WE all know there’s nothing wrong with arts managers having strong political opinions and those opinions are of no business to the organization where they work. At the same time, how a manager expresses those opinions does impact the organization and a good manager needs to be aware of this when exercising his/her right to political expression. Case in point, the California Musical Theatre (CMT) fiasco which unfolded earlier this week…
Governance
We Still Need To Get Over Our Bad Selves
The Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA) released a letter on October 21, 2008 addressed of the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer urging her to rescind her decision to reassign the paper’s long time music critic, Don Rosenberg. The details about the issue have been written about throughout a wide range of blogs and traditional media outlets (such as Baltimore music critic Tim Smith’s blog) so I won’t bother rehashing the details here. Nevertheless, the letter contains a few points that every orchestra manager should consider…
Knowing When To Quit
The 6/19/2008 edition of the Wall Street Journal published an article by Janelle Gelfand (the Cincinnati Enquirer music critic) that asks whether or not this is truly the end of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra (CSO). Currently, the CSO executive board continues to rebuff calls for mediation, has fired the staff (although executives continue to work with full pay and benefits), cancelled the summer season, and failed to pay the musician’s for …
Create The Market
I ran across an interesting blog post at evancarmichael.com about Akio Morita, founder of Sony. Within a series of installments that chronicle the growth of Morita’s company, there is one post called "Create the Market Where There Is None." The article goes on to examine some specific components where Sony profited by focusing on creating a market as opposed to meeting a perceived demand and although those examples don’t necessarily apply to the business of creating live orchestra classical music, the strategic thinking behind those ideas fit like a glove…
Examining Columbus’ Master Agreement
Today’s article will examine some of the unique components of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra (CSO) maser agreement (also known as a collective bargaining agreement or “the contract”) governing full time and per service musician employment. We’ll also finish up the remaining few questions with CSO Executive Director, Tony Beadle…