On Thursday January 26th The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship (IAE) will be teaming up with WBEZ’s new project Front & Center to host a resource fair for the self employed, small businesses, start-ups, and freelancers.

Mini seminars and presentations will run through out the evening at the fabulous Catalyst Ranch located at 656 W Randolph St # 3W in the Polka Room.

Mini Seminar Topics Include: 

Entrepreneurship 101
Presented by Institute For Arts Entrepreneurship

Receiving small loans as an independent worker
Presented Accion Micro Lending

Doing your taxes as a freelancer, small business owner, or independent
Presented by Center for Economic Progress

Create. Innovate. Repeat: featuring 4 fabulous presenters, 7 slides and just 5 minutes each to pitch their most innovative business idea to you.
Presented by Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship.

Partial List of Participants Include:

Co-Lab Evanston providers of shared office spaces.

Northside Freelancers Network  who can help you connect to the growing Chicago self-employed community. Make sure to ask them about their weekly “freelancers soup” lunch.

Accion will be on hand to discuss how to get a  micro-loans to jump start your own business.

Northside Community Bank can help you find funding for your small, local project.

IndieMade is itself a small business. They create websites for independents, artist, small businesses, and start-up projects.

Rockstar CPA offers CPA services specifically geared towards the self-employed, with a specialty in creative projects.

The Law Project offer affordable legal resources for freelancers, independents, and small businesses, such as creating contracts, negotiating pay, etc.

Chicago! Come on out and celebrate self-employment with us! We hope to see you on January 26th.

Fair begins at 6pm @ Catalyst Ranch  656 W Randolph St # 3W, in the Polka Room

At what point, if any, does extending brand uniqueness create a tipping point that then threatens the very foundation of the brand itself? Lately I have been asking myself this very question about the Starbucks brand.

Starbucks 1st store location in Seattle's Pike Place Market, 1971

As we all know, back in the 90′s Howard Schultz transformed the second most consumed drink after water, and the second most traded commodity after crude oil, coffee, into a unique retail destination for us all between work and home.

Putting people before products, Schultz used intuition more than “brand strategy” in those early days to develop Starbucks into the social place outside of work or home most of us did not even realize how much we needed. Schultz’s vision and intuition allowed Starbucks to leverage a low cost commodity, coffee, and transform it into a “$4.00-human-interactive-experiencial-brand.”

And now with Howard Schultz’s recent return to Starbucks as CEO, after a series of setbacks and financial downturns after his departure, the question is can he add more value to the bottom line while retaining the “human soul”- the uniqueness- he built into the Starbucks brand? Or is he reaching for the tipping point leading to the erosion of it?

According to Merriam-Webster something that is unique is defined as:

1. Being the only one.
2. Being without a like or equal.
3. Distinctively characteristic: peculiar.
4. Unusual.

There is no doubt Starbucks has managed to create a unique retail store environment with their friendly customer oriented staff, great music, comfy chairs and heartfelt emotional connective messaging.

And they have quite successfully been able to extend the feeling you get from their brand outside their stores too spending far less on advertising than other large retailers and consumer products companies to achieve tremendous brand loyalty.

Check out these 2006 comparative stats of what other companies spent on advertising for their brand.

1. Microsoft – more than 20 percent of their annual revenue or $11.5 billion
2. Coca-Cola – more than $2.5 billion
3. Yahoo – more than 20 percent of their annual revenue or $1.3 billion
4. eBay – 14 percent to 15 percent of its revenue – which was $871 million, much of that to advertise on Google
5. Google – In the millions rather than billions of dollars – with $188 million
6. Starbucks – $95 million

In 2006, Starbucks spent just $95 million on advertising with 7.8 billion in sales demonstrating their amazing strength as an “experiential brand”.

But is it possible to continue to expand the human experience of this brand while Starbucks’ transition into what Schultz hopes will be the first company to excel as both a retailer and a purveyor—in supermarkets and other mass-market channels—of consumer packaged goods?

According to Schultz, “This is a unique inflection point for Starbucks; I think we’ve identified a very big opportunity to do something that really has not been done before. And that is the following: there are many, many companies, domestically and around the world, that have built a domestic national footprint around retail stores, just like Starbucks—the Gap, Costco, Wal-Mart, Coach, Zara. And there are many consumer-packaged-goods companies—Pepsi, Coke, Kellogg’s, Campbell’s. There hasn’t been one company I can identify that has been able to build complementary channels of distribution by integrating the retail footprint and the ubiquitous channels of distribution—in our case, grocery stores and drug stores.

So the model is, Starbucks can seed and introduce new products and new brands inside our stores. We introduced VIA instant coffee in our stores. Instant coffee is a $24 billion global category that has not had any innovation in over 50 years. And no growth. If we took VIA and we put it into grocery stores and it sat on a shelf, it would have died. But we can integrate VIA into the emotional connection we have with our customers in our stores. We did that for six to eight months and succeeded well beyond expectations in our stores. And as a result of that, we had a very easy time convincing the trade, because they wanted it so badly.”

And while it’s true Starbucks has tallied up five years of positive earnings and five years of positive free cash flow, again, in part, under Schultz’s leadership, Starbucks stock has only just recently seen a rise above mid 2006 values.

However, food stocks should be on the rise. It makes sense that with unemployment up, the housing market down, and the world economy on shaky ground that food-makers would deliver stable sales.

So the question is can Starbucks continue to introduce produces like VIA into their stores and translate the uniqueness of their brand through them into distribution channels?  Will their customers buy into all the products they introduce in their retail environment, bond with them, and then readily buy them from their local grocery store or drug store?

I don’t know about you, but I for one was completely turned off by VIA’s introduction at Starbucks.  My sense of embracing the serenity of my “home away from work or home” felt threatened by the through I was being encouraged to take a little packet of dried coffee home as a substitute for the experience of being in their retail environment. I have always bought into Starbucks being an ” escape,” a destination, a home away from home. To add insult to injury, I was told if I liked their dried coffee, which I also perceived as cheapening the brand,  I did not even have to come back into the store- I could buy it elsewhere. It almost felt like an invitation to never come back- I felt like I was losing a friend.

Howard Schultz in his 2011  book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul specifically talks about his mission in a way that’s very different from most CEOs. “Everything we’ve tried to do,” he writes, “is steeped in humanity.”  I certainly find Schultz’s new goal as being very problematic for the brand.

Purveyors use distribution channels and have retailers who connect with end users for a reason- because retails act differently than purveyors. I have witnessed this first hand within the music industry. The clarinet company I represent, Buffet Crampon, increasingly in the 90′s adopted some of my best practices working with customers. Increasingly they acted more like a retailer than a distributor, or the purveyor they are, by increasing the attention they paid towards potential end users. They threw private parties and gave potential customers the opportunity, before retailers, to see and experience new products.

In the end, it pissed off retailers who felt side stepped and while left uninformed were expected to close the sale with the majority of the customers anyways. I am not sure how much it really did to help them grow their brand then but they have abandoned most of those practices now. While I realize, Starbucks first and foremost is recognized as an extremely well established retailer- a significant difference from being a purveyor dabbling in retail,  placing people over products simultaneously in both distribution channels and retail environments will be challenging. Distributors exist to move product and retailers exist to sell those products to people. The motivation of each is different and as a result using the same messaging for both won’t be easy to effectively manage.

While I think Schultz’s idea is very interesting to try and be the first company to excel at both,  how will Starbucks lead me or anyone else to rediscovering why we’re best friends with this as their end game strategy in their retail environment?

I don’t know about you, but I spend time with a best friend.  I get to know them. I also frequently see them in the same places and I don’t just spend money on them. While distributors and Schultz alike may hope Starbucks can convincingly sell us many products at the local grocery from an experience or two in their retail environment, it is yet to be seen how well they can translate the uniqueness of their brand into repetitive buying decisions in locations outside their own doors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by Lance Hall, actor, director, creator of Launch Pad Casting Workshop and a participant in The IAE‘s inaugural class.

Since sessions at The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship started, we’ve been working with a lot of introspective discovery and self-reflection. In the past few weeks, we’ve begun to tie it all together. The layers and layers of light bulbs keep switching on. Here are a few things that stand out in my memory:

A part of the brainstorming activity.

If you’re like me, you’ve been a part of plenty of brainstorming sessions. This past month, though, we did a brainstorming exercise in which we actually made use of our personal characteristics. I’ve never done anything like this. Things like my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, personal preferences, shortcomings and strengths all made it into the mix. It was really amazing to see how my personal identity could sharpen different ideas, create new fronts for personal growth, and reveal where my difficulties are going to lie.

We talked about money. It might seem painfully obvious in a school for entrepreneurship, but we didn’t talk about bookkeeping, budgeting, or anything like it. We worked with our own personal history with money. There were definitely some tears among us. I think all of us were surprised how deeply our financial heritage has affected who we are and how we act.

When we started at The IAE, we were told one of the biggest goals is to cultivate whole-brain thinking. The reason for this really hit me when we started talking about money in emotional terms. An entrepreneur has to balance analytical (left brain) activities with creative (right brain) processes. A big part of that is learning to navigate the numerical (left brain) aspects of capital, and master our emotional (right brain) connection to money.

Meet the artists of the IAE.

If you’re interested in careers in the arts, finding out more about the IAE, or just discovering one of the most innovative and essential ways we can get our economy back on track (come on, one of these has to concern you), come meet the IAE:

How can we improve the chances that productivity will flow from our imagination or our creativity?  For starters we need to think of imagination and creativity as distinctively different. These two words should not be used interchangeably.

Think of it like this. If you can visualize something in your mind- the famous person you hope to marry, your first house, the new car you want to buy or your first trip to a new planet in the solar system, then you are a living breathing IMAGINATIVE human being. All humans posses and can access this amazing power in various strengths.

However,  accessing this power source-while an INCREDIBLY important 1st step- does not require action. We can dream all day and visualize whatever we wish without obligation to render what we see. Here is where the next step comes. To transform our imagination into creativity requires a far more complicated ability-  to transform what we envision in our heads into a reality. This requires a sequence of steps that move our thought processes back and forth between our left ” hard skills” and our right “soft skills”.

Helping individuals transform their active imaginations into productive and hopefully innovative creativity is certainly a lot harder to do. It’s no wonder 60%’s of CEO’s surveyed by IBM in 2010 are concerned about developing a more creative work force to help them  innovate their organizations, huh?

But the real dilemma is how are we suppose to help our world become more creative when there are SO many theorists who have written their own theory about how to sequence the steps between right and left to access one’s creativity?

Let’s see, you have Osborn’s 7 stage model in 1953, and Koberg and Bagnall in 1976. Parnes model in 1977, Amabile’s in 1988 and Mumford’s in 1991. And before them, there was Wallas, Dewey, Rossman, Guilford, Stanislawski, Gordon, Kepner-Tregoe, Arnold, Churchman,  and Zwicky. This is starting to look like the cereal aisle. Confusing! Which “theory” is the right one to help me be more creative?

Some researchers have attempted to identify creativity through cognitive aptitude and personality tests like  MacKinnon 1962, Guilford 1967; and Torrance in  1974. Others have isolated personal creative characteristics described as “cognitive styles” – Kirton did in 1976 in his “problem solving styles” -Basadur 1990 and Selby wrote their own in 2004, as did Prather in  2008.  And if that’s not enough to confuse you, then look at Csikszentmihalyi 1996 assertion that it is complexity, not specific traits or following a thought process, that is the discerning factor in producing a creative personality. Here is his list.

With so many theories about how to ignite creativity, the water seems terribly murky as to exactly how best to generate more of it productively. And so, yet another researcher enters the picture. It’s Ned Herrmann who introduced his whole brain theory model back in 1998 that has become quite popular now-especially as an employee assessment tool.

According to Herrmann, 5% of the population uses one of the 4 quadrants in their brain. 55% use two quadrants. 35% use three quadrants and only 5% use all four quadrants.  Herrmann’s research shows that the more of our brain we use- the closer to “whole brain thinking” we achieve- the more we are able to synthesize information CREATIVELY into productive outcomes. The data reveals that both the right (creative) and the left (linear) need to be full activated to produce the greatest level of productivity.  According to Herrmann’s research this can be developed through synthesis of skills across right and left.  Senior and “C-level” executives tend to be more whole brained in their thinking.

And these are exactly the kind of leaders we need more of to solve our worlds problems.

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Lisa Canning

We have lost our imagination. That’s what’s wrong with America. The leaders (or want to be’s) of our great country have no vision or language to help us reimagine our world. Our founding fathers envisioned what America could be and devised a language- our constitution-  for it. It was a brave imaginative act. It was through new shared language that America came alive.

We need more bravery.  Bravery to defend our ideas and to stand up for what we believe in. There is no better example of what bravery means than those who serve in our military. It is disgusting how we throw our military men and women in the trash and leave them jobless, emotionally bankrupt and hopeless after they protect and serve us all. What are we transmitting to ourselves about the value of bravery?

We need action not reactions. How many committees do we need to form?  How much consensus must we build to know what to do and when to do it? How many studies must we undertake?  How much talk, talk, talk, talk, talk must occur before we come to a NEW LEVEL of consciousness that simply and clearly informs us to ACT?

We need to value honor. It’s hard to get anything done in life without it. We need to honor our words and back them with actions. How often do you find a lack of consistency between words and actions with loved ones, friends, co-workers, and leaders? How can we trust each other without this basic form of respect and shared understanding? How can we play together or stand up tall and proud together without honor really?

And for that matter, where did our drive go?  It takes determination, sweat and commitment to create an amazing life, a business, a legacy. Instant gratification is a sugar high compared to the sustainable energy that flows from committing and investing into your life’s work. And yet, sympathetically, I can understand how most people I know get to the point where they say ” It’s too much trouble. Life is too unstable.  It’s like a continuous walk uphill in the sleeting cold rain, gale winds blowing without an umbrella or a raincoat. I don’t care enough to risk it. Go ahead, you do it. I’ll watch and see how well it works for you”. Yah. This is what’s wrong with America.

We have lost our confidence. Our ideas are shot down, our brave acts thrown out with the trash and our trust in mankind chipped away at slowly until our confidence is shaken. It takes confidence in ourselves to make a difference, confidence from our communities to make change happen and confidence in our government for each of us to steward our slice of the world with integrity and make the world a better place.

So where does this leave us? Stalled and alone with our selfish selves. Seems like not the best premise to restore hope or build something to believe in, does it?

What makes life worth living is the joy of helping others. At least that’s what life in America means to me. There IS A WAY to do good and do well at the same time here at home. I find it simply bizarre how often my purest desire and sincerity is called into question. What does that say really about America and her people? Do we really SH*T where we eat or have we just grown so accustom to others doing it that it seems normal and acceptable that we do it too?

We have only one life to live America. Use your One voice to make a difference. Find a sisterhood or brotherhood of believers just like you.  Make a tribe with them. And when you do?  Be LOYAL and KIND and GIVING towards them. WITH THEM use your imagination.  BE brave, ACT, and do it with HONOR. If you do, you will rise above adversity together and your confidence will grow together.

Let us  be brave enough to reimagine our futures together FIRST with our truest of true friends and then expand from there. Those who really believe and VALUE the same things we do. Let’s hold each other accountable in the name of progress and honor. Gosh. Imagine that. Now find the language you need to make it come true in your family, in your community and in this lifetime.

We can restore America into all things possible again.

Appeared in Forbes, Written by Dan Schawbel, contributor

I recently caught up with Ryan Blair, who is a serial entrepreneur and author of the new book “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain.” Ryan established his first company, 24-7 Tech when he was only twenty-one years old. Since then, he has created and actively invested in multiple start-ups and has become a self-made multimillionaire. After he sold his company ViSalus Sciences to Blyth in early 2008, the global recession took the company to the brink of failure resulting in a complete write off of the stock and near bankruptcy. Ryan as CEO went “all in” betting his last million dollars on its potential and turned the company around from the edge of failure to more than $150,000,000 a year in revenue in only 16 months winning the coveted DSN Global Turn Around Award in 2010. In this interview, Ryan talks about how he re-branded himself after being in a gang, the issues with the education system, and more.

How did you shake your criminal record and re-brand yourself?

I remember when I was working my way up in the first company that employed me, I used to have nightmares that one day they’d find out about that I had been in a gang, call me into the office, and fire me. In the beginning I didn’t talk much about what I’d been through. But eventually when I got to a point where I had established myself as a professional entrepreneur, I embraced my past, used it as part of my branding, and crossed over.

In this day and age people want authenticity. Now that the world is social, people know all about you. Assuming you decided to join humanity, that is. It turned out that as I started showing my true identity, so did the rest of the world. One of the reasons my company ViSalus is one of the fastest growing companies in the industry today is because we share our good, bad, and ugly. Like sharing a video of me playing a practical joke on one of my employees, for instance. As a result of embracing authenticity, I turned the company around from near bankruptcy to over $15 million a month today. Unlike our competitors, our distributors and customers know exactly who we are, and I’d say that corporate America has a lot of catching up to do.

What’s your take on the educational system? Will a college degree help or hurt your chances at starting a successful business?

As a product of Los Angeles’s public school system, in a state with the highest dropout rate in the nation (about 20 percent), I can tell you from personal experience that some of our brightest minds are being misidentified because of a one-size-fits-all learning environment. Because I had ADD and dyslexia I never got past the 9th grade.

I recall sitting with a career counselor in continuation high school, being told that I didn’t have the intellect or aptitude to become a doctor or a lawyer. They suggested a trade school, construction, something where I’d be working with my hands.

The irony is that today I employ plenty of doctors and lawyers. Would you rather be a doctor or a lawyer, or a guy who writes a check to doctors and lawyers?

If President Obama phoned me today and told me he was appointing me Educational Czar, I’d turn education into a business, a capitalistic, revenue driven system, creating a competitive environment where each school is trying to attract customers, based on quality of customer experience.

As an entrepreneur, having a college degree or getting classroom training won’t hurt your chances for starting a successful business, but it’s ultimately not necessary. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers,” he makes a point that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to master a skill set at a professional level. That means experience, over traditional education.

What three business lessons did you learn from juvenile detention?

I learned a lot about business and life from my time spent incarcerated. I like to call these pieces of wisdom my Philosophies from the Jail Cell to the Boardroom. One of the biggest lessons I learned was that in Juvenile Hall, new guys always get tested. When I went in the first time, I was just a skinny little white kid and I had to learn fast. People will be bumping into you on the basketball court, or asking you for things, testing to see if you’re tough.

And everyone knew that if a guy let someone take their milk during lunchtime, they weren’t as tough as they looked. Soon you’d be taking their milk everyday, and so would everyone else. It’s the same for business, if you give people the impression that you can be taken, you will be.

Also, adaptation is the key to survival. In jail the guy who rises to power isn’t always the strongest or the smartest. As prisoners come and go, he’s the one that adapts to the changing environment, while influencing the right people. You can use this in business, staying abreast of market trends, changing your game plan as technology shifts, and adapting our strategy around your company’s strongest competitive advantages. Darwin was absolutely right — survival is a matter of how you respond to change.

The last lesson I got from jail is that you have to learn how to read people. You don’t know who to trust. It’s the same for business because a lot of people come into my office with a front. I have to figure out quickly who is the real deal and who isn’t. Based on that fact, I developed an HR system that I use when interviewing potential new hires that I call the Connect Four Technique. Yep, you guessed it. I make my future employees — and I have hundreds of them — play me in Connect Four.

Can everyone be an entrepreneur? Can it be learned or do you have to be born with a special gene?

No. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur. There are two types of people in the world, domesticated and undomesticated. Some people are so domesticated through their social programming and belief system, so employee minded, that they could never be entrepreneurs. And they shouldn’t even bother trying. The irony is that this is coming from a guy who teaches millions of people how to become entrepreneurs. I’m literally selling a book about becoming an entrepreneur, telling you that not everyone should read it.

To be an entrepreneur, you have to have fighting instincts. Are instincts genetic? I don’t think so, but you ‘inherit’ them from your upbringing. Now, if you’re smart you can reprogram your beliefs. But there are still some people that would rather watch other people be entrepreneurs, like the people in the Forbes “richest celebrity list” than take the time to reprogram themselves, and live their lives like rock stars, too.

Is there a need for business plans these days?

When you’ve really got the entrepreneurial bug, the last thing you want to do is sit down and write a business plan. It’s the equivalent of writing a book about playing the guitar before actually knowing how to play the guitar. You don’t know what your new business is going to be like. And just like a guitar, a business will have to be tweaked and tuned multiple times, and you’ll need long practice sessions and repetition, before you can get even one successful song out of it.

In my book “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain,” I actually included a chapter called “I Hate Business Plans” where I talk about this. Most business plans that get sent to me, I close within seconds of opening them up because they are full of fluff and hype. A business plan should be simple, something you could scribble on a scratch pad. No more than three pages of your business objectives, expected results, and the strategy to get there. But the best business plan is one built from a business that is already up and running and that matches the business’s actual results.

The point is that you should be so obsessed with your business that you can’t sleep at night because that’s all you can think about. And that’s your ultimate “business plan.”

About Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, LLC, a full-service personal branding agency, and author of “Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future.”

What kinds of new jobs in the arts can we create?  What combination of skills do we need to unlock new economic opportunities for us and to change society’s perceptions of what value the arts deliver? How can we add more to GDP by building hybrid careers that transmit and translate all of our skills across all sectors and strands?

Below are two lists that I think are valuable to creatively thinking through the possibilities.  The first are interdisciplinary sites focused on the development of leadership skills through emotional intelligence building.  Embedding emotional intelligence training as part of an arts based venture can have many applications across many disciplines outside of the arts.

The second list is a list of performing artists who have already figured out how to fine-tune their artistic and creative competencies to provide experience-based learning alternatives to traditional leadership training and development. This list might provide some reflection and generate some ideas for those of you who are interested.

Emotionally Intelligent Leadership

• About Learning Styles
• Breakthrough Creativity-Achieving Top Performance Using the Eight Creative Talents
• Center for Creative Leadership
• Change Leaders, Inc. – Board Development, CEO Coaching, and Executive Team Development
• Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations
• Human Capital Institute
• Integral Leadership Review
• New Horizons for Learning-Learning in the Workplace
• What Make’s a Leader?-Harvard Business Review Article on Emotionally-Intelligent Leadership

Performing Arts-based Leadership Training

• Ariel Group-Leadership Presence
• Banff Centre – Inspiring Creative Leadership
• Being and Living Enterprises – Creatively Optimizing Purpose & Performance
• Brian Tate Productions – The Voice of Leadership
• Business as Performance Art
• Colorado Business Committee for the Arts
• Creative Skills Training Council-Asia Pacific & Australia
• Creative Leaps International
• Leadership for Lawyers
• Learning Innovations Laboratory-Harvard Graduate School of Education
• PianoScapes – Awakening the Commons of the Imagination
• Society for Arts in Healthcare
• Theatre4Business – Play Hard; Work Well
• The Art of Possibilities
• The International Forum – Leadership Through Music
• The Maestro Effect
• Music and Management – Music Provides Excellent Metaphor for Business Climate
• Viva La Voice – Celebrate the Power of Your Full Expression

There is an unspoken social contract the world has made with artists. It goes something like this: “We love what you do, you inspire us. But you don’t live in the “real” world so you couldn’t possibly economically revive us.”

If your an artist reading this post, and you truly wish to enter into other sectors of society in meaningful ways to help our broken world, the reality of bumping into the invisible wall is real. Trust me. I am living the dream and working at the wall and focused on dismantling it one brick at a time.

And if you are one of those folks who might have made this social contract with us artists, knowingly or unconsciously, reading this post?  It’s time to let go of it and find some 21st century innovative artists who will offer you a far better ROI than you can imagine.

I was told the other day by a seasoned technology entrepreneur, venture capital and angel investor that “…people all the time lie to us- we expect it. One of the ingredients to becoming an entrepreneur is to thicken your skin and learn to ignore it and rise above it. It’s probably one of the reasons why so many entrepreneurs are assholes when they succeed really.”

I have to tell you this does not work for me. Imagine what would happen to our work and new businesses if the basis for all we do was built instead on trust and collaboration?

Get the picture?

Artists do you see the potency of the work in front of us to do?

If the world we live in now was built on a lack of trust and a lack of collaboration- which it has been- let’s create our own entrepreneurial opportunities to help ourselves and others prosper by teaching the virtue and benefits of ethical conduct and true collaboration through our artistry. Imagine just how vibrant our world would be.

This is what the arts have to offer IF we develop the skills to translate our creativity and standard of conduct into meaningful ways to others.

Who will join me at the invisible wall?

I need a dump truck now please. But I am in search of a fleet…

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

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

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

ETA loves ASU and Linda Essig’s P.A.V.E. program (Performing Arts Venture Experience). So consider supporting
Blue Bike, a student led venture by pledging something to help them reach their goal before Wednesday June 29th 1:07pm EDT .

Through KickStarter, 71 Backers have pledged a total of $3,721 to fund Blue Bike’s “The Blue Bike Kid Show,” a multimedia experience designed to demystify the technology and science that surrounds us and encourages kids to explore and engage in it. The Blue Bike Kid Show follows the absurd misadventures of Boyd, EP, & Steve, the time-traveling assistants of legendary inventor Nikola Tesla. Kids will be able to see the show live at schools, science centers, and community events as well as follow the Blue Bike web-series online.

Blue Bike is designed to inspire and empower children, ages 8-13, to take ownership of modern digital technology–not just as a product for consumption but rather as a means of creation. Riding along with the Blue Bike gang, children will learn about the science and technology being developed in their own communities and how to use that knowledge to make their communities better.

Blue Bike’s funding goal is $5,000 (minimum pledge you can make is $1).

Deadline to make a pledge is Wednesday, June 29, 1:07 EDT.

Written by Peter Spellman, Berklee College of Music

Artists tend to be slow starters but good finishers if they take the long view and stick to their knitting. A musician confident in her skills, creativity, contact network and personal drive might sometimes wonder, “Why am I not yet famous?” All the pieces seem to be in place, but fame still eludes.

Even if  “fame” be defined as “simply supporting my life and paying my bills solely though musical work,” this more humble end prize is still a distance off.

Or is it?

How we define “success” for ourselves will often influence our view of the “prize”. I personally view “success” as the successive realization of a worthwhile goal. If I am reflecting my long range goal in my day, even in the smallest of ways, then I am “successful,” according to that definition.

When asked about her “success”, musician Zoe Keating described it as “the sum of many tiny moments.” Success is not someday; success is every day. The key is to knit your success to conscious goals.

We consider 5% GDP growth pretty good; 10% awesome. How might this apply to the tempo of music career development? Well, say you play 20 shows this year and your combined revenue for performances and music sales total $2000. Now, let’s say next year you play 30 shows and generate $3000 total sales. While it might not seem that much, it’s actually 50% growth! Project 50% growth per year out ten years and you’ve got a sustainable music career. Even 40, 30 and 20% growth are admirable business benchmarks.

Claude Monet didn’t event start his water lily series until he was in his seventies; Goethe finished Faust in his eighties; Pablo Casals was still performing in his nineties. Mozart didn’t complete a masterpiece until about ten years after he began composing.

The point is we should give ourselves permission to grow our careers at a tempo that makes sense to us rather than to over-strive and burn out too soon.

Slow starter, good finisher.

About Peter Spellman
Peter Spellman found his way into music as a guitarist in various New York bands and then switched to drums after seeing the Police perform in the late 1970s. Since then he’s performed and recorded with reggae outfit, The Mighty Charge, world music ensemble Friend Planet, and now with the Underwater Airport crew. He’s scored films for the National Science Foundation, composed video games for Massachusetts General Hospital, and coaches music entrepreneurs at Berklee College of Music. He is author of “The Self Promoting Musician” and “Indie Business Power: A Step by Step Guide for 21st Century Music Entrepreneurs”. Find him at mcareerjuice.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market Research on a Shoestring!

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

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

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

 

Get Funded!

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

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

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

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

 

The Entrepreneur’s Legal Guide to Starting Up

By Naeem Zafar, University of California, Berkeley

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

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

 

The Definitive Entrepreneur’s Guide to Lawyers:

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

About Naeem Zafar

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

 

This post appeared on ArtsAppeal on Tue May 17th, 2011 and was written by David Zoltan.

If you have any interest whatsoever in seeing employed professional artists, arts administrators, and technicians, you must be interested in demand for the arts. There is no grant, no large gift, no government subsidy that can replace it. Art for art’s sake will always happen, and much of it will end up on YouTube, in attics or basements, or performed for intimate groups. But people that are employed to create art for the sake of our mutual entertainment, as our cultural medium, and/or posing the human questions of our time cannot survive without demand.

I was reminded of this essential property from a progressive article talking about taxes on the wealthy. The author relates:

I used to own a business and have been in senior positions at other businesses, and I know many others who have started and operated businesses of all sizes. I can tell you from direct experience that I tried very hard to employ the right number of people. What I mean by this is that when there were lots of customers I would add people to meet the demand. And when demand slacked off I had to let people go.

If I had extra money I wouldn’t just hire people to sit around and read the paper. And if I had more customers than I could handle that — the revenue generated by meeting the additional demand from the extra customers — is what would pay for employing more people to meet the demand. It is a pretty simple equation: you employ the right number of people to meet the demand your business has.

If you ask around you will find that every business tries to employ the right number of people to meet the demand. Any business owner or manager will tell you that they hire based on need, not on how much they have in the bank.

This is something that I could relate to as an entrepreneur, and though the push of the article in question is about taxes, it applies as much to arts organizations in general. There’s no magic solution, no savior business model, no technological wizard that substitutes for butts in seats.

And so if we’re to turn to dredging up demand that doesn’t presently exist, we need to think outside the box.

1. Diversity: Scott Walters spoke eloquently at TEDxMichiganAve of the need to direct money towards underserved communities. While Walters was primarily speaking of rural communities that absolutely can and should have arts organizations to serve them, I look at the tremendous number of predominantly white, young, male, upper-middle class, urban theatre companies around Chicago and around the country and despair just a little. If another company wants to get funding, our government and foundation sources really need to say “You’re on your own.”

By the same token, Walters equated organizations like Steppenwolf or Arena Stage that have been around for decades and still find themselves dependent on foundation and government funds to being like a 60-year-old living in their mom’s basement. While I can see the argument for foundations and government supporting specific programs that align with objectives that that group wishes to invest in (and then only for a limited time to get the program off the ground), I fully support the idea of encouraging the NEA, state arts agencies, and foundations to move to a “venture capital” system that concentrated on expanding the groups that meet specific needs of under-served markets, geographically, demographically, and so forth. This has tremendous potential to expand the number of people attending the arts, as I continue to fully believe in the statement I put forth that the best way to tell someone you don’t care about them as an audience member is to never put someone they can relate to onstage (and/or writing the piece, designing sets that feel familiar to them, etc.).

2. Dynamic Pricing. I feel strongly that this is a positive tool for reaching out to new audiences without sacrificing (and likely even increasing) revenues. It requires sophisticated box office/CRM systems, but the ability to better target price elastic groups is critical. Being able to better offer solid strategies for filling the seats is only strengthened with flexibility in prices. When paired with strong experience management techniques that develop relationships beyond the transaction, dynamic pricing can open doorways wide open that are currently closed.

3. Participation. Another theme at TEDxMichiganAve brought up by several speakers (Gwydion Suilebhan, David Dombrosky, and David Loehr most prominently but put out there in various forms by many) was participation of audiences in the artistic process. Arts education participation has long been understood to strongly influence participation later in life, but now we’re seeing that current participation also increases the likelihood of participation as an audience member. Certainly, we can’t stop the floodgates opened by YouTube, Flickr, and other social media venues, nor would we want to as these are our primary target markets of people that clearly enjoy the arts, even if they don’t yet make the connection between what they do and what we do!

This needs to go beyond social media however. Finding ways of involving audiences in the artistic process needs to be a live and continuous objective if we expect new audiences to value live and continuous involvement in the arts. Advisory councils, auxiliary boards, and so forth can fill part of this need. Opening up invitations for patrons to get involved in season selection or inviting them into workshops and rehearsals to hear what they think or inviting them to make suggestions wholesale or inviting them to reinterpret things they’ve seen on stage for a small group or anything else that your artistic staff is comfortable with can create intimate connections with your arts organization that simply aren’t possible via social media.

And it will be that connection that increases loyalty to your organization. With loyalty will come additional value to capture which the non-profit model allows you to capture via individual donations, something not possible in any other model. It will drive demand to your door and turn customers into patrons into donors into advocates which will in turn drive even more demand.

And that’s exactly what we need right now.

About David Zoltan
David Zoltan is the founder of ArtsAppeal, a consultancy specializing in developing fundraising practices in the arts industry through a holistic loyalty-based approach. As a recognized thought leader in the arts management field, he was granted a TED license to curate an independently organized TED conference, TEDxMichiganAve, examining the future of the arts industry featuring 13 speakers from across the United States. David is a graduate of the Masters program in Arts Management from the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. He’s a successful entrepreneur, having started, ran, and sold a retail game store and tournament center before even celebrating his 30th birthday, as well as working directly with top entrepreneurs from around the world as a consultant and coach. His writings can typically be found on the ArtsAppeal blog at http://artsappeal.org, as well as featured on several other websites around the blogosphere.

Where, in life, can you ‘win’ and truly be rewarded?

For the past 3 months I have been glued to my computer writing and revising grant applications. Except for my fingers flying over the keyboard, and my mind ablaze with word-smithing chatter, my body sits motionless for hours on end.  I go to sleep dreaming about sentences I have written and wake up with a cereal bowl full of alphabet letters giving me the chance to literally eat my words before it starts all over again.

You see, I have never written a grant before. Before now, I lived in the for profit world. The learning curve is steep and it’s a hard process trying to rise to the challenge.

The first grant I wrote took a 100 hours to develop. 3 days before it was due, Marete Wester, Dir of Arts Policy from Americans for The Arts gave it a read and quite frankly tore it apart. God Bless her. Really. Thank God she did.

I had asked a number of people if they would read it and give me feedback but she was the only one who did in earnest. I received the copy back with tons of notes in the margin. Marete focused constructively on what I did not write well.

I ‘listened’ carefully to every word she wrote- letting the lessons sink in.  And once I had, I followed every suggestion she made and re-wrote the grant entirely, in just three days, starting over from scratch. This proposal was for a 6 figure request for support. I needed to write an incredibly well polished proposal to have a chance. Period.

It’s been a month since I submitted the proposal. Yesterday I heard from the foundation. They have asked to read our full proposal as well as asked we increase the amount requested to include our research proposal.

Lesson learned: Ask the smartest person in a subject area you know- or wish you knew- for help. While not often, sometimes they just might help you. I live by this rule and I can’t even begin to tell you how many amazing people, over the years, have stepped forward and offered to help me, like Marete Wester.

Look, other than a little gumption, asking is free. And for that matter rejection is too. It’s the receiving help part , however, some regard as the real ‘problem’. Why? Because it will challenge you to be disciplined: to listen, learn from what you hear and not resist, and then do what is required to rise above yourself and improve. Quickly.

Have you ever been bribed? How did it happen? What lessons did you learn?

In 1974,when I was 10, my father offered me $100.00 to lose 10 pounds. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer  inflation calculator my dad was offering his 10 year old daughter the equivalent of $456.20 in today’s dollars. Yeah, what 10 year old wouldn’t be motivated by that?  And losing that 10 pounds he highly incentivized me to lose was as hard for me then to accomplish as it is for me now.

But I did it and it made a big impression on me to this day. I remember well the day I walked into the bike shop with my Dad and paid cash for a decked out girls brand new Hollywood Schwinn bicycle I was able to buy for myself with my very own stash.  This lesson stuck: Conquering hard stuff in life- the stuff that requires the most from us ever- and yet is really good for us – deserves a great reward.

And what if the reward, you ask, never comes?   Then the question you have to ask is: Are you sure your doing the right hard stuff?

There is still time to get your ticket to The Chicago Michigan Avenue TEDx on Saturday May 7th at Symphony Center in Chicago.

The big question: How can we make changes to our industry to support the arts? Where do we begin and what will that future industry look like? David Zoltan will play host to people from all over the arts industry to answer these questions and more. Join him on May 7th, 2011 at The Symphony Center, “Club 8″ for his TedX talk. Together we can
create solutions and evolve!

8:00am – Registration and Welcome

9:00am-10:30am – First Group
David Zoltan, Organizer – Welcome
Seth Boustead - Executive Director, Access Contemporary Music
Gwydion Suilebhan – Playwright
Drew McManus – Orchestra consultant

10:30am-11:00am – 30 minute break

11:00am-12:30pm – Second Group
David Dombrosky - Executive Director, Center for Arts Management and Technology
Scott Walters – Director, Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education
Lisa Canning – Founder, The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship

12:30pm-1:30pm – 60 minute lunch break

1:30pm-3:00pm – Third Group
Ian David Moss – Arts Policy Wonk at Createquity.com
Crystal Hall, Adam Marks, Melissa Snoza – Fifth House Ensemble
Tom Tresser- arts and business consultant, arts policy activist
Adam Thurman – Director of Marketing, Court Theatre

3:00pm-3:30pm – 30 minute break

3:30pm-5:00pm – Fourth Group
David J. Loehr – Playwright and co-founder of 2amtheatre.com
Julie Ritchey - Artistic Director, Filament Theatre Ensemble
Eric Ziegenhagen – Artist and funding consultant

Click here to purchase tickets to this event!

Written by Jeffrey Nytch,
Director of The Entrepreneurship Center for Music, Univ of CO- Boulder

We keep hearing reports of struggling orchestras (and opera companies): Syracuse shut down, Charleston on life support, any number of others in the “smaller, regional orchestra” class trying to figure out how to stay afloat. (For a further run-down, check out this article: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/familiar-story.html.) We blame the economy, or markets too small to support a full-time professional orchestra, or dwindling corporate and government support. We tell ourselves that the problem consists of the particulars of a given group or blame ineffective “marketing” (as if more advertising or visibility alone will make people change their mind about wanting a product). But looking at those explanations simply allows the orchestral establishment to avoid looking at the larger systemic issues. But now one of the Big Ones is in big trouble: the much venerated Philadelphia Orchestra. We don’t yet know the details, but it’s easy enough to predict what they are: high structural debt, shrinking institutional support, high fixed costs and, more likely than not, loss of audience.

The question is, will this wake us up? Commentators and advocates have been trying to raise awareness about these bigger problems for the last decade, but their work has largely been consigned to the periphery. I wonder, with the Philly being the first orchestra of this size and fame to sink under the crippling constraints of its own outmoded approach to both their business and the art it supports, if now the mainstream orchestral community will begin to ask itself if the 19^th-century business & art model that has been the basis for classical orchestras for over a century might be due for some changes. Thus far, the more forward-thinking orchestras have still only managed tweaks to the old models; perhaps now more leaders in the field will see the need for a major overhaul.

And what of the entrepreneurial perspective in all this? Well, one of the cardinal rules of entrepreneurship is that markets that are in extreme turmoil are markets ripe with opportunity – for those who are able to see the problems from a different perspective, that is. So how would an entrepreneurial approach change the way we go about solving the current orchestral crisis? If you were to re-invent the orchestra from scratch, based on the principles of entrepreneurship, what would you come up with?

About Jeffrey Nytch
Jeffrey Nytch comes to the Entrepreneurship Center for Music having built a diverse career as a composer, teacher, performer, and arts administrator. For 15 years he has continually created fresh ways to support and nurture that career, whether it be through developing commissioning opportunities, establishing residencies with community organizations, or building relationships with patrons. He has also run a small business, helped found a non-profit service organization in Houston, performed a wide range of repertoire as a vocalist, and served five years as Managing Director of The Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble (“PNME”), one of the nation’s premiere new music ensembles.

jeff.nytch@colorado.edu
http://music.colorado.edu/departments/ecm/
www.jeffreynytch.com

Kraig Kleeman, Nathan Latka, George W Bush, Lisa Canning and Dean Tom Berliner

Last night I had the honor of speaking on a panel with Nathan Latka and Kraig Kleeman at the first World Leaders Forum at Judson University in Elgin, IL. immediately following a keynote given by George W Bush.  The evening was very special to me, politics aside, because until last night I had never met anyone who has held this high of an office before. Our former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, and former speaker of the House Denny Hastert too were present for the event. Equally, I had never met anyone at their level either.

What struck me about the evening was how social circles, at every level, share a lot in common. Mostly in that everyone in them is a human being, just like you and I; trying to do the best in life they can with whatever circumstances, opportunities, struggles and triumphs have presented themselves.

And as I “worked” the VIP room last night, introducing myself and chatting with folks who had supported and underwritten the cost of the event at Judson, I was reminded that all social circles share other things in common too. There are givers, and takers, warm, kind souls, and steely one’s,  talkers, and listeners, those who come to show off their expensive clothes and those who could care less but came to support or hang out with a friend.  Individuals from all walks and views of life are in every social circle.

People are people. At every level a group is full of diversity. The trick is to find the people in whatever social circle you find yourself in this moment in, and connect to the one’s in it that can truly help you make the difference you wish to make. There is ALWAYS someone in the room who fits that description. But you have to “work” the room until you find them.

The “price of admission’ into the circle, whatever the costs to bring you all together, does not define the circle. Your ability to find your “people” in it- your tribe- is. So go shake hands and share who you are. You never know where it can lead you. I certainly never do and it’s worked pretty well for me. And it can for you too.