It’s As Though You Were In The Room

QuickTime videos from January’s American Orchestra Summit, including my session, Thinking Outside the Box: Organizational Structures and Strategies, are now available at the Summit website. Based on the segments I’ve watched, it looks like the sessions are presented unedited and although the sound can be a little soft, video quality is good and offered in large dimensions. The summit produced some intriguing discussions; in particular, my session touched on the dynamic impact of Cleveland Orchestra’s Miami residency (which pops up around the 48:00 mark in the video)…

You can follow Adaptistration’s Summit related thread of articles here as well as the official Summit blog, hosted at InsideTheArts.com. Although you can only access the vids from the Summit’s website, perhaps – sometime soon – they will be able to post some embed code or allow users to download.

About Drew McManus

"I hear that every time you show up to work with an orchestra, people get fired." Those were the first words out of an executive's mouth after her board chair introduced us. That executive is now a dear colleague and friend but the day that consulting contract began with her orchestra, she was convinced I was a hatchet-man brought in by the board to clean house.

I understand where the trepidation comes from as a great deal of my consulting and technology provider work for arts organizations involves due diligence, separating fact from fiction, interpreting spin, as well as performance review and oversight. So yes, sometimes that work results in one or two individuals "aggressively embracing career change" but far more often than not, it reinforces and clarifies exactly what works and why.

In short, it doesn't matter if you know where all the bodies are buried if you can't keep your own clients out of the ground, and I'm fortunate enough to say that for more than 15 years, I've done exactly that for groups of all budget size from Qatar to Kathmandu.

For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, keep track of what people in this business get paid, help write a satirical cartoon about orchestra life, hack the arts, and love a good coffee drink.

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