of what they do by arresting people or enforcing the law, but through the value of “Promoting public safety.” In that same line, what is the higher purpose we are called to do—the positive, animating, galvanizing, ennobling value that the arts uniquely allow us to accomplish and pursue? Dana Gioia at the NEA is beginning to lead that agency down the value road more powerfully than any of his predecessor. He announced at a meeting I attended last month a new set of statements for the NEA—one an overarching statement---Because a Great Nation Deserves Great Art-- with three value based sub-points: “Because the Arts Serve All Citizens; Because Encouraging Voices from all walks of life is the ultimate democratic practice. And because the center of America’s creativity resides in the arts.” Powerful value statements, each with a specific pointed appeal to partnering values of democracy/ inclusiveness, patriotism, and creative potential, among others. Every organization must understand its extrinsic, communal value—and maximize its own power in conveying this value to the larger world. One theatre I know has distilled its three primary values into three talking points, capturing them small cards wallet sized cards that can be easily pulled out mid conversation when precise verbiage is needed and precise supporting facts and figures are warranted. Every Board member has one. It clearly distills the value that they want to convey, and together, by singing the same songs in the same language, by consistently using the same three “key messages” as media trainers would say, the entire organization is working to build critical consciousness in its community. Let’s carry it further: if we really want to make that difference, it’s time to make those cards not only for every Board member, but for every actor. Every technician, every administrator, every custodian in our employ. No matter what the media does or doesn’t do for us, we have the power to build the consciousness from the bottom up. These efforts can only be amplified by our more fervent attention to how we maximize our letterhead, our business cards, our very spaces. Think, for example, of what we see when we enter a theatre lobby: pictures of actors who we’re about to see—both in psuedo-chic headshot and in scenes from the play we’re about to see. We go to the show, see the people we’ve been told we’ll see doing the things we’ve already been shown they’ll do. But it we want to make people understand our economic role, what would happen if we put the headshots of everyone responsible for bringing the work to the stage—every stage hand, every costume constructor, every box office person—a manifestation of the 67 people it took to bring the performance to the stage, not just the 6 actors parading before you—a reminder of our reach as employers and our role as small businesses? If we want people to see they power we have for children, what it our lobbies are filled with photos, not from tonight’s play, from the educational workshops, the school programs, the student work we do? Can we present student work as curtain raisers? Can we use students a guides? No one is poised to come in and save us—but we have the power to control the eyes of the community every second they’re in our space. If they fail, upon departure, to understand our issues, our strengths, our values, we have no one but ourselves to blame. The value clear organization—one clear in its core values, one armed with a clear value statement, one clear about its extrinsic value for its community—is the one best prepared to move thoughtfully to create and seize market value—a strategy involving seven planes of attraction:
But even while we create market value for our institutions individually, we must build communal value for the arts in aggregate. We must, in the words of Barry Nailbuff, enter the world of “co-opetition”—cooperating to grow the pie even as we compete to grow our individual piece. In an age of right wing conspiracy, I want an arts conspiracy—conspiracy, rooted in the Latin for con-spire—to breathe together. I want us to conspire for the sake of the arts. The value I build as a theatre can only help the value of orchestras, if we do this right; the orchestra value can only build the value of operas; the value of operas that of museums, and so forth. Before I leave you, let me confound you a bit: everything I have said—this conveying of value—is designed to begin to build an arts policy, to arm foundation officials with arguments to keep us on the funding agenda, to build alliances with others who may not perceive we have common cause. But let’s face it: no one actually goes to the arts for these reasons. Who sits home and says, “Gee honey, if we go to the theatre tonight, it will leverage $5-7 for the local economy?” or “You know, if we attend that Matisse exhibit, kids will perform more than 80 points higher on their SAT’s.” We go for different reasons—we go for the emotional encounter, the communal balm, the intrinsic experience that nothing else can replace. Especially today, this need is acute: if Richmond is at all like New York, one can scarcely enter mass transportation or sit in an airport without hearing, time and time and time again, “Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior…” In a country that I feel I scarcely recognize as the one I grew up in—a country that now seems to prioritize entitlement over stewardship, ranting over substantive discourse, that increasingly turns its back on those beautiful words inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty—Give me your tired, your poor—in favor of immigration policies designed to keep others out—in this country and this time, we are encouraged to view one another with hostility and suspicion. The arts invite us to view one another with generosity and curiosity: far from being mythic weapons of mass destruction, the arts bear the potential of comprising weapons of mass salvation. Ultimately promoting our value is positing this intrinsic AND the extrinsic—the emotional terrain, which will be more powerfully explored in the upcoming report from the Wallace Foundation entitled “Reframing the Muse.” The intrinsic without the extrinsic feels squishy and touchy-feely to those charged with business decisions; the extrinsic without the intrinsic feels inorganic and inauthentic. It is both and—not either or. Back to Newsletter Top |
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Ben CameronSince 1998, Ben Cameron has served as the Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for not for profit theatres currently claiming 17,000 individual and 440 professional theatre company members. Prior to this appointment, he had been active in corporate philanthropy, first as senior program officer at the Dayton Hudson Foundation and subsequently as manager of community relations at Target Stores in Minneapolis, MN. In this position, he supervised a $51 million national giving program which focused on grant giving, cause marketing and volunteerism at the community level. From 1988 through 1992, he worked for the National Endowment for the Arts, serving as director of the theatre program from 1990. His experience working in not-for-profit professional theatre includes three years as associate artistic director at Indiana Repertory Theatre (1981-1984); literary manager for PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, NC (1984-1986); and a host of freelance assignments at Baltimore’s Center Stage and Yale Repertory Theatre, among others. He has taught theatre at the Yale School of Drama, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University. He has published numerous articles on theatre, including a monthly editorial column in American Theatre. He received an MFA in dramaturgy from the Yale School of Drama in 1981, where he was the first recipient of the Kenneth Tynan Prize, a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a John Motley Morehead scholar; an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from DePaul University in Chicago in 2001 and, in 2003 an honorary MFA in Acting from American Conservatory Theatre. He has served as Vice President of the National Arts and Business Council and currently sits on the Boards of Grantmakers in the Arts, National Arts Strategies, and the American Arts Alliance, where he serves as the Secretary of the Board. He has appeared as a panelist on the Metropolitan Opera’s Chevron/Texaco Opera Quiz each season since 1996, has spent 18 days on the Queen Mary 2 as an Oxford Lecturer presenting lectures on theatre, and is a member of the Tony Awards Nominating Committee. Back to Newsletter Top | |||
Bruce Thibodeau
Bruce Thibodeau founded the Arts Consulting Group in 1997 and has extensive experience in the arts and business management. The firm is the leading provider of interim management, project consulting, executive search, and organizational development services for the arts and cultural sector. ACG now has offices in Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Dallas, New York, and Boston, with consultants located across the country. | |||
The Tatman GroupThe Tatman Group is here to meet your association’s needs. Please contact Paula Laird, your association management specialist, with any questions or suggestions you may have to better serve you. Our contact information is below: |
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The Tatman Group 4707 Bluebonnet Blvd., Suite B Baton Rouge, LA 70809 P.O. Box 82531 Baton Rouge, LA 70884 Phone: (225) 767-7640 Fax: (225) 767-7648 |
DavidTatman david@tatmangroup.com Nicole Hidalgo nicole@tatmangroup.com Keli Ourso keli@tatmangroup.com Randi Viloria randi@tatmangroup.com Debbie Bliek debbie@tatmangroup.com |
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