Whose Responsibility Is It?

, And

I'm in the throes of an "do I or don't I" quandary.

Decisions are easier to follow when they're somebody else's responsibility to make.

Perfection paralysis. Second guessing all the possible outcomes. Each answer has a catalog of additional questions that go along with it.

If you're lucky, if you've cultivated the right relationships with people you trust with your decision, you can ask for advice. But if you're the one-in-charge, it's still your decision. You can take input, you can build trees, you can create iterations, but the decision is still yours to make.

"How to be" productive or successful articles talk all the time about removing low-level decisions--what to wear, what to eat for breakfast--so that you open your decision-making bandwidth to the high-level, change-the-world decisions. Be commercial and take investors or stay nonprofit and cultivate donors. Give your product away versus charging all the market will bear.

Empower your frontline employees to make their own decisions or give them carefully-worded handouts on what to do in any situation.

Joy and autonomy versus cog in the machine.

That decision seems to be low-level. You're leading an arts organization.

Comments

New Year, New You Vision Board

VISION BOARDS! Let's get a couple of things clear, right at the start. THERE IS NO WRONG WAY TO MAKE A VISION BOARD. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE. You believe that putting pieces of pretty paper on another piece of paper calls into your life your deepest hopes and dreams, then you believe it with all your heart and soul. These are inspirational devices, not architectural blueprints. Ok, now that we have some caveats taken care of, the briefest of background before we get to the supplies and instructions (OH MY GOD THIS IS WHY THE ONLINE RECIPE BLOGS ARE LIKE THIS) I've been making vision boards consistently every year for my birthday (ish, usually on the new moon closest to my actual natal day) for a decade and before that on and off since college. I've always considered paper art as my chosen visual artistic medium, so vision boards were right up my manifestation alley. At one point in my life I wanted to work in magazine publishing (scratch that, I still do) so buying and keeping...

High Art vs Low Art

“The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” - -The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936 Is there any more contentious question in the art world than the concept of “high” versus “low” I like venn diagrams. And shouldn't art really be in the middle? art? Who gets to judge? What are the parameters in which to judge? There is no standard definition for either concept and personal explanations range from simple to incredibly complex. One common theory about how to explain the difference is high art is “popular” and low art is “unpopular”, that is, appealing (or not) to many people. This also links to another version of the difference: that high art fosters the widest connection between people while a smaller subsection enjoys low art. This is in direct contradiction, though, to the idea of low art being part of mass culture (raising yet another question of “is art culture” or merely a com...

Theater in the Age of Netflix

I read a great article in the December issue of Fast Company titled " Retail in the Age of Amazon. " Long-time readers know of my penchant for following retail conversations and seeing how they are applicable to the theater world and this article was no different. (New readers: hello! do you think retail and theater overlap, too?) I sat down to write notes on all the topics and details from the article that I wanted to flesh out on for theaters. I thought it would be 4 or 5, since the article itself had 4 sections to it. Instead, I had TWENTY-TWO points to hit. To flesh out each of those points, even a paragraph a piece, seems a tad much for a blog post. Some of them I've written about before, like defining success on your terms and using heretical ideas . A lot of them are about how going back to basics and focusing on differentiation rather than competing at the same game can help retail businesses survive and thrive in the age of click-and-buy. This is...

Perpetually Curious

Search This Blog