Leading by Design

Even though 2020 will technically be in our rear view mirror soon, its ramifications will be with us for years to come. Make no mistake, there's a lot of work to do. So, here are my four really tough, but really important, resolutions designed to lay some solid groundwork for doing your best work in 2021. Aren't you glad there are only four? If you're interested in my resolutions from previous years, take a look here  and here .

Times of extraordinary change and disruptions demand flexibility, humility, perseverance, self-reflection and a responsiveness to a complex confluence of realities by museum leaders. Agile leadership requires mapping out a meaningful, relevant, and financially viable path forward to achieve greater public impact, inclusion, and value through resilience practices. Resilience strategies require rethinking long-held approaches and tackling embedded exclusionary, colonial, and outmoded ideologies and practices to establish more flexible, inclusive, and responsive frameworks that better align with external realities. With your purchase of THE RESILIENCE PLAYBOOK and time with the Resilience Team, your organization can reimagine a future that is relevant and responsive to the changing world around us. Specifically, THE RESILIENCE PLAYBOOK encompasses 5 Resilience Goals and 20 Plays that offer practical and empowering approaches to help your organization realign around equity and inclusion, c...

I am currently working with two colleagues from the cultural and heritage fields to think and write about organizational resiliency in times of upheaval and ambiguity. We believe resiliency in this crucible moment requires, first and foremost, nonprofit organizations activate equity and inclusion by embracing it as central to all their internal and external work. It begins when organizations commit the time to examine their own historical roots and practices as a critical step to ensure they “live” their most meaningful missions, visions, and values. Resiliency requires many organizations also renegotiate what it means to be valuable to their communities. The traditional idea of “value” has changed and is changing, and recognizing the extent to what our communities really value is key to being wanted, needed, and, thus relevant. All organizations must retool their financial mindsets, taking a hard look at their current financial realities and realigning the costs of doing business with...

On May 19th, exhibition designer and developer Paul Orselli and I sat down to talk about museum and nonprofit leadership. If you'd like to watch more of Paul's Museum FAQ's, find him on YouTube .

DOES THIS SOUND LIKE YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW? Director is hired to revitalize a long-in-the-tooth cultural organization with an aging audience/support base. New momentum must be created for stability today and growth tomorrow. How to move forward and bring most everybody along? That’s just one of the thousands of questions to be asked and answered on the long journey of breathing new life into an organization that has hit a very wide plateau or peaked too soon. Almost every cultural organization struggles every day to find its path to the future. Yet, as directors, we may be only aware of it when the struggle becomes a crisis. What’s the skill set for keeping a finger on the pulse of an organization, anticipating its needs, and creating its future? A New York Times article about Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb’s approach to leading a major cultural institution into the 21 st century offers up some really useful insights. Yes, this is the GM whose recent produ...