Entrepreneur the Arts » Employees

Building a Business Base for Creative Entrepreneurs

Guest Blogger — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:22:16 +0000

Written by Randy Woods, October 25th. Appeared in Entrepreneur Magazine online.

Andy Fife's mission is to provide a solid financial foundation for entrepreneurial artists.

In the drizzly Pacific Northwest, Andy Fife is a rainmaker for the region’s thriving arts community. Through Shunpike, a Seattle-based arts organization, he has helped nurture more than 2,500 creative enterprises across Washington, providing a solid financial foundation for the region’s most prominent entrepreneurial artists.

So what’s his big secret? “We mostly focus on writing a business plan, creating a marketing plan, securing funding, establishing lines of credit,” Fife says. “That, itself, could be considered innovative in the art world, where most people aren’t trained in the business fundamentals.”

“Artists always do badly with money,” admits Jennie Shortridge, a Shunpike client and co-founder of Seattle7Writers, a collective of published Pacific Northwest authors. “We just aren’t very good with spreadsheets and bank accounts and, frankly, we don’t always want to be.”

That’s where Shunpike comes in, offering two tiers of service for its financially challenged members. “Basically, we’re a service hub for all the back-office functions,” Fife explains. “Our mission is to handle all of that for them and let them spend their time doing what they do best, which is producing art.”

Shunpike’s first-tier program offers grant-writing services, tax-exempt 503(c)(3) status and consultation about fundraising, finance and advisory board development for a $100 annual fee and a 7 percent cut of revenue. The second tier, called the Partner Artist program, offers all of the above, plus assistance in bookkeeping, taxes, licensing, permitting, human resources, payroll and insurance. The same $100 annual fee applies, plus 10 percent of revenue.

Even in the shadow of the Great Recession, Shunpike appears to have no shortage of potential clients. A 2010 report by Americans for the Arts said Seattle is home to 4,370 businesses in the “creative industries”–museums, symphonies, architecture, advertising–employing more than 21,000 people.

When Fife joined as executive director in 2007, Shunpike’s annual budget was $400,000; today, it’s $1.4 million. About 55 percent of these funds come through donations by government agencies, corporations, foundations and individuals, he says. The rest comes from consulting fees and percentages of Partner Artists’ revenues. Shunpike, now in its 10th year, has about 115 Partner Artists on its roster.

Providing aid to nonprofits is Shunpike’s specialty, but the group also doles out advice to for-profit ventures. Katrina Toft, co-founder and owner of Two Ravens Studio in Tacoma, Wash., sought marketing and financial advice from Shunpike in 2010 when she and her business partners wanted to grow their metalworking business.

“Andy created a diagram for us, explaining how to get bank loans, address environmental concerns and go through the permitting process,” Toft says. “We also learned to be open to not just the standard methods of marketing. He gave us great advice on utilizing social media and venturing into Facebook.”

“It’s so important to learn business skills,” says Teresa Thuman, producing artistic director of the nonprofit Sound Theatre Company, a Shunpike Partner Artist since 2006. “We had no real structure when we started, so Shunpike essentially became our business office. They helped out tremendously with grant-writing, licensing and fundraising.”

Fife recommended that Sound Theatre eliminate overhead by renting out local theaters. He is also a champion of pooling artists into collectives and raising funds via online crowdsourcing, much the way Kickstarter works, with incremental PayPal donations.

“You might find other organizations that will help support your business, but no one else will support both your business and your artwork,” Thuman says. “There’s really no other organization like Shunpike.”

Soon that may no longer be true. Fife says he may try to export the Shunpike model. “The strength is that it’s a very local approach,” he says, “but there’s no reason it can’t be repeated in other cities.”

How Great Companies Think Differently

Guest Blogger — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:00:09 +0000

Written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Rosabeth is Chair and Director of the Advanced Leadership Initiative of Harvard University, a collaboration across the professional schools to help successful leaders at the top of their professions apply their skills to addressing challenging national and global problems in their next stages of life.

Idea in Brief

Traditional theories of the firm are dominated by the notion of opposition between capital and labor, disconnecting business from society and posing conflicts between them. According to this view, companies are nothing more than money-generating machines.

By contrast, great companies use a different operating logic. They believe that business is an intrinsic part of society, and like the family, government, and religion, has been one of its pillars for centuries.

Great companies work to make money, but in their choices of how to do so, they consider whether they are building enduring institutions. As a result, they invest in the future while being aware of the needs of people and society.

There are six facets of institutional logic, which radically alters leadership and corporate behavior: a common purpose; a long-term view; emotional engagement; community building; innovation; and self-organization.

Artwork: Sarah Morris, Midtown—HBO/Grace, 1999, Gloss household paint on canvas, 213.4 × 213.4 cm

It’s time that beliefs and theories about business catch up with the way great companies operate and how they see their role in the world today. Traditionally, economists and financiers have argued that the sole purpose of business is to make money—the more the better. That conveniently narrow image, deeply embedded in the American capitalist system, molds the actions of most corporations, constraining them to focus on maximizing short-term profits and delivering returns to shareholders. Their decisions are expressed in financial terms.

I say convenient because this lopsided logic forces companies to blank out the fact that they command enormous resources that influence the world for better or worse and that their strategies shape the lives of the employees, partners, and consumers on whom they depend. Above all, the traditional view of business doesn’t capture the way great companies think their way to success. Those firms believe that business is an intrinsic part of society, and they acknowledge that, like family, government, and religion, it has been one of society’s pillars since the dawn of the industrial era. Great companies work to make money, of course, but in their choices of how to do so, they think about building enduring institutions. They invest in the future while being aware of the need to build people and society.

In this article, I turn the spotlight on this very different logic—a social or institutional logic—which lies behind the practices of many widely admired, high-performing, and enduring companies. In those firms, society and people are not afterthoughts or inputs to be used and discarded but are core to their purpose. My continuing field research on admired and financially successful companies in more than 20 countries on four continents is the basis for my thinking about the role of institutional logic in business.

Institutional logic holds that companies are more than instruments for generating money; they are also vehicles for accomplishing societal purposes and for providing meaningful livelihoods for those who work in them. According to this school of thought, the value that a company creates should be measured not just in terms of short-term profits or paychecks but also in terms of how it sustains the conditions that allow it to flourish over time. These corporate leaders deliver more than just financial returns; they also build enduring institutions.

Rather than viewing organizational processes as ways of extracting more economic value, great companies create frameworks that use societal value and human values as decision-making criteria. They believe that corporations have a purpose and meet stakeholders’ needs in many ways: by producing goods and services that improve the lives of users; by providing jobs and enhancing workers’ quality of life; by developing a strong network of suppliers and business partners; and by ensuring financial viability, which provides resources for improvements, innovations, and returns to investors.

In developing an institutional perspective, corporate leaders internalize what economists have usually regarded as externalities and define a firm around its purpose and values. They undertake actions that produce societal value—whether or not those actions are tied to the core functions of making and selling goods and services. Whereas the aim of financial logic is to maximize the returns on capital, be it shareholder or owner value, the thrust of institutional logic is to balance public interest with financial returns.

Institutional logic should be aligned with economic logic but need not be subordinate to it. For example, all companies require capital to carry out business activities and sustain themselves. However, at great companies profit is not the sole end; rather, it is a way of ensuring that returns will continue. The institutional view of the firm is thus no more idealized than is the profit-maximizing view. Well-established practices, such as R&D and marketing, cannot be tied to profits in the short or long runs, yet analysts applaud them. If companies are to serve a purpose beyond their business portfolios, CEOs must expand their investments to include employee empowerment, emotional engagement, values-based leadership, and related societal contributions.

Business history provides numerous examples of industrialists who developed enduring corporations that also created social institutions. The Houghton family established Corning Glass and the town of Corning, New York, for instance. The Tata family established one of India’s leading conglomerates and the steel city of Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. That style of corporate responsibility for society fell out of fashion as economic logic and shareholder capitalism came to dominate assumptions about business and corporations became detached from particular places. In today’s global world, however, companies must think differently.

Globalization increases the speed of change; more competitors from more places produce surprises and shocks. An intensely competitive global economy places a high premium on innovation, which depends on human imagination, motivation, and collaboration. Global mergers and acquisitions add further complexity, with their success resting on how effectively the organizations are integrated. Moreover, seeking legitimacy or public approval by aligning corporate objectives with social values has become a business imperative. Corporations that cross borders face questions of cultural fit and local appropriateness; they must gain approval from governmental authorities, opinion leaders, and members of the public wherever they operate. Their employees are both internal actors and the company’s representatives in the external community.

Only if leaders think of themselves as builders of social institutions can they master today’s changes and challenges. I believe that institutional logic should take its place alongside economic or financial logic as a guiding principle in research, analysis, education, policy, and managerial decision making. In the following pages, I will describe six ways in which great companies use institutional logic, how it gives them an advantage, and how the perspective can radically change leadership and corporate behavior.

A Common Purpose

Conceiving of the firm as a social institution serves as a buffer against uncertainty and change by providing corporations with a coherent identity.

As companies grow, acquire, and divest, the business mix changes frequently and job roles often vary across countries. So what exactly gives a company a coherent identity? Where are the sources of certainty that permit people to take action in an uncertain world? Purpose and values—not the widgets made—are at the core of an organization’s identity, and they can guide people in their efforts to find new widgets that serve society.

Consider the Mahindra Group, an $11 billion multibusiness company based in Mumbai that employs 117,000 people in 100 countries. Like many emerging-market enterprises, the Mahindra Group operates in many industries, including automobiles, finance, IT, and several dozen others. And like the great companies, it invests in creating a culture based on a common purpose to provide coherence amidst diversity, proclaiming that it is “many companies united by a common purpose—to enable people to rise.”

Globalization detaches organizations from one specific society but at the same time requires that companies internalize the needs of many societies. Establishing clear institutional values can help resolve this complex issue. For example, PepsiCo has made health a big part of its aspiration to achieve Performance with Purpose. Nutrition, environmental responsibility, and talent retention are pillars supporting the slogan. Performance with Purpose provides strategic direction and motivation for diverse lines of business in many countries. It requires a gradual shift of resources from “fun for you” to “better for you” to “good for you,” in PepsiCo parlance. It provides a rationale for acquisitions and investments. It is the logic behind the creation of a new organizational unit, the Global Nutrition Group, and new corporate roles, such as chief global health officer. It guides a quest to reduce or eliminate sugar and sodium in foods and beverages. Above all, it provides an identity for the people who work for PepsiCo all over the world.

Leaders can compensate for business uncertainty through institutional grounding. Great companies identify something larger than transactions or business portfolios to provide purpose and meaning. Meaning making is a central function of leaders, and purpose gives coherence to the organization. Institutional grounding involves efforts to build and reinforce organizational culture, but it is more than that. Culture is often a by-product of past actions, a passively generated outgrowth of history. Institutional grounding is an investment in activities and relationships that may not immediately create a direct road to business results but that reflect the values the institution stands for and how it will endure.

Institutional grounding can separate the survivors from those subsumed by global change. A sense of purpose infuses meaning into an organization, “institutionalizing” the company as a fixture in society and providing continuity between the past and the future. The name can change, but the identity and purpose will live on. In 2007, Spain’s Grupo Santander acquired Brazil’s Banco Real and folded it into its Brazilian assets. But Banco Real’s spirit involved much more than its financial assets. Its then-CEO Fabio Barbosa was put in charge of creating the combined entity, Santander Brazil. Although the new organization faced pressure to increase branch profitability, under Barbosa’s leadership Banco Real’s focus on social and environmental responsibility, along with its private banking model, were infused throughout Santander Brazil and the parent.

Successful mergers are noteworthy for their emphasis on values and culture. When the merger of two Swiss pharmaceutical companies formed Novartis in 1996, CEO Daniel Vasella wanted the new company’s mission to be globally meaningful and central to the integration and growth strategy. The question was how to provide employees with a tangible experience that reflected those values. When I floated the idea of a global day of community service—unheard of in Europe at that time—Novartis agreed. The company allowed each country organization to determine how it wanted to serve local communities, based on its interpretation of what the two histories and one future would suggest. The day of service has become an annual Novartis event, held on the merger’s anniversary.

Affirming purpose and values through service is a regular part of how great companies express their identities. In June 2011, IBM celebrated its 100th anniversary by offering service to the world. Over 300,000 IBMers signed up to perform 2.6 million hours of service on a global service day. They contributed training and access to software tools, many of them developed specially for the occasion, to schools, governmental agencies, and NGOs. Projects included training on privacy and antibullying in 100 schools in Germany; a new website developed in India for the visually impaired, with a launch at 50 locations; and access to small-business resources for women entrepreneurs in the United States. The company gave the tools away, even in cases where the software could form the basis for commercial products, to demonstrate IBM’s commitment to being a contributor to society.

A Long-Term Focus

Thinking of the firm as a social institution generates a long-term perspective that can justify any short-term financial sacrifices required to achieve the corporate purpose and to endure over time.

Keeping a company alive requires resources, so financial logic demands attention to the numbers. However, great companies are willing to sacrifice short-term financial opportunities if they are incompatible with institutional values. Those values guide matters central to the company’s identity and reputation such as product quality, the nature of the customers served, and by-products of the manufacturing process. Banco Real, for instance, created a screening process to assess potential customers’ societal standards as well as their financial standing. The bank was willing to walk away from those that did not meet its tests of environmental and social responsibility. This short-term sacrifice was prudent risk management for the longer term.

Companies using institutional logic are often willing to invest in the human side of the organization—investments that cannot be justified by immediate financial returns but that help create sustainable institutions. In South Korea, after the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Shinhan Bank set out to acquire Chohung Bank, a larger and older bank that the government had bailed out. The moment the acquisition was announced, 3,500 male employees of a Chohung Bank union, whose ranks extended to management levels, shaved their heads in protest and piled the hair in front of Shinhan’s headquarters in downtown Seoul. The acquirer then had to decide whether to go ahead with the acquisition and, if it did so, what it ought to do about Chohung’s employees.

Shinhan’s leaders applied institutional logic. They negotiated an agreement with the Chohung union, deferring formal integration for three years, giving equal representation to both Shinhan and Chohung managers on a new management committee, and increasing the salary of Chohung employees to match the higher wages of Shinhan employees. The acquirer also handed out 3,500 caps to cover the heads of the protestors. Shinhan invested heavily in what it called “emotional integration,” holding a series of retreats and conferences intended not only to spread strategic and operational information but also to foster social bonding and a feeling of being “one bank.” According to financial logic, the acquirer was wasting money. In terms of Shinhan’s institutional logic, the investments were an essential part of securing the future.

The result: Within 18 months, Shinhan had grown both banks’ customer bases, and the Chohung union was having a hard time fomenting discontent against the benign acquirer. Although a formal merger wouldn’t occur for another year and a half, Shinhan and Chohung employees were working together on task forces and discussing best practices, and ideas were spreading that began to make the branches look more similar. Employees were, in essence, self-organizing. By the third year, when formal integration took place, Shinhan was outperforming not only the banking industry but also the South Korean stock market.

Emotional Engagement

The transmission of institutional values can evoke positive emotions, stimulate motivation, and propel self-regulation or peer regulation.

Utilitarian rationality is not the only force governing corporate performance and behavior inside organizations; emotions play a major role, too. Moods are contagious, and they can affect such issues as absenteeism, health, and levels of effort and energy. People influence one another, and in doing so they either increase or decrease others’ performance levels, as my study of teams and organizations on winning and losing streaks reveals (see my book Confidence, Crown, 2004). Well-understood values and principles can be a source of emotional appeal, which can increase employee engagement. Having a statement of values has become common, so the issue is not whether a set of words called “values” exists somewhere in the company. Adhering to institutional logic makes the regular articulation of values core to the company’s work. The CEOs of companies I studied, whether headquartered in the U.S., Mexico, the UK, India, or Japan, allocated considerable resources and their own time to breathing new life into long-standing values statements, engaging managers at many levels in the institutional task of communicating values. The point was not the words themselves but the process of nurturing a dialogue that would keep social purpose at the forefront of everyone’s mind and ensure that employees use the organizational values as a guide for business decisions.

As a Procter & Gamble executive, Robert McDonald had long believed that the company’s Purpose, Values, and Principles was a cornerstone of its culture, evoking strong emotions in employees and giving meaning to the company’s brands. Within a month of becoming CEO in 2010, he elevated the purpose—improving the lives of the world’s consumers—into a business strategy: improving more lives in more places more completely.

In P&G West Africa, for instance, every employee has a quantitatively measurable purpose-driven goal: How have I touched this year? So P&G West Africa’s Baby Care Group set up Pampers mobile clinics to reduce high rates of infant mortality and help babies thrive. A physician and two nurses travel the region in a van, teaching postnatal care, examining babies, and referring mothers to hospitals for follow-ups or immunization shots. They also register mothers for mVillage, a text-message service (many of the poor in West Africa have cell phones) that offers health tips and the chance to ask questions of health care professionals. At the end of each mobile clinic visit, everyone gets two Pampers diapers. The emotional tugs for P&G employees are strong; they feel inspired by the fact that their product is at the center of a mission to save lives. They also feel proud that Pampers’ sales have soared and that West Africa is among P&G’s fastest-growing markets.

In companies that think of themselves as social institutions, work is emotionally compelling and meaning resides in the organization as a whole rather than in a less sustainable cult of personality. Top leaders exemplify and communicate the company’s purpose and values, but everyone owns them, and the values become embedded in tasks, goals, and performance standards. Rather than depending on charismatic figures, great companies “routinize” charisma so that it spreads throughout the organization.

Partnering with the Public

The need to cross borders and sectors to tap new business opportunities must be accompanied by concern for public issues beyond the boundaries of the firm, requiring the formation of public-private partnerships in which executives consider societal interests along with their business interests.

One paradox of globalization is that it can increase the need for local connections. To thrive in diverse geographies and political jurisdictions, companies must build a base of relationships in each country with government officials and public intermediaries as well as suppliers and customers. Only by doing so can companies ensure that agendas are aligned even as circumstances—and public officials—keep changing. Those external stakeholders are interested as much in the corporations’ contributions to the local community as they are in their transactional capabilities. At the same time, great companies want both an extended family of enduring relationships and a seat at the table on policy matters affecting their business.

Public-private partnerships to address societal needs are growing in number and importance, and are especially prevalent among enterprises that think institutionally. Partnerships can take many forms: International activities, conducted in collaboration with the United Nations and other global organizations (such as Procter & Gamble’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water program with UNICEF and several NGOs); large domestic projects, undertaken in collaboration with government ministries and development agencies (PepsiCo’s agricultural projects in Mexico with the Inter-American Development Bank, for example); product or service development to address unmet societal needs (for instance, P&G’s linkages with public hospitals in West Africa); or short-term volunteer efforts (IBM’s work following the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and earthquakes in China and Japan to provide software to track relief supplies and reunite families).

The Benefits of Institutional Logic

Companies that operate using institutional logic reap substantive benefits.

Institutional logic is built on a foundation of purpose and values, which serve as a buffer against uncertainty and change.

Conceiving of the firm as a social institution generates a long-term perspective. Short-term financial sacrifice becomes permissible in the interest of positioning the firm for sustainable success.

Strong institutional values can evoke positive emotions, stimulate intrinsic motivation, and propel self- or peer regulation.

Great companies see business as a primary pillar of society. This focus facilitates the kind of cross-border and cross-sector engagement needed to tap global opportunities. Through the formation of public-private partnerships, firms consider the public interest along with business priorities.

The attention placed on social conditions often generates experiences and ideas that lead to learning for innovation in products, services, and business models.

In a firm steered by institutional logic, employees can be treated as self-determining professionals, coordinating and integrating activities and producing innovation through self-organization in addition to formal assignments.

In companies that adhere to an institutional logic, executives cultivate relationships with public officials neither as a quid pro quo nor to push through particular deals. Rather, they seek to understand and contribute to the public agenda even as they influence it. For example, PepsiCo’s chief global health officer, who came from the World Health Organization, is planning a cross-sector project to reduce childhood obesity. IBM’s CEO, Samuel Palmisano, circumnavigates the globe six or seven times a year to meet with national and regional officials, discussing how IBM can help their countries achieve their goals. This is not sales or marketing; it’s a high-level conversation to demonstrate the company’s commitment to furthering the development of the countries it operates in. Such engagement at the top helps other IBM leaders get a seat at the table when discussions about the country’s future take place.

Institution building requires the efforts of many people. The more interested that top leaders are in external relations, the more likely they are to involve others and to reward them for building relationships with the nation and community. Although relatively few people might hold formal responsibility for these external interfaces, a great many might perform institutional work by volunteering, attending public meetings, and participating in community service. Such activity projects a sense of authentic motivation. Community building is not a hard sell for people native to an area or for long-term residents; there is an emotional pull of place that makes such work desirable. For others whose careers take them across geographies, this work is a way to connect their organizational roles with the places they now live, making them feel more rooted.

When leaders come to see themselves as having societal purpose, they can choose to get involved at local, national, and even global levels. A few years ago, the head of IBM Greater China organized a personal diplomatic mission to Washington, meeting with White House officials and U.S. politicians to discuss the impact of China’s emergence as an economic superpower. He had a desire to see both nations thrive and believed that his role in a global company afforded him a unique perspective. After retiring in 2009, he remained an IBM “super alum,” in company parlance, and was supported by IBM in attending a major U.S. university for a year, with the company’s support, to learn about health care. At the end of 2010, he returned to China and launched an initiative with a Chinese government institute to develop an IT-enabled evidence base for traditional Chinese medicine that will build on IBM ties.

Innovation

Articulating a purpose broader than making money can guide strategies and actions, open new sources for innovation, and help people express corporate and personal values in their everyday work.

Companies’ claims that they serve society become credible when leaders allocate time, talent, and resources to national or community projects without seeking immediate returns and when they encourage people from one country to serve another. IBM’s Corporate Service Corp, for instance, develops future leaders by sending diverse teams of the company’s best talent on monthlong projects around the world. The attention placed on social needs often generates ideas that lead to innovations. For Cemex, operating by institutional logic and considering unmet societal needs produced innovations such as antibacterial concrete, which is particularly important for hospitals and farms; water-resistant concrete, useful in flood-prone areas; and road surface material derived from old tires, desirable in countries that are building roads rapidly. An idea from Egypt for saltwater-resistant concrete, helpful for harbor and marine applications, became a product launched in the Philippines.

Institution building helps connect partners across an ecosystem, producing business model innovation. Cemex started Construrama, a distribution program for small hardware stores, in 2001 as a response to competition from Home Depot and Lowe’s, which were then entering Latin America. Construrama offers the small stores training, support, a strong brand, and easy access to products. In accordance with its values, Cemex sought dealers who were trusted in their communities, rejecting candidates whose business tactics didn’t meet the company’s ethics standards. Cemex owns the Construrama brand and handles promotions but doesn’t charge distributors, operate stores, or have decision-making authority. It requires, however, that stores meet its service standards. Among those is participation in community-building philanthropic endeavors—expanding an orphanage or improving a school, for instance. By the mid-2000s, Construrama had opened enough stores to qualify as a large retail chain in Latin America and was expanding into other developing countries.

Creating opportunities for individuals to use company resources to serve society furthers institution-building goals. Novartis employees serve in hospitals, where they see firsthand the challenges of disease and how their drugs are used. In 2011, P&G employees set out in Tide Loads of Hope vans to visit communities in the southern U.S. ravaged by floods. In the mobile Laundromats, managers and other professionals washed and folded clothes for local people, getting to know them and their circumstances. These kinds of interactions express corporate values and produce valuable learning, too.

Self-Organization

Great companies assume they can trust people and can rely on relationships, not just rules and structures. They are more likely to treat employees as self-determining professionals who coordinate and integrate activities by self-organizing and generating new ideas.

Institutional logic holds that people are not paycheck-hungry shirkers who want to do the bare minimum, nor are they robots that can be ordered to produce high performance. Instead, employees make their own choices about which ideas to surface, how much effort to put into them, and where they might contribute beyond their day jobs. Resource allocation is thus determined not only by formal strategies and budgetary processes but also by the informal relationships, spontaneous actions, and preferences of people at all levels.

Fully understanding a company requires knowledge of its social structure and informal networks, and optimizing performance requires social investments. At Shinhan Bank, the two banks self-integrated through social bonds and relationships well in advance of the three-year mark when official integration was to take place. The new connections manifested in such actions as each bank’s voluntarily hanging the other’s banner in its headquarters. At Procter & Gamble, managers in Brazil turned strategic and organizational traditions on their head to develop low-cost, high-quality alternatives to premium products. They undertook this risky initiative on their own and self-organized to ensure closer cross-functional teamwork and partnerships with customers. They felt that they had an obligation to improve the lives of consumers who could not afford premium products. Similar institutional logic led the P&G Himalaya team, a global cross-functional group, to find ways to make Gillette razors affordable and desirable to men often bloodied by barbers using rusty or worn-out blades.

Managers in great companies understand that formal structures can be too general or too rigid to accommodate multidirectional pathways for resource and idea flows. Rigidity stifles innovation. Informal, self-organizing, shape-changing, and temporary networks are more flexible and can make connections between people or connect bundles of resources more quickly. Employees’ formal roles come to resemble the home base from which they are continuously mobile as they carry out daily tasks and projects, develop work relationships, and participate in team or group activities. Matrix organizations—in which individuals report to two or more bosses depending on the different dimensions of their tasks—become what I dub a matrix on steroids. People are accountable along many dimensions simultaneously, attending to multiple projects and using their networks to assemble resources for all those projects, often without going through a decision-making hierarchy.

Although there is a drudgery and confinement component to many jobs—plenty of Cemex employees work in factories, Shinhan’s banks have tellers stuck behind counters, and every company has stay-at-desk support staff—trusting people to make choices about where, when, and with whom they should work makes jobs more engaging. For example, on any given day about 40% of IBMers in the U.S. do not go to an IBM office. They work at home or at customer sites, moving between locations and taking vacations at times of their choosing. IBM’s work-at-home programs, such as the one started in Japan in 2001, have caught the attention of governments interested in keeping women with technical degrees in the workforce. In some cases, IBM offers allowances to support infrastructure in the home, which has enabled a Harvard graduate working in India to combine project work with child-rearing, for instance, and a software manager from Egypt to move with her husband to Dubai.

Institutional logic assumes that people can be trusted to care about the fate of the whole enterprise—not just about their own jobs or promotions—and to catalyze improvements and innovations without waiting for instructions or sticking to the letter of a job description. Job descriptions nowadays document only part of what people do; performance reviews and salary bands capture only some of the activities through which people might add the most value for the company.

When people self-organize to create networks to share information, new initiatives or innovations are often the result. Organizations must encourage the creation of such networks, of course, and facilitate them through communication platforms or meeting spaces, but the networks usually flourish best if they spring from volunteers who do things that bosses might not have anticipated. What’s more, these self-organized networks often keep good ideas alive long after an organization would have abandoned them.

For example, three PepsiCo managers in Latin America had shared a dream for around a decade of developing new kinds of potatoes that were suitable for southern climates, less starchy, and environmentally sustainable. They felt that the initiative should be based in Peru, the potato’s birthplace. The troika remained in contact despite their moving to different locations, and even after years of ho-hum response, they presented their ideas wherever they could. They eventually received a boost when a new Peruvian potato chip whose creation they championed became a sensation. The chips, which used multicolored potatoes from small farmers in remote villages in the Andes, combined nutrition, tastiness, and social contribution. Proof of concept turned the dream into reality: In August 2010, CEO Indra Nooyi announced the establishment of a global potato development center in Peru, headed by one of the three champions.

Self-organizing communities can be a potent force for change, propelling companies in directions they might not have taken otherwise. People with no formal orders serve as explorers and entrepreneurs. For example, had it not been for self-forming networks, IBM might have lagged behind or even missed out on two big business ideas: virtualization and green computing. These emerged as among IBM’s top strategic priorities after an Innovation Jam in July 2006, a web chat spanning several days to which over 140,000 employees contributed ideas.

The virtualization initiative came together outside of formal structures and, initially, as a voluntary activity. Some 200 early adopters of virtual platforms—such as Linden Labs’ Second Life and similar platforms—found each other through the company’s chat rooms and created an ad hoc group of people who shared ideas in their free time through avatars and weekly phone calls, with conference lines sometimes open in the virtual world, too. After a year of informal self-organization, the network found an IBM executive sponsor. IBM then designated virtualization an emerging business opportunity and provided funding for it.

My argument has come full circle. A logic that justifies treating employees as self-determining volunteers—in essence, as true professionals who care about high performance because they believe in the company as institution—makes it important to have a motivating purpose and values to provide coherence and common identity. The first enables the last. The six principles I describe in this article are interrelated and share many characteristics. Especially for great global companies, institution building is not the result of carrying out specific activities but a coherent, holistic pursuit in which elements reinforce one another, are inextricably intertwined, and reflect a logic and leadership style that permeate the corporation.Skeptics abound, of course. Firms that present themselves as institutions concerned with serving society often come under more scrutiny than others do, and they must withstand criticism about the gap between stated aspirations and performance, financially and socially. If they make money while doing good, they will be criticized for manipulation; if they do some good but not enough to solve complex problems, they will be criticized for lack of courage or commitment. Despite a growing number of advocates for a new kind of capitalism that finds win-win opportunities by creating value for both business and society, there is still controversy over the obligations of business.

The great global enterprises are not waiting for grand new theories or perfect answers. Their leaders already use an institutional or social logic to supplement economic or financial logic in guiding and growing their enterprises. Institutional logic cannot be captured by cost-benefit equations or reduced to the language of economics, and yet it turns out to be a powerful driver of financial performance.

Leaders in the great companies can tell a different story about the basis for their decisions. In so doing, they are able to produce new models for action that can restore confidence in business and will change the world in which we live.

About Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the chair and director of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. Her most recent book is SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good (Crown, 2009).

ETA Top 25 Most Read Posts in 2010

Lisa Canning — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 11:44:16 +0000

Our 2010 most read posts are interestingly some oldies but goodies. From our top 25, 14 are from 2007 through 2009. Our oldest post from 2007, which also happens to be our #1 post, is about my journey writing a book.

So for all you writers out there, this list just goes to show you that it’s important to get your writing our there because its more likely to become well read with the passage of time.

#1 Starving Artist Not
#2 The Four C’s of 21st Century Education
#3 Oh the places you’ll go by Dr Seuss
#4 Tongue twisters for actors and speakers
#5 Characteristics of successful entrepreneurs
#6 Ten steps to finding your artistic voice
#7 Best and worst marketing campaigns
#8 How to create a badge for your blog
#9 An artistic entrepreneurial case study: The story of blue man group
#10 Ben Cameron on change transformation and renewal in the arts
#11 One blank piece of paper
#12 Dinner in the sky
#13 Conservatory made me successful in business
#14 How to make your creativity explode create your own strategic implode
#15 North Africa Economic Partership announced between Aspen Institute and U.S. Department of State
#16 Top 20 arts entrepreneur blogs
#17 What does fame mean to you?
#18 I’m not an entertainer. I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker
#19 Artists as social entrepreneurs
#20 Our dirty little family secret
#21 The definition of a calculated risk
#22 Innovating through artistry
#23 Paradigm shifts build innovative companies
#24 Overcoming mediocrity
#25 What is your imagination worth to you?

Pulling the Road Forward: PNB-NAPEO Summit

Lisa Canning — Mon, 30 May 2011 11:20:17 +0000

Lisa Canning, Founder of EntrepreneurTheArts.com, TheIAE.com and LisasClarinetShop.com

Well, today I leave for Washington for my first PNB-NAPEO (Partners for a New Beginning- North Africa Partners for Economic Opportunity) Summit. Madeline Albright will kick off our meeting and then we will spend two days in meetings that range from a PNB overview from the ground to Entrepreneurship for Women in the Middle East to clean water initiatives. Great stuff.

IAE is supported by Partners for a New Beginning’s North Africa Partnership for Economic Opportunity (PNB-NAPEO), a public-private partnership created by the U.S. Department of State. The mission of PNB-NAPEO is to build a network of entrepreneurs and business leaders in the United States and North Africa where both communities can identify projects that will foster entrepreneurship and job creation, especially for youth.

The meeting will be loaded with a lot of business folks interested in PNB’s mission from different vantage points. Gosh, what a big help this is going to be to The IAE. And what fun it is going to be attending such a high-voltage education oriented networking meeting. This will be a great opportunity to grow my network of support for The IAE and continue the transformation process- from idea into reality. Are YOU ready to transform from a caterpillar with 16 legs into a butterfly who, with just a single pair of wings, can fly?)

At the Summit, I am looking forward to meeting Naeem Zafar. Check out this blog post he wrote about the initiative.

The Four Minute Mile

It was called the greatest sporting achievement of the 20th century by many. No one believed that a human can run a mile in under four minutes. The belief was considered an ultimate barrier for generations. This disbelief was until one fateful day in 1955 when the British medical student Roger Bannister broke the barrier by a hair. He ran a mile in just under 4 minutes. Unbelievable feat! Never in the history of mankind had such had an accomplishment ever taken place.

But within one year the record was broken again. By seventeen other people!
What does this tell us? The clarity is profound for me as an entrepreneur. The barriers are often mental. We convince ourselves that it cannot be done. It is not until we see others do it that we believe it might be possible after all. Such was the turning point for the entrepreneurs in the Middle East and many Muslim majority countries when Maktoob, an Arabic language web portal and email service, was acquired by Yahoo for $160M last year.

“Tell the stories” – telling simple stories about how somebody did it makes a huge difference in somebody’s life – some place far far away. This was my main message as I attended and spoke at the TechWadi event at the presidential summit on entrepreneurship in Washington DC this week. This was a follow up from President Obama’s historic speech in Cairo on June 2009 when he promised a new beginning on how US communicates with the muslin majority countries in the world. Obama asserted that a new chapter in US foreign policy that is based on mutual respect and dialog will usher a new era. Well this was the follow up and it was a great week. We had the opportunity to hear so many stories from entrepreneurs from 55 countries on how they innovated and created compelling companies.

I was moved by the story of Puni, an Indonesian entrepreneur who invented, sold and installed 60 micro power plans that can generate water if there is a water fall of 3 meters or more. She told the story of how it brought electricity to remote villages and how that changed lives. I was also moved by the story of a Turkish entrepreneur who started a service to enable remote order taking and delivery of food from restaurants by signing up 4000 restaurants. He is doing 22,000 transactions per day and is very profitable.

Several initiatives were created and the US State department is encouraging collaboration and providing the infrastructure now that should make America’s greatest strength and innovation (Entrepreneurship) its strategic piece of diplomacy.

Check out these ebooks that Naeem has written. I can’t wait to meet him. Imagine the possibilities for art and culture, as a ‘sector’, to create innovative new businesses and job strands in the U.S. and North Africa? I am.

Market Research on a Shoestring!

Get a Reality check on your big idea for under $100. By Naeem Zafar, University of California, Berkeley

Entrepreneurs don’t like to do market research. Whether they find it unnecessary, think it takes too much time and money, or are simply terrified by the idea, they often start up their businesses without the necessary preparation or understanding of exactly what they are getting into.

But market research doesn’t have to be an expensive, unbearably time-consuming nightmare. It is an essential aspect of starting a new business that can be conducted quickly and easily if you know what to look for and where to look. Market Research on a Shoestring is full of techniques, tricks, and secrets that will help you ask the right questions and find the answers you need to better understand your business and the market it faces. If you want to raise funds for your startup or simply maximize your chances of success, you need this book!

Get Funded!

A Definitive Guide to Seeking the right funding at the right time and from the right source
By Naeem Zafar, University of California, Berkeley

Entrepreneurs need funding at various stages of their companies’growth. This to-the-point book is your essential guide to the funding process. Organized into three sections, this book outlines the likely sources of funding and how they operate, how to approach investors, and the 12-step process of getting funded.

As a valuable bonus, Get Funded! includes the names of several hundred angel investors and venture capital firms.

If you are serious about seeking funding for your startup or simply want to know your options, you need this book! This book is the complete guide to seeking and getting funding that all entrepreneurs look for and seldom find.

The Entrepreneur’s Legal Guide to Starting Up

By Naeem Zafar, University of California, Berkeley

A simple, to-the-point guide that outlines the decisions all entrepreneurs must make when setting up a legal entity. This eBook is packed with practical, time-tested tips and suggestions about incorporation, hiring the right lawyer, registering patents, and
minimizing your legal bill. The eBook includes a step-by-step guide to finding and hiring the right lawyer for your company and offers proven strategies that will save you thousands on your legal bill. There’s also an easy-to-understand chart explaining the differences between the various corporate structures and offering a quick guide to the most common legal issues plaguing entrepreneurs, as well as effective methods for overcoming them.

Knowing the ins and outs of setting up a startup and picking the right lawyer isn’t a matter of intelligence—it’s about experience and expertise. You may have a great deal of both when it comes to your industry, but most entrepreneurs don’t know much about the law. Your strengths lie elsewhere. As a result, you may find yourself intimidated by the idea of selecting legal counsel.

The Definitive Entrepreneur’s Guide to Lawyers:

35 Little-known facts, secrets, techniques, and tricks to making sure you get every penny’s worth of value from your lawyer By Naeem Zafar, University of California, Berkeley

Containing nearly three dozen money-saving, angst-minimizing tips, The Definitive Entrepreneur’s Guide to Lawyers is a go-to resource for the entrepreneur who wants to streamline the budget while leveraging the most effective legal services available. The guide includes a step-by-step guide to finding and hiring the right lawyer for your company, an easy-to-understand chart explaining the differences between the various corporate structures, proven communication strategies that will slash your legal bill by half each month, and a quick guide to the most common legal issues plaguing entrepreneurs, as well as effective methods for overcoming them.

Knowing the ins and outs of picking the right lawyer isn’t a matter of intelligence—it’s about experience and expertise. You may have a great deal of both when it comes to your industry, but most entrepreneurs don’t know much about the law. Your strengths lie elsewhere. As a result, you may find yourself intimidated by the idea of selecting legal counsel.

Finance Essentials for entrepreneurs:
A Simple Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Statements for Your Business. By Naeem Zafar, University of California, Berkele

Finance Essentials for Entrepreneurs is a startup owner’s indispensable guide to basic finance. Zafar draws on two decades of entrepreneurial experience to create an eBook that offers a simple, proven method for understanding the most important elements of financial management for businesses. Zafar understands what entrepreneurs need to know about business finance. He also knows that their time is precious. In Finance Essentials for Entrepreneurs, he delivers that knowledge in practical, to-the-point language free of technical jargon and longwinded discourses. Spreadsheet examples
are clear and relevant.

About Naeem Zafar

A member of the faculty of the Haas business school at the University of California Berkeley, Naeem teaches Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the MBA program. Naeem is the founder of Concordia Ventures and focuses on educating and advising entrepreneurs on all aspects of starting and running a company. Naeem’s entrepreneurial experience includes working directly with six startups, and he has extensive experience in mentoring and coaching founders and CEOs. Naeem is now the president and CEO of Bitzer Mobile, a company that simplifies enterprise mobility.
Until 2007, Naeem was the president and CEO of Pyxis Technology Inc., a company specializing in advanced chip design software for nanometer technology. Naeem has also been president and CEO of two other high tech startups (Silicon Design Systems and Veridicom, a Bell Labs spin-off that invented the silicon fingerprint sensors today found on most laptops). Naeem has held senior marketing and engineering positions at several companies including Quickturn Design Systems that had an IPO in 1993 and grew to $125M in revenues.
Naeem holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Brown University (magna cum laude), Rhode Island, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Naeem is a charter member of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs www.TiE.org ).He is also a charter member of OPEN (www.OPENSiliconValley.com ) where he serves as the president.

What’s Happening Down Under

Linda Essig — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:48:41 +0000

I had reason to read the Australia Council report on artists’ careers this week (http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/artists/reports_and_publications/artistcareers) and found the news simultaneously encouraging, grim, and enlightening. Forty-five percent of Australian artists make their living outside of the arts sector – not just day jobs related to the arts, but jobs that are not in the creative sector at all. On the other hand, artists report spending 80% of their time on creative or arts-related work. The overwhelming majority of those employed in the arts sector are employed in the design professions of illustrator, graphic designer, interior designer, or fashion designer. The proportion of arts sector workers employed in these applied fields has been growing steadily since the inception of the study in 1996, indicating that more arts workers are seeking – and finding — employment in the “applied arts” than in the “fine and performing arts.” Ultimately, artists are likely to develop what my (Australian) colleague Ruth Bridgstock calls “portfolio careers,” a mix of employment opportunities that enable artists to be creative in a number of different areas, which, when amalgamated make for a whole career. We see this phenomenon frequently in the US, where artists often combine their creative work with teaching positions or service jobs. The most touching part of the report was the quote from a young man in whose “portfolio” includes a job as a warehouse manager: ”I enjoy the balance between working in the warehouse and making art. The warehouse and driving the delivery van give me the headspace to come up with ideas for projects and problem solve projects I’m working on at the time. If I only made art I think I would burn out very quickly.” I guess that’s one way to put a positive spin on it…..

Experiential Immersion Teaches Entrepreneurial Mindset

Lisa Canning — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:30:00 +0000

My mom and dad at their foundry, Alpha-Cast, Thur July 8, 1976

What does experiential immersion really teach you about entrepreneurship? Well, welcome to the story of my mom and dad and the lessons I learned from watching my father and mother resuscitate a failing business, turn it into a wild success and then knowingly try and out run their foreign competition and go bankrupt again.

When I was growing up, I watched my father invest in a variety of small businesses. He was making so much money as a criminal attorney and needed somewhere to invest it. He was also very unhappy with his work and was trying to find an exit strategy.

As a result, my father frequently talked about the businesses he was investing in and what their challenges were at the family dining room table. Our dinner table was the place my family talked about business and politics when I was growing up. It became a tradition to learn over dinner. We rarely talked about our day, or routine subjects that might occupy a child’s mind like playing with friends, or some fun I had. Instead my father turned our meals together, especially those when my mother was passed out drunk at the dinner table, but also those where she was not, into an entrepreneurial-living-family-lesson-plan night after night.

But one subject matter that was strictly off limits was my fathers career as a criminal attorney. He would simply never discuss it. I am sure he represented mobsters, murders and vicious criminals and successfully got them off the hook for their crimes. My dad simply, eventually, couldn’t take their “blood money” any longer and was seeking refuge by investing in other businesses in hopes one of them would draw him in. This much I knew from his few sparce comments and the jokes he made about his profession. My parents always told me, albeit in a joking manner, that one of the reason my dad had to get out of criminal law was because we didn’t have any more room in our house for any more artwork; our house was filled to the gills with artwork that was sometimes offered, in part, as repayment for my fathers legal services.

My father was in search of something he truly loved to do where he could help people and feel good about it. The investments he made into machines shops, and a fastener business (nuts, bolts, screws) helped him learn that the opportunity at the foundry he named Alpha- Cast was the one where he could really make a difference. Isn’t that what we are all seeking as artists and entrepreneurs- to make a difference? It took my Harvard trained father several investments in different businesses to figure out where he best belonged.

What drove my father was his belief in the power of helping people. Through law he thought he could help others to help themselves but he was wrong. All he did was postpone their wake-up call and allow them to continue to hurt others. His experiences dabbling in entrepreneurial investments taught him where he truly belonged. His work building Alpha-Cast and supporting over 200 families doing it was the best work I ever got to see him do.

And yet while building Alpha-Cast was my parents biggest joy, and the source of my mothers money spicket for clothes and the spoils of riches, it also just about financially destroyed my family when it later went under. ( But more on that for another post in the experiential-immersion- lesson lane.)

Just a couple footnotes about this article. First, my parents were living in a deluxe high rise over looking Lincoln Park in Chicago when they were also ” living in a motel” to jump start Alpha-Cast. Seems, as journalists often do, some of the facts are not quite right. And lastly, my parents did eventually build a chapel in the foundry and a big party room. Babies were baptized and couples were married there. It was the coolest thing to see my fathers dreams for Alpha-Cast come true. And as my father’s daughter, I guess it should be no surprise, that the lessons I learned from my parents have inspired me to want to help others make their dreams come true too.

A Call To Action!

Lisa Canning — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:46:27 +0000

OurÂ fortune cookies and No More Starving Artist Button Board were a big hit at the Chicago Creative Expo.

On Saturday April 10th, at the 7th Chicago Creative Expo held at The Cultural Center in Chicago, The IAE was in full blooming form.

Our imagination training ensemble, The Bite-Size Arts Ensemble, performed What’s Your Imagination Worth? to a just about full house in the Claudia Cassidy theater.

During the day, Bite-Size Arts Ensemble members Shawn Bowers, Lance Hall, Dharmesh Bhagat and a helper from our PR firm, PR Chicago maned the IAE booth, fielded questions andÂ handed out applications for our workshops and 2 year program. We had so many different kinds of artists stop by, and every imaginable question asked about our workshops and programs, that not only were these guys talking all day but they gave almost ever brochure, button, and application we brought with us away!

Meanwhile, I spent the day in the Consult-A-Thon helping artists work through various issues with their existing business or start-up ideas.

Bite-Size Arts Ensemble member Dharmesh Bhagat signs up a potential student to our mailing list.

Shawn Bowers fields a question about The IAE curriculum

Bite-Size Director Lance Hall answers questions about our 12 week imagination training workshop that begins June 7th.

Here are some quotes from emails I received already today from some of the artists I met at the Consult-A-Thon!

“Thank you for giving me such a positive experience at the Consult-a-Thon.”

“You showed me so many different angles to look at things I would have never thought of (or it would take me a very long time).”
“I’m still decompressing from this weekend but willÂ regroup and take action!”

Is Your Imagination Worth Investing Into? The Bite-Size Arts Ensemble gave away over 300 fortune cookies with our special message inside.

“Just wanted to tell you thanks for the wonderful meeting on Saturday at the Expo. You may have changed my life!”

“You gave me so much to think about. I have been in a buzz with friends ever since.”

I have already signed up for the boost camp online..”

So what about you? While the Chicago Creative Expo 2010 may be officially over, the energy, enthusiasm and support for The IAE it created has just begun and we are calling YOU to action too!

Do you know whatÂ your imagination is worth? Is it worth investing into by becoming a Bite-Size Arts Ensemble member and creating your own show to build your communication skills and test your business ideas in our 12 week workshop beginning Monday June 7th?

Or what about shaping or re-shaping your business idea to create a better plan of action to move your career and ideas forward with our 2 week Boost Camp that starts Monday July 26th?

Or what about joining us and learning how to live life on your own termsÂ ONCE AND FOR ALL by attending The IAE’s 2 year weekend program that begins January 5th, 2011?

Early Bird registration discount of 20% for The Bite-Size Arts Ensemble Workshop or Boost Camp if you apply by May 15th. Discount code is: ICanFlourish

The Artist as Innovator: From Starving to Entrepreneurial by Thinking Outside The Box

Lisa Canning — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:19:14 +0000

I wrote this article for the Chicago Artists Resource (CAR). I thought you all might enjoy reading The Artist as Innovator: From Starving to Entrepreneurial by Thinking out of the Box. And besides, if you have not checked out The Chicago Artists Resource site before you should – it is a great Chicago based deep resource and one stop networking site. Over 50,000 artists stop by each month for a read or to share.

And for all you local artists- this Saturday is the big event! The Chicago Creative Expo runs all day! The Bite-Size Arts Ensemble is performing at 1:30 in the Claudia Cassidy Theater.Â I am also offering free one on one consultations.Â The consult-a-thon will be on the 5th floor on the Washington side of the Cultural Center, 78 E. Randolph. To schedule an appointment click here. I am also willing to set up additional times after the expo for any of you who are unable to schedule a time with me there. Email me at lisa@theIAE.com if you are interested.

Here is the complete list of all of the FREE workshops being offered at the expo and where they will be held! Hope to See you this Saturday at the EXPO!

Why is The IAE Relevant and Necessary? A Case for The IAE

Lisa Canning — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:02:57 +0000

A Case for The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship

Introduction:

Founded in 2008, The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship (The IAE) is a Chicago-based 501c(3) organization committed to helping artists create sustainable artistic careers through achieving self sufficiency. Our mission is directly tied to the belief that artists have an extraordinary amount of yet-to-be-realized value they can provide to society, especially in these economically challenging times, if they can be taught to apply their artistic capacity in new ways to allow their talents to become relevant and necessary.

The 2009 Artists and the Economic Recession Survey created by Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) demonstrates how financial difficulties can impact an artists ability to sustain a productive creative life:

Artists often have to hold multiple jobs to make ends meet – 66% hold at least one job in addition to their artistic practice, while 21% hold two or more additional jobs.
Two-thirds reported their total 2008 income was less than $40,000, including nearly one-third who earned less than $20,000.
Artists have experienced a decrease in sales of work (48%) or a need to lower fees/rates charged for work (44%), both of which suggest the arts are experiencing the contraction in consumer spending as much as many other industries.
More than a third of artists reporting a decrease in the monetary amount of grants (37%), the number of awards granted (36%), and the number of grant opportunities available (35%). More than a third of artists report that compared to 2008 they have fewer bookings scheduled (38%) and fewer opportunities to exhibit/perform/present their work (35%). About three in 10 say there are fewer services available by nonprofits (31%) and fewer teaching (30%) and artist residency (27%) opportunities.

And yet these financial challenges pose more than the obvious problems they reflect in an artists ability to create their art or deliver quality cultural experiences to their audience. It is the belief of The IAE that the economic stability of artists, or lack thereof, has not only significantly contributed to the erosion of the demand for cultural and artistic expression in general but, in today’s economic environment, has put at risk the very need for it to exist entirely.

With roughly 100,000 fine arts majors graduating each year from institutional arts programs around the country, and no decline insight of prospective students who want to study art, the fact that only 2.1 million tax payers in the US report that they earn a living as artists demonstrates the attrition rate after graduation is quite high.

While the romantic stereotype of the starving artist to a young artist/student initially often serves to only further fuel their artistic imagination and desire of what life can be like living a bohemian lifestyle, comments from family, friends, employers, colleagues, and distant admirers as to their career prospects as an artist, once he/she graduates, creates both external and internal pressure to embrace a profession that assures stability. After all, even the bohemian lifestyle of an artist gets old when you can’t afford your car payment, let alone buy a house and raise a family which an annual income, at best, of $40,000 a year income does not provide.

The IAE believes that the rate of attrition of post-graduates has contributed to the decline of the creative sector. The value of the full-time work these artists could have been doing has never been realized inside the communities they would have served. And the communities in which these artists began to work experienced, on some level, these artists inability to survive — reinforcing the lack of relevant value the arts must hold, despite their patron’s attraction to them. Thus the notion of the starving artist syndrome continues. And as we know, perceptions create reality. And as such, over the course of a 40-year career span, the impact those artists could have made, we believe, has had a slow, steady and now significant and measurable impact on society’s view of the need and relevance for consuming cultural experiences in daily life today.

Henry Fogel in a speech he gave to the National Association of Schools of Music in November 2009 said this: Any careful examination of newspapers across America over a fifty-year span, will demonstrate dramatically the shrinking of arts coverage. Fifty years ago, every small town newspaper had an arts critic, sometimes more than one. Now, many smaller communities have let that lapse completely, and even many large cities have offered buyouts to retire their art critic, and chosen not to re-fill the position. Look at Public Television if you want further proof of the decreasing importance of the arts in America. Public Television was started precisely to broadcast programming that would have too small an appeal for commercial TV. (Never mind that in my youth, classical music was seen regularly on commercial TV, the Ed Sullivan Show, Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s concerts, the Voice of Firestone, the Bell Telephone Hour, and live operas on NBC). Now, PBS considers Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bocelli, or Andre Rieu to be highbrow programming. The number of symphony concerts, quality jazz, dance, and even staged operas, available in this country on television has been declining at an alarming rate.

Specifically, as a result of the absence of proper training to ensure more artists who graduate from art school can fill needs in their communities and financially afford to remain in the creative sector, we believe society has been left with little choice but to be unable to perceive the impact, value and relevance of the arts in their daily lives as a whole.

According to a 2003 major study, Investing in Creativity, completed by The Urban Institute and financially supported by over 38 foundations, only 27% of adults think artists contribute “a lot” to the general good of society, far fewer than recognize the social contributions of teachers (82%), doctors (76%), scientists (66%), construction workers (63%), and clergy (52%). The public perceives the contributions of artists in much the same way it perceives those of elected officials (26% say they contribute a lot to the general good), and just slightly better than it perceives the contributions of athletes (18% think they contribute a lot).

And yet, as noted by John Cimino, Creative Leaps International, scholar Thomas Homer Dixon says the space between problems that arise and our ability to solve them- the ingenuity gap- is growing today at an alarming rate in business, scientific research, education, the environment and world affairs. And innovative thought leaders like Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink and Richard Florida are helping to create a mindset that the arts, and artists, are capable of offering so much more to society. Author Ken Robinson proclaims we are Out of our Minds to have sidelined creativity and the arts when every layer of American society from elementary education to supply-side economics is starved for more imagination, more original thinking, and more creative intelligence. According to business writer/entrepreneur Daniel Pink, “Artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big-picture thinkers“ can now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys. Economist Richard Florida argues that artists and other members of the “creative class” are vital to regional economic development. He suggests that they comprise the vital cultural core essential to attracting and developing workers for knowledge industries, which are increasingly important to the U.S. economy.

In these economic times, innovation is a critical tool that can grow revenue like never before and catapult our largest companies and newest start-ups to new levels of international competitiveness and profitability that we truly need to not only save, but redefine how we achieve our future economic vitality. Certainly the arts offer, with training, fertile ground to devise new ways to contribute and become vital, integral and again relevant to society.

After all, the visceral nature of the arts provides a unique barrier breaker -a unifier- regardless of race, religion, gender, age, status or income across all sectors of society and industry. No matter what the subject matter, using the arts in new interdisciplinary ways can bring people to new levels of understanding and simultaneously create new sustainable financially viable career paths for artists.

According to the Investing in Creativity study by The Urban Institute, their research suggests there is a substantial demand for artists in hybrid markets and yet few programs exist to support their development. Artists are involved in art and community development, social services, education, health, civic engagement, and youth development, among other areas through arts-based organizations such as Project Row Houses in Houston, Street Level Youth Media and Little Black Pearl in Chicago, Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles, El Centro de la Raza in Seattle, Life Pieces to Masterpieces in Washington, D.C., Zumix and Troubador in Boston and many more examples can be found in every one of LINC’s case study sites.

Although many artists do important work primarily in the context of conventional cultural markets, LINC found scores of examples like the ones listed above. Investing in Creativity research suggests that many artists work in all of these sectors, either at the same time or switching from one to another. Their field research in fact highlighted this pattern. It also reveals that artists seem to benefit when there is a wide range of different sector opportunities in which they can engage.

And yet demand for what artists do is not fully conceived or well articulated, in large part because the formal validation mechanisms in both arts and non-arts contexts are relatively narrowly developed. For example, if an artist is working at the intersection of arts and community development and making contributions in both areas, it is very likely that the full extent of those contributions will not be recognized or valued in either the cultural realm or the community development realm. Moreover, adequate language to describe such practice and contributions currently does not exist. The IAE seeks to bring clarity to the value of these hybrid roles to the community by focusing on the development of self-sufficient career paths for artists who will be motivated to illuminate the value of their hybrid roles to society.

Additionally, arts administrators, researchers and analysts, funders and policymakers tend to view the public, commercial, nonprofit and informal sectors as separate realms with little connection to each other. Often artists seem to be categorized as “nonprofit” or “commercial,” as if those categories were mutually exclusive and as such funding sources are difficult to obtain and not rising in priority as demand, and need, is growing because of the cross pollination that occurs in a hybrid artistic role.

Respondents to the Investing in Creativity study emphasized the critical nature of peer-to-peer and mentoring relationships for training and professional development across the discipline spectrum and how important these relationships are to successful career transitions. Artists working at the intersection of arts and other fields, such as community development, education, health, justice, or other areas noted that the public validation and training programs needed to sustain and advance these practices is generally weak. Furthermore, many artists feel they lack the skills to market themselves to the wide range of realms where they could potentially be successful. Our own survey indicates similar results. Over 83% of all respondents have said they would undertake a two year course of study to increase their skills to earn a living as a self-employed artist. Additionally, LINC’s research revealed that many higher education and training institutions for the arts are not proactive in developing markets for artists or teaching them the business skills they need to succeed and that funding for such programs is virtually non existent.

The IAE believes that by helping artists imagine and create new innovative career paths we can play a significant role in helping both artists and the community rediscover new ways for artists to be recognized as contributing a lot of good though the development of self-sustaining hybrid careers that can become relevant to the communities these artists will serve. As such, through our programs at the IAE, we seek to helps artists grow their artistic imaginations about what is possible, while teaching them tangible necessary skill sets to give them the assortment of tools they need to turn their creativity into self-sufficiency.

The IAE seeks to make it possible for artists to develop a business arising from identifying gaps in the market place they can uniquely fill with a form of their creative practice. These businesses will be varied and may relate directly to a product, societal problem, service or process, a form of expertise, consultancy, or their values, beliefs or knowledge. IAE training will provide the means for artists to understand how to create the infrastructure and environment for new creative opportunities to be realized.

Although there are increasingly quality arts entrepreneurship courses and programs in colleges and universities around the country, given the attrition rate of artists exiting the field, the need for more quality programs is self -evident. Furthermore The IAE knows of no other school focused exclusively on the development of self-sustaining hybrid career paths in the arts leveraging the strengths of ongoing one-on-one mentorship and experiential learning across all artistic disciplines. The IAE is committed to bringing artists and their creativity into the center of economic activity.

Self Employment in the Arts 10th Conference (SEA) Feb 19-20, Lisle, IL

Lisa Canning — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:57:00 +0000

Happy 10th anniversary SEA! The SEA conference is coming right up and if you have never attended you need to! Come learn more about how to turn your artistic passion into a living from other successful artists.

What The Conference Offers

In addition to keynote presentations, topic specific sessions by artists, panel discussions, faculty sessions, and workshops,Â come hang out with a lot of really fun, creative artists and entrepreneurs.Â I will be speaking and hanging out there too! Hope you will join the fun.

Here’s the list of speakers and topics that will be presented:

Visual Arts:

Robert Fishbone â€“ Keynote & Social Media Panel
Jeanette Smith (Art Consultant) – Art Licensing
Robert Lee Fritz (3-D Artist) – Creating niches and corporate sales
John McDavitt (Commercial Artist) – Heroic Decision Making
Janet Bloch (Artist & Consultant) â€“ Exhibiting Professionalism
Andie Burchett (Pencil Artist) – TBD
Jessica & John Page â€“ Photography & New Business (Alum)
Ping Wu â€“ Fashion Design (Alum)

Media Arts:

Kelley Baker (Filmmaker) – Guerilla Marketing & Self-Distribution
Julie Freestone (Sundance Institute) – TBD
Jeffrey Fisher (Fisher Creative Group) – Be a Mobile Media Mogul

Performing Arts:

Matt Hennessy (Musician and Recording Engineer) – Recording Industry
Greg Eichelberger (Musician) – Creating & Managing a Career
Lisa Canning (Musician & Entrepreneur) â€“ New Economic Opportunities for Artists
Victoria Lyman (Dance Boutique)- Turning Your Artistic Passion into a Retail business
Vanessa E (Singer) â€“ Multiple Income Streams
Matt Boresi – Mock Auditions & ClosingÂ Keynote

Literary Arts:

Jennifer McCord & Sheryl Stebbins – Publishing Today
McCord & Stebbins – Writing a book proposal
(A limited number will have the opportunity to have a book proposal reviewed.
Please see website for more details.)

Nuts & Bolts:

Elizabeth Russell (Russell Law)- Legal Issues
Tim Kelley (Columbia College) – Legal Issues for Performing Artists
Kay Osborne (Drury University) – Accounting for Artists

Panel Discussions:

Marketing
Social Media & Websites
Portfolios
Getting Started
Faculty Sessions:
2 Faculty Panels of Coleman Fellowes
Pam Mickelson (Morningside College ) â€“ Brand Builder Matrix (for faculty & students)

Learn more about the speakers presentations:

Here is the schedule at a glance:

There is no time like RIGHT NOW to register! See you at SEA.

Can’t come to Lisle, Illinois?Â Here are a few other opportunities to get involved:

March 13th SEA OzArts : Coordinated by Drury University in Sprinfield, MO

March 26th & 27th SEA BizArts:Â Coordinated by Edmonds Community College in Washington

March 27th Southern Entrepreneurship in the Arts Conference: From Survival to Success
Coordinated by The University of North Carolina Greensboro

TBD SEA South: Coordinated by The University of Tampa

5 Decisions

Lisa Canning — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 05:22:33 +0000

Just got back from a wonderful clarinet-buying trip at Buffet-Crampon, the clarinet manufacturer I represent, who is in Jacksonville, Florida. It was an especially pleasant trip. My flights left and returned relatively on time, I was offered a convertible to drive as my rental car, and the B&B I always stay at, The Fig Tree Inn, offered me a new room – the nautical room- which I loved.

AND searching for great clarinets felt particularly easy this time. (I swear the French have good days and bad days drilling those damn holes in grenadilla wood. But this time, the great instruments fell one right after another all in a few serial number rows.)

Anyway, while I was having all this fun, I had a thought that you might enjoy reading about 5 decisions I made this week. So here they are in no particular order:

Five. My ability to have insight into a situation, make a decision and take action quickly– usually a skill set that makes me money, saves me time and I trust to protect my entrepreneurial life, cost me. I was just about to close on a small condo in the city, that I intended to use periodically and also rent out occasionally to clients, when abruptly the mortgage company cancelled their mortgage commitment to me. I had made the mistake of advertising it online at Lisa’s Clarinet Shop that it would soon be available to customers passing through town. This particular mortgage company, as is the case now with so many of them, will not currently write any investment property mortgages. I did not think of this property as an investment property so it never dawned on me they would–my mistake. As a result, the seller became impatient and I lost the property.

Oh well. A bomb blew up in the mine field. It happens. ( It’s just in hindsight you feel pretty dumb. It’s that classically-trained-perfect-artist-syndrome inside of me- got to do it “perfectly” EVERY time. Though, neither my real estate broker or attorney thought to ask the question either… hmmm- they are suppose to be my trusted advisors who guide me to achieve what I am trying to accomplish. That is what I pay them for.)

Four. I made the decision of changing my new Not for Profit ensemble, The Bite-Size Arts Ensembleâ„¢, to a DBA (“doing business as”) designation, underneath the umbrella of Entrepreneur The ArtsÂ®. By doing so, I have turned ETA into a Not-For-Profit. Up until right now, ETA did not have a corporate identity. The reason I decided to do this is because truly the work of ETA is mission based. Changing the way WE ALL think about, and learn to create and act on, the imaginative potency of the arts as a catalyst for change- for us, inside corporations, universities and government too– just like President Obama is trying to do again by utilizing the creativity and artistry inside the NEA to communicate his agenda to the American people- this is a mission that is going to take a village and should be a NFP. (Oh, and if your not sure if you believe me google the equivalent of “The White House in bed with the NEA” and include a few words like propaganda, partisanship and socialism. Is this really what you want to see happen? Are we really going to lie down and just accept letting others lead us towards becoming an extinct breed? Does innovating your artistry matter to you? What if this is truly how you need to learn to leverage your artistry so you can experience change– and see how someone can change how they feel about themselves and the world because of what you do? )

Three. Likewise, I had an inactive LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) set up for the book I wrote. The one that Susan Schulman, (Richard Florida’s agent) agreed to represent on my behalf, Starving Artist Not! (That at Susan’s insistence became Build A Blue Bike) — but the book never sold–

And so this legal entity has been sitting idle.

So this week, I decided to remove the name Starving Artist Not! on the articles of incorporation document and sent a name change to the Secretary of State to replace it with The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurshipâ„¢. Since The Institute of Arts Entrepreneurshipâ„¢ is founded in the concepts of developing an artist into an artistic entrepreneur, the same founding principals in my book, it seemed to make sense. And of equal importance, since the school’s purpose is to help artists create artistic ventures, and not to act as angel investors, we will not, and cannot, assume liability for others actions or businesses.

Equally, this change in our legal status made good sense– we should be an LLC and limit our liability.

Two. I decided to hire, part-time, an actor, Shawn Bowers, who has this amazing gift for social media. After careful consideration I decided if social media was good enough as the primary PR engine for President Obama’s campaign to be elected as President, its plenty good enough to serve as the platform for my PR to promote ETA and IAE. Shawn wrote the press release titled “Chicago Arts Incubator at Flourish Studios” in two hours beautifully, didn’t he? On his first week on the job he set up a Facebook page, Twitter account and identified over 50 blogs and websites to send press to about ETA, Flourish Studios and The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurshipâ„¢. He is off to an A+ start.

One. I managed to decide I would submit an mp3 of my recording of “Shiva” to the folks at UT- Austin who are in charge of organizing the The International Clarinet Association Conference for 2010. I asked to play and I think they might just let me– but I’m NOT advertising they are here. (That already cost me once. I hope the lesson is now learned.) Bless their hearts- really. They get SO MANY requests and everyone comes with their agenda’s jockeying for position– I hate to add one more to their load.. it seems always so political to me. Most of these conferences feature the same twenty-five GREAT artists year after year. No imagination required. Hope this one in Austin steps outside the ICA’s comfort zone a little bit and extends far into the great musical list of creative imaginative and freelancing less-well-known clarinetists.

Box? What Box?

Shawn Bowers — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:23:56 +0000

Allow me to play the devils advocate for a moment and ask “What’s wrong with thinking inside the box”? It’s dull, certainly, and not very rewarding, and usually quite a tedious process, but other than that, what is the harm? When did “thinking inside the box” become such a social stigma? When did it become something to scorn and malign instead of something to build upon? It occured to me today, as I was trying to describe what qualities I found most valuable when I was looking to hire someone, that the qualities I prize the most highly in someone that I plan to work with are very much “inside the box” qualities. They are as follows: – Show up. (On time). -Meet your deadlines. – Don’t complain too much in between. They sound obvious because they are. They are quintessential “inside the box” qualities that require no skill or special training to achieve. They are dull, tedious, and unrewarding to the extreme; surely they are worthy of our scorn and ridicule? Or are they? I happen to think that these are invaluable qualities, whether they’re boring or not. In fact I might even go so far as to say that the ability to show up, to get things done, and to do it with a pleasant disposition are the key elements to success. Showing Up Don’t you hate it when you’re sitting at home minding your own business and someone knocks at the door and offers you a job with full benefits and a nice plump starting salary with flexible hours and a company car and a generous annual bonus? What’s that you say? You say this has never happened to you? Oh, right. This is reality. The expression “opportunity knocking” I think is very misleading. Opportunity never knocks. It walks in without asking and if no one is around when it gets there then it walks out again. Showing up may sound like a stupid piece of advice, but sometimes that’s all it takes. It is the easiest way to get noticed. For example, I was casting a short film a few years ago and a gentleman showed up for the audition. Since the film was silent, and since he was a voice actor, he decided that it probably wasn’t the right role for him but he left a headshot and resume and I added him to my mailing list. Several weeks later we had a fundraising event and I sent out email announcements to my mailing list. He came to the event and reintroduced himself and I was very pleased and impressed that he had chosen to take the time to come all the way out for an event to fund a film that he wasn’t even a part of. When it came time to cast our second film I made sure to send him an email to invite him to the audition and when it came down to the final three actors and I was trying to decide between them I said to myself: “These three actors are all very talented, but I know that THIS one will show up.” And that was the deciding factor. Meet Your Deadlines Henry Ford invented the assembly line to speed up the manufacturing process; a team of individuals each with a specific task that needed to be completed before the item being built could pass to the next person. One worker would tighten a bolt, the next would pull a lever, the next would add a spring and so on until a Model T rolled off at the far end. Now imagine if the first worker didn’t tighten his bolt. The next worker couldn’t pull his lever, the fellow after him couldn’t add his spring, and no cars would roll off the end of the line. The entire team would be held up waiting for one person to do their damn job, and in the end nothing would be accomplished. This is an exaggeration of the importance of deadlines but only a small one. Filmmaking is, like many activities, a team effort. It takes an incredible amount of effort to get a production rolling and only one small grain of sand in the works to bring it to a standstill. If a costumer doesn’t have a costume ready in time then the actors, the cameraman, the gaffer (that’s the lighting guy), the director, the sound engineer and so on all have to wait for it to be finished and production grinds to a halt. I’m unfairly picking on costumers here, but really it could be any member of the team holding up production; an actor without lines memorized, a sound engineer without the proper equipment, the cameraman with dirty lenses, etc. The point is, if you’re part of a team (and we all are, in some way or another) other people depend on you to get your work DONE before they can do their part. I’ve worked with some people who were innovative, creative, masterful, geniuses in their field, but who couldn’t get a single thing finished in time. I always think twice about working with them a second time- is the quality of their work worth the time and expense of having to wait for them to finish it? Sadly, the answer is often “no”. I’d rather have a functional Model T roll off the end of the line than to hire a virtuoso bolt-tightener who is going to hold up the line. Don’t Complain Too Much There are two schools of thought on this: One is “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” and the other is “The squeaky wheel gets replaced”. At times, it is appropriate to bellyache a little bit about any job. The hours are long. The pay is bad. The expectations are unreasonable. I worked one summer in a Summerstock repertory theatre in the costume department. Summerstock theatre is incredibly intensive. We would work twelve hour days, in the basement of a theatre, six days a week, for three weeks until the main show went up. I would see the sun for 15 minutes in the morning and for a few minutes at lunch and dinner breaks. Complaining was something we all did exceptionally well and with great abundance to blow off steam and to comiserate. The point is that even though we whined a lot, we still did the work and put in the hours. Complaining is natural when things suck, but when complaining becomes more important than getting the work done it becomes a problem. I intensely dislike working with the kind of person who complains about the work they have while doing nothing. It takes a supreme effort to motivate them to do anything which invariably leads to the rest of the team needing to do more work to compensate. The more the rest of the team has to work the more dissatisfied they get and the less they want to work and the more motivation it takes to get them going. Give me someone who will work in spite of their complaints any day. So maybe the point of all this is that we should think of The Box as a toolbox, instead of as a trap. The tools we keep in it are pretty basic: a hammer, a screwdriver, a tape measure, etc but we wouldn’t try to build our dream house without them. Why would we try to build our dream job without basic tools like showing up, meeting deadlines, and not complaining too much? And who knows, The Box could be handy as a step ladder for reaching those lofty goals or as an ballast when we need to steady ourselves in troubled economic tides. Maybe The Box iteslf is our most important tool whether we’re thinking inside it or thinking outside of it.

Jump Start Your Life- I have the spark plug

Lisa Canning — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:16:59 +0000

One of the reasons I want to write books is because books, art, poetry and film, as examples, all intrinsically are built to last. Their very form offers easy “spark-creating-experience” access, like a hand full of nourishment going right into our mouth. Love that rush of energy that follows, don’t you? You know, the part before you get tired?

While it is impossible for a memory to replace the actual real time experience of euphoria, or intense joy, anger or sadness– only the kind a work of art can deliver, it can be waiting eagerly for you on a shelf, if it’s a book, or hanging on your wall.

What a basic concept entrepreneurship is for artistry, and yet without this simple “must have”, generations upon generations have defined who we are and what we are capable of creating for others in life, through a very narrow, confining, and as I see it, rather destructive single lens.

In honor of the power of the written word to enlighten and transform, here is my recommended reading list to jump start your very best you in 2009.

Do You Want to Become More Entrepreneurial?
* Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, by Bo Burlingham

* The Art of The Start by Guy Kawasaki

* Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies,
by Michael Gerber

* Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, by Richard Florida

*The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live, by
Scott A. Shane

*Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, by Barry J. Moltz

*Birthing the Elephant: A Woman’s Go-For-It Guide to Overcoming the Big Challenges of Launching a Business, by Karen Abarbanel and Bruce Freeman

Marketing Maven
* Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin

* The New Marketing Manifesto: The 12 Rules for Building Successful Brands in the 21st Century (Business Essentials) by John Grant

* The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

* Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say by Douglas Rushkoff

* Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

* The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing by Emanuel Rosen

* The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott

Organizational Development
* The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market by Michael Treacy

* Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins

* The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky

*First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham

* Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham

* Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

* The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

Financial Health Check
*The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical & Spiritual Steps So you Can Stop Worrying by Suze Orman

* Finance Your New or Growing Business: How to Find and Raise Capital for Your Venture by Ralph Alterowitz and Jon Zonderman

*Conscious Finance: Uncover Your Hidden Money Beliefs and Transform the Role of Money in Your Life by Rick Kahle

*The Seven Stages of Money Maturity: Understanding the Spirit and Value of Money in Your Life by George Kinder

*The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life by Lynne Twist

Reaching for Greatness
* The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

* This Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love by Tama Kieves

* Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland

* The Everyday Work of Art by Eric Booth

* The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer

6 Tips for Using Free On-line Business Tools

Lisa Canning — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:33:17 +0000

January’s Entrepreneur Magazine offered these six tips on using free on-line tools:

#1
Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to use it. “Because there’s so much out there, businesses have a tendency to be like a kid in a candy store,” says Drew McLellan. “Start with the strategy of what you want to accomplish, and then find the tool that will allow you to do that.”

Adds Mike Whaling, “It’s a matter of figuring out which tools are right for your business. Know your audience, and then go to where they are already having conversations.”

#2
You don’t have to figure it all out by yourself. McLellan suggests doing a simple Google search on a tool or task you want to accomplish. “You’ll find people talking about it,” he says. “And people are incredibly quick to share what they know.”

#3
Don’t lose your company’s brand. Using a variety of tools can lead to an inconsistent company image and voice. Says McLellan, “Run it through the litmus test of â€˜Is this right for my business? Does it portray my business the way I want?’” Whaling also emphasizes thinking about what your business’s name will be associated with because many free tools are ad-supported.

#4
Push your preconceived notions aside. MySpace and Facebook aren’t just for the kiddies anymore. Says McLellan, “There are a lot of people conducting business on [these sites].”

#5
Does the tool have staying power? For every successful blog, video website or social network, there are dozens that won’t make it. So, again, talk with people online and discuss their experiences with the tool to gauge its stability and reliability.

#6
It may be free, but you still need to invest. Just creating a profile won’t cut it. Making the most of these tools requires time and effort, says Whaling. “There’s an investment in reading other people’s blogs, commenting on posts, getting involved in the community and building relationships.”

Can you get someplace in life for nothing?

Lisa Canning — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:25:57 +0000

Is it ever possible in life to get somewhere for nothing and have it be somewhere really good? Over the decades, we certainly have heard that “there is no such thing as a free ride” and that “if it’s too good to be true, it likely is”.

But these days, thanks to the internet, there is lots of FREE stuff online, much of which supports the entrepreneur and a start-up venture.

According to an article which appeared in Entrepreneur Magazine this month, Gary Vaynerchuck, co-founder of Wine Library, has been taking advantage of free business tools for nearly three years to grow his 11 year-old wine retail business. Using a combination of web-based tools, such as social networking, blogging and video, he’s taken his company to annual sales of $50 million. One way Wine Library uses these tools, is to notify his friends of daily specials by using MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, in place of email. His success with these tools has even landed him two book deals and regular speaking engagements across the country. “Building brand equity and connecting with your consumers through these social tools has a global impact on your business and your brand,” says Vaynerchuck, 33.

Alison Boris, 38, and Kathi Chandler, 31, have also been capitalizing on free tools since nearly the beginning of their LA based hand bag boutique, called AllyKatStyle. Besides a MySpace page, they also have profies on Digg and StumbleUpon, which are community content sharing sites, to grow their business.

All these free tools also mean that for even a small business, the “little guy” can look a whole lot bigger, not to mention more sophisticated. With a price tag of FREE, it’s hard not to want to take advantage and get on the ride to somewhere great.

Have I gotten your attention? Good, then let’s get you started:

Communication/Email
Dimdim ( dimdim.com)- open source web conferencing application; free basic service
Jott (jott.com)-voice-to-text service for creating notes, lists, e-mails and text messages; free basic service
Oovoo ( oovoo.com) -video messaging, chatting and conferencing
Paltalk ( paltalk.com) – Group IM, chat and video call application
Plugoo ( plugoo.com) -direct chatting with any blog or site visitor
YouSendIt (yousendit.com)- send files up to 2GB; free basic service

Content, Media, Video
Audacity (audacity-sourceforge.net) Open source software for cross-platform audio recording
Blip.tv: (blip.tv)- Video blogging, podcasting and video sharing service; free basic service
BlogTalkRadio (blogtalkradio.com) radio network for users to host their own shows
DropShots ( dropshots.com)- Video hosting and photo sharing
Feedburner ( feedburner.com)- media distribution services for blogs and RSS feeds
Fix My Movie ( fixmymovie.com)- Video enhancement service; free basic service
Paint.NET ( getpaint.net)- image and photo editing software
Phixr (phixr.com)- picture and photo editor
Seesmic (seesmic.com)- Video conversation platform
SlideShare ( slideshare.net)- Share and embeded slideshows. Powerpoints and PDF’s into web pages
VideoSpin ( videospin.com)- video-editing software

Financial
BizEquity ( bizequity.com) – company valuations
Mint ( mint.com) – personal finance, money mangement, budget planning and financial planning software
MyBizHomepage (mybizhomepage.com) – financial dashboard for small business Quick Book users
QuickBooks (quickbooks.com) small-business accounting software; free simple start 2009 download)
Wesabe (wesabe.com)- Financial advice, analysis and planning

Marketing, Networking, PR
Wordpress (wordpress.com)- Blog publishing tool
Craigslist ( craigslist.org)- Online classified and job posting network
CollectiveX ( collectivex.com)-Create social networking and collaboration sites for groups
Digg (digg.com)- content sharing site
Linkedin ( linkedin.com)- Business social networking site
Pligg ( pligg.com)-Open-source, community-centric site for discovering, rating and sharing content
PolicyMap( Policymap.com) -Geographic and demographic information system for creating custom maps, tables and chartes; basic free service
YouNoodle ( younoodle.com)-Netowrking for startups and valuation with Startup Predictor
YourPitchSucks (yourpitchsucks.com) PR pitch reviewing and advising
Stumble Upon ( stumbleupon.com)- Content sharing site

Office Productivity, and Organization
Adobe Buzzword (adobe.com)- Collaborative word processor application
CutePDF Write (Cutepdf.com)- PDF creator; free basic service
Dabble DB ( dabbledb.com)- Create, manage and share online databases; free basic service
Doodle (doodle.com)- Schedule, and coordinate meetings and other appointments
FreshBooks ( freshbooks.com)-Invoicing, time-tracking and expense service; free basic service
SurveyMonkey ( surveymonkey.com)-Create and publish custom online surveys; free basic service
ThinkFree Office ( thinkfree.com)-Office productivity suite; free basic service
WuFoo (wufoo.com)-HTML form builder for creating interactive forms;free basic service

Project Management, Collaboration
Remember the Milk (rememberthemilk.com)-Task management solution and to-do lists
Socialtext (socialtext.com)- Wiki and website collaboration; free basic service
Team Task ( teamtask.com)-Collaborative project management and community website builder
Yugma (yugma.com)-Web meeting and collaboration service

Web
Google Alerts ( google.com/alerts)- E-mail updates on choice of query or topic
KickApps ( kickapps.com)- platform of applications to integrates social features into a website
Microsoft Office Live Small Business (smallbusiness.officelive.com)- Create a company website, domain and email; free basic service
Synthasite ( synthasite.com)- Web hosting and building
Weebly ( weebly.com)-Website and blog creator
Widgetbox (widgetbox.com)-web widgets for various applications
Woopra ( woopra.com) -Web tracking and analysis application; free basic service

How The Grinch Stole Christmas

Lisa Canning — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:04:14 +0000

My wish for you, ON CHRISTMAS DAY,
will be for you TOO, to keep the GRINCH at bay!

But if by chance, you simply cannot,
Band mighty together, as a great big Who-Ville lot!

WWHHYY????? Smarty-Arty, I hear you say?

BECAUSE, with all your JOY stirring together,
the grinch who came to visit, just might feel a WEE bit better.

Merry Christmas, my dears, what’s your ETA,
to ENTREPRENEUR The Arts, in a new innovative way.
PLEASE COME WITH ME, lets ride far, far and away!

signed your friend, an artistic missionIST, a student of Dr. Suess-a-visionIST, gliding, and sent with love.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S3KM92s-pg]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL0uu_q2grc]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkDELa8YSqY]

The story of Righteous Babe

Lisa Canning — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:04:45 +0000

The story of Ani DiFranco and how she and her partner Scot Fisher built Righteous Babe is a wonderful story about building artistry through a sense of community, the creativity to do so, falling in love, breaking up and the re-birth of relationships and the company. This story appeared in INC magazine and was written by Bo Burlingham, editor at large for Inc Magazine, who also wrote a book about companies that choose to be great instead of big called Small Giants. Righteous Babe fits right into this category!

Ani DiFranco is sitting in her dressing room at the Chicago Theater, six hours before a performance, and she wants to set the record straight. Money, she says, had nothing to do with her decision to reject all those offers from major record labels and start her own business. Nor did she turn down the offers out of fear of losing her artistic freedom. So what was it, then? “I didn’t want to participate in what big corporations are doing to society,” she says. “My decision not to work with a major label was not about me. It was about something bigger than me.”

There are, in fact, quite a few things bigger than Ani (pronounced ah-nee) DiFranco. She is, well, diminutive, although she hardly seems that way when she comes charging onto the stage at the start of a performance, her brown dreadlocks flying, her guitar blazing, her body twisting and turning in a blast of energy. Legions of fans can’t get enough of that energy and the music that goes with it. And yet, for all her artistic success, it’s often her commercial ventures that get attention — much to her chagrin. When Ms. focused on her business prowess in citing her as one of “21 feminists for the 21st century,” she fired off a letter of protest to the magazine’s editor: “Imagine how strange it must be for a girl who has spent 10 years fighting as hard as she could against the lure of the corporate carrot and the almighty forces of capital, only to be recognized by the power structure as a business pioneer.”

It is, however, a designation she can’t escape. Her record company, Righteous Babe Records, is one of the few successful artist-created labels around, having sold more than 4 million of DiFranco’s records and put out CDs by more than a dozen other performers. And it’s no ordinary company. In an industry dominated by giant corporations, Righteous Babe has the look, feel, and smell of a small hometown business. Staff members, for example, respond with handwritten notes to the thousands of letters the company gets from its customers, DiFranco’s fans. In return, the company elicits a level of devotion seldom seen in business. Customers go out of their way to protect it, patrolling the Internet and reporting on websites that try to sell unauthorized recordings of DiFranco’s music. Some fans are so passionate about the business that they come from as far away as Australia and Switzerland, not to see DiFranco perform, but to visit the company headquarters in Buffalo. “I’m standing here in total awe,” wrote one visitor from Los Angeles in the guest book.

And it’s not just the fans. Talk to the company’s record distributors, its printers, the manufacturers of its CDs, the concert promoters, not to mention its employees, and you realize that DiFranco and partner Scot Fisher have tapped into one of the most underappreciated forces in business, namely, the power of community. To do that while maintaining great margins is quite an accomplishment — especially for a company whose CEO believes, as DiFranco sang on a recent album, that “capitalism is the devil’s wet dream.”

Scot Fisher is a tall, quiet, somewhat diffident man who works out of a cluttered office at Righteous Babe’s headquarters. At 43, he still dresses like the construction guy he was when he first met DiFranco. Although he is usually referred to as her manager, the term does not do justice to the role he plays in her business life. Besides looking out for her career, he is the chief architect, co-owner, and operating head of Righteous Babe and its six component businesses, including a touring company, a retail operation, a music publisher, a real estate developer, and a foundation, as well as the record label. Together they do about $5 million in sales, mostly from DiFranco’s CDs and her touring. (Profits are harder to figure but probably run a bit less than $1 million a year.) Yet another venture, a concert venue, will open next spring in a restored church down the block, which will also house a jazz club, an art gallery, and the headquarters of Righteous Babe. In addition to complementing the other businesses, the concert hall represents a hedge against the uncertain future that Righteous Babe and all record companies face these days. “I’m in the buggy business, and it’s 1905,” says Fisher. “It would be insane to count on CDs being here in 10 years.”

“I’m in the buggy business and it’s 1905. It would be insane to count on CDs being here in 10 years.”
He wound up in the business almost by accident. Back in 1988, he was the co-owner of a small construction and housepainting company, and he’d recently moved into an apartment that the girlfriend of one of his partners was sharing with a woman she’d gone to art school with, an 18-year-old folksinger. One evening, he went to see his new housemate perform at a local bar. “It was sort of obligatory,” he says. “Then she started to play.” Nine years her senior, Fisher soon became DiFranco’s confidant and mentor. Along the way, they fell in love. At some point, Righteous Babe entered the picture. “In the beginning, it was more of a joke than a real business,” DiFranco says. “You know, ‘Yeah, uh-huh, I got a record company. You’re looking at it.’”

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that she would gravitate toward entrepreneurship. She’d been figuring out how to make her own way in the world from an early age. At nine, she was spending Saturdays busking at the local farmers’ market. At 12, she was making and selling cards of pressed flowers to earn money for horse camp. At 15, when her parents divorced, she moved out and lived on her own, largely supporting herself. Only once, in 1991, did she come close to signing with an established label, backing out as soon as she read the terms of the contract.

And yet, even without a contract, her fame spread. By the end of 1993, she had released five albums under the Righteous Babe label, and they were setting sales records at the folk festivals where she performed. Thanks to her constant touring, she was developing a loyal following, especially among young women, many of them lesbians who identified with her feminist lyrics and considered her one of their own. But Righteous Babe existed pretty much in name only. It had no structure, no organization, no full-time employees, and no office. DiFranco’s albums were getting very little radio airplay and couldn’t be found in most record stores. On top of that, she’d had a major falling-out with her business manager.

Into the breach stepped Fisher, who had been studying law while DiFranco was working on her music career. “I figured I could always be a lawyer,” he says. “When would I get another chance to manage Ani DiFranco?” DiFranco, for her part, had doubts about having her lover take charge of her business affairs. “In the end,” she says, “he just sort of declared himself my business manager.” Fisher says they had an understanding that he’d step aside if it turned out he was wrong for the job.

There was, in fact, little reason to believe he was right for the job. He lacked experience, credentials, and credibility in the music business. “It took [Ani's agent] Jim Fleming a couple of years to tell me that the first time I called, he thought, ‘Omigod, it’s the boyfriend.’” Fisher says. “But I knew where I stood. I knew people didn’t respect me. I’m from Buffalo. I’m used to it.”

To read the rest of the article click here

Words of Wisdom from 5 Top Entrepreneurs

Lisa Canning — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:51:55 +0000

Youâ€™ve got the artistic part down pat, Let us help with the rest*

“Sixteen years ago, we were cold calling and struggling to land our first client, The Port Authority of New York. New Jersey called us by mistake, attempting to contact a company whose name was silmilar to (ours). We kept them on the phone and discussed their IT (informational technology) infrastructure and project needs at length. Needless to say, they became our first client. We still laugh at this.”
Ranjini Poddar, Artech Information Systems LLC, Cedar Knolls, New Jersey
Began:1992 Initial Investment: $200,000 2003 Sales: 2.2 million 2007 Sales: 182.2 million

“The biggest mistake we ever made was undervaluing ourselves. When we started, we were young and hungry and we didn’t give ourselves credit for the amount of value we brought to our clients and strategies. So the lesson learned is: Don’t undervalue yourself and your expertise, and don’t let you size dictate your value.”
Shenan Reed, Morpheus Media, New York City, New York
Began: 2001 Initial Investment: $0 2003 Sales: 2.0 million 2007 Sales: 35 million

“It is important to take an inventory of your strengths and what you like to do. Focus on those things and get help for the others as soon as you can.”
Amy Langer, Salo LLC, Minneapolis, MN
Began: 2002 Initial Investment: $150,000 2003 Sales: 3.4 million 2007 Sales: 42 million

“Be a great juggler. As a woman in business, you will always have lots of balls in the air, including activities of running your business and being strategic in your decisions to grow your business. In many cases, ( you also have) the role of being a wife, a mother, a daughter and a sister. The same traits that make us great in all of these roles are the ones that you will rely on to excel in business.”
Leslie O’Connor, Search Wizards, Atlanta, Georgia
Began: 2000 Initial Investment: $0 2003 Sales: 359,600 2007 Sales: 12.2 million

“Build an atmosphere of trust and respect. You must always respect the (employees and clients) you work with. Believe in your people. Make your word count. In addition, never lose focus on your next challenge.”
Jeni Bogdan, The Saxon Group, Sugar Hill, Georgia
Began: 1995 Initial Investment: $100,000 2003 Sales: 13.4 million 2007 Sales: 81.8 million

*The image at the top of this post is an advertisement for The Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC), a nonprofit arts and culture service agency dedicated to Northeast Ohioâ€™s success by preserving and advancing its arts and culture sector.

A Sophomoreâ€™s Summer Building a Business

Lisa Canning — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:06:55 +0000

Kelly Penick has written a few articles on this blog. Here is another post about her progress building a business as a sophomore in college. I began working with Kelly, as one of her advisors, last year. Here are links to some of Kelly’s other posts to learn more about her journey.
My First Try at Buying a Business
Jumping Off a Cliff Daily Towards My Future
Her Passion: From a Freshman at Appalachian State, Boone, NC

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By Kelly Penick

Oh the click of the time clock on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 to 10am. This moment was my 600th hour of education at Artistic Academyâ€”and my moment declaring my completion. What a wonderful feeling to turn my timecard in for the last time.

I have to say that my leaving the Artistic Academy was bittersweet. I had grown close to one of the instructors and adopted her as one of my grandparents. Her hugs and loving words meant the most as we did our final toast with diet squirt cola and I hit the road for Raleigh. My mom and I were on our way their to take one of my state board exams.

As I rode along I reflected on the last few months. One of the goals that I can fondly look back on is one of the instructors saying that the Esthetician course takes 4-4 Â½ months to complete and I was able to beat the clock and make it all happen in 3 Â½ months.

Now that I am back at Appalachian State, the memory of this summer and what took place doesnâ€™t seem real. The fact that I can hand out a business card for All About Beauty by Kelly and tell people that I am a licensed Esthetician in the state of NC, almost doesnâ€™t feel real. Transitions for some are not always the easiest. I know for me I am prone to having a routine. And now I have to break into yet another one at ASU which include: school, work and leadership in the Entrepreneurs Club.

I am currently working in a day spa and paying the owner a weekly rent. I like this option because I am basically self-employed and can comfortably come and go as I please. But, I have found that the biggest obstacle thus far is the balancing act of school, work at the spa, and leading a student organization on campus. Due to this involvement in the Entrepreneurs Club, I am required to attend several business luncheons and events as well as work diligently with the executive board, and there goes my spa time out the door.

Right now I am really working on delegating the work and opportunities in the club. The club has seen tremendous growth this semester and I of course want to see it take on any opportunities that are possible. I feel that this leadership position in the club is only strengthening my own leadership skills as well as my communication skills, all of which I will always be using in my own business. â€œHow do I motivate people to get work done? How do I avoid doing all the work myself?â€ These are the most frequent questions I have been asking myself lately.â€

The way I look at it isâ€¦. I didnâ€™t go and put all my summer into getting this license and now that I have started school, fear that I am just going to never use it. I know that my priorities are a major factor in juggling my schedule and clearly defining those is what I am concentrating on presently. I want to be certain that my daily actions are always propelling me toward the accomplishment of my goals in life and to become a spa owner someday.

Top 10 Things Entrepreneurs Do and Know

Lisa Canning — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 02:36:17 +0000

#10 Know when to stop and cut your losses and know when to pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

#9 When you have been hit hard, and knocked down, stand right back up.

#8 Know success is part financial, part emotional and part about a healthy lifestyle.

#7 Givers gain. Always go out of your way to be the first to help someone regardless of if there is something in it for you. It’s all about karma.

#6 Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are.

#5 Hire people who are not like you, but bring different strengths to the table, that compliment your skill set.

#4 Cash flow is king. WIthout cash your out of business.

#3 Develop your instincts and trust them.

#2 Have a minimum of three and preferably a five year plan on paper including profits & loss and balance sheet projections. Remember: they are there as a “work in progress”, so you can change them as you progress along the way!

#1 Love the path you choose and passionately pursue it.