business committee for the arts
Third Annual
Forum for New Ideas
October 6, 2005
Steelcase Inc.
New York, NY
The Business Committee for the Arts, Inc. (BCA) presented the third annual Forum for New Ideas to bring together innovative thinkers to explore new, non-traditional ways for business and the arts to work together to broaden and strengthen the operating objectives of both sectors and to enrich the educational process and the quality of life in communities throughout the United States.
Sponsor:
Steelcase Inc., New York, NY
Moderator:
John Waters
Design Director
Whet Design, Inc., New York, NY
Panelists:
Robert Ottenhoff
President and CEO
GuideStar, Willamsburg, VA
Robert Root-Bernstein
Professor of Physiology
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
Molly Smith
Artistic Director
Arena Stage, Washington, DC
Excerpts:
Robert Ottenhoff
President and CEO, GuideStar
One of the big issues for those of us in to the not-for-profit world is sustainability...Our society is demanding that not-for-profit organizations be more transparent and more accountable....When we give money, we want proof that it is being used effectively and efficiently...People also want to be more engaged in philanthropy....And third, there is a greater demand for data....
...Guidestar is revolutionizing philanthropy by providing information about organizations so individuals can be confident with their decision to support a group....Part of our challenge is to collect more valuable information and to create products and services that help users utilize our information. Hopefully, the result will be increased donor confidence that leads to more giving.
Those of us who run a not-for-profit must work with our donors to develop business models that are sustainable with renewable income. Hope is not a business model, nor is it a business plan.
Robert Root-Bernstein
Professor of Physiology, Michigan State University
I've been studying creativity for years. Scientists have very odd backgrounds. As I worked with biotechnology, pharmaceutical and chemical companies, I discovered that some top scientists were poets, playwrights and musicians....It is a hidden culture. I also discovered that the key to creativity is not solving the problem, but getting the problem right in the first place....Most people don't solve a problem because they never think about what the problem is. They assume the way the problem is given to them is the way to solve it. That is not the case.
We discovered that problem solvers in business, science and the arts use the same basic pre-verbal and pre-mathematic thinking tools that are not part of the formal curriculum, except for the arts. When you ask scientists how they problem solve, they talk about observing things, finding patterns....The arts are critical to solving problems. Scientists imagine they are a black hole, an electron or a virus....They must ask themselves what would I do? How would I behave? And, how would I (the scientist) interfere with that behavior? All scientists use empathizing, observing, imagining, an analogizing. When you look at most modern art you analogize. Patterns are there....We must learn to observe them.
Our educational system is based on writing. Scientists, mathematicians and technologists have a private language. They are pre-verbal and pre-mathematical....They have reached something called synosis—an ability to bring all your senses together.
Scientists and technologists could not do their work without being creative. In my research I create art to explore the interactions between objects, how one defines another. It's all visual, kinesthetic. My colleagues who can't do this visualization don't understand what I do....The best audience I have are artists. I could not do my work, nor could the people I work with, if I did not have an arts background.
If we want to have creative people leading companies we must support the arts and arts education.
Molly Smith
Artistic Director, Arena Stage
...I feel that artists and scientists are in league with each other. When I have conversations with scientists, I realize that scientists and artists are all about experimentation—finding a problem, following it, hitting dead ends, backing up, moving in different directions.
The best art is always subversive. It dares to break existing rules and roles... and it is created when people trust their guts rather than their heads.
If the front door is locked, come in the back—find ways to break the rules. We broke rules with our board of trustees...typically focused on financials. We ignored the business side of Arena and pulled the board into the creative process, breaking rules and roles. Board members divided into artistic teams and created seasons of plays and critiqued them. It was a roaring success!...There are so many things we share as humans, and when we can open that in each other, it opens our own capacity.
...I serve on a board of directors of Theatre Communications Group (TCG). We set a goal to reach 50 million persons attending theater within the next decade. So how do we do this? Our conversations began with developing great ad campaigns, but paying for this would be impossible. People began to think how we could break the rules. We decided to offer an evening of free theater on one specific night all over America. The belief was that this initiative would be picked up by the media, raise theaters' profiles, bring many new people to live theater or those who come occasionally, and encourage them to go more often.
This project is piloting in Philadelphia, Austin, and San Francisco....In San Francisco an hour after it was announced, the Web site received 100,000 hits.... Next year we're going to add six more cities.
I think to make a new program work you need a champion on your side. A business champion is incredibly important to the arts....
Not all the programs go well and that's where you really have to trust your guts.... You hit a dead-end with certain things and it falls apart. I like to call them brilliant failures. I like brilliant failures much better than boring failures because you learn what to do next time.