Jim Collins

Your Personal Board of Directors

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The Drucker Exchange has an animated interpretation of a speech Jim Collins (Good to Great, Built to Last) delivered in 2009. The speech is titled “Ten To-Dos For Young People” but I am pretty sure it is good advice for people of any age.

The first thing Collins suggests is getting a personal board of directors where the members are chosen not for their accomplishments but for their character. These people don’t necessarily need to know they are on your board of directors.

This struck me as an oft overlooked aspect of personal development. We are often told to find mentors and network to advance our careers, seldom does the character of these mentors and the necessity of moral and value guidance get mentioned.

People in the arts often need this type of guidance because establishing a career is so difficult and subject to so many conflicting pressures. It is not only a matter of whether you appear nude in an “art film” to pay the rent but also the question of whether you are a sell out if you faced with an opportunity for commercial success. Are you a bad person for choosing either of these paths? Professional mentors may not provide the same advice as personal mentors.

He also proposed examining yourself as objectively and dispassionately as a scientist would a bug. Just as a scientist doesn’t make judgments about how the bug would be better bug if it only worked harder or learned more, you should just look at yourself as you are at this moment and simply catalog the features you and others observe.

I thought this was especially apt advice for people in the arts since so much self evaluation is derived from qualitative, often emotionally based criteria. Detachment can be difficult to achieve, but the results can be both valuable and comforting.

Although I have often heard the advice to perform objective self-evaluation and had it compared to a scientific approach, I found it helpful to be reminded that a scientist doesn’t generally wish the insects they are observing were as fast as cheetahs and intelligent as dolphins. They hunker down and try to discover what the bug can teach us about the world.

I also liked Collins advice to look at your statement to question ratio and see how you can double it. He says he was once told that he was spending a lot of time trying to be interesting and that perhaps he should shift his effort toward being interested.

Now I will say that while there is that stereotype of the self-impressed artistic type who makes statements about the “true meaning” of something, I think this is part of the learning process. Often these statements are just an attempt to test one’s view of the world.

I think everyone is allowed to be an unsufferable egoist for while to work themselves out. The problem arises if you don’t realize this is a method of learning and not the default mode of social interaction.

Collins advice is apt both personally and professionally as a method of teaching yourself how to learn from everyone you meet. I think this dovetails well with my post last week about the importance of asking audiences and the community about their experience with the arts rather than telling people what their experience will or should be.

Finally, (and if you have been counting, you know I have covered fewer than 10 points–watch the video it is only 4:30 minutes long and a cartoon for goodness sakes), Collins advice is to find something that you have so much passion for you are willing to endure the pain.

If you are involved with the arts, you have probably already made this decision. Even if Collins wasn’t thinking specifically about the arts when he said this, the animation team was and depicted this point with a ballerina dancing and then massaging her feet.

Artists As The New Entrepreneur

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I was reading an interview on Inc.com with Jim Collins, author of Built to Last in which he says being an entrepreneur is less risky, though much more ambiguous, than working for someone else.

Not risk. Ambiguity. People confuse the two. My students used to come to me at Stanford and say, “I’d really like to do something on my own, but I’m just not ready to take that much risk. So I took the job with IBM.” And I would say, “You’re not ready for risk? What’s the first thing you learn about investing? Never put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve just put all your eggs in one basket that is held by somebody else.” As an entrepreneur, you know what the risks are. You see them. You understand them. You manage them. If you join someone else’s company, you may not know those risks, and not because they don’t exist. You just can’t see them, and so you can’t manage them. That’s a much more exposed position than the entrepreneur faces. But there’s lower ambiguity on the paint-by-numbers path: very clear but more risky. The entrepreneurial path: very ambiguous but less risk. Of course, the truth is that it’s all ambiguous, anyway. If you think you can predict the future, you’re crazy.

One of my first thoughts was that if this were true and everyone thought this way, everyone would be an entrepreneur and no one would be around to work. Is it the illusion of security predicated on the belief that a company has a business model and system that will ensure salary and medical insurance payments are made that causes so many to work for another instead of themselves? Who wants to handle all the legal paperwork and accounting associated with running one’s own business when you can work for someone who has lawyers and accountants to do that work already? (Though lately few are investing too much confidence in accountants and lawyers.)

But on the flip side of things, I wondered if the relative lack of security associated with working in the arts is one of the reasons so many arts organizations pop up. If the prospects of success are chancy across the board, I suppose it is logical that you cast your lot with the devil you know rather than joining someone else. You figure you can out economize them. If they are putting on good shows eating frozen pizza, you can do a better job while surviving on ramen noodles all the while hoping you will be eating better at some point down the road.

I think people in the non-profit sector embody Collin’s vision of entrepreneurs pretty well in that many do understand the risk and ambiguity involved with working for another or one’s self. I almost wonder if it might not be worthwhile encouraging people in the arts to apply this energy and willingness to endeavors outside of the arts. We have all been told, if you can imagine doing something else, do that rather than pursue a career in the arts. I am sure everyone has envisioned what that something else might be. In some cases, it might involve working for someone else, but that vision might be easily be diverted to working for oneself.

I really suspect that the internal drive an arts person has that sustains them in starving for their art is the exact same drive entrepreneurs employ in starting up their companies. The only difference is that the arts person may see growing their vision to a 500 employee company as selling out. To be fair, the whole process of meeting with venture capitalists, dealing with human resources, accounting and laws can seem intimidating and impregnable barriers. They say the next phase of the economy will emphasize the creatives. What if this might portend the emergence of organizations and processes which take advantage of the drive and vision of the artist and facilitates with the removal of the barriers either through training or performance of those functions in a manner which the artist can easily relate.

Let me be clear, I am not necessarily talking about empowering artists to be more successful artists. Yes, it would be great if solid arts organizations emerged. I am referring instead to arts people bringing their drive to the thing they would do if they weren’t in the arts. I am thinking about directing that drive toward game and software design to restaurants to human resource companies.

Wouldn’t be heartening to have worked in the arts for 10-15 years and realize that your hard work and relentless drive proves you may just have the tenacity to embrace the risks inherent to starting up a new company and there are people who want to help you do it?