Recognizing Your Customers

There has been a post on The Drucker Exchange that has been nagging at the edge of my unconscious for a couple weeks now. Actually, it was one line from a news piece about how the Massachusetts Department of Transportation has been able to replace bridges in days rather than years.

“The highway department didn’t use to see the drivers as customers,” Frank DePaola, administrator of the highway division for the department, told the Times. “For a while there, the highway department was so focused on construction and road projects, it’s almost as if the contractors became their customers.”

There is obviously a lesson here for all businesses, including arts organizations about taking a step back and re-evaluating who your customer is. Often times it is multiple people.

Adam Thurman illustrated this in a post he made yesterday about buying a suit.

“He told me that he understood that no one really needs a suit…
[…]
He understood that people aren’t really paying for a suit, they are paying to work with a person that truly gives a damn about how they look. They are paying for the feeling they get when they look good.

It takes a certain humility to embrace that thought. It takes a humble artist to understand that it isn’t all about her or her art, it’s about the audience and the feeling they get from the experience.”

I actually took the time to follow a link in the Drucker Exchange post to one of Peter Drucker’s books, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices where he talks about the fact that there are often many customers that have to be pleased. For example, in some cases, it might be both the consumer and a government regulator, each of which have vastly different definitions of what they value.

Another example Drucker gives addresses how people’s priorities change over time–a teenage girl wants the most stylish shoes with price being a lesser concern and durability being of no concern. Her older sister (or the same girl in a few years) will have these same priorities in different proportions.

Arts organizations have seen this effect. When people reach a certain age, they tend to gravitate toward the arts more frequently than when they were younger because their priorities change. The challenge being faced now is that overall social priorities have gradually shifted over time as well so while people’s priorities still mature over time, the way they choose to express those priorities are manifesting in a different manner.

So in the context of all this, one of the challenges I constantly face in serving my customers is the perception that our theatre is hard to find and get to. Even though I recognize this is a need to be served, it really confounds me and is therefore somewhat akin to my not recognizing who my customers are.

There are standard department of transportation road signs directing people to us from 2-3 miles out. To get to the theatre from the highway, you make a right, go three lights, make left, go to the bottom of the hill, make a right, make a left and you are pretty much delivered to the campus. It is generally straight drives and right angles. There are no confusing one way streets to navigate. Everything is well lit and on major thoroughfares with regular signs. Parking is free and plentiful.

I understand that people might overlook the signs, obvious though they are. We offer directions and maps for download off our website that include reverse directions so that you can get back home. We have copies of those directions available in the lobby as well as people depart.

We have a dedicated directions line you can direct dial to, which from the feedback we have gotten, I suspect people are listening to on their cellphones as they drive.

My suspicion is that “hard to find” really means they are unfamiliar with the location because they don’t drive by the neighborhood on a regular basis. We are separated from the local retail area by an interstate and there is no reason to drive across unless you attend school or live in the neighborhood.

The other problem is that most people probably use GPS or Google Maps instead of checking our website for directions. Unfortunately, the shortest distance route actually makes you get off the highway three miles early and takes you through a zillion stop lights. At certain times of the day, that route can easily add an hour travel time due to traffic.

These aren’t things I can solve, though I am always looking for options. One thing I will try to do is communicate the sources of reliable information more frequently via various channels before people embark on a trip to the theatre.

If anyone has suggestions or stories of how you solved this sort of problem, I would love to hear about them.

Domain Knowledge And Arts Management

I was watching the illustrated lecture seen below on the Drucker Exchange website. William Hopper gives the lecture on domain knowledge which is what a young college graduate would get 50 years ago when he went to work for a large company. Over time, the person would work their way up the ladder of promotion learning the craft of management under the supervision of a more experienced person and you would learn the business of your company.

Hopper says that business schools undermined this system starting in the 70s when they began to spread the idea that getting an MBA would allow you to manage anything. Instead of starting at the bottom, you could go right to the top and need not worry that you didn’t know much about the business of the company because everything operated more or less the same.

It got me wondering if the arts might be heading in the same direction or not with more people getting management degrees and the general itinerant nature of the profession. A good number of the executive leadership of arts organizations are getting ready to retire. Many of them started as artists before moving on to management and then they stayed at their organizations for many years.

There has been discussion about how emerging leaders are having a hard time getting experience because the existing leaders aren’t ready to move on yet. Many of the younger leaders move around a lot trying to find better opportunities. This may be beneficial in giving leaders a wide variety of experiences to draw upon, but doesn’t provide a depth of knowledge about any one organization. Then there is the dearth of good mentors who have the time to act as such for a younger generation.

I was also wondering if aspiring leaders were bringing extensive knowledge of an arts discipline with them these days. Now that there are expanded opportunities to enter cultural management degree programs, these leaders may not have a lot of experience in the means of production for that art. Before I entered my graduate program, I had some acting experience in school and took classes outside of school as well; I worked as an electrician and carpenter in school and for three different summer theatres (plus one where the box office staff was on the electrics crew during strike).

These experiences have ensured that I talk to my tech staff before signing any contract for a performance or rental event.

I am not sure if these sort of activities are part of an arts manager’s career path any more. Be pleased if anyone wants to relate their story.

I do take consolation in the fact that people have to wear so many hats in the arts there is a pretty good chance that even if someone isn’t really familiar with the other aspects of their discipline before they get their degree, they will be fairly well acquainted with the means of production during their first job. Though the lack of resources that create this situation is not really something to celebrate.

I am not entirely sure how to portray this education vs. experience situation. We are in a place where the first generation of people with arts management degrees will be assuming control soon and I think they can probably do so with more confidence than some of their predecessors because they will possess technical knowledge about laws and regulations their predecessors had to learn about as the subject came up.

What they will lack is the experience of working with boards, government entities, unions, foundations and donors over the course of many years in situations where relationships and institutional memory are important. But this is going to be true for any new leader unless they have been promoted to leadership from within, a situation which is becoming ever rarer.

New Year’s Not To Do List

So I am back and raring to go. This is the first Christmas holiday season I have been away from my bed in about 10 years. I went back to visit places I used to work and gained some insights and ideas. I bookmarked things to write about when I returned, but it will take a little bit for me to sort and process some of these things in my brain. One bit of wisdom to start off the new year I came across was linked to by Daniel Pink. It was an entry on the Drucker Exchange, a blog maintained by the late management guru Peter Drucker’s Drucker Institute.

The entry titled, Your Not-To-Do-List, essentially advises organizations and individuals to examine themselves and decide what efforts they are no longer going to pursue. It sort of follows the idea that if you bring something new into your house, you get rid of something old. In this case, you are encouraged to get rid of something old to leave room for the arrival of future innovations. The Drucker Exchange cites a 2004 interview in Forbes where Drucker says:

“A critical question for leaders is, “When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose?” The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But, by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do. So, I always advise my friend Rick Warren, “Don’t tell me what you’re doing, Rick. Tell me what you stopped doing.”

The only hitch I think arts organizations might have with this is that waning audiences can make many programs look like they should be put on the not-to-do-list when some just need the attention being spent elsewhere to succeed. I think it is telling that Drucker focuses on the almost successes and achieved goals for elimination rather than targeting poor performers. While the latter should certainly be examined for elimination, Drucker reminds us not to become too invested in the moderate successes just because they provide a degree of satisfaction.

I just read the article this morning and spent most of the day catching up with a backlog of emails so I haven’t really had time to ponder what I might want to eliminate both personally and organizationally. However, over the holidays I had been thinking of discussing with the staff a new approach to one of our events with an eye to more closely connect with the local arts community. The old approach to the event might be the perfect thing to put on the top of our not-to-do-list.

More Revisting Drucker

Following up on my last trip to early entries, I had done a handful of entries on Peter Drucker’s Managing the Nonprofit Organization. I am not going to link back to all the entries, but I thought the topics covered in this one were particularly interesting because he addresses the unintended consequences of decisions and provides guidance on how to avoid them.

One of my favorite quotes:

“…Soon people in the organization no longer ask: Does it service our mission? They ask: Does it fit our rules? And that not only inhibits performance, it destroys vision and dedication.”