Values Don’t Come Cheap

Creativity Post had a good piece last week about simple business rules that complements Vu Le’s recent Nonprofit With Balls post on developing organizational values. Both pieces caution against making facile declarations and assumptions about how you will operate.

For example, Vu relates how he and his staff took months

“…developing a list of five core values and the team agreements associated with each one. Many of these behaviors came at great costs to the organizations, results of lessons learned from terrible experiences, some of which were due to my own leadership failures for not institutionalizing our values.”

He goes on to relate the deliberate process they used to create these values, encouraging others to use it as a model.

On Creativity Post, Greg Satell, address how meaningless it is to declare you are making an effort to “win the war for talent,” “focus on your core competencies” and “enhance shareholder value.”

But by relying on those simple rules and slogans, we often fail to think things through. If we merely say, “we have to win the war for talent,” we are less likely to think about what kind of talent we want to develop. Reducing decisions to “focusing on the core” negates serious analysis of threats and opportunities. Shareholder value is basically a license to do anything.

The truth is that the real world is a confusing place. We have little choice but to walk the earth, pick things up along the way and make the best judgments we can. The decisions we make are highly situational and defy hard and fast rules. There is no algorithm for life. You actually have to live it, see what happens and learn from your mistakes.

Given that last line, it may not be a great coincidence that the “operating rules” that Vu Le and his team created were born of lessons learned from mistakes and mistypes.

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

CONNECT WITH JOE


Leave a Comment