It is the alleys and loading docks that teach us the most about organizations. It not true that dirt and utility reveal truth. Dirt is just as able to hide truth as it superficial beauty. However, backdoors can reveal the commonalities of structure – how it is built and operates. It is often useful to know those common things before we go in search of those elements that make them special.
This is a blog about the performing arts, arts organizations, and artistic decisions. However, it is going to begin with the board meeting of a technical organization in China. The board had invited me to attend as its Foreign Corresponding member and provided a graduate student to translate. My language skills are limited to pleasantries, technical terms, and a words for few foods, both those I enjoy and a those I can’t abide.
The meeting provided to be remarkably similar to meetings I had attended in the United States and Europe. Reports, budget reviews, and a few questions that needed to be resolved. One such question was a board proposal to change the way it trained young workers. The idea was silly and impracticable and the chair eventually tired of the lengthy presentation. He bang a small bronze bell, the tool he used to end the debate. On hearing the sound, the speaker froze, turned to the chair and said “The cranes at daybreak leave their shadows on the lake.”
Confused, I turned to my translator. He shrugged his shoulders and said “It’s from a poem.” At this point one of the board members leaned my shoulder. The speaker is a member the communist party, she said, and he is reminding the board that his idea supports one of the four goals of the party for the year and that the chair should not ignore him.
The scene was repeated three hours when another tedious speaker told the board that “if the roots are not damaged, the bush will bloom again in the spring.” After the morning’s incident I was confident that I understood what was happening until my board colleagued whispered “It’s not what you think.” He’s from the army. He’s warning the party members not to mess with the military.”
Thus began my education in the influences on corporate boards in China, the forces that have a seat at the table. Chinese incorporation law can require boards to include representatives of specific groups include those from the Chinese Communist Party, National Ministries, Civic Government, the Police, and the Military to name a few. As I began to appreciate these representatives, I discovered that their influence was often normative rather than direct. Rarely did they issue commands. Instead, they would describe solutions that would be acceptable to their organization or the people that they represented.
The experience caused me to reflect on the boards one which I had been a member. I began to see that in them, debate was often shaped by people arguing that certain kinds of solutions would be acceptable to the groups they represented, be those groups software engineers, investors, donors, or audience members. I’ve listened to many individuals argue that certain actions would make our organization attractive “to young people” while, in fact, they were presenting criteria for an approach that would be acceptable to them, whether or it could accomplish the desired goal.
With this perspective begins the discussion of how the senior leadership of an organization makes decisions and how it influences the creative decisions of that organization. We start with the elements that are common to most organizations: budget and policies. From there we expand to influences that present but often unacknowledged. We will focus on the institutions that start to appear in the second half of the twentieth century. The theatres that formed during that period have little in common with the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s or those of the RKO and Shubert Organizations of the 1910s beyond the fact that all of them produced Shakespeare from time to time.
Furthermore, the post war institutions have a common body of theory, ideas that have a normative hold on the arts. Drucker’s 1946 Concept of the Corporation, may have described the structure and operation of General Motors but it also identified the standards that a good organization should practice. And, of course, artistic organizations aspire to be “good organizations” as they define and understand the term good. They also have members who are willing to stand up to the ringing bell and tell the assembled group that their ideas are in harmony with some larger set of goals.
Bibliography:
Drucker, Peter, The Concept of the Corporation, Beacon Press, 1946.
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