It's Guest Author Time

Guest-Author

I’m away at the Grand Tetons Music Festival through August 16 and that means you’ll be treated to a series of posts from gust authors. We have a good mix of returning guest authors alongside some new faces and from what I’ve seen from some of them so far, it going to make for some good reading.

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Upgrading Habits

If you’re anything like me, you have a rather large list of blogs and other online news RSS feeds. For some time now, I’ve used my Google homepage to aggregate those feeds but it has never been a perfect solution. But not long ago, I started using the news reading application from Pulse on my Droid Smartphone and iPad and after several months of regular use, I have to say that it is the best solution I’ve found to keep on top of all my regular sources. The only hitch is that, as of now, it is only available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

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The Pen Is Mightier Than The Board

Denial is a crazy thing; particularly when it comes to crisis management. One tip on knowing when your organization might be taking the first step off of a very large cliff is when more stakeholders focus on insignificant items to the detriment of obvious, high priority tasks. For example, if your orchestra’s senior management team becomes so consumed with figuring out how to replace copier toner to the point of starting the institutional meeting to announce reorganization bankruptcy 25 minutes late, then you might have a problem (true story, but from years ago).

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The Way Funding Should Work

The 8/3/2011 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (hat tip, LinkedIn) published a brilliant article by Kevin Starr, Mulago Foundation and the Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program Director, that examines the value of unrestricted foundation funding. Given yesterday’s article about the perilous minefield that is foundation support within the orchestra business, Starr’s article couldn’t be timelier.

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