In 2005-2006 the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre underwent sever institutional trauma by making a snap decision to eliminate the pit orchestra. After several months of no live music and contentious bargaining the PBT board and musicians finally found a solution which brought live music back to the ballet. Now, the 2006-2007 season is seeing the very same events transpire but this time it’s in Atlanta…
Mock Negotiations: Contrasts & Comparisons
After completing the mock negotiation session with the MBA students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bolz Center for Arts Administration program, my mind wandered into contrast and comparison mode and I began to think about what just transpired with the UW-Madison students and how music performance students from the Eastman School of Music responded to a similar mock negotiation session I conducted with them in 2004… I want to preface this …
UW-Madison Mock Negotiation Reflections Part 2
Continuing where things left off in Part 1, the MBA students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bolz Center for Arts Administration program were serving as the orchestra musician negotiation committee in a mock collective bargaining agreement negotiation. After receiving some very bad news about their fictional orchestra’s financial conditions and a subsequent initial proposal from the management to reduce overall expenditures by 35%, the students on the negotiating committee refused to …
UW-Madison Mock Negotiation Reflections Part 1
There’s nothing quite like looking at the business from a different perspective. Even more stimulating is when those perspectives come to you from unexpected sources. Such was the case with the mock orchestra collective bargaining agreement negotiations I conducted with the MBA students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bolz Center for Arts Administration program… Regular Adaptistration readers might remember that I conducted a similar exercise with students from Eastman School of …
[Rain + Construction] x Rush Hour Traffic = No Blog
My sincere apologies to those of you stopping by today to read about the events from the mock orchestra negotiation with the students from UM-Madison. Unfortunately, Mother Nature decided to release a deluge of rain along most of my drive back to Chicago. That, combined with some construction along I-90, slowed me down enough to put me in the thick of Chicago rush hour traffic. As such, what should have been …