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Find out about museums and what's happening in the museum world, about leadership, management and governance of museums, including the management of change, the contribution of museums to learning, contribution to public issues such as the natural environment, cultural diversity and relations with indigenous peoples.
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April 10th, 2008
Increasingly, criticism is being voiced about the destructive effect of the market on civilized society. This has even reached the hallowed halls of museums. Two leading museologists Robert Janes, formerly of Glenbow in Calgary and Maxwell Anderson, now Director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and formerly of the Whitney in New York have criticised this trend.Janes (“Museums, Corporatism and the Civil Society” Curator The Museum Journal 50(2): 219-237, 2007) observes, “the prevailing worldview in North America is grounded in the belief that continuous economic growth is essential to individual and societal well-being”. He argues that this is enfeebling or diverting museums from realizing their unique strengths and opportunities as social institutions in civil society: museums, he asserts, must exploit their uniqueness, resist domination of marketplace thinking and seek ways of achieving meaning and sustainability within their communities.
Anderson (“Prescriptions for Art Museums in the Decade Ahead”, Curator the Museum Journal 50(1), 9-18, 2007) asserts, “rather than following a path towards community service or an educational mandate, the [museum] field has been led astray by a corporate mindset.” Anderson identifies the primary challenges facing art museums in rebalancing their mission, and suggests a series of remedies to the unrealistic economic model that threatens to exclude education as museums’ primary mandate.
Before dismissing what is said below as overly ideological, consider this statement from John Gray (School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics) reviewing (in The Guardian September 15, 2007) Naomi Klein’s recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Allen Lane).
“Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.
“Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.”
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of eight books and his essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and weekly in the Guardian (widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas). In an article in the Guardian last year (22 February 2007) Ash said,
“What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it. And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.”
In the last 40 or so years much of the business world and many governments (as expressed by New Public Management or NPM, particularly in developed western countries, have adopted market (or “rational”) economics and corporatism. Market mechanisms, according to this approach, should be allowed to determine production and pricing and government should stay out of the way of entrepreneurial business ventures. The focus is on the short term because the emphasis is efficiency as assessed by return on investment reflected in stock price as spruiked by stock market analysists. Rather than seeking new products and markets and quality service, the market oriented business seeks increase in the wealth of shareholders. (To varying extents, Nordic and some other European countries have been less prepared to adopt the market economic model.)
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Posted in General, Policy, Management, Museums generally, Economics | 1 Comment »
April 10th, 2008
New Public Management or NPM, is the transfer of business and market principles and management techniques from the private into the public sector. In the view of Wolfgang Drechsler, Professor in the Technology Governance Program at Tallinn University in Estonia, it is the most important reform movement within the public sphere over the last quarter of a century. The goal of NPM is, in Dreschler’s words, “a slim, reduced, minimal state in which any public activity is decreased and, if at all, exercised according to business principles of efficiency. NPM is based on the belief that all human behavior is motivated by self-interest and, specifically, profit maximization.”
Wikipedia describes NPM as “a broad and very complex term used to describe the wave of public sector reforms throughout the world since the 1980s. [NPM is] based on public choice and managerial schools of thought [which] seek to enhance the efficiency of the public sector and the control that government has over it. The main hypothesis … is that more market orientation in the public sector will lead to greater cost-efficiency for governments, without having negative side effects on other objectives and considerations.”
The application of NPM has had a great effect on governments in many countries and continues to do so in several countries including Australia and Canada. There is every reason why Boards and Directors of museums should be aware of these matters and doing their best to minimize the application of market economics and its outgrowths like NPM and Public Choice Theory.
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Posted in General, Policy, Management, Museums generally, Economics | No Comments »
April 9th, 2008
is the website of Tom Flynn Art Advisory Services. There are a large number of very interesting essays on a number of differnet issues facing museums including return of cultural property, the Churchill Museum at the War Cabinet Offices and so on. There is a blog which has been in abbeyance but is about to recommence. The website and blog both have lots of interesting commentary, most recently (April 2008) concerning the Parthenon sculptures and the UNESCO conference in Athens in March on the Return of Cultural Objects to their Countries of Origin. Tom has a post “Parthenon Marbles Case Overshadowed by Iraq Looting” on the museum security network about the Sculptures also.
This is a copy of the updated entry in the Links page of this site.
Posted in General, Government, Cultural Property, Conferences, History, Architecture & Design, Armed conflict | No Comments »
March 27th, 2008
There are several new items on museums as organizations and achieving change. Firstly, I have recently come across some excellent pieces relating to teamwork.
A Peter Day program on the BBC (which incidentally includes stuff about the Cambridge Boat Race team) featured amongst other people Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School. On her website there is a link to a podcast by her dealing with teams. The BBC piece is extremely interesting. Of course one of the reasons I liked it is that yet again it demonstrates what we can learn from other people and other organisations, in this case from the mobile phone giant Nokia and the University boat races on the Thames.
By the way, a recently broadcast piece on the ABC Radio National program “All in the Mind” dealt with apes and it would be a challenge to work out what one can conclude from that about how human groups work.
In the recently started ‘ning’ (an online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network) deals amongst other things with achieving organisational change and there is a post there which may be of interest.
Before finishing, a recent appointment to directorship of a large museum in Australia and the reaction to it highlights some of the challenges museums face. This is also dealt with in Museum 3.0.
Last, A paper entitled “Advancing Museums” has just been published in Museum Management and Curatorship.
Here is an extended abstract of the paper.
In the last 40 or so years museums, like many other nonprofit organizations, have focused to a greater extent on the demands of a market (or “rational”) economic model, adopted by most developed western countries – business and government alike - as a governing paradigm. Financial efficiency, restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing and fixed term contracts for senior staff have been major corporate developments. Boards have come to see their main role as oversight of executive management. Museum executives have been encouraged to be more entrepreneurial. Performance indicators have been introduced to show that museums contribute value for money.
Simultaneously, there have been substantial and vitally important advances in understanding of the learning experience in the museum environment, an experience which depends significantly on prior knowledge and contributes to individual identity and. Dramatic developments in information technology have also led to a great increase in public accessibility to knowledge about the collections.
A review of high performance forprofits and nonprofits and the most effective museums shows that best practice involves understanding the ‘industry’, a challenging work environment and attention to recruitment. Strategy for the executive leader means creating and communicating a vision encompasing unique deliverable value and appropriate organizational values. In all high performing organizations there is great attention to recruitment and to training and development.
A revised agenda for museum boards and executive leadership is developed and some other challenges are identified. Boards and executive leaders must seek advances in strategic issues which only they are responsible for; performance indicators must reflect that focus, not operational issues.
Posted in General, Information Technology, Leadership, People, Australia, Museums generally | No Comments »
January 29th, 2008
There are a huge number of vacancies at the executive leadership level in museums around the world. There is no guarantee that they will be filled in a sensible manner.
In a commentary on Business on the BBC World Service in January 2008, Lucy Kellaway, a columnist for the Financial Times, recounted her experiences spending a day with Korn Ferry pretending to be a headhunter. “I raced around London in taxis, sat in on interviews and drew up lists. When it was time to go home, I asked the woman I had been shadowing if she would give me a job. No, she replied after an indecently short pause. The main problem with me, she said, was that I said what I thought.”
Acknowledging that Finding the right person for the right job is more important than most things, and anyone who can do it deserves not only a place in heaven (or similar) but also the thwacking great fee they extract for their efforts”, Kellaway went on to describe how one large executive search firm provides their clients, amongst other things, with a “Leadership Advantage Toolkit ” to assist them to define the kind of person they are seeking. “Included were 66 characteristics that might be desirable in a leader, including “dealing with paradox” and “organisational agility” to be rated according to “mission critical”, “important” and so on.
“This is a low trick. It is about making clients think they are buying rigour in the hope this will make them less likely to protest when presented with the inevitably disappointing shortlist of candidates.”
Kellaway says, “In fact headhunting is both simple and difficult. The theory is simple: there are good managers and not-so-good ones. Alas, most are fairly mediocre, as managing isn’t easy. Choosing the good ones has nothing at all to do with 66 carefully weighted competencies: it is more a matter of finding three. The ability to think, the ability to act, and (most important) the ability to get others to act.”
Recruitment of leaders often is still being conducted in a formulaic and unthinking fashion. The vast majority of us pay the price of that. Taking on board what Kellaway so succinctly says, we can also observe that the appropriate way to go about recruitment is fairly clear. People like Fernandez Araoz, Warren Bennis and Nitin Nohria spell it out. Appointment of people to leadership positions is amongst the most important task of all employers, as Jim Collins points out.
It is the rigmarole of bureaucratic rules, the gobbledegook of recruitiment consultants and, most of all, the failure of boards and department heads to carefully think through what they want the person to do and what the appointee is actually likely to do that gets us into a mess.
There is potential for a mess at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with the impending departure of Phillipe de Montebello, about whom there are very many recent articles. Then there is the Smithsonian Secretaryship. If the recent history of appointments to that position and the very recent comments about the Smithsonian being made by people like Senator Diane Feinstein are anything to go by we could well end up with more confusions or worse. We should watch it all with interest
Posted in General, Management, Leadership | No Comments »