ESSENTIAL LESSONS FROM THE GREAT MANAGERS

In this chapter, we present profiles of four visionary administrative leaders of top New York performing arts organizations:

1. 1.Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera
2. 2.Sir Clive Gillinson, executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall
3. 3.Meredith “Max” Hodges, former executive director of Gallim Dance (now executive director of the Boston Ballet)
4. 4.Rachel S. Moore, former CEO of American Ballet Theatre (now president and chief executive of the Music Center in Los Angeles)

While there are no standard career paths to follow in the performing arts, even on the management side of things, there are lessons to be learned from every success story. In this chapter, we offer insights and advice from the careers of these four dynamic leaders.

The material here is drawn from original research, from one-onone interviews, and from the presentations Gelb, Gillinson, Hodges, and Moore personally gave to the students of “Understanding the Profession: The Performing Arts in the 21st Century.” By reading this chapter, you will be getting a front-row seat in the class. You will also be getting a behind-the-scenes look at how the performing arts business functions at the highest level.

PETER GELB, GENERAL MANAGER, THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

AUTHENTICITY

When answering questions, Peter Gelb speaks out of one side of a smile and fixes the person he is addressing with a pair of intense, twinkling eyes. He deploys an even tone that is the same no matter whom he is talking to. Whether it is a nervous diva about to go onstage, an audience of millions watching one of his Live in HD broadcasts, or a Juilliard or Fordham University senior, you get the same Peter Gelb. As he tells it, it was just this authenticity that got him the job he currently holds and that has guided him throughout his career.

Gelb’s title is general manager, which means he wields chief executive and artistic authority at the Metropolitan Opera, the world’s largest not-for-profit performing arts organization. The Met has 1,600 year-round employees and can employ up to 1,600 more during its performance season.¹ It has an annual budget of more than $300 million, which dwarfs the budgets of all other performing arts companies in the United States and most cultural organizations of any kind.² The Met occupies center stage in the global opera world. Fans, singers, and other opera companies from every country look to the Met as the most prominent opera venue on earth.

Gelb has been general manager since 2006, and it is difficult to imagine that he was once an unlikely choice for the job. Gelb’s predecessor, Joseph Volpe, started out as an apprentice carpenter at the Met and worked his way up through the ranks. Conversely, Gelb jumped over to the Met from his post as a transformational—some would say controversial—head of Sony Classical, where he had broken the taboo against recording movie soundtracks (Titanic; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), which before his tenure were considered too lowbrow to be recorded and marketed to classical movie audiences. He also started the commissioning of original contemporary classical works for release on the label. Before Sony, Gelb had worked as an agent for Columbia Artists Management. He later started and headed up the Sony subsidiary CAMI Video, producing classical music telecasts and documentaries, some for the Met itself, many of which won him Emmys. But his only jobs in opera proper had been as a Met usher at the age of 16 and a stint as freelance head of the Met’s media department in the late 1980s.

All of this gave him a reputation as a showman and popularizer rather than a potential guardian of opera as high art. His appointment to the Met’s top job raised the hackles of some traditional opera fans, while galvanizing those who believed that without engaging changing tastes, opera was doomed to extinction. There was controversy about his appointment not only before his first day on the job but even before his job interview.

“I was literally the last person they spoke to,” said Gelb, talking to the students of “Understanding the Profession: The Performing Arts in the 21st Century.”³ “When I became general manager in 2006, the Met was already imperiled. That was obvious, or else they probably wouldn’t have hired me.” Even before the effects of the 2008 global financial meltdown, the Met’s finances had been suffering. Midway through the three seasons before he took over, the opera house had been forced to cut its budget. Gelb is quick to point out that he is a great opera lover, but that during his job interview he didn’t harbor any illusions about the art form’s declining fortunes.

Before Gelb’s job interview, average seasonal attendance at opera houses across the United States had been in decline, dropping from 42,000 tickets sold on average per house in 2002 to 39,000 in 2006.⁴ As a percentage of full capacity, ticket sales at the Met itself had dropped from around 90 percent in 1980 to only 79 percent in 2005, the year Gelb signed his contract with the Met.⁵ During his interview, Gelb spoke to the search committee about what he would later famously call “a cultural and social rejection of opera as an art form.”⁶ His fears proved prophetic. Here is just a partial list of American opera companies that have closed since 2008: Opera Pacific (Orange County, California), Connecticut Opera, Spokane Opera, Cleveland Opera, Baltimore Opera,⁷ Orlando Opera,⁸ Opera Boston,⁹ and—most notoriously—New York City Opera,¹⁰ which shut down in October 2013 after 70 years in existence (see Chapter 2).

It was an acute awareness of the high stakes for opera’s survival that led Gelb to be so candid with the Met’s search committee, which included Beverly Sills (one of the greatest opera singers in history, spoken of in the same breath with Maria Callas and Enrico Caruso). Sills was chair of the Met’s board of directors and had reached out to Gelb, inviting him to interview for the top job.

During his interview, Gelb looked straight at the members of the search committee and told them that their beloved opera house was fast losing relevance. He compared the Met to an island settlement that had lost touch with the mainland. If he were hired, said Gelb, he would be fearless about making big changes at the institution that would link it back up to the larger landmass of American culture.

Gelb’s candor—including telling one of the world’s great opera singers that the art form she had devoted her life to was headed for near extinction—could easily have put him out of the running for the most coveted offstage job in opera. Instead, it bumped him to the top of the list. It was Sills herself whose support proved decisive. A word in Gelb’s favor from her mattered not only to the other members of the board but eventually to the galaxy of New York society, in which the Metropolitan Opera is a brightly burning star, and from which the Opera draws its major financial support. Gelb was called back and offered the job the next day, and just one day after that, he signed a contract.¹¹

Gelb’s authenticity helped him not only get his job but carry it out, too. Sills’s initial support started Gelb’s relationship to the Met’s board off on the right foot. Sills stepped down from the board in 2005 and passed away in 2007, but Gelb and his innovations (detailed below) have continued to enjoy direct and enthusiastic support from the board and many of its key donors. First impressions do indeed matter a great deal, and it’s important to be authentic and fearless when you make them.

THE TECHNOLOGY GAMBLE

Gelb’s most prominent achievement has been to harness technology to bring the Met’s workings, both onstage and off, before the eyes of millions of people outside the opera house. He created the Met’s Live in HD broadcasts, which transmit real-time, high-definition video of select performances each year to movie theaters around the world.

The Met has a long tradition of using live broadcast media. Its radio broadcasts helped an entire generation, among them Gelb, to learn about and appreciate opera. During his class presentation at Juilliard, Gelb displayed an old black-and-white photo of a gymnasium floor packed with rapt adults and children. They were gathered to listen not to a sports broadcast, as the image might imply, but to a live opera on the radio. It was not uncommon for groups to gather and listen to the same opera performed live on multiple different occasions, each time straining to hear whether their favorite soprano or tenor had what it took to hit the high notes that night. With the slightest hint of pride in his voice, Gelb said that the Met’s movie theater broadcasts have, in the 21st century, become the performing arts equivalent of Monday Night Football: “It’s a sports-like, gladiatorial experience listening to live opera.”¹²

Launched in the 2006–2007 season, the Live in HD broadcasts are filmed by 10 to 12 HD cameras installed on and around the Met’s stage. The camera locations are specially chosen for each production, with the cameras never permanently installed, allowing the program to keep abreast of the cutting edge in high-definition technology. The camera angles provide unique views of the singers and the scenery, and Gelb himself produces the broadcasts from a van parked outside the opera house, tweaking the lighting and the camera angles in real time for best effect. Critics have said that the presence of TV cameras has affected the way the Met designs its productions, tailoring them for screens rather than the stage. Gelb refuted this: “Despite what’s been written in the New Yorker and elsewhere, I never tell stage directors to think for the camera. The Met is a live performance venue, not a soundstage. We might adjust the lighting by 10 percent here and there to make sure that certain things work on camera. It is the same thing the people in the audience are seeing. Well, as long as the original lighting designer isn’t there to see it.”¹³

The broadcasts have drastically increased the number of people who can experience the Met’s performances. In the 2012–2013 season, 12 operas were broadcast to 1,900 movie theaters in 60 countries.¹⁴ Even if the Met sold out all of its performances in a given season, which it does not, that would mean that a total of only 700,000 people in the house seats were able to experience the productions.¹⁵ Global viewership of the broadcasts in 2012 was 2.5 million.¹⁶

Despite initial fears that the Live in HD broadcasts would be a loss leader, the series proved profitable by its third season and currently contributes about $17 million annually to the Met’s bottom line.¹⁷

During Gelb’s presentation, a student asked whether the broadcasts have diverted ticket sales away from live opera in places outside New York City. Gelb said he didn’t think so and pointed out that the Met does only around ten broadcasts per year, a number that most likely whets local appetite for live opera without satisfying it. And cultivating a live audience in an age when time-shifted media consumption is growing is the key to having a vibrant, distinctive place for the performing arts in the future media landscape, said Gelb.

The Met’s technology strategy also includes a Sirius XM radio channel launched in 2006, a first for the opera world, and an online subscription service, which gives users access to a complete archive of filmed Met operas as well as the live broadcasts, which are put online several months after their initial transmission.¹⁸

Harnessing new technology rather than seeing it as a threat to a live art form comes naturally to Gelb because of his background in the recording industry. It was actually a David Bowie live promotion created by Sony’s pop music division and linked with movie theaters that Gelb witnessed during his time at Sony Classical that first gave him the idea to create the Met’s Live in HD broadcasts.¹⁹

INCREASING ARTS EDUCATION

Gelb believes that the waning interest in opera on the part of younger people comes from a lack of education about it, not any flaw in the art form itself. Under his tenure, the Met has vastly increased its educational outreach efforts, especially online. In an age of slashed government education budgets, almost all opera education in America now comes from opera companies themselves. It is Gelb’s hope that as more young people are introduced to opera, it will lose its reputation as either a boring or elitist activity.

REVIVING THE THEATRICALITY OF MET PRODUCTIONS

Nobody would argue that the Met has ever been lacking musically, but when Gelb came on board, it had come to be seen as an artistically stifling place for directors and designers. The acting style was known colloquially as “park and bark,” meaning that little more was expected of singers than that they hit their mark on the stage and belt out the right notes. The string of theater and film directors whom Gelb has hired at the Met in recent years has changed that standard not only on the stage at Lincoln Center (where the Met is located) but on opera stages around the world.

It is now no longer enough for up-and-coming singers to have beautiful voices. They have to be able to act, too. One of the darlings of the Met’s stage in recent years, Jonas Kaufmann, is often praised in the press for his acting skills as much as his voice.

Gelb has also set about commissioning more new productions, an average of six each season, with each season opener being a brand-new production. His recruited directors have included big names from outside opera, like the late British film director Anthony Minghella, South African artist William Kentridge, and American playwright and theater director Mary Zimmerman. Gelb says he made a point of finding directors who would come to opera with a fresh eye or who had previously shied away from the Met.²⁰

Gelb doesn’t see his flashier new productions as a departure from the true faith, as many do, but rather a return to it. He points out that opera’s great strength has always been that it uses all of the arts at once: “visually stunning sets, emotionally moving acting and storytelling, and, of course, transcendent music.”²¹

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Gelb had a piece of advice for students that is applicable to an arts organization of any kind and size: Engage with the community and recognize that you don’t operate in a vacuum. Find other organizations that you can partner with so that you can boost one another’s attendance and profile.

In the Met’s case, that means peer organizations like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the New York Public Library, and the Guggenheim Museum. A 2010 MoMA exhibition of works by William Kentridge coincided with the 2010 premiere at the Met of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, whose production design was done entirely by Kentridge. The synergy was no accident, but was planned years in advance by Gelb and MoMA’s director, Glenn Lowry. As Gelb tells it, the idea cropped up as the two were sharing a meal—proof that it is beneficial to reach out to other arts leaders in your community even with no specific goal in mind.

If you can’t find anything going on in your community, Gelb advised that students create a cross-media event of their own, like he did for the Met’s Prince Igor. In a section of the Met’s lobby that had not been used as an art gallery before, Gelb mounted a multimedia exhibit depicting multiple imaginings of what Prince Igor, a real figure from medieval Russian history, might have looked like.

—

Throughout Gelb’s long run of controversial decisions, the Met’s board of directors has supported him, especially during the labor negotiations of the summer of 2014, the Met’s most intense in three decades. Dragging on for the entire summer, the negotiations avoided a general strike (and thus a delay in the Met’s season, which actually happened in 1980) only at the last minute after several all-night bargaining sessions.²²

During his tenure, Gelb has managed to attract record donations. Met board chair Ann Ziff and her family have given more than $65 million since 2006, including a single gift of $30 million, the largest in the opera house’s history.²³

But before the record donations and even the job itself came Gelb’s courage to speak his mind. Referring to his initial job interview, Gelb said, “I was hired based on that critique. I was hired because I could apply real-life knowledge to an organization that had become disconnected from everyday life.”²⁴

“My chief goal,” he said, “is to help keep the art form alive and the Met alive in the future.”²⁵

SIR CLIVE GILLINSON, EXECUTIVE AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, CARNEGIE HALL

FOUR REASONS TO GIVE YOUR PRODUCT AWAY FOR FREE

Carnegie Hall is the most famous concert hall in the world. Its name is so widely known that when Sir Clive Gillinson left his job as manager of the London Symphony Orchestra to head up Carnegie Hall in 2005, he got a call from the Bangalore Times. Gillinson was born in Bangalore, India, but lived only the first three months of his life there. That didn’t stop the paper from running the front-page headline “Bangalore Boy Takes Over Carnegie Hall.” During his tenure, he has transformed the flagship concert venue into a beacon of arts education and outreach. When he spoke to the students of “Understanding the Profession: The Performing Arts in the 21st Century,” he was adamant that not-for-profit arts organizations shouldn’t be afraid to give their resources away for free. Here are his four reasons.

1. It keeps you close to your values. Arts organizations in general and not-for-profit arts organizations in particular don’t gain their power in society because of their wealth. They gain it because of the values they are dedicated to. When you are willing to give your product away for free, it forces you to have a compelling answer to the key questions: “Why are we doing this? Why does our organization exist?” When you’re not working for financial rewards, you have to be very clear about your mission to stay motivated.

In the case of Gillinson and Carnegie Hall, his answer to both questions comes from a clear and unwavering dedication to the inherent value of music. Says Gillinson, “Our responsibility is to the future of music and the impact it can have on people’s lives.”

2. It changes your relationship to your audience. When somebody exchanges money for a product or an experience, they are a customer. When somebody is offered a product or an experience for free, they are the recipient of a gift. Giving your product away for free can transform and enrich the public’s relationship to your organization by making people patrons and partners rather than mere customers. Gillinson sees those who are the beneficiaries of Carnegie Hall’s education and outreach programs as no less than “partners in the future of music.”

3. It makes it much easier to raise money. Imagine yourself approaching a potential donor. You have two possible pitches. The first is, “We are doing our best to monetize our product, but we cannot possibly charge enough to make ourselves profitable. Can you help make up the difference?” The second pitch is, “We are making our art and our educational resources available for free to the community and the world. Can you help us make that possible?” Gillinson believes that the second pitch is by far the more inspiring of the two. Too many arts institutions, he believes, waste time trying to figure out how to monetize what they do. The result is that they end up not making very much money and also not making much of a difference. Donors want to give to projects with a clearly defined higher purpose. When you are giving away great art, nobody has any doubt about what that purpose is.

4. It increases the impact of your organization. The people who need your art most might not be able to afford it. It is too often the people on society’s margins who lack the experiences, hope, and meaning that great art can offer them. When you give away what you do, you have a better chance of making a difference where it matters most.

Carnegie Hall’s outreach and education programs, transformed and greatly expanded under Gillinson’s tenure, are a great example of this philosophy in action. The programs now reach about 450,000 people per year, in the form of extensive educational programs in schools and free performances and classes in hospitals, homeless shelters, senior centers, and prisons.²⁶ A program called Musical Connections offers long-term musical instruction to juveniles and adults in the prison system, including inmates at Sing Sing in New York State.

Sing Sing is one of the most notorious prisons in the world, with 79 percent of its inmates having been convicted of a violent crime, and over half locked up for ten years or more.²⁷ Carnegie Hall’s outreach program engages a group of highly trained musicians to lead a selection of inmates in a year-long composition workshop that culminates in an end-of-year concert. At the concert, an ensemble made up of the inmates and musicians from Carnegie Hall play a program that includes original works composed by the inmates themselves.

Musical Connections aims to help transform the inmates into people capable of reintegrating into society once they are outside the prison walls. It also aims to lift some of the soul-crushing burden of incarceration.

Gillinson felt the impact of the program at Sing Sing when he attended one of the program’s end-of-year concerts. There were 90 inmates in the audience, and Gillinson said he’d never seen a group more attentive, silent, and totally absorbed in the music. After the performance, he asked one of the participants what the project had meant to him. He received a baffled look in return; then the inmate said, “This isn’t just a project. This is my life.”²⁸ Speaking of the program’s impact on his life, another inmate remarked, “The bars, the cells, this location, it no longer exists. It’s just me and the music and how I feel inside.”²⁹ Transformative power like that is truly something you cannot put a price tag on.

MEREDITH “MAX” HODGES, FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GALLIM DANCE

THE POWER OF PLANNED GROWTH

About halfway through her presentation to the students of “Understanding the Profession: The Performing Arts in the 21st Century,” Meredith “Max” Hodges unveiled her secret weapon, the Opportunity Framework. It’s a method for making decisions that she learned from Alan Grossman, one of her Harvard Business School professors. She says it helped her nearly double the budget of Gallim Dance in the two years after she joined the company as its executive director in 2012. (Hodges joined the Boston Ballet in 2014, as we discuss later.)

The Opportunity Framework was designed to solve the biggest problem facing all not-for-profits: how to stay afloat financially while fulfilling an organization’s core mission. The Framework depends on a big-picture, long-term view of an organization’s mission and all its activities, but it is also capable of delivering a solid answer to the more tactical question “What do I do first on a busy Monday morning?”

THE OPPORTUNITY FRAMEWORK

The Opportunity Framework is plotted on an x-y axis similar to one you’d find in an algebra textbook. The x-axis runs horizontally, with mission fulfillment increasing as you move from left to right (Figure 6-1). On the far left are activities that don’t fulfill the mission, while on the far right are activities that do. The y-axis runs vertically, with profitability increasing as you move upward. Activities that deposit money in the bank are at the top, while activities that drain money are at the bottom.

The upper right quadrant (A) combines mission fulfillment and profitability. In an ideal world, it’s where all your activities would be. For a not-for-profit, this quadrant is the sweet spot. You want to put as much of your activity here as possible, says Hodges.

The upper left quadrant (B) is for activities that turn a profit but don’t necessarily fulfill the organization’s mission. During Hodges’s presentation, one Juilliard student identified this quadrant as “selling out,” and Hodges smiled and nodded her head, adding that some activities in this spot are inevitable for any nonprofit. The trick is to accept projects with very strong profit margins, especially if they provide a quick turnaround. The catch is twofold. First, avoid projects that, while profitable, might eat up too much time. “It it’s going to take up, say, one day a week for the next 11 weeks, then it’s an automatic no,” Hodges told the students.³⁰ The other catch is to avoid any projects that actively contradict or inhibit your mission.

The lower left quadrant (C) combines mission failure and money loss. Anything you’re already doing that shows up here should be dropped as quickly as possible, and any optional new projects that could be plotted here should be avoided. It might seem obvious to ditch activities in this quadrant, but until you think in terms of the Opportunity Framework, it might not be obvious what is actually a drain on mission and money. Hodges emphasized to the students the need to be ruthlessly honest about which activities fall into this quadrant: “It doesn’t matter if they are services you need to provide. You find another way.”³¹ For example, programs that benefit deserving recipients but are outside your own organization’s mission might be transferred to a partner, ideally one with more competency in the program area. Services your audience or visitors might need, like running a museum café (see below), can be maintained but moved out of this quadrant by outsourcing them or changing the way you achieve them, usually by seeing how a peer organization has solved the problem and emulating its actions.

The lower right quadrant (D) is for those activities that fulfill your mission but don’t make money. Supporting activity in this quadrant is the reason not-for-profits exist—or, as Hodges quips at her own expense, “Losing money but fulfilling your mission: the definition of contemporary dance!”³² For anything that falls into this quadrant, the plan is simple: Pursue as many projects as can be funded.

While she was Gallim’s director, Hodges and her staff made daily use of the Opportunity Framework to choose a portfolio of projects to work on and decide which ones needed attention and when. They used it to plan out not only what they were going to do on any given day but also what to put on Gallim’s long-term schedule. Though Hodges says she often had fun applying the Framework, she never lost sight of how high the stakes were: “Our goal is to spend every dollar and every hour of our staff’s time that we can afford to spend on fulfilling the mission of the organization. And so, how do you do that?”³³

At first glance, the Juilliard and Fordham students were wary of the Framework. To a roomful of artists, using an x-y axis to set your priorities seemed stilted, and one or two raised their hands to say so. But, after Hodges plotted a few examples from Gallim’s real-world activities, the power of the Framework quickly become evident. It revealed itself as a tool for refining intuition, not stifling it (see Figure 6-2).

Gallim’s stated mission is “creating and performing original work by Andrea Miller [its founder], nurturing the careers of young artists, and stimulating the imagination of a diverse international audience.” Keeping Gallim’s mission in mind, Hodges plotted four examples on the Opportunity Framework and explained their placement:

1. Creating a new evening-length work and performing its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) It is the huge cost, in both time and money, of creating a new work that puts this activity firmly in the lower right quadrant of the Framework rather than the upper right. It fulfills Gallim’s mission perfectly, but it cannot possibly be profitable. It takes Miller and her dancers about 20 weeks of regular time in Gallim’s studio to create a new work. That is almost half of the 44 weeks out of each year that the company’s dancers are paid to be active. Then, there are payments to the composer for the score and to the musicians who will record it, as well as fees paid to lighting and costume designers, etc. Hodges explains that BAM, though a worldclass institution and a great partner, cannot reasonably be expected to pay a fee high enough or generate enough ticket sales to offset the creation of a new work. So she plots this in the lower right, Quadrant D.

2. Touring to Chicago When performing arts companies travel, they are paid a flat fee by the venue that invites them to perform. Touring groups can end up with a profit after their hotel and travel expenses are subtracted from this flat fee. It’s not always a huge amount, but because the flat fee is known in advance, many tours can be planned to ensure a profit. For Gallim, it is especially beneficial to travel to Europe, where state-funded arts venues can afford fees that are generous in comparison to those paid by most venues in the United States. As Hodges put it, “We love going to Paris.”³⁴ Touring to Chicago, too, is profitable enough to warrant being placed in Quadrant A.

3. Performing at a Miami Marathon event Gallim danced at the 2013 Miami Marathon while wearing a major retail brand’s latest line of sportswear. Gallim’s only direct expenses were airfare and per diems for the dancers, all offset by the substantial fee paid by the brand, which was accustomed to paying the fees of creatives in the commercial advertising world—on average much higher than those in the performing arts world. To the students, Hodges said the “revenue for that gig was really great,” which puts it at the top of Quadrant B. The caveat here, she warned again, is to watch out for profitable activities that suck up too much staff time to make it worthwhile.³⁵

4. Operating the museum café For her final example, Hodges drew on her experience in the museum world. A gift shop or a café might seem like a ready win for a nonprofit, but it can quickly turn into both a money pit and a time waster. Said Hodges, “Running a restaurant profitably is a hard thing that people specialize in and spend their whole lives trying to get right, and it turns out that museum curators may not be good at it.”³⁶ So the activity goes into Quadrant C, a distraction from the mission and a money loser.

The way to flip this particular activity from Quadrant C to Quadrant B is to do what most big cultural institutions do: collect a fee from an established name in the restaurant business in exchange for letting it use prime museum real estate. Even if the fee were as low as $10 a year, it would still be better than losing money on a non-mission activity.

Hodges and her team applied this tactic to the use of their Brooklyn studio space. Rather than letting the space go unused when the company was not rehearsing or teaching their own movement classes, Miller and Hodges decided to offer additional classes in yoga and African dance. In addition to making productive use of the space, it also raised Gallim’s profile in the community. And rather than offer the classes themselves, something Gallim was not necessarily prepared to do, they found established yoga and African dance instructors with existing clientele who were willing to pay the company a nominal fee for the use of the space. Gallim’s profit margin for the classes wasn’t very high, but it was still a stream of revenue that didn’t exist previously, and it didn’t demand expertise that Gallim didn’t already have.

When applying the Framework, or thinking more abstractly about future activities, it is important not just to think passively. Said Hodges, “If somebody calls and offers you an opportunity in Quadrant A, of course you say yes. But what else do you do? You spend your days pursuing new and additional opportunities that land in that quadrant.”³⁷ Don’t just classify existing opportunities, but use the Framework to imagine and implement new ones.

A sense of balance is also important to success. Loading up all your activity in just one of the three desirable quadrants won’t lead to success, said Hodges. You need to pursue a balanced portfolio of activity across all three desirable quadrants: A, B, and D.

THE OPPORTUNITY FRAMEWORK’S IMPACT ON GALLIM

During Hodges’s tenure, Gallim underwent a period of explosive growth. Founded in 2007 by its artistic director, Andrea Miller, just two years after her graduation from Juilliard, the company was started with enormous ambition but modest means. Its first rehearsal spaces were Juilliard classrooms that she and the dancers would sneak into after hours. Their first gigs were all money losers, where they paid for the privilege of performing in venues where they had a shot at being noticed by presenters and agents. Miller’s mother donated enough so the dancers could be paid $50 per performance. The whole operation was run out of Miller’s apartment, with dancers doing all the administrative work in their spare hours.³⁸

Hodges first encountered Gallim in 2010 at Fall for Dance, an annual event held at New York City Center, a performance venue in Manhattan. The lineup at Fall for Dance is designed to be a mix of names you know and some you haven’t heard of yet. At that time, Gallim was one of the unknowns. Hodges was impressed by two things. The first was Gallim’s stellar performance, which convinced her that the group had a bright artistic future. The second was Miller’s performance with the donors and dance patrons sitting in the first few rows of the audience. Rather than hanging back after the show and relying on her dancers’ performance alone to shine for her, Miller was out in the crowd shaking hands and making connections. These patrons, some of whom became Gallim’s most valued trustees, appreciated how bold Miller was in talking about Gallim’s budget, the small size of which astonished them.

By 2012, five years after its founding, Hodges was brought on board as Gallim’s first executive director. Her role was to direct the business operations, as Miller directed the artistic vision and choreography. In the 2012–2013 season, the first year of Hodges’s stewardship, Gallim’s budget grew from $414,000 to $699,000, a huge leap of 68 percent.³⁹ Hodges attributes the change to having a plan for growth, informed daily by the Opportunity Framework: “We moved to a phase where we were planning ahead, setting goals, and stretching ourselves, not just picking up the phone and accepting whatever was coming in.” The growth continued after that first year. Gallim’s revenue in 2013 was $761,000, a solid 8 percent increase on the previous year.⁴⁰

To the students of “Understanding the Profession: The Performing Arts in the 21st Century,” Hodges stated her bold objective: “to grow Gallim to be one of the biggies.” By biggies, she meant established modern dance companies like the Paul Taylor Dance Company, which has an average annual budget of $8 million.⁴¹

After two years with Hodges at the helm as executive director and continued artistic excellence by Miller, Gallim is on solid footing. It now occupies a permanent location in Brooklyn with offices and rehearsal space, and it employs seven full-time dancers, with 44 weeks of paid activity per year, more than most dance companies. Miller’s ambitious choreography has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a tremendous honor for a young artist.⁴²

Hodges’s presence at Gallim was a testament to the fact that even the most exceptional art needs the help of a good business sense to survive. Hodges said, of her business school education as it applied to the art world: “It 100 percent translated. Every single moment of my education translated. I think it’s unfair to assume people need lessons to play the violin but running an organization should just be intuitive.”⁴³

THE POWER OF PLANNED GROWTH IN HODGES’S CAREER

Hodges has applied the same careful strategies for growth to her own future as well as Gallim’s. As early as her business school days, she set herself on a direct path to where she is today. “I wanted to be the executive director of a cultural organization,” Hodges said. “I couldn’t have told you for sure it was going to be a dance organization, but I would have said for sure it was a nonprofit.”⁴⁴ While she was an MBA student, Hodges wrote, “More people need art: the thick, anguished brush strokes of a Van Gogh; the high soaring notes of an overture; the whisper and promise of an opening curtain.”⁴⁵ That sense of mission has been driving her ever since.

After completing her Harvard BA and MBA (both with honors), Hodges went on to work at Bain & Company, which regularly jostles with McKinsey for the top spot among the world’s consulting firms. Even though she could have gone from Bain to just about anywhere in the business world, she stuck to her plan to be of service to the arts.

Her first stop in the art world was in the finance department of the Museum of Modern Art. Trading high finance for high art meant taking a serious pay cut, but Hodges said it has been worth it. After making a meaningful contribution and learning some great lessons at MoMA, she was ready to make a deliberate move to a smaller organization. She wanted to go from the middle tier of a large, established cultural institution to the top tier of a small one, where her efforts would make a more noticeable difference.

She recommends a similar strategy to anybody who wants to follow in her footsteps. Start at a blue-chip organization, which will give you both credibility and a great knowledge base, and then branch out to a place where your efforts not only result in bigger changes but can also get you noticed more easily. While Hodges is too modest to say so, it’s obvious that she is on track to be running a place like Lincoln Center in 20 years’ time.

In 2014, Hodges was tapped by the Boston Ballet as its next executive director. With an annual budget of about $30 million,⁴⁶ cultural prestige as New England’s oldest professional ballet company, and the largest ballet school in North America, it no doubt represents Hodges’s first but confident steps onto a much larger stage.

RACHEL S. MOORE, FORMER CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE

BRANDING

The “Beleaguered American Ballet Theatre” In 2006, during her second year as the administrative head of American Ballet Theatre (ABT), Rachel S. Moore found herself traveling back and forth to Washington, D.C., to meet with senators and members of the House of Representatives. It was a surreal experience for her and an unusual one for the head of a ballet company. She was in Washington trying to complete the final stages of a lobbying campaign that was also a rebranding campaign. Her goal was to get Congress to pass a bill declaring ABT the official ballet company of the United States. It was a move typical of Moore’s management style: adventurous but also part of a rational, long-term strategy.

Moore’s focus on branding and her path to Washington began before she was even hired as ABT’s administrative head. As part of the interview process a year earlier, she had found herself sitting across from ABT’s then board chair Lewis Ranieri, a formidable Wall Street figure who was profiled in Michael Lewis’s history of 1980s high finance, Liar’s Poker. At issue was an ABT ad campaign, then on the streets, which Moore felt contained awkward language and a heroin chic aesthetic that was in poor taste and didn’t reflect ABT’s identity. She couldn’t have known that Ranieri had spearheaded and signed off on the ads himself. Despite Ranieri’s gall at her criticism (he later joked that he narrowly restrained himself from “throttling” her), he and the rest of the board eventually voted Moore into ABT’s top administrative job.

The board had been looking for a candidate with a different profile. They wanted a hardened administrative veteran at the end of his career who could tackle the numerous internal threats to ABT’s existence. Instead, they ended up choosing Moore, then just entering mid-career, because of her vision and her deep connections to ABT itself.

Moore had first studied ballet at the age of 11 in California’s rural Central Valley. Just a few years after taking up ballet, she found herself commuting to Sacramento to study at the ballet there, and by 16 she was spending summers at ABT in New York. At 18, she became a fullfledged member of ABT’s corps de ballet, led by none other than Mikhail Baryshnikov (or “Misha,” as she calls him). Though a broken ankle ended her dance career when she was just 24, Moore pivoted quickly to another path and managed to successfully apply to college, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University, despite being seven years out of step with her peers.

During her summers away from Brown, she interned at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., where she was the congressional liaison. Her time at the NEA piqued her interest in arts policy and helped her be open to later study at Columbia University, where she earned an MA in arts administration. Throughout it all, she never lost her strong emotional connection to ballet, which she says formed the core of her developing personality as an adolescent. After a slate of increasingly prestigious jobs in dance administration, including two positions at the Boston Ballet during a time of crisis for the company, Moore was ready to step in and help ABT in its own time of crisis.

She jokes that before her tenure, the press had a disconcerting epithet for ABT: the “beleaguered American Ballet Theatre.” At an institution where cash flow is intermittent (Moore calls it “lumpy”) at the best of times, things were so bad when she started as head of ABT that the dancers and musicians were barely getting paid on time. Partly responsible for this was the fact that ABT’s longtime mainstay, its touring business, had faltered, and top-level management was turning over so quickly that nothing was being done about it. Added to that was a board of directors that was seen to have drifted from a clear understanding of its core responsibilities and that had forgotten where its responsibilities differed from that of the full-time staff.⁴⁷

Underlying all these difficulties, as Moore saw it, was a branding problem. Even before taking the reins as ABT’s executive director, she knew that balancing the books and reinvigorating the staff were not going to be enough to turn things around. Before making progress, she and the company needed to answer a vital question: What was ABT’s core identity?

America’s National Ballet Company Another name for a branding problem is an identity crisis. At its worst, rebranding is a series of superficial changes made to a company’s public image meant to mislead people. At its best, rebranding can help a company answer the question “Who are we and what is our purpose?” No company or even person can entirely escape the branding problem. We all have an image that the outside world sees and, like it or not, even choosing not to care about this fact is still a branding choice. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates understood something of branding when he advised his ambitious pupils to “be that which you wish to seem.” He was saying, in other words, that a change of perception—both how others see us and how we see ourselves—can translate into a change of being.

In the context of the marketplace, the most urgent question of branding is how to be different from other companies or people who supply the same product. How certain companies have solved this problem has resulted in some icons of daily American life. Coca-Cola needed a way to let its drinkers know why its formula was best. Apple, in its famous 1984 Super Bowl ad, told the world how it was different from IBM, and the world has never forgotten. Strip away Coke’s black-and-red color scheme and tagline (“The real thing”) or Apple’s logos and slogan (“Think different”), and you’d have nothing but undifferentiated bottles of carbonated sugar water or boxes of circuitry. No matter how good a product may be, without its brand identifier, the experience of using it isn’t quite the same. The ideas and emotions tied to some brand names are an intangible but essential part of a product.

In the case of ABT, it needed to differentiate itself from its main competitor, New York City Ballet (NYCB). Both companies had been founded in the 1940s and were headquartered in Manhattan. Both have world-class reputations as producers and performers of ballet. But while most New Yorkers thought of NYCB as a hometown institution worth buying high-price tickets for and cutting big donation checks to, they didn’t see ABT in the same way.

There was good reason for this. ABT had long been a touring company that spent most of its season away from New York. While it often performs on the Lincoln Center campus, ABT doesn’t have a permanent space there, like NYCB’s Koch Theater, which is just across the plaza from the permanent homes of the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. In fact, ABT doesn’t have a permanent performance space anywhere in New York City. But despite its long touring season, no place outside New York City felt that ABT was part of its community, either.

When she was hired, Moore said that even at ABT itself nobody had a strong sense of where the company belonged, and that this in turn weakened the sense of mission and pride that all not-for-profit staffs rely on as their daily fuel. “We needed to reframe ourselves from a vision/mission viewpoint, but also in a way that strengthened the business case,” says Moore.⁴⁸

As a starting point, Moore reached back to a previous rebranding effort that had been made by none other than President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1957, Eisenhower called for ABT’s name to be changed from Ballet Theatre to American Ballet Theatre, so that the company could tour behind the Iron Curtain as a symbol of American cultural vibrancy. At the time, the U.S. government was giving money and clout to other artistic institutions, like MoMA, which mounted international traveling exhibitions of abstract expressionist painting. It was all part of a strategy to project American soft power in the global struggle for dominance with the Soviets.

During the Cold War, ABT traveled the world via military aircraft and found itself coming into contact with ambassadors and heads of state. Upon meeting some members of the company, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev quipped, “How can these people be so thin if they are from the land of milk and honey?” ABT’s role as an official cultural ambassador continued throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Moore, knowing this lore from her days in ABT’s corps, was inspired to once again cast the company as America’s national ballet, putting it in league with the great national companies of Europe like the Paris Opera Ballet and England’s Royal Ballet. This would differentiate ABT from NYCB, while also giving it a boost in prestige.

Moore and her team set about formulating a tagline, which is a necessary element in the creation of any brand. A tagline is a short, memorable phrase that sums up a brand identity and makes it stick in the mind. Some familiar ones are Maxwell House Coffee’s “Good to the last drop,” American Express’s “Don’t leave home without it,” and “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” Moore and her team settled on “American Ballet Theatre, bringing dance to America and American dance to the world.” It was when she overheard one of her ballerinas making fun of the phrase that she knew the idea was good: “I thought, ‘Yay! Snark!’ When the staff starts making fun of it, you know the idea is entrenched.”⁴⁹

Moore says the rebranding reenergized the staff. They no longer worked at “the Beleaguered American Ballet Theatre,” but at an organization that was out to change the world. Throughout the company, people started feeling once again that they had an occasion to rise to. ABT’s new identity became the center of a web of changes that spread throughout the company, bringing a renewed energy and positive outlook with it.

Not satisfied with just self-definition as America’s national ballet, Moore decided to complete what Eisenhower had started and get an official stamp of approval from the federal government. Like any business that wants to get in touch with its congressional representatives, Moore and her team hired a lobbyist. After wrangling with senators and representatives (some of whom knew almost nothing about the arts) and engaging in some “good old-fashioned Washington horse trading,”⁵⁰ as she puts it, Moore found herself with bipartisan sponsorship of a joint resolution in the Senate and the House. The bill was passed and in 2006, ABT officially became “America’s National Ballet Company.”⁵¹

Touring The first immediate benefit of the federal government’s imprimatur was a reinvigoration of ABT’s international touring business. Europe’s national companies are most comfortable partnering with an organization they see as a direct peer. ABT, with its congressionally approved status, now officially fits that bill.

ABT has also resumed its work with the State Department and once again represents the United States abroad. Off the top of her head, Moore mentions touring to Cuba and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and being the first American performing arts organization to perform in Oman, which flew in the Dresden Philharmonic to play for the dancers and mark the occasion.

In the course of proving its national status, ABT had offered evidence to Congress that throughout its history it had performed in all 50 states. And in keeping with its tagline, “Bringing dance to America,” ABT has hit the road again in earnest throughout the United States.

As with all the fine performing arts, the audience around the country for ballet is declining, but Moore has a brand-based solution for that as well. By lending ABT certification to dance schools throughout America, Moore and company hope not only to improve the quality of dance education but to educate the next generation about the value of classical dance as a cultural activity.

The Kleenex of the Ballet World In her office near Union Square in Manhattan, Moore gets up from the interview table to pull one of a series of thick binders off the shelf. Full to the brim with glossy pages separated by colorful tabs, the binder is one volume in ABT’s extensive guide for dance teachers. “Education,” says Moore with a chuckle, “is part of the perfect cradle-to-grave marketing strategy.”⁵²

Moore is the first executive in ABT’s history to launch a comprehensive dance education initiative. She is familiar with how healing and also how harmful dance education can be for young people. When she encountered ballet at age 11, she found learning it to be a bastion of grace and rationality in her life, and it helped her build a strong sense of self. But inside ballet’s brutal meritocracy, it is impossible that every young dancer will overcome all the challenges set before them. Normal adolescent and teenage feelings of inadequacy or troubled body image can become exaggerated when judgment of the dancer in the classroom is confused with judgment of the person outside the classroom.

ABT’s branded curriculum is designed to help prevent such potential harm to young dancers by tempering instructional attitudes and methods. “We want to avoid a situation where students are living in terror,” says Moore, “which is no way to create a healthy artist or a healthy human being.” Moore says she cried every night as an ABT summer student and was probably not the only ballerina to do so. Some students are so traumatized by the ballet instruction process that they abandon dance altogether, even as future audience members. Says Moore: “I have many friends who will not even walk into a theater after training for ten years as a dancer. And that’s lamentable.”⁵³ It is also the exact opposite of one objective of Moore’s educational initiative: the creation of a future audience for ballet.

When local dance teachers become certified in ABT’s curriculum, they are allowed to put ABT’s logo on their place of business and on their promotional materials. Moore thinks of it as something like the Good Housekeeping “Seal of Approval.” This promotes good instruction by giving ABT-certified teachers a marketing edge against their competitors, and it also leads to successive classes of students who are used to associating their own dance education with the institution of ABT itself.

Teachers maintain their certification by presenting their students for examination once every two years to ABT-appointed examiners. The examiners also provide in-class feedback to the instructors, which Moore says most dance teachers are desperate for. There are currently 1,400 teachers of the ABT curriculum in 48 states and 13 countries.⁵⁴ The curriculum has even secured a beachhead in St. Petersburg, Russia, home to that formidable fortress of Russian ballet, the Vaganova Academy. Moore hopes that the ABT curriculum will further reinforce abroad the idea of a distinctive American style of ballet.

Moore sets aside the binder and pulls out a pair of tiny pink ballet shoes. The ABT logo is stamped onto the leather soles, and a black-and-white picture of an ABT ballerina appears on the box. The shoes are offered at Payless, and Moore says about 1.2 million pairs are sold each year. The partnership began through a longtime member of ABT’s board, a former Payless CEO.⁵⁵

ABT also sells branded leotards, which the company contracted out from two leading manufacturers, first Capezio and now IDS. All the students in ABT-certified schools wear ABT-branded garments, which helps not only with revenue generation but with further identification by the students between ABT and excellence in ballet.

“We want to become the Kleenex of the ballet world,” says Moore. Kleenex, while still an official brand name, has become so identified with its products that it is used interchangeably as a noun for tissue.⁵⁶

All of this adds up not only to a solid and stable source of revenue for ABT but also a foothold for ballet in the economic life of America. “The last thing a parent is going to give up in tough times is something that’s good for their children,” says Moore. Far from viewing it as a coldhearted ploy, Moore sees ABT’s integration into dance education as a way for the company to advance its values. When all the arts are part of education, it becomes much harder to see them as just luxuries. They become part of what it means to grow into a fully realized human being.⁵⁷

National Brand, National Revenue While the official stamp of congressional approval did not bring any federal money, it did give ABT access to new sources of revenue. In the world of corporate sponsorships, there are separate pots of money that companies set aside for regional and for national campaigns. Most organizations get a shot at only one of them. But ABT, since it regularly puts on performances in regional centers while also maintaining a national presence, is often in the running for both types of funding.

The justification for this, according to Moore, is that individuals with high net worth, whose attention is so valued by corporate marketing departments, are likely to bring their knowledge of ABT’s brand with them as they travel around the country. ABT is a consistent presence in Palm Beach, on Rodeo Drive, and on Broadway.

To relieve some of the pressure that comes from competing with NYCB for board members and their contributions, ABT has moved its annual Nutcracker from New York City to Orange County, California, where it also plans to establish a school. Orange County, which has the third highest concentration of millionaires of any U.S. county, has no resident ballet company.⁵⁸ Moore very much hopes that ABT will fill the vacuum. She hopes an annual Nutcracker will give ABT an entry to being seen as a part of the local community. When an Orange County resident writes a check big enough to win him a spot on ABT’s board, Moore wants him to honestly feel that he is giving back to the place where he lives.

GIVING BALLET A STRONGER FUTURE

Largely white, wealthy, and conservative Orange County is not the only new community where ABT hopes to make itself better known. In minority communities across America, ballet—where it is known at all—is often seen as remote and elitist. Moore thinks of this not just as an identity crisis for ABT but for ballet itself. She points out that in 2014, there were still no African-American principal ballet dancers anywhere in America, or in any major ballet company in the world.⁵⁹

Moore is very proud of ABT’s Misty Copeland (then soloist, now prima ballerina as of summer 2015), whose memoir Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina is about, among other things, being a black dancer in the nearly monolithically white ballet world. Copeland’s memoir hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2014, and she is universally seen as a prodigy in the dance world. She is only the third African-American ballerina in ABT’s history. Copeland’s success is a cause for joy, says Moore, but it doesn’t mean that both ABT and ballet don’t have a long, long way to go.

Bringing more diversity to dance is morally right, but Moore also points out that it’s a good long-term business move for all ballet companies. As America moves toward a future where whites will be a minority sometime around mid-century, unless ballet reaches out to nonwhite communities, it may someday find itself without an audience of meaningful size.

To this end, ABT under Moore’s leadership founded Project Plié, an educational initiative whose explicit goal is to diversify America’s ballet companies. Partnering with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Project Plié introduces students to ballet through performance and instruction, and also seeks to identify future talent. And though she doesn’t say so, it’s easy to imagine Moore being quite pleased if the future dancers and audience members of Project Plié grow up with a strong association between ballet and ABT’s brand.

Giving ballet a future is not just part of Moore’s job description— it’s a mission that gives her daily strength: “People before me worked hard to give me my chance. I feel it’s my obligation to do the same for future dancers.”

Starting in the fall of 2015, Moore will assume leadership of the Music Center in Los Angeles, which houses the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Opera, Center Theatre Group, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.⁶⁰

KEY NOTES

Questions to Ask Yourself

• •Am I making full use of technology to promote my organization or bring my performances to as many people as possible?
• •Can I link up my mission and activities to performing arts education? (Besides being a great way to enrich the lives of young people and create future audiences for the performing arts, adding an educational component to your mission can make you or your organization eligible for a host of private and public grants.)
• •Are there any other artistic organizations in my community, both in and outside the performing arts, that I could partner with? (When creative people get together, there is often a flow of new ideas. When two art forms create works in concert around a particular subject or theme, there are expanded opportunities for co-promotion and richer artistic creation. So go out and find an artist or administrator from another cultural institution in your town, get together, and toss around some ideas.)
• •Should I be giving my product away for free? (Especially if you are running a small or recently founded organization, giving your product—e.g., your performances, perhaps your recorded music, or your educational resources—away for free might be the right move. Weigh the potential revenue from ticket sales or fees against the level of exposure and attendance that free events are likely to generate. Perhaps a combination of free events and paid, ticketed events might make sense. Perhaps you should give away your educational resources but charge for performances, or vice versa. We are certainly not advocating that free is always the best choice, but as Sir Clive Gillinson points out, for some organizations it is the optimal way to get others motivated about your mission, and it can help put you in a good position to raise funds.)
• •Are there communities in my town or city that don’t traditionally have access to the performing arts? Can I strengthen my own organization and benefit those communities by finding a way to engage them?

Tips

• •Before you sign on at an organization, determine if it has a strong sense of identity coupled with a strong sense of mission. In other words, do the people there know who they are and what they are trying to achieve in the world? If the answer is yes, your future bosses and coworkers will likely be much happier and more productive people than if your answer is no. If you are running your own organization, take a step back and evaluate whether you have a clear sense of your mission and identity. It can make all the difference in the quality of your day-to-day working life.
• •It never pays to be inauthentic, especially if the reason is to avoid saying what you think others might not want to hear. We’re not saying you should go out of your way to be blunt or to hurt others’ feelings, or that you always need to say what’s on your mind. But when it comes down to the important moments in your career, respectfully staying true to your inner convictions and your conclusions about any given situation will benefit you in the long run. You’ll be doing your colleagues a favor because they will know you better and know where you stand. You’ll be doing yourself a favor because you’ll avoid situations that become painful or undesirable down the road. And don’t just respond to external circumstances authentically. Create your own projects that come from the deepest, truest part of yourself. You may not always succeed, but finding the motivation and clarity of purpose to do the work won’t be difficult, and that’s more than half the battle.

Exercises

• •Pick somebody in a performing arts organization in your community who does what you want to do, and ask her for an informational interview. When you meet with her, ask her about the guiding principles that have been most important in shaping her career. Talk to her about how she got her current job and about previous stages of her career. If you’re shy about doing this, imagine yourself in her shoes. Ask yourself: Would you mind if an ambitious young performer came to ask for advice? You’d probably be flattered and ready to help.
• •Plot your current activities on the Opportunity Framework. Is there anything that’s a drag on both mission fulfillment and resources? Is there anything that’s right in the sweet spot of mission fulfillment and sustainability? Are there opportunities you can seek out and create to balance out your Framework?
• •Tag yourself. A good tagline, like the one for American Ballet Theatre (“Bringing dance to America and American dance to the world”), can stick in the minds of potential audience members as well as give you or your organization a clearer sense of mission. To come up with a tagline, try describing yourself or your organization in just a few words. Don’t overthink it. The clearer and more concise, the better. Just try to sum up what you do and what you offer to the world. And don’t worry about getting it right the first time. Advertisers are paid handsomely to come up with taglines for commercial businesses. So try writing a lot of potential versions—10, 20, 30. Keep plugging away and one will stand out. If you’re in an ensemble or working in an organization, invite everybody to join in. You never know where the next bright idea might come from. As with all the exercises in this book, you’re at your most creative if you’re having fun.