Mom's mass was held at this beautiful church.

Since her passing I have been gifted with a string of  JOY-FILLED miracles. There is no other explanation for WHY my life has ALL OF A SUDDEN lite up like a giant birthday cake with stunning sparklers and firecrackers going off. Maybe mom’s birthday card after all has arrived and her soul has been saved.  Let me explain.

For starters a university who I will not for awhile be able to name,  has stepped forward and is ready to explore how they can become The IAE’s  academic accreditation partner. Breathtaking all by itself and THE VERY NEXT THING we MOST need right now.

A general manager from a mid level theater but 7 blocks down the street from where the IAE will open, emailed me the other day and offered to donate rehearsal space to the school.  While  Flourish Studio’s is an IDEAL classroom setting, it is NOT an artistic noise producing one. We have been pondering how we would solve this problem close to our location and then this magically appears.

Next came a wonderful opportunity for me personally to present a workshop at the 2nd annual P.A.V.E. conference at ASU. I have always wanted to meet Ben Cameron from the Doris Duke foundation and now I will finally be able to! I am so honored to participate.

Last Thursday I had lunch with the chief editor of an established AND up-and-coming Chicago based magazine. She asked if she could help me edit my revised book proposal to repackage the book I wrote 3 years ago that did not sell; Build a Blue Bike. She wants to help because she believes my book needs to be published by a big publisher and wants to do what she can to help me finally get it sold.

Incredibly, as we were returning to her parking lot, and I was about to pull into the first open parking stall to drop her off, there was a Blue SCHWINN Bike chained to the fence.   I have a 1960′s Blue SCHWINN Bike I bought for my book still in boxes in my garage, and a whole presentation I created around the material in the book that involves taking it apart and putting it back together. There is also a blue bike that roles in on my flash intro to LisaCanning.com. It too is a Blue SCHWINN. I intentionally wanted a Schwinn because the bike I rode as a child was a blue Schwinn. I even had an exchange with the marketing people at Schwinn to gain access to their image files so that I could use their brand of bike to promote my book, when it was published.

According to my new publisher friend, there has never been a bike before chained to the fence in the lot; nor have they EVER seen this bike before. ( For those of you who don’t know-Build a Blue Bike was picked up almost three years ago by NY literary agent Susan Schulman and never sold; Susan has represented Richard Florida and Julia Cameron.)

In hind site I now realize what Build a Blue Bike was missing- a hook. And dear reader, my mother, through her death, has given me the hook my book NEEDS –the stories I am now FREE to share about our dirty little family secrets.  My mothers creativity in life and through her death is simply otherworldly; breathtaking. As spectacular as all my mom could be.

This week has TRULY offered me DEEP and PROFOUND blessings. The passing of my mother, and my tormented relationship with her clearly, finally, undeniably has ended through her physical death. I TRULY feel a profound peace and gratitude for this to have happened to me. I feel 20 pounds lighter and free. I can FINALLY TELL MY STORIES ABOUT HER TO HELP TRANSFORM so many artists creativity into something valu-ABLE; NOT rudderless!

And yes, while it made me sad that so few people loved my mother enough to say their goodbyes at her funeral other than my husband, my ex-husband, my brother, the mother of my best friend when I was 10, four of my friends and two of my mothers;  I have to tell you that all of this last week has offered me NOTHING short of divinely sent miracles.

You see, when you PLAN to clear your life of the debris that is IN YOUR WAY to lead the LIFE YOU WERE MEANT  to live– it’s not total destruction and annihilation you find at YOUR ground zero- but instead the source of true miracles that will define you for the rest of time. And trust me you will know when you have arrived at your Ground Zero and when your transformation has begun.

Although I do have to tell you that I felt as though the heavens above were playing a little joke with me on Thursday afternoon when I went to pick up my mothers remains at the funeral directors office.

When I arrived at the building, I walked down the hall the wrong way.  Quickly I realized that not only was the building being dug up all around it- just like ground zero- but that indeed the funeral directors office was inside DePaul University’s Rosemont Campus and was next to be torn down. I successfully helped build a program at DePaul but it was never the arts entrepreneurship program I had hoped it would be.  Symbolically, the school I had taught at for 10 years was being dug up and replaced by a casino.  My school FOR NEW LEARNING IN THE ARTS will NEVER BE REPLACED BY A CASINO! 

So here I am picking up my mothers remains at my true ground zero. All that preceded this moment was meant to help me grow but not meant to be permanent. All that is unfolding before me NOW IS my true and undeniable destiny. THIS IS one of the hardest lessons to learn, really; how to truly change our destiny through the choices we make and the emotional shifts we must learn.

Are you ready to learn?  Are you ready to find your rudder? Won’t you please apply to the IAE, or help us promote the IAE to others you know, or add our button badge link to your website?

Isn’t it time for ALL ARTISTS to learn how to make THEIR VERY OWN MIRACLES happen at a SPECTACULAR ground zero of their  VERY OWN?

Written by Nancy Davis Kho, Special to The San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Standing next to a barbecue shaped like a flying buzzard on a recent sunny afternoon, the winds coming over the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains to ruffle the ashy edges of a cooking fire, metalsmith Bill Sorich can be forgiven for waxing poetic. “Fire was the first entertainment, the first television,” Sorich says, adjusting the height of the grill holding homemade elk sausage by means of a pulley system rigged through the mouth of the bird, which stands 6 feet tall. “People just like looking at fire.”

Architectural designer Kristen Harrison understands the appeal – so much so that in the 20 years she’s known Sorich, she’s purchased five of his custom-made barbecues. “I keep two at my office, two at my house, and one at a house up in Oregon,” Harrison says. “I’ve had perfectly good steak cooked on a propane grill. But with these barbecues, once we’re done cooking, we throw a few logs on and everyone gathers around the fire. It’s really the original concept of barbecuing.”

This being Memorial Day weekend, there will be plenty of people flipping on the gas barbecue or dumping charcoal briquettes into a Weber. But for those who see grilling as more contemplative, there are a few Bay Area artists who have elevated the humble barbecue into art – art that cooks.

Surrounded and inspired by nature, Sorich, 62, lives with his wife, Lisa Hedstrom, a textile artist, in a house the couple built high in the Los Altos hills, near Skylonda. The house and expansive workshop, like much of Sorich’s art, make liberal use of recycled materials, and power is generated in part through solar panels and a windmill. Given the seclusion of the rustic property, it’s no surprise that animals are a recurring motif in Sorich’s whimsical fire pits and barbecues.

There’s an armadillo made from a discarded beer barrel, its individual stainless-steel tiles welded on and the sinuous tail working as a handle to open and close the top. With the top closed, the grill looks like garden statuary. “That one took me 10 years to think up, and three weeks to make,” says Sorich. Two tall iron barbecues, one shaped like an emu and the other a flamingo, have weathered to an orangey red, while a mini-grill shaped like a sea turtle looks ready to swim into the current.

“My idea of art isn’t something you hang on a wall,” says Sorich. He trained as an industrial welder and worked for Westinghouse for years but liked the creative challenge of making something from discarded materials. “I come from industry, so they have to work,” he insists of his fire pits and grills, which range in price from $500 to $15,000. “They’re guaranteed, for my life or yours.”

Q-ing up the ‘cues

By day, Don Carlson, 47, teaches welding to middle school students at Marin Country Day School. But by night, Carlson, who learned his skills as a pipe welder in the Navy, creates monstrous barbecues from recycled materials in his Richmond garage. Bobby-Q, Rooster-Q and Q-Ball are a few of the Monster-Qs that have emerged from found objects through Carlson’s artistic vision.

While they share a certain asymmetry and ferocious looking “mouths” that act as the grill’s opening, each barbecue is unique. “Finding the right pieces takes a while,” he says. “It’s a good thing I don’t do it to make a living,” Carlson quips, “because I have to make them at my own pace.” A typical Monster-Q, most of which are built around empty halon tanks once used in fire extinguishers, might incorporate wrenches, railroad spikes and chipping hammers in its quirky design. One Monster-Q even sits on discarded cafeteria table wheels for easy rolling.

“I go in with an idea of what I want to make,” Carlson says, “but the personality evolves as I work on it.” Carlson’s otherworldly barbecues, which cost $500 to $3,500, are mostly sold by word of mouth and at open-studio events. His next open studio is in conjunction with Pro Arts East Bay Open Studios.

Carnivorous art

After Brian McConnell finally finished redesigning his backyard in Twin Peaks, he didn’t want the standard barbecue setup. “I wanted to have a grill that looked like part of the garden and that was not immediately recognizable as a grill,” McConnell, an entrepreneur, said.

He turned to Oakland blacksmith Daniel Hopper to create something that would fit into the plant theme. Hopper, who tends toward organic, industrial designs, came up with the perfect form for a backyard barbecue: a carnivorous Venus flytrap. Using a cut-up Weber grill as a form around which to shape the sheet metal, Hopper designed two enormous flytrap-shaped barbecues and three companion metal pitcher plants for lights. Originally, one of the forged steel flytraps was meant for vegetarian fare and the other for meat, but McConnell says, “I think we lost track of which side is which.”

Of the design Hopper says, “I like my work to incorporate an element of danger that people feel compelled to address physically.” In the case of the flytrap, it’s evident in the long metal trigger hairs made from forged pipes: They’re handy to hang a utensil on but undeniably menacing. Extending well beyond the barbecue’s closed mouth, guests ignore them at their peril.

McConnell appreciates the fact that Hopper’s art isn’t static. “I entertain a lot and like the idea of functional art that people interact with. Paintings are nice, but a barbecue does something useful.”

But here’s some news: we don’t all have the same orientation to these different phases. Some steps give us energy, some take energy away. In some of the phases we feel at home, as though we could stay there forever. Others we may avoid. The trick is, in the world of the entrepreneurial artistry, we are pretty much obliged to make it through the cycle if we want to be successful. Here are some tips on how to leverage your strengths and support your weak areas:

Determine your style. It may seem obvious to you, but if you haven’t given it some thought, you may be surprised. Which do you get the most energy from: picking a direction, generating ideas, developing the ideas so they’re fully articulated, or implementing them and sending them into the world?

If you have drawers full of half-started poems, perhaps coming up with ideas is your strong suit. If you keep promising yourself you’re just about done with that composition, but you’ve been saying that since Obama was sworn in, you may be into the development stage. Maybe you’re strong on two, three, or even all four of the steps — that’s possible too.

Surround yourself with others who complement your preferences. Working in an ensemble to mount a new production? If the team is full of people who love to get the work out there, the production may risk being underdeveloped. Draw on the strengths of people whose preferences are different from yours.

Be patient with yourself. If being deliberate about what you want to work on is a complete mystery to you, and you find yourself half-way through a project before realizing it’s not what you wanted to do, make a note of that for the next time. Practice clarifying what you want before you jump in.

Understand that preference is not the same as ability. We may be proficient at all phases of the process, but some steps may kick us around the block before we’re done. Forewarned is forearmed for those more challenging steps.

Stick with it. The rewards of bringing our creative ideas from inklings to openings are worth the effort! They help build momentum for the next time around, and inspire the rest of us to go ahead and consider, conceive of, flesh out and finally…post that blog! (and here I go…)

Here’s Adam:

Before you make the first call to a presenter, you need to have done your research. Know who you are calling, what their tastes are, and have a sense of what about you might interest them. Be aware of any common acquaintances, shared interests, even alma maters. Just like a good pop song, you need a hook.

Once you get on the line, you need to get that hook in within 7 seconds. If you can’t state who you are, and get traction on the hook in that time frame, your sale is likely done for. The people you call are always going to be busy, so drop whatever names you need to drop toot sweet.

Now that you’ve got their attention, draw them out. Cite aspects of their series you appreciate and ask them to tell you more. Learn about their audience, demographic, and taste. When appropriate, tie in what you learn to facts within your own organization or presentation. If they talk about a runaway success they had with a particular style of performance, share the successes you have found recently—reviews, audience numbers, grants, etc.

If things are going well, send them more information electronically or by post so that they have time to live with your materials, mission, and body of work. Don’t make this first call too long. Rarely will you find a situation where you book a concert on this initial call. Don’t try to make this happen. Send more information, and let them know that you’ll follow up a week later to make sure they received it, and answer any questions they might have. This encourages them to review your materials in a timely manner, consider questions, and potentially be ready to discuss a project with you later on.

Booking a concert is a partnership between performer and presenter. The initial call is really just a cheap pickup line in a crowded bar. Get in there, get the digits, and get out. Better to follow up later if you want it to be a lasting relationship.

Adam is the pianist and Director of Artistic Programming for Fifth House Ensemble. For more information, please visit www.fifth-house.com. Like what you read here? For more music entrepreneurship tidbits, visit www.playingclosetothebridge.wordpress.com, brought to you by members of 5HE.

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Whatever daily energy you spend, is it enough? Do you wish you had more time to create your art? More money to help change the world?

While no one can produce more time- we all have only so much of it left- we can produce more money- increasing our life power source and its capacity to illuminate the important things in our life. And ironically, if we can learn how to produce more money in less time, we can also find ourselves having more time to spend doing those things that most matter to us.

Look- WHATEVER it is you dream about- what you need to do is increase the time you have available and generate more money to allow you to achieve “it” more vibrantly.

Welcome to why I hope you will join us for one of our summer workshops or apply to our 2 year program to attend  The IAE. We want our students to be artists first and forever. But we want each and every one of you to learn how to use your imaginations in new ways to learn new techniques and tools to lead you into a life that offers you more time and more money to become the brightest energy source you want to be.

I think a lot of artists think of money as something that they either have or do not. Got imagination? Come join us and we will help you grow your energy source so you can decide where to shine your bright light.

I’m trying to turn toward my peripheral vision to uncover my blindspot(s) — where an answer lies — but what I see and hear instead is this constant barrage from my mind: Get to your 14 things to do, go through those 4 different pending email folders, make those calls, strategize then plan then do then act then go, go, go or you are in trouble. To escape this noise, I click on an email and suddenly find myself reading Will Marre’s blog, where he is addressing something similar in his post “Take Back Your Life.” He describes the increase of stress in our personal work worlds, and this part speaks to me:

Those who have decided to work for themselves as consultants or starting a new enterprise have so much pressure to outperform that the velocity of our warship has to always be moving at “warp.” If we slow down the immense gravity of our death-star economy will crush us. Whew.

That’s it. The pressure I too often feel has put some kind of neck brace on me. I can’t turn my head toward a very real force that is trying to get my attention. This is why I’m so antsy. I need to shift but the immense gravity weighs on me and I can’t move.

So now I’m trying to access a different part of my being through the less rigid, right side of my brain. I rifle through some writing and find a poem of mine that recalls a long-ago moment in Napa, CA. Yes, this is close to the feeling I’m having.

I remember the need I felt then to dip my head into some different kind of water:

Every good business idea must go through a two step process to become a successful business

• First, you have to identify something people want that you uniquely can deliver.
• Secondly, you have to figure out how to make money giving it to those who want it.

Take Google for example- early on google did a fantastic job building a product people wanted. Google was equally able to get users, see massive user adoption and gain traction. They had only one problem- it took them literally YEARS to figure out how to make money doing it.

How many times have you experienced something you have created being interesting and desired in the market place but yet few, if any, are willing to pay (enough)  for it? Can you afford to fund your start-up for years, like google, without turning a profit until you can figure out how it will generate the right amount of income for you? It’s ok- don’t worry about it.  Not too many of us creative types– including this postmortem restaurantier– can.

You will have no need to forgive yourself if you learn how to iterate your idea INTO the perfect business for you.

On my way home from a meeting today I  found this empty restaurant on Randolph Street with the words Forgive Yourself scrawled on the awning. Did this chef/creative entrepreneur BEFORE they committed to an expensive location, and the possibility of both financial and emotional ruin, inexpensively and strategically test and iterate their concept until they were certain it would work as they envisioned?

You will never have to be in the position of having to “forgive yourself” if you have the proper training and entrepreneurial support systems around you to build the know-how to test, iterate and ultimately launch a creative enterprise.  There is a reason why it takes 2 years to go through The IAE. It’s because we know what it takes to help you to help yourself succeed…

Our 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 and  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 will  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 what 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 terms  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

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.  I am also offering free one on one consultations.  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!

Leslie Fishbein, president of Kacey Fine Furniture, was idly watching a T-Mobile commercial when inspiration struck. What if we replace our drivers’ cell phones with camera phones, she wondered. That way, she figured, delivery personnel at the Denver retailer could take photographs at their destinations to show that they had not damaged a customer’s walls or floors — or, if they did, document the problem instantly.

Not especially revolutionary or groundbreaking, Fishbein knew, but clearly a step forward. In fact, that’s exactly the kind of modest brainstorm for which Fishbein constantly is hunting. Her six-show-room chain thrives on new ideas. Fishbein collects them in three-ring binders. Since 1995, she’s filled four such binders — at 10 to 20 ideas per page and 200-plus pages per binder, that’s more than 10,000 ideas. And the best ones, she says, often turn out to be those that at first appeared simple, even mundane. “The point,” she says, “is not the big hit but incremental improvements all the time.”

What about the killer app, the bold, outside-the-box brainstorm that is supposed to transform organizations? If you really care about making ideas work for you, forget such ambitious notions, say Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder in their new book Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations. Rather than big, competition-leapfrogging advances, the authors argue that one of the keys to business success is the constant implementation of small ideas — just like the steady stream of employee suggestions Fishbein collects in her binders. Why singles instead of home runs? The competition inevitably copies or counters your home runs, rendering those gains ephemeral. But after studying idea-generation tactics at 150 companies in 17 countries, Robinson and Schroeder concluded that small ideas, especially those particular to processes or systems, improve companies in almost Darwinian fashion with ongoing small adaptations that are often impossible to copy.

What’s more, the best small ideas often take on a life of their own, generating a torrent of related suggestions. Consider Fishbein’s experience with the camera phones. The new devices had barely been distributed before the company’s 205 employees began chiming in with all sorts of additional suggestions. Indeed, documenting delivery damage is now only one of the phones’ many uses. Faced with a tight stairwell or narrow hallways, delivery crews now show the bottleneck to Kacey’s director of transportation, who can often advise them over the phone instead of rushing to the scene. Loading dock workers document merchandise damaged in shipment and instantly e-mail the photos to the manufacturer, speeding up both claims and replacement. And upon delivery, after positioning, say, a sofa, a worker can take pictures of the entire living room — capturing, perhaps, the lack of end tables and lamps. Guess what the salesperson mentions in his follow-up call?

Encouraging a steady stream of small ideas helps prime the pump for big ones.

The authors found something similar at a small Danish subsidiary of the U.S. textile manufacturer Milliken & Co. The Danish company’s looms — the same machines in place at countless other factories around the world — were running three to four times faster than the manufacturer believed possible. The looms were also making products that the manufacturer’s own engineers said were not possible. How? “Thanks to hundreds of little ideas from their frontline employees,” says Schroeder, a professor at the College of Business Administration at Valparaiso University. “Add a knob here so you can change the tension, a simple procedure for moving materials in and out faster — all kinds of ideas, so many that the loom no longer resembles what the manufacturer delivered.” Thus the key advantage of small ideas over big ideas: Because they’re much more likely to remain proprietary, small ideas more often result in a sustainable competitive advantage.

Moreover, encouraging a constant stream of small ideas helps prime the pump for big ones. “Where you don’t see an environment where people step forward with ideas on a daily basis, you’re much less likely to get the big ideas,” says Robinson, a professor at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts. Robinson points to Boardroom Inc., a newsletter and book publisher based in Stamford, Conn. Boardroom’s employees have been presenting their company-bettering notions in weekly department meetings since 1992, when founder Marty Edelston initiated what quickly turned into a company-defining system he calls I-Power. Boardroom doesn’t just hope its 70-some employees will come up with ideas to save money, enter new markets, streamline production processes, or boost teamwork. The idea-focused company insists they do so. Employees must average two ideas per week to qualify for quarterly profit-sharing bonuses. No one’s missed yet.

Granted, “countable” ideas at Boardroom need not be earthshaking. In fact, they can be as small as “the person who sends a fax should make sure the fax goes through.” But sometimes, even small suggestions generate significant savings. One employee suggested the company cut the dimensions of its books by a quarter inch. The smaller size led to lower postal rates and annual savings of more than $500,000, Edelston says. What seemed a small idea was, in fact, a very big one.

Eager to encourage such windfalls, many managers reward idea generators with as much as 5% to 25% of the first-year savings. Bad idea, Robinson and Schroeder discovered. For one thing, their research found a negative correlation between increased rewards and the number of employee ideas. What’s more, you don’t need rewards to elicit lots of ideas from employees. People like to make suggestions at work — especially when such ideas are likely to be acted upon. Plus, if you tie bonuses to a percentage of the savings attributed to an employee idea, you must then somehow pinpoint the savings — which often can be difficult to calculate. And, no surprise, employers and employees often disagree on the estimated savings — “up to a factor of 10,” says Robinson. Lawsuits? You bet.

Ideas Are Free includes another suggestion that managers would be advised to heed, and it has to do with one of the most venerable of institutions — the employee suggestion box. Created by the National Cash Register Co. in 1892, the suggestion box remains a fixture at 50% of U.S. companies, according to Robinson. “It really seems like suggestion boxes make sense,” says Robinson. “Everybody knows workers have good ideas and like to hand them in.” So what’s the problem? Employee suggestion boxes invite raw ideas, Robinson says. Even more problematic, managers wind up reviewing them out of context and typically far from their point of origin. In many cases, somebody in HR empties the suggestion box and traffic-cops the ideas — in between other tasks. And then there’s the relative anonymity associated with submitting ideas to a box. The best ideas, Robinson says, arise in group situations, “where the person who thinks of it has to defend it, and it’s immediately critiqued by people close to the problem and often improved.” His suggestion for the suggestion box: Scrap it.

Peter Singer is famous for posing a stunningly difficult question, paraphrased as, “If you are walking by a pond and you see a child drowning, do you save her? What if it means ruining a very fancy pair of Italian shoes?” Okay, if we assume the answer is yes, then why not spend the cost of those shoes to save 20 kids who are starving to death across town or the world? There’s really no difference. Or by, extension, invest in research or development that solves a problem forever… The issues are proximity and attention.

My take is that most people would instantly save the kid, but given the choice, probably wouldn’t take the road by the pond again any time soon. We like to avoid these situations, because these situations make us uncomfortable.

Avert your eyes.

The reporter tells you, I’m going to show you a video of the meat you’re going to eat for dinner being slaughtered. Avert your eyes. Or the fundraiser says I’m going to tell you about easily avoidable suffering in the developing world. Avert your eyes…

It boils down to a simple question, “how much is enough?” She knows that one iPod is all she needs, but she wonders how much philanthropy is enough?  And this is a key marketing question for anyone seeking donors.

Do I have to use up all my Italian shoes? How much is my share? …and at some point, will we end up avoiding Singer’s question altogether?

If you don’t give anything to good causes, then you define enough as zero and you have no worries about achieving ‘enough’. A sad but effective strategy.

If you give money to emergencies, friends with the guts to ask and the occasional feel good moment, you’ve also defined ‘enough’ in an easily achievable way. Your gift is a reaction to inputs.

What about people who make substantial, anonymous donations to long-term causes? How do they know what’s enough? How do they decide that now it’s okay to go out for a fancy dinner and not send the money to the worthy cause instead? If the solution isn’t clear, if it’s limitless, how do they avoid the temptation of avoiding the problem by doing nothing?

Marketers at good causes have a real challenge as they try to raise money from people who aren’t billionaires. As they approach people with $10,000 or $100,000 in the bank, this fear of not seeing a limit is very real, and if it’s not confronted, they will fail at both raising the money and generating satisfaction for the donor.

The Mormon Church says, “tithe”. Loosely paraphrased, they say, “10% is a lot, and 10% is enough.” This is actually very smart, because they’ve created a difficult but achievable standard, a way to be a member of good standing in their tribe.

When my dad ran the local United Way drive as a volunteer, he pushed for one percent. “One percent isn’t a lot, but it’s enough.”

What’s enough? I don’t think good cause marketers need to worry so much about which number or figure they choose, but I think they need to dream hard about whether giving people comfort with a ceiling will bring in a new class of significant donors. Too many people still avert their eyes.

PS this same thinking works for marketers trying to persuade people to join a gym, learn an instrument or go on a diet… if people can’t figure out what ‘enough’ is, where the end lies, they may decide it’s not worth starting. Sad but true.

Are you an artist able to contribute and thrive under any circumstances? Are you aware of your full potential?  Below are two questions designed to challenge your convictions and broaden your persective.  But before reading on, write down the following: 

1. The top two types of artistic work you hope to pursue (to earn income)
2. Your primary artistic skill (i.e. playing viola, composing, painting, dancing)

Question 1

If it were impossible to build a career through your top two employment preferences, what would you do?

Many artists consider only a couple career options for themselves.  For example, I’ve spoken with hundreds of musicians who hope to land an orchestra gig. “If that doesn’t work out, I’ll teach college,” they explain.  And beyond that…well…they have no idea.  There are no other viable paths imaginable.

Now, for people who want these jobs more than anything, I sincerely hope their aspirations come to fruition. However, both aforementioned fields are extremely competitive, with far more qualified applicants than positions.  What if, for some reason, things don’t work out?  What options will you have?  Are there other meaningful ways to create a career through music?  Or what if the “dream job” turns out to be a nightmare, at least for you?  What then?

One feature that impresses me about entrepreneurs is their flexibility.  If a project fails, they try something else.  There are countless stories of seasoned entrepreneurs who lose everything after having it all. But an impressive new empire is erected in their next act. Regardless of environment, these individuals somehow find ways to triumph. Life success (as opposed to a singular enterprise) is the ultimate goal. And they’ll do whatever it takes to get there. Yet another reason for artists to think like entrepreneurs.

Question 2

If you were no longer able to utilize your primary artistic skill, what roles would you play as an artist?

I was actually faced with this scenario when participating in a residency called Asian Pacific Performance Exchange (APPEX) in 2006.  This program hosted 18 musicians and dancers from the United States and Asia for a month and a half, providing an inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural environment.  During the first week, I had no access to my instrument (piano).  Forced to consider what to contribute without the luxury of hiding behind my ‘axe,’ it was a terrifying but liberating experience.  Was I a singer?  A percussionist?  An actor? A prop? A project coordinator?  A leader? One colleague later joked he was glad to know me first as a dancer!!!! (Though I’ve always considered myself a horrible and awkward mover, my first ‘artistic’ engagement was indeed boogieing at a 4^th of July block party.) This experience resulted in tremendous personal growth as I re-imagined my artistic worth.

There are artists who have been confronted with this predicament on more serious levels.  For example, the jazz musician David Baker was an up-and-coming trombone star when his lip was irreparably injured in a car accident.  Not one to give up on his artistic inclinations, he learned cello, and built a career as a composer, string player, teacher, and author. Even without his original primary musical skill, he flourished.

Who are you as a creative artist beyond your main thing?  What are you capable of accomplishing? Imagine how many options would open up by embracing your full capacity.

Here’s another variation for musicians:

If you found yourself in a room with accomplished performers from across the globe, none of whom read music, what role would you play?   

Some classically trained players—products of perhaps the only musical tradition on Earth that doesn’t prioritize improvisation—would be stuck. Don’t let that be you. Are you an artist who adds an important voice to any conversation?

Hmmmm….

These questions are unexpected and challenging. They might require serious soul-searching.  But by identifying creative answers, you may illuminate a world of new and wonderful opportunity. 

Go ahead. Open Pandora’s Box.  Imagine your full promise as an artist.  Sometimes the best way to do this is by eliminating your greatest aspirations and skills (and therefore crutches) from the discussion. At least for a moment.

A Case for The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship™

Introduction:

Founded in 2009, 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 André 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 Mind” 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, currently underway, indicates the same 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 most notable nationally recognized program happens to be here in Chicago, at Columbia College. Unfortunately,  the Arts, Entertainment and Media Management Program,  not for a lack of student enrollment or interest, but instead because of a change in institutional priorities, it is in the process of undergoing a major restructuring that will result in a majority of its programs being eliminated or significantly diluted.

The IAE is committed to bringing artists and their creativity into the center of economic activity.

How far are you willing to believe in what your imagination can do for you and your future as an artist?

The truth of the matter is that as much as I LOVE all of you artists and your creativity,  TOO MANY of you have no idea how to use the resources of your POWERFUL imaginations to help transform your life into whatever you wish it to be. As a result, I see too many of you wondering why you can never get ahead and witness far too often your goals and hopes and dreams slipping through your fingers. Like smoke from the lamp becoming the genie,  artists need to learn to recognize a tiny little smoke stream as opportunity. And opportunity, like smoke, evaporates quickly if you don’t know how to transform it into the genie.   I think there might be a lot to learn here from the smoke….

Look, our imaginations are NOT intangible and elusive resources  that we can access only when the spirit stirs us or swirls around us. Our imagination is NOT like smoke from the genie bottle-only good for creativity and artistry, but actually an ESSENTIAL set of tools that can lift, launch or transform our careers, as well as add to our pocket book, if we are willing to leverage, in new ways, all it offers.

Let me explain.

One of the common barriers for artists in being readily able to building creative ventures lies in their ability to apply the same principals of imagination they bring to their artistry to the real world. The Bite-Size Arts Ensemble, in our presentation What is Your Imagination Worth? A New Kind of ROI looks at 5 essential tools of imagination that are invaluable to creating future creative prosperity.  Here are the five tools and why they are so important for you to learn how to use in new ways:

A Willingness to Fail
Jane has played the piano and written music since she was a kid. She attended Berkley College and has made a modest living as a gigging musician ever since. In her 40′s, Jane decided she wanted to try and finally improve her life by being able to actually afford to buy a house. She really wanted to move out of the basement apartment she has been renting for the last ten years and have a place of her own she could call home.  So Jane decided that her best asset to try and sell would be her music to high school and college jazz bands. She decided she really wanted to finally try and see if she could actually sell a few of the literally hundred of charts she had written over the past twenty-five years. Jane picked up the phone and started calling every musician she knew ( and she knows a lot of them!) asking for more names of directors in the area she could contact about selling her music. She then proceeded to start compiling email lists from those contacts, created a website as well as her first  newsletter about her music and background. Sounds like Jane was off to a really good start right? Yeah, except for one thing. After three months of sending out her newsletter and writing personal emails to  directors only a few people had expressed interest in knowing more about her music and no one had yet placed an order.  Seems like a lot of work for nothing, right? So what did Jane do? She complained that her music was not for everyone and repeated over and over to her friends that ” she knew there was a reason why she never had bothered to try and sell it in the first place” and then she gave up.

And yet, when Jane was first learning how to write music she wrote all kinds of dreadful stuff. Music that was simply unplayable and not enjoyable or interesting to listen to.  Over and over and over again she failed until she got it right. Jane had to work hard at it too.  If only Jane was willing to apply one of the most important ingredients of imagination- her willingness to fail- to her emerging music business as she has to her playing and composition that now  has lead her to great success as a big band leader. The audience she plays for today loves all of the music she writes as does her musicians. But her success did not come in 5 minutes or 3 months worth of effort. It took years….

Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
Do you remember the first time you performed or exhibited your work publicly? Do you remember how you felt? Were you uncomfortable in your own skin? Nervous? Unable to string a coherent sentence together to someone who came up to you after to performance or at the exhibition? Did your stomach do flips and turns you never knew were possible? Did you notice all your mistakes and feel uncomfortable and vulnerable?

And yet if you are here reading this post, clearly you did it again, and again, and again.  You were willing to step out of your comfort zone and continue to try because it was worth it to you. It was for you! For the love of your art! Well guess what? Building a creative ventures requires MANY MANY MANY moments of feeling the same way. The same creative passion that flowed from your imagination that lead you to that first public moment, is the same one, if you let it, that can lead you to embrace the same kinds of awkward uncomfortable moments as you learn how to build your first creative venture.  Like the same “beginner” on your first appearance, you must be willing to learn and grow as if you were again a beginner.  Because for the moment you are a beginner again– in building a creative venture. 

Flexibility and Fluency
Every artist I know can bend to the left or right with their artistry. Want to hear me play it faster, louder, more dreamy, more staccato? We are taught how to change styles at the drop of a hat and, in our artistry, are constantly willing to be “open” to new ideas.  We listen and accept all the different iterations we can create and appreciate all the new ways we can express who we are with our inflection and style. And yet when confronted with lessons to learn in the business world- like how many different ways you need to be able to communicate to potential clients, how to close a deal with different personality types, why you need to be more agile and adapt to the needs of the audience you wish to serve– seemingly those same principals of flexibility and fluency that are so well known to us in our artistry fly right out the window.

Not every customer is going to like your style of communication. Period. If you want more business you need to be flexible enough to know how to build a relationship the CUSTOMER will value and will appreciate. Not every customer has the same interest level or knowledge about your product or service. As a result, each one needs  exactly the right kind of communication and information specific to their needs in the moment. None of this is all that different from how you use your imagination to create a work of art or a performance that effectively communicates to your audience what you are trying to get across. You simply are learning how to tailor it to the needs of your target market.  Unfortunately,  what I often find in artists is a know it all attitude or the rigid narrow kind of thinking about what they should and shouldn’t do that screams ” I am a beginner at this and need to feel in control”.

Don’t you remember how beginners try and show off what they can do with reckless abandon when they have not yet developed enough skill?  Heck, I tried to play the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with orchestra in 8th grade- God help me. Often adult artists act the same way except that it is harder to help change if you do not have the willingness to learn and reflect on what you need to learn. In our art form we are so good at getting it right and  learning from criticism to create the flexibility and fluency  that our artistry needs- why not bring it with you into other parts of your life and in the building of your creative venture?

Did you always KNOW how to bend and flex your artistry? Were you born like that? Or did you go to a school and learn from a really FINE teacher who showed you how to do it? Building a creative venture requires the exact same tolerance and willingness to learn from and follow someone you respect. It requires a willingness to fail and the ability to get out of your comfort zone and accept that you probably don’t really know what is required to build these skills and likely, as you did with a teacher, must bend and flex the way THAT SPECIFIC TEACHER tells you to until you have all the skills mastered fluently and can decide for yourself. If you are a serious artist, then you know it did not take you 10 minutes to develop your talent- it took years. This is why we are opening a school- The IAE- to teach these skills as well as offering a workshop to learn how to begin to apply these lessons by creating your own Bite-Size Arts Ensemble beginning in June.

Improvisation
What does it mean to improvise? Do you know what it means to experiment and play with the elements you have in front of you to see what they can create or do for you? How do you improvise with your audience currently?   How do these same elements  come into play in the creation of a business?  Being able to improvise requires that you are willing to fail, can get out of your comfort zone and you have learned how to be flexible and fluent enough to take a risk and try something in the moment. Creating something new requires “live”  and ongoing experimentation.

You can experiment with how you communicate to a potential client or with the actual product you deliver. You might  experiment by mixing up something in the way you promote yourself or the venue you select to perform. Improvisation is a core tenant to building a business and can take many different shapes and forms.  Improvisation is a very necessary tool to learn how to create authenticity and real connectivity between you and your clients or audience.  What is your imagination worth? Are you really willing to learn what it takes to reach you prospective paying audience with your artistic gifts?

Diverge and Converge
Once you have diverged by mastering how you can utilize all the tools of your imagination in building your creative business, you will be ready to converge them into the realization of a dream. And here is the fun part. This is where- yes you guessed it– that little smoke stream becomes your own personal genie. The genie that can grant you three wishes or fulfill your dream.

The things you want most in life can be yours- in time-  if only you are willing to become a beginner again and learn how to apply the most powerful resource as an artist you have to offer your future– Your imagination.  Are you ready?

Not everyone reacts the same and there is no universal fix. Don’t try to use all these fixes at once. Pick out items from this list and try them out until you find the right combination for you.

Visualization strategies that can be used anytime

• Concentrate on how good you are at public speaking.
• Pretend you are just chatting with a group of friends.
• Close your eyes and imagine the audience listening, laughing, and applauding.
• Remember happy moments from your past.
• Think about your love for and desire to help the audience.
• Picture the audience in their underwear.

Strategies in advance of program

• Be extremely well prepared.
• Find a  acting class.
• Get individual or group public speaking coaching.
• Listen to music.
• Read a poem.
• Anticipate hard and easy questions.
• Organize your speaking notes.
• Absolutely memorize your opening statement so you can recite it on autopilot if you have to.
• Practice, practice, practice. Especially practice bits so you can spit out a few minutes of your program no matter how nervous you are.
• Get in shape. I don’t know why it helps stage fright, but it does.

Strategies just before the program Remember Stage fright usually goes away after you start. The tricky time is before you start.

• Be in the room at least an hour early if possible to triple check the public address system and everything else on your checklist. You can also schmooze with participants arriving early.
• Notice and think about things around you to be present.
• Concentrate on searching for current and immediate things that are happening at the event that you can mention during your speech (especially in the opening).
• Get into conversation with people near you. Be very intent on what they are saying.
• Yawn to relax your throat.
• Doodle.
• Draw sketches of a new car you would like to have.
• Look at your notes.
• Put pictures of your kids/grandkids, dog, etc., in your notes.
• Build a cushion of time in the day so you are not rushed, but not too much time. You don’t want to have extra time to worry.
• If your legs are trembling, lean on a table, sit down, or shift your legs.
• Take a quick walk.
• Take quick drinks of tepid water.
• Double check your A/V equipment including the public address system, projectors, etc..
• Don’t drink alcohol or coffee or tea with caffeine.
• Concentrate on your speaking ideas and how they will benefit the listeners.
• Concentrate on your audience.
• Listen to music.
• Read a poem.
• Do isometrics that tighten and release muscles.
• Shake hands and smile with attendees before the program.
• Go somewhere private and warm up your voice, muscles, etc.
• Use eye communication.
• Go to a mirror and check out how you look.
• Breathe deeply with your diaphragm, evenly, and slowly for several minutes.
• Don’t eat if you don’t want to and never take tranquilizers or other such drugs. You may think you will do better, but you will probably do worse and not know it.
• Open your arms wide, in private, and imagine your eneregry filling the room and covering every listener.  Imagine radiation sunshine from your chest, fingers, etc.

Strategies when the program begins

• If  legs are trembling, lean on lectern /table or shift legs or move
• Try not to hold the microphone by hand in the first minute.
• Don’t hold notes. The audience can see them shake. Use three-by-five cards instead.
• Take quick drinks of tepid water.
• Use eye contact. It will make you feel less isolated.
• Look at the friendliest faces in the audience.
• Joke about your nervousness. What’s the right wine to go with fingernails?

Remember nervousness doesn’t show one-tenth as much as it feels. Before each speaking engagement make a short list of the items you think will make you feel better. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different combinations. You never know which ones will work best until you try. Rewrite them on a separate sheet and keep the sheet with you at all times so you can refer to it quickly when the need arises.

When speaking in public use these steps to control stage fright so it doesn’t control you.

As I begin the process of applying for foundation support for The IAE, it will truly be interesting to see who else is willing to climb on board and support the future of arts training. It is going to take a village. Lip service won’t do. Are you one of our tribe?

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It is truly an honor to have been asked to speak with you today at this conference of the National Association of Schools of Music, especially when I consider all the work done by NASM member institutions, their administrators, faculty, and students, to advance music and its study throughout our nation over the last 85 years. As many of you know, I have only recently joined your world formally, but my entire life in music has been one with a strong attachment to music education, and indeed for the past eight years I have taught at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. And there has never been a time when I didn’t think about the roles of music education not only in preparing the future musicians of our society, but in helping to establish the place of music in that society.

I am sorry to say that I think that most schools of music have focused perhaps too strongly on the preparation of musicians part of that mission, and not thought enough about the second part, even though tremendous efforts continue to prepare P-12 music teachers and otherwise build support. But there is no question in my mind that a crucial part of our mission is, in fact, to work harder and smarter toward the establishment of an important place in society for the music we teach. And given the way that place has gotten smaller and more distant from the center of society in recent years, we had better focus on it.

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 music critic, and chosen not to re-fill the position. If you attend a gathering of the music critics’ association, one of the main topics of conversation is the shrinking space they are given to cover the arts.

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 André 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.

The federal and local governments have contributed to this decline – the National Endowment for the Arts support for arts organizations of all kinds around America has, in real dollars, declined dramatically in the past twenty-five years. State, City and county funding has also dropped significantly in recent years. And then there’s our public education system, which for the past twenty-five or thirty years in city after city has been reducing or abolishing music and the arts, in order to concentrate on testable, quantifiable results like math and science scores, and/or in response to periods of severe budget stress, when the arts are often among the first things to be eliminated. All of this is a sign of the marginalization of the arts in America.

More and more, it seems to me, there is a growing climate of anti-intellectualism in America, and with it a trend to diminish the importance of our cultural heritage. This includes not just Western classical music, but folk music, jazz, blues – the whole range of the musical arts.

I want to share a story with you – a true story, and an instructive one. In 1987, the Chicago Symphony (which I managed at the time) was on tour in the United States. On the way from Arizona to Austin, Texas, the truck carrying our instruments turned over. I wouldn’t allow the instruments to be moved until I and our stagehands were on the scene to assess damage and oversee the process – so a new truck was ordered, the Orchestra flew to Austin, and the stagehands and I chartered a small private plane to fly us to Junction, Texas, which was ten miles from the site of the accident. (The proprietor of the small airport lent us his pickup truck to drive to the site). The pilot of the small plane was right out of central casting for a Texas pilot – tall, silver-haired, sixty-ish.  In fact, he was Lyndon Johnson’s private personal pilot after Johnson left the White House.  Because the incident had already made national news, he knew about it and began to chat with us during the flight. He said that he had never been to a symphony concert, was sure that the music was too stuffy for him, that he didn’t know anything about it and in fact would be somewhat intimidated by the idea of going to a symphony concert. I told him that if we in fact got the instruments to Austin in time on a new truck, I would like him to be my guest – and he somewhat reluctantly agreed. So here, at the age of approximately sixty, this man experienced his first concert – and it wasn’t a beginner’s program: Schubert’s 5^th Symphony and Mahler’s 5^th Symphony, with Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony.  At the end, he came back stage visibly moved, saying that he had no idea that this music could reach him the way it did, and that he had just had a transforming experience.  He actually became a subscriber to the Austin Symphony that very week, and remained so until he died a few years ago.

Now – I don’t believe for a minute that by sheer coincidence, I happened to run into the one person in America who might have loved a symphony concert but who was somehow intimidated by the way the classical music industry has presented itself over the past hundred years or so. In fact, I know that he is typical of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people, people who feel that they don’t know enough to enjoy or relate to art music – and that to a large degree this fact is a major reason for the increasing isolation of what we call art music from a central place in our society. Ten years ago the League of American Orchestras conducted focus groups of people who went to the theater, to museums, but not to symphony concerts – and throughout the country, in large cities or small towns, the predominant reason that these people stayed away from “classical music” is that they were intimidated. They felt they didn’t know enough about it to appreciate it; they felt that they might embarrass themselves by, Heaven forbid, clapping at the wrong time; they felt that this music was for “the stuffed shirt crowd,” or was “stuffy.” Those words appeared over and over again.

So what does this have to do with us?  Plenty!  When some of us speak about “advocacy,” we think narrowly, in terms of influencing funding decisions, or government decisions. But we do not think enough about proselytizing, about how those who make music actually talk about it and present it, as part of advocacy – and traditionally many of us haven’t thought of it as part of our job in preparing musicians to make their way in this world.  And we had better change dramatically and rapidly. We are beginning to, but too slowly. I am pleased to see efforts developing in schools and in NASM. But, we need to grow our capabilities rapidly.

There is a serious distortion of values in the world – a set of values that puts the short term ahead of the long term, which puts financial achievement ahead of ethical standards, and a set of values that increasingly diminishes the worth of intellectual achievement and of human expression.  In fact, when future generations look back and judge the civilizations and societies of the past, it is first and foremost the cultural and artistic achievements of those societies that are spoken of.  To be sure, engineering and scientific achievements are major parts of the picture of any society. But whether it is Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart,  Rembrandt, Picasso, James Baldwin, Garcia Lorca, Duke Ellington, Woody Guthrie, or Leonard Bernstein – the artists and the art they created express the deepest and most profound thoughts of the civilizations in which they lived and worked.  And it is the achievements of those artists that, in fact, define civilizations, define humanity.  It is, in fact, the arts that distinguish us.

But it is typical of artists to decry this trend in society, and to blame society – rather than to understand that we who care about culture and music, and who make that music or train those who do, have a very real and critical role in establishing society’s impression of what we do.  We need to understand the role that the classical music world has played in isolating itself – just a few examples:

• Although it is changing now, for many years we presented program notes filled with musicological jargon that the general public could not follow – “the retrograde inversion of the principal fugal theme, resolving on the harmonic seventh…” – an approach guaranteed to make people attending concerts feel inadequate to appreciate the music.
• We refer to 25-year-old assistant conductors as “maestro.”  An off-putting word if ever there was one.
• Classical music announcers or lecturers who speak in deep, reverent tones, to let us know that we are doing a good and hallowed thing by listening to great music.
• Enforcing rituals – such as not clapping between movements. This is a 20^th century invention, historically wrong, but designed to show that “I know this piece isn’t over yet – and you don’t.” I even saw a conductor visibly admonish an audience for applauding after the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, not even a structured symphony! How many more times will people pay money to be humiliated by the people they are applauding?
• I could devote a whole other speech to the issue of diversity. It is of course a national scandal that it took until 1947 for baseball to accept Jackie Robinson. But it was eight years later, 1955, when Marian Anderson was to be the first Black singer to appear on stage at the Metropolitan Opera. And it was two years after that – 1957 – when major American orchestras finally integrated, with a cellist named Donald Whyte in the Cleveland Orchestra. It took another five years for a second, a violinist named Sanford Allen in the New York Philharmonic. I served on panels with the late Donald Whyte, and he told the story of being told by some of our most prestigious orchestras, in the 1950s, not to even apply because “we don’t take coloreds!” That was only about 50 years ago, not ancient history – we’re talking about the parents, grandparents, uncles of today’s young African Americans! And we wonder why so few African Americans have thought of classical music as a career!

So why am I telling you all of this – you didn’t commit those sins, after all.  However, I believe that as a field, those of us who educate musicians, those of us who present or perform music, those of us who not only have a vested interest in the success of our art form in this country but who also should believe passionately in the inherent cultural value to a civilized society of what we do, we have had a tendency to function as if we had no roles in fixing the results of a century of bad practice.  That must change. Simply saying that we are now open to all is not enough to correct the past behavior of our field.

“Advocacy” to me means that in addition to giving technically accomplished and emotionally communicative performances of a wide music, everyone who is involved in music must understand that he or she has a role in breaking down those barriers that we all watched be put up. Everyone must understand the social and cultural context in which we will make our music – our students must be taught that context, and they must be prepared to think and speak about it, and think and speak in a way that tears down those barriers. And I don’t think we challenge our students anywhere near enough to even think about this side of being a musician.

Too often, someone says to me “why should we care about music that was written by dead, white, European males?”  My first response is to ask this: “what city in the world has the largest number of professional symphony orchestras from which musicians actually make a living?” After they guess Vienna, or London, or even New York – I tell them that the answer is Tokyo. Then I might ask in what country today are we seeing the most explosive growth of orchestras? The answer is China.  The people of those countries do not seem to have worried about the fact that western symphonic music is European based, not Asian based.  The same is true across many musical forms and idioms. People of many backgrounds can and do appreciate and relate to jazz. Look at the worldwide audience for the music of the Silk Road, and the incredible non-Indian audience held rapt by Ravi Shankar.  The tired old cliché that the music we believe in is universal, and that it has transformative powers on human beings, is a tired old cliché because it is true.  But too few of the people who actually perform that music understand the cultural and social context in which they are currently functioning, and thus do not think about much beyond the art of performing the music.

Another problem, I believe, in America today is that people in power, people who shape the civic thinking in our country, want simple and quantifiable answers – graphs, charts, numerical indications of progress. So when you talk about the non-quantifiable human qualities of music and the arts, when you start talking about the way in which an understanding of great art leads to a greater understanding of other cultures and peoples and reflects and illuminates the human spirit, you are asked to prove it. Well…I can’t document it with graphs – but every year of my life spent in music makes me more certain of it.  And exhibit A for me is not a chart – it is an orchestra, a very specific orchestra. Many of you, I am sure, have heard of it: it’s called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and it is now in its eleventh year of existence. Founded by Daniel Barenboim, it consists of Arabs, Palestinians, and Israeli Jews – and every year for three or four weeks they live together, eat together, rehearse and perform together. My wife and I were a part of that orchestra from the beginning – and that first year was an experience I shall never forget. Daniel Barenboim, and  famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma working with him, assembled this group of young musicians, ages 17-25, and brought them together in Weimar, Germany. In addition to forming an orchestra, Barenboim and Ma invited them to form chamber music groups which they, Barenboim and Ma, would coach in preparation for a chamber music concert to take place the night before the orchestra concert. There was only one rule – no all Jewish chamber group, and no all Arab/Palestinian group. The resulting chamber music concert was 3 ½ hours long – and each group only played one movement, not whole pieces – or it would have gone on forever. To sit there and watch, for instance, a movement from a Brahms Clarinet trio, played by an Egyptian, a, Syrian, and an Israeli was one of the most moving experiences of my life – to see these kids working out musical problems together, leaning into each others’ phrases, and embracing each other while receiving applause – this was all the charting and graphing I will ever need to demonstrate what it is that music can do that nothing else can.  We know this – you and I and those who are in our fields know this. The question is how can we work together to help the rest of the world to know it – and to get the value, the human value, of this art form across to those who determine what we teach our future citizens?

So the question is “are we preparing our students to go forward in this world and help to shape the America of the 21^st Century?” If we are going to build an America that is something more than faster computers, bigger buildings, more productive factories, and certainly about something other than more devastating wars and conflicts, then we cannot exist in a self-made plastic bubble, unaware of, and unwilling to try to change, the society in which we live.

As I mentioned previously, some schools of music are definitely beginning to address some of these issues. However, I think they are in the minority and those efforts are still in their relative infancy. NASM is urging greater attention by all music schools. What are some of the things that I believe we need to think about in our preparation of the next generation of musicians? And what are things we need to think about ourselves?

• We personally need to involve ourselves with arts advocacy efforts in our own communities, and we need to encourage our colleagues and our students to do the same. Virtually every state has a state arts advocacy organization – in Illinois we have the Illinois Arts Alliance – that brings together all of those who create art, who present art, who educate, and who believe in the centrality of arts to any civilization. My friends who work in that area nationally and locally tell me that arts educators are traditionally under-represented in those arts alliances. I am told that many professional educators in the arts do not feel welcomed as strategic partners in these settings. This needs attention and change because local and state advocacy organizations help to ignite and keep alive a public dialogue about the importance of the arts in our communities, whether advocating to governmental forces, to school boards, or to those who shape public opinion. Those of us who are committed to a thriving arts community should involve ourselves in their efforts and seek their involvement in promotion of what we do.
• It is imperative that we teach musicians to think not just about the music itself, but its place in society – in this particular 21^st century American society – and about their role in ensuring and enhancing that place.
• Musicians need to learn how to speak about music to all constituencies – not just to other musicians. They need to engage with audiences and potential audiences, and they need to be trained to do this effectively.
• Musicians need to understand the need for formal advocacy – for communicating to those who set public policy, whether it is educational curricula in our school systems or our politicians – and they need to be trained in effective ways to make the case for music as an essential component of any civilized society.
• Musicians who are being trained to be orchestral players need to know how orchestras work, and how they can and must play a role in orchestras’ advocacy efforts, fundraising efforts, and audience development efforts. Now most musicians get into orchestras with only one bit of assumed knowledge about orchestras – “the management is the enemy.”  To say that that is not helpful to the successful operation of a symphony orchestra is an understatement. I teach such a course at Roosevelt – and I’ve had graduate students who were surprised to learn that members of Boards of Directors don’t get paid to be on the Board! There is a long history in America of separation between those who make music and those who administer and/or present it – that separation is unhealthy. Administrators must welcome musicians into the decision-making and governing process, and musicians must be trained to function in that process.
• Musicians need to be sensitive to, and supportive of, efforts to diversify our world – strong, pro-active efforts that will help to overcome a century of actual, real discrimination. While that situation has improved dramatically in our lifetimes, it is a very important and real part of our field’s history. Musicians need to hear from people like Aaron Dworkin of the Sphinx Foundation whose organization does a terrific job promoting string playing among young musicians of color, on the need for greater change in this area.
• Musicians need to be sensitive to changes in society. Today’s society is very much more visual oriented than was the case even thirty years ago.  We have the first generation of 50-year olds who grew up with television as a constant in their childhoods. That simple fact has re-wired people, and enhanced their expectation of some kind of visual stimulus as they experience music. Yet if you try to explain to orchestra musicians the importance of, say, risers – so people on the main floor can see something other than the socks of the front row of string players – they get angry at the thought that anything other than the way they play the notes should matter. They need to be exposed to thinking about all manners of the presentation and delivery of music – including electronic and the internet – and to engage in discussions about what that might mean for the future.
• We need to encourage exploration, debate, discussion about the history of classical music in America – how it was, in fact, used for much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries to actually separate social classes in this country – and how as our society has thankfully moved to a more democratic spirit our field has been slow to adapt, and rid itself of some of the ritualistic trappings with which the music business surrounded itself.
• In the performances that we present on behalf of our schools, we need to think about, and experiment with, all aspects of concert presentation. Educational institutions should be on the leading edge of experimentation – we should be laboratories for new approaches to the presentation of concerts. After all, we can easily afford an occasional misstep much more easily than a multi-million dollar orchestra, and we cannot be as glued to tradition as they are.  We can be a catalyst for change, actually helping the industry, the professional orchestras and opera companies, progress. And in the process we must teach musicians to be open to new approaches to presentation, to experimentation.
• If we’re going to be true advocates, we must confront the fact that ticket prices are a barrier to symphony orchestras, opera companies, and many classical concerts. A recent experience that I have had consulting with the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, which almost completely sells out every single performance of a full 30-week season with three performances a week, plus additional chamber orchestra concerts – in large part because the heavy government subsidy they receive allows them to keep ticket prices very low – has underlined the importance of this issue for me. We are of course not in a position to lower the prices that our nation’s orchestras and opera companies charge – but we are in a position to raise the issue, engage the subject in serious discussion, and perhaps even partner with business schools and others in coming to grips with this issue.
• In short, musicians that are being trained for the future need to be made aware of the societal and cultural climate into which they are being sent, and they need to be made aware of the fact that they will be central players in changing that climate. This is absolutely essential if we are not to see a continued marginalization of art music in the future.

In June, the NEA released its national Arts Participation study for 2008, and in case nothing else I have said gives you cause for worry, that study should. It shows a dramatic decline in arts participation and attendance across the board, at all age levels, over the past six years. While we might wish to blame some of that on the economy, reading this study in detail indicates, I think something deeper – a continuing trend toward a distance between Americans and the arts. If we, at the higher education level, continue to train artists without dealing with the climate into which we are sending them, we run a very real risk of contributing to a continuing trend toward irrelevance.

Now that I am a college dean, I look forward to working alongside all of you on these very pressing issues that confront us all.  We must work to bring more and more people to our institutions and our country’s concert halls.   We must expand our audiences so they can experience all of the joys and passion every one of us experience in the concerts halls and opera houses we frequent.

The peak of human achievement, in civilization after civilization, is represented by its artistic and cultural achievements – and any society worthy of respect is a society that respects and preserves the great art handed down to it from the past, and adds to that heritage by the creation of new art. And that society must accept that bringing great art to the center of society is a responsibility that to a great degree rests with its artists.  Since our government will not likely be the body to do this, it becomes the obligation of all of us who work in music to do this critical work.

The great playwright Arthur Miller may well have put it best: “When the cannons have stopped firing, and the great victories of finance are reduced to surmise and are long forgotten, it is the art of the people that will confront future generations. The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of the politicians.” Thank you very much for listening.

Stephanie Sack changed prices at Vive La Femme from high-end to "cheap and chic," which "completely saved the business," she says. Photo: Erik UngerBy: Christina Le Beau November 09, 2009

Written By: Christina Le Beau  Crain’s Chicago Business, November 09, 2009

The “new normal” is forcing entrepreneurs to rethink — and in some cases completely reinvent — their businesses.
The need to diversify, dump duds from the product line, tweak pricing, get into new markets or find new uses for old technologies has become keenly relevant as shell-shocked business owners grasp the reality that they’re facing a structural — rather than cyclical — shift in the economy.
“Last year and into this year, a lot of people were more reactionary and impulsive. Now they’re thinking more strategically,” says Raman Chadha, executive director of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at DePaul University. “Once everybody realized this is how it’s going to be, they had to find a way to adapt.”
Clare Hefferren found her new niche by repositioning Callosum Creative Ltd., her 4-year-old solo graphic design firm, as a corporate image consultancy.

After realizing last fall that ad agency layoffs were flooding the market with freelance competition, Ms. Hefferren, 40, hired a strategic adviser to help her determine a new revenue stream that drew on her background in fashion as well as marketing. They came up with a service called People-First Branding, which offers coaching in communication, business etiquette, appearance and other aspects of “personal branding.”

Wanting to focus on the repositioning, Ms. Hefferren stopped seeking new business in the first half of the year. “Clearly this affected our goals, numbers and my personal finances,” she says. This year, she brought in only $20,000. But the upshot is that her new personal-branding business is on track to bring in 70% of her projected revenue in 2010.

Another successful repositioning: Two years ago, retailer Stephanie Sack sensed that consumers’ discretionary spending was about to shrink considerably. So she switched Vive La Femme, her plus-size boutique in Bucktown, from high-end price points (up to $525) to a “cheap-and-chic” model with prices from $35 to $175.
REVENUE IMPROVES

Ms. Sack, 35, who opened the store in 2002, says revenue since the price change has been the best ever. This year she expects to take in $400,000, up from $360,000 last year and $240,000 in 2007. “I had a spidey sense that my decision to reprice the store would play well,” she says. “And it did. It completely saved the business.”

Ms. Sack and Ms. Hefferren were quick to take action in seeking out a reinvention, but that isn’t always the norm.

“Recessions have occurred routinely throughout American history, but they’ve been minor by standards of recent memory, so there’s an entire cadre of executives who’ve never seen anything like this,” says Steven Michael, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and co-author of a 2005 study on recession-fueled business failures.

“Executives and entrepreneurs are naturally optimists. They want to focus on what they’re good at,” says Mr. Michael, whose report states that about 500,000 businesses fail in each recession. “It’s a second order of consideration to think about the risk (of continuing to do the same thing).”

In September, New York-based ThomasNet, which connects sellers and buyers in an online industrial marketplace, released the results of a survey that asked 800 executives and professionals how they were handling the recession. About 70% were looking for business in new industries, increasing their marketing, and exploring new sales channels as a way to increase cash flow and dilute risk. And 38% were developing new products. All good signs.

But another study released the same month by New York-based credit card issuer American Express Co. found that 68% of 763 small-business owners and managers were stressed out, and 41% focused mainly on retaining current revenue sources (rather than seeking new ones). Only 26% said they were looking to grow this business.

In which case Jim Flanagan’s case is instructive.

GOING GREEN
Mr. Flanagan, 55, is president of Nuance Solutions Inc., a 37-year-old Chicago company that develops and produces cleaning chemicals for private-label and branded clients. Nuance Solutions was strictly a commercial and industrial manufacturer until 1999, when it began dabbling in retail cleaners. But it was still using mostly conventional chemicals.
Then, in 2002, Mr. Flanagan was referred to a job for Seventh Generation Inc., the huge cleaning products company based in Burlington, Vt. “We’d always prided ourselves on using greener raw materials, but there was no advantage to marketing that because people weren’t buying green just to be green,” Mr. Flanagan says. After Nuance got the Seventh Generation referral, things changed.
‘IN CONTROL OF OUR DESTINY’
“We had to look hard at our company and where to go, and all arrows pointed toward us developing more markets for green products,” he says. “That was a significant difference.”

And, in hindsight, a prescient move. Sales at the 70-employee company have been rising steadily ever since. Today, 75% of Nuance Solutions’ $25 million in revenue comes from green cleaners, commercial as well as retail. And it’s the reason, Mr. Flanagan says, that the company has grown even during the worst recession in his lifetime.
“We were ahead of the curve, so we felt we were in control of our destiny and had better seize the opportunity to go out and grow the company before (green manufacturing) gets more crowded,” he says. “It’s a scary time right now, so I feel pretty fortunate.”

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,  come hang out with a lot of really fun, creative artists and entrepreneurs.  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 – 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) – Exhibiting Professionalism
Andie Burchett (Pencil Artist) – TBD
Jessica & John Page – Photography & New Business (Alum)
Ping Wu – 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) – New Economic Opportunities for Artists
Victoria Lyman (Dance Boutique)- Turning Your Artistic Passion into a Retail business
Vanessa E (Singer) – Multiple Income Streams
Matt Boresi – Mock Auditions & Closing  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 ) – 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?  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:  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

But with all the creativity you have inside of you, do you need an original thought or idea to construct your venture around? How much does originality matter? Are you really creative as an artist if your business idea is not a true one of-an  original- enterprise?

In thinking about this question I thought it might be worth looking at some classic business examples.

Take for example a brand new hot franchise; the toner cartridge refill business.  There is nothing revolutionary about refilling toner cartridges, at a discount, over having to buy a brand new one for your printer, at full price, every single time. Nothing original at all; except for the fact that a brand new market has been created based on something so incredibly simple. Cartridge World, the leader in this market, was recently ranked by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the fastest growing franchises in the U.S. The company has more than 1000 stores open and is opening more than one new store per day.

Many business ideas begin by identifying a market problem or need, just like Cartridge World’s creator Bryan Stokes did, and then go on to produce a product or service that fills that need. Others discover or create an entirely new market that no one ever thought of before. What did we do before email, cell phones, the internet, or Starbucks coffee?

Building a business is about defining a market that you can serve, and by serving it, you financially benefit. Building a business is not about being original but about finding your own way to innovate. Innovative ideas, without execution however, are simply hallucinations!

Becoming an entrepreneur is a balance between the use of logic, risk and creative obsession. Combining these skills in equal parts, like the three sides of a triangle is the surest way to produce the right kind of environment that is ripe for economic benefit.

While the Cartridge World example of entrepreneurship is not founded in artistic expression, it demonstrates clearly the role of innovation in the controlled environment of pure entrepreneurial,  albeit not artistic, development. This example, however, does embody 2 sides of the triangle entrepreneurs know best and that we, as creative types, need to continue to develop; logic and risk.

Car Max: Classic Entrepreneurial Design

In the early 1990’s Circuit City executives Rick Sharp (CEO) and Austin Ligon (Vice President of Corporate Planning) spearheaded an effort to identify a new retail opportunity to extend Circuit City’s growth into the next decade. They looked for a large retail category with no significant national competitors and unmet consumer needs. Extensive research pinpointed an excellent opportunity in automotive retailing, especially in used cars.

In 1992 they tested the idea with a broad range of focus groups where consumers told them that car shopping was a fairly bad experience. Based on this market input, the CarMax concept was refined and a business plan was developed.

CarMax created a hassle-free car shopping experience, with a good selection of high-quality, trust-worthy cars that delivered exactly what the consumer surveys and focus groups said they wanted.

The first CarMax superstore opened in 1993, and by April of 2004 the company appeared for the first time on Fortune Magazine’s Top 500 companies, debuting at 435.

The CarMax concept focused on finding a business that was good for the bottom line and generated lots of profits. The idea was based on customer feedback, then further researched and tested. Financial projections and a business plan were set. As the company met each goal expressed in their business plan, the business was proven to indeed be a significant money making venture.

To a highly creative person, the concept that Car Max developed may not seem particularly original. However, when it debuted, it was an extremely innovative twist on a very old way of doing business. This is at the root of what true creativity and classic entrepreneurship is all about, and is something that every creative person needs to understand and learn.

You don’t need an amazing, original, new idea to attract enough good customers to achieve economic viability. You simply need one solid idea that can come from something tried and true but is founded in your true creative obsession(s).  And you cannot forget that you must do the proper planning, research and testing required before you begin. Before any idea is executed, it must be tested, researched, analyzed and backed up with financial statements to show why it will work.  Our 12-week Bite-Size Arts Ensemble workshop that will begin in early June will give you the opportunity to begin to test and research your ideas, by the way. Following our 12 week workshop, Boost Camp will launch, at the end of July, to turn those ideas into a business plan!

But as successful innovative companies like CarMax know, ongoing client excitement and interest in a venture comes from the truly creative touches a venture can consistently produce, which gives creative types a clear distinctive advantage in building ventures if they can learn the entrepreneurial skills needed to properly test market, research and analyze the potential viability of their idea.

Some of the most remarkably creative business ideas are often equally founded in common simple things and don’t have to be all that revolutionary to be very marketable, effective, and profitable.

Tried and True Construction

Lots of people, including me, build businesses on somebody else’s ideas. My musical instrument business, which I started in college, was founded on a tried and true concept selling products through the mail and eventually in retail stores. It worked for me because I was able to shape it around my obsession to be a catalyst for others to creatively grow through developing their musical gifts with the right musical instrument, and mail-order was a perfect economical vehicle for my obsession.

I built that business, and after it three more, on a structure of retailing and customer service that are far from original. What I did do that was original was to find a way to make those familiar ideas unique through my passion and interests in the arts. While my ventures have not lead me to extreme wealth, they have rewarded me handsomely, both financially and with the freedom I seek as a creative being to live my life on my own terms.

While some creative entrepreneurs are led into ventures that produce unimaginable wealth, what matters most is that every creative entrepreneur at their core is focused on expressing their unique talents with the world and forges ahead to do so.

Some of you, like Starbuck’s coffee founder Howard Schultz, will find immeasurably wealth in the market that your unique talent is best suited to explore, while others will be handsomely rewarded but find a more modest life than the super rich and famous. Either way, the right-sized pot of gold is waiting for you at the end of the rainbow, if you follow the dream you are meant to walk around in and live.

Pour Your Heart into It

Howard Schultz, the founder of the small coffee shop in Seattle that became Starbucks, built an international institution that is now $29 billion and growing by following his passion and personal value system.

When Howard bought his first coffee shop on Seattle’s waterfront, his vision of his future was not well defined. But by using his creativity, passion, and value system, he shaped what Americans have done forever; drink coffee, into a national obsession.

“Again and again, I’ve had to use every ounce of perseverance and persuasion I can summon to make things happen,” he said.  “Life is a series of near misses. But a lot of what we subscribe to is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see and pursuing that vision no matter who tells you not to. … when you really believe — in yourself, in your dream — you just have to do everything you possibly can to take control and make your vision a reality.”

Main Street America now has a coffee shop which serves as a home away from home for millions of Americans as a result of his creation. Clearly his idea has been copied by many, and clearly selling coffee was and is not a new idea.

What was new and remains the creatively unique to Starbucks, unlike its newly found competitors, is the unique concept of how to sell that coffee that Howard Schultz and the Starbucks team continue to apply. Schultz discovered American’s desire to hang out in a cool place to work, socialize, and bond. His coffee gives American a way to do exactly that.

He continues to reshape and redefine his vision through the way he honors and embraces his employees, offering excellent unfound benefits in similar types of lower level positions and flexibility to encourage them to stay. He has continued to evolve his business through the release of enjoyable CD’s ranging from blue grass to jazz as well as through the ever changing shape of his store layout design and creature comforts within.

Howard Schultz wrote an excellent book about Starbucks entitled Pour Your Heart into It. Some of the principles he ascribes to his success, which truly don’t require the re-invention of the wheel, are:

• Don’t be threatened by people smarter than you
• Compromise anything but your core values
• Seek to renew yourself even when you are hitting homeruns
• Everything matters.

Howard Schultz believes in himself and his value system strongly enough to have defined his business concept and stuck with it. A business idea that allows for you to personally invest 100 percent of your value system into, and is directly in line with your passions, means you are only steps away from living your dream.

If you are creative, being original is not as necessary as being innovative. As in the examples of Starbucks or my own business, Lisa’s Clarinet Shop, the role innovation plays is more critical; innovators let their creativity and true obsessions show.