Clara Miller from the Nonprofit Finance Fund works with nonprofits at all stages of crisis — from the highly stable and responsive to the oppressively unstable and inert. Some are going with flow of the economic thrill ride, others are hanging on by their fingertips. She summarizes the key challenges that have been plaguing nonprofits […]

While wandering the web looking for some insights on risk assessment and risk management (two key challenges for arts and cultural managers), I found the following rather intriguing theory: Humans have a target level of risk they find acceptable (physical risk, financial risk, personal risk, you name it). It’s not a shock to think that […]

A recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts runs the numbers on the September 2008 market and credit crash, and the numbers are rather large. In total, the average American household lost $107,850 through 2009 in income ($5,800), Federal recovery spending ($2,050), and declining stock and home value ($100,000). It’s a cold splash of water […]

James Undercofler in his State of the Art blog suggests that the current training, support, and authorizing systems we use to advance the nonprofit and public arts are not prepared to engage the cultural entrepreneur. And boy, does he have a point. The essential elements of successful entrepreneurship — chief among them seed capital and […]

Last Thursday I was pleased to be the opening speaker for the Indiana Cultural Tourism Conference in Indianapolis. The event drew arts, culture, heritage, convention/visitors bureaus, and other related professionals from around the state to learn and share the changing nature of their work. Since they asked for an ’emerging trend’ discussion that relates to […]

Sorry that the last weeks of classes here in the Wisconsin School of Business have kept me distracted. I had piles of theses to wade through with my brilliant students, which kept my brain otherwise engaged. And now, with the end of the semester, the conference season begins. Hope to see some of you at […]

Frequent visitors to this blog or ArtsJournal more broadly may have noticed a disquieting warning awaiting them this week. Due to some malicious hacking, ArtsJournal’s web systems had been compromised with troubling code. Google noticed, and flagged the site as hacked. Web browsers with the capacity to block such flagged sites showed a warning message […]

Colleague and fellow Wisconsin business school alumna Linda Hall helped me discover this 2001 research paper on the qualities and challenges of leadership in a digital age (Mary Lynn Pulley & Valerie I. Sessa, ”E-leadership: tackling complex challenges,” Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 3, Number 6, 2001). Instead of solid, categorical conclusions about the nature […]

Interesting news that the West Yorkshire Playhouse decided NOT to allow tweeting or other mobile media use by their audiences, after some internal and external debate. There’s not much detail on the reasons for the decision in the article, but negative feedback from the universe and artistic concerns for the actors seemed to play a […]

As part of the Arts Enterprise course I co-taught last semester with Stephanie Jutt, we had the great pleasure of hosting a public talk by Bill Ivey, director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and transition team leader for […]