Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success… It’s most everybody’s dream, and the title of a very useful book by Kathryn Ullrich, a high tech and consulting executive recruiter at Kathryn Ullrich & Associates located in the Silicon Valley. The book is the result of the Getting to the Top career development programs, a series of seminars and workshops that have been held in Stanford and UCLA business schools since 2006. Each of them had a functional focus: VP Marketing, VP Product Management, VP Sales, VP Bus Dev, VP Strategic Alliances, CEO, COO, General Manager, CIO, CFO.

There are numerous books related to improving one’s skills in marketing, sales, product management, and basically any of the typical corporate functional areas, and tons of books focusing on leadership. Yet, there are very few practical guides, if any, that deal with career development itself, and respond to the seemingly simple question: I am a small biz specialist in a mid-sized company today, how will I become one day the CMO of a Fortune 100? This question is at the back of the head of thousands of MBA students, yet, more often than not, they spend exorbitant tuition costs and hardly get any form of response to their simplest existential problem. You are trained. You are happy to find your first job, and after that, you are pretty much in the wild, haphazardly jumping from one position to another across various companies based on a random variety of criteria: better pay, closer to home, nice boss, trendy area, or whatever. Ten years later, a recruiter looks at your resume, and has the feeling that you have zigzaged through your professional life quite a bit. Or have you? Does what you did reflect a career strategy that you knowingly — or unknowingly — followed? It’s up to you to make it come across, though. It’s up to you to convey your own credibility.

Obviously, you can’t know it all and plan it all when you are 25 (that’s often the sign of conventional bores), but as you evolve, you start to have an idea of what you ultimately want to be at down the road. So sit down, and go through the personal assessment that will enable you to identify the guidelines that traverse your career to both leverage your past course and get better control over your future. However, this doesn’t mean that you should remain deaf to unexpected opportunities. While it’s true, as Kathryn acknowledges very early on in her book, that the vast majority of people now get their jobs through their network, and that not all hiring decisions are not based on requisite skills or experiences, it’s also true that zero sales and marketing experience will be a problem if you apply for a position as VP of Channels and Strategic Alliances or that a total of lack engineering skills are likely to make you a mediocre VP of Product Management. You’ll get on the nerves of engineers in no time!

The particular interest of Getting to the Top is that it’s really one of the very first books to lay down typical career paths in a no fancy way, with real examples of real people. Kathryn’s purpose is not to establish normative criteria and tell you Here Is What You Must Do, but to honestly provide you with typical career paths through true-to-life examples to help you plot your own course and assess where you are at any given point. Stop wondering about what it takes to become a VP: be aware of the definition of the role, check if you have the crafts usually expected in that role, if you have the tactical and strategic skills that are expected and the type of experience that will enable you to succeed. This book will save you a lot of time – as well as spare you from disappointing interviews. Yes you can be lucky and land a job above your actual qualifications, but guess what! You may also be miserable (or ridiculously unfit for the task and suffer from it). Frankly, how good of a CEO will you be if you have no strategic perspective, if you don’t give a damn about what customers think, if you hate to communicate or respond to the (sometimes petty) concerns of your direct reports? In other words – if you have no leadership. Nobody is entitled to anything, but success is within your reach if you are realistic. So look at the stars but keep your feet on the ground and read this no BS guide! Your career development is not only your responsibility, and rising to the top means understanding your goals, developing, and sticking to a career strategy, even as it evolves.

The recession is bad for everyone. But is it worse for arts organizations? Yes and no. “We are in tough times in the arts just like everybody else,” says Russell Willis Taylor, CEO of National Arts Strategies. “Access to capital has always been difficult, and it’s not going to get easier. Even rich people don’t feel rich right now. Sure, that’s a big problem. But non-profit arts organizations, just as any other organization, also have to take a hard look at themselves, reassess their strategy – because strategy, in its essence, is do less, and better.” Despite this grim landscape, Russell remains confident (”I am not worried, but indeed am confident about the future of the arts”), but is calling for action: “Organizations will have to focus. Pick the things you do best and do them better than anyone else.”

Meet Russell Willis Taylor: From for profit to non-profit organizations (NPOs): Faulkner said he loved Virginians “because Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs.” Well, Russell was born in Virginia and she is definitely not a snob and that’s why I like her. She is first and foremost an amazingly hard worker with an impressive track record in both commercial and non-profit organizations. I suspect that NPOs ended up interesting her the most because they are a continual challenge: “The non profit sector has a different layer of complexity. When people come from the commercial sector, working with big numbers and tough deadlines, they tend to believe that an NPO will be a snap. You soon realize that when you have virtually no access to capital markets and you don’t measure performance in numbers only, it’s actually quite complicated to run a non-profit. What NPOs can learn from the for profit sector has to do with adequately supporting your endeavors, hiring people who are the right fit, aligning people’s skills to the task at hand, paying them decently… but I believe that the for-profit sector can learn from the NPOs that mission-driven organizations who really spawn value are the best businesses.” Wherever she has served, as the director of development for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art early in her career, as the initiator of the fund-raising department of the prestigious English National Opera (ENO) that she later rejoined as executive director, as a special advisor to the National Heritage Board in Singapore where she resided for three years, and since 2001 as the CEO of National Arts Strategies in Washington, D.C, she has successfully championed operational efficiency and organizational leadership, and one simple, yet powerful mantra: Make meaning!

Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures and videos as well as see them in full screen). Note on 4/6/9: Temporary problem with the videos due to an unexpected change in YouTube policies. Zoomorama is addressing the issue.

Making meaning in a world that has changed: It’s not enough to simply state that NPOs must be run more like businesses. “‘What business do you have in mind?’ is the question I ask to many NPO executives,” Russell says. “Do you want to be run like Enron or Worldcom? What we do is help organizations contextualize information from the graduate schools of business and make it useful to people who are running NPO businesses. For some subjects, 90% is what you learn in an MBA program and 10% of it is need to be contextualized and for some other subjects, maybe 50% is what you learn in a business school and 50% has been customized to the topic at hand. This 10% to 50% is where an NPO brings a specific value – where it makes meaning. That’s the hard part, and where many traditional arts organization are having the biggest problem.”

In a good economy, a so-so company, whether it is commercial or non-profit can struggle along for years. But recessions often end up revealing a variety of undersides and flip sides, and dismembering business-as-usual attitudes. As unwelcome they may be, they are a time when companies can’t sweep latent problems under the rug and hope for the best – the best won’t happen miraculously. So how does this translate for the arts? “Although the arts in America are doing great,” Russell says, “lots of arts organizations are in a tough spot because they have to address several issues at once. They must determine what their optimal size should be, based on their financial resources, as well as redefine their market, and by doing both, define their goals.” A turnaround of sorts.

Financial resources are the most visible part of the problem. “A lot of NPO’s are undercapitalized. Most medium-sized art organizations (between $5M and $25M) would be tiny businesses in commercial terms. Many don’t have reserves. They don’t do pure income budgeting, they do project based budgeting. If you are in performing arts you have a really tough problem because you have to commit long before you have the revenue and signing contracts that are three years out to get the singers you want or the directors you want, for example, but you can’t always plan your revenue that way, and, as a result, these companies are very high risk businesses, inherently.”

This inherent risk can endanger NPO’s when combined with an over-provisioning or mis-provisioning of a given market, two issues that have been plaguing the arts scene well before the beginning of the recession and were often left unattended by organizations – which have kept doing basically the same things they did in the 90s’, i.e. what was done in the 80’s, i.e. in the 70’s (when NP Arts was a thriving young industry). And yet, over the last 10 years, commercial arts have changed significantly, sometimes pulling the rug out from under NPO’s feet: “The NP arts have been extraordinarily successful in establishing a national niche market and we thought that we had the moral high ground because what we do is of the highest quality. The finest commercial companies couldn’t enter that market because you couldn’t make money in it, so we were OK, but now with new technologies, new distribution systems, and with changing customer behaviors, commercial companies have found ways to make money making high quality products. Twenty years ago, a regional theater’s biggest competitors were other performance venues within a 100 miles radius; now its biggest competition is HBO. Vertically integrated companies have intensive marketing, spend a lot of money on a creative product, and realize the gain from it over a 3 or 4-year period. You can have HBO, you can have Sundance for films – there is a way to make money out of high quality products. You can now make profitable niche marketS in the arts. We used to view ourselves as the arbiters of taste and the only people able to provide non-commercial high-quality artistic products. It’s not true anymore. We can choose to stay on the ice that we occupy that is getting smaller and smaller, like polar bears with global warming, or we can use our creative intelligence to invent how to bring meaning to people. If not enough people want to come and sit in a symphony hall, does that mean that people are not interested in classical music? No. It doesn’t. The first symptom of an industry that is in trouble is when it blames its customers. When a symphony orchestra has trouble and we say that people are not appreciating arts, we are blaming our customers. It’s not the appetite for music that goes away. People only expect different delivery modes or different programming, and ultimately a better integration into the social fabric.”

The other meaning of the word recession: ceding back: The problems that NPO’s may experience during a recession are no different from the ones experienced by commercial organizations. “What we are seeing is what economists refer to across the globe in every market, not just the arts, as a brutal rationalization of the market and it’s not going to be fun for anybody, and I am not dismissing it. But no recession, no depression ever killed the arts. I think we are doing a lot better in articulating the unique value we add. For so long we have been talking about the instrumental benefits of the arts in order to get legislators, city council people, and federal government people, with the goal to make it OK to support us –and we need to get more comfortable with the intrinsic language again — talking about our work in a way that matters and doesn’t just refer to economic benefit. We make communities, communities of joy, of thought, of debate — it’s important work on its own terms.”

At a time of an economic recession, it is only appropriate to also remember the other meaning of the word “recession” as the act of ceding back. I would venture to say that arts organizations are not designed for the mere preservation of the arts or the employment of the people who run them – no more that commercial organizations are aimed at only pleasing its executives and a bunch of shareholders. The primary goal of an organization is to satisfy its customers and users, and reach out to them – i.e. ceding back their feel of ownership. That’s what multiple initiatives have been able to achieve well before our current recession. “Look at enterprises like Community Musicworks in Providence. Wow Are they amazing! It’s a quartet. They decided that they were interested in completely changing the quality of life of that 20% of the population in Providence that doesn’t know anything about classical music. So they opened a storefront school, and they work with the community. Sebastian Ruth is one of the most extraordinary, charismatic people you will ever meet. He is not charismatic in a big loud way. He is incredibly intense. They are incredible musicians. People get on the train from New York to see them. They are doing these concerts with the kids from the neighborhood who had never picked up an instrument before they went to see these guys. They are unbelievable. They are doing this because they believe that great art has the power to change lives. The quality of their work is superb. And of course look at El Sistema. The founder, José Antonio Abreu is an economist and amateur musician. When he founded the Social Action for Music, he believed that they only way to affect poverty was to make it possible to young people to create something of beauty. And his program is now probably the most successful social program in the world!”

Russell is definitely optimistic: “People are going to be coming together for the kind of experience that the arts provide that doesn’t cost a lot of money but means a lot. I think the community is not simply a nice thing, it’s the only thing, and arts organizations have a premier role to play in creating the sense of community. There is a Starbucks at every corner. There is a Walmart in every town. But you know how you know where you are when all towns start to look alike. You know where you are by the art that is being enjoyed and created — that is what gives us that important sense of place now.”

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information:

About National Arts Stratetegies: http://www.artstrategies.org;

Russell Willis Taylor’s detailed bio: http://www.artstrategies.org/about/staff/Taylor_Russell.php

Community Musicworks (Providence String Quartet):http://www.communitymusicworks.org/quartet.htm

El Sistema: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Sistema

José Antonio Abreu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Antonio_Abreu

I also wrote a post on the impact of the recession for start-ups a few weeks ago: http://delbourg-delphis.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=116

It’s great to live one’s life in the fast lane, and even better to do so with a sense of purpose. This is what I like about Frederic Kerrest. Entrepreneurship is his passion, and everything he does is aimed at honing his skills to become an effective entrepreneur.

From engineering to sales: “I didn’t like talking to computers all day long. I preferred speaking with people”. After six years as a student in Computer Science at Stanford, and employment as a software engineer at Applied Materials, WebTV Networks, Sun Microsystems and Moai Technologies, the entrepreneurship virus hit Frederic, who co-founded an IT Consulting firm with Stanford pals in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. This was a challenging, but successful, two-year experience in the midst of the Argentine economic crisis and clearly a fantastic way to learn what the real world is made of. At only (or already) 24, what was he going to do next? Go learn a little bit more about a growing business. He joined Salesforce.com as a sales engineer in 2002, when the company had 125 employees, and he left as a business development manager in 2007. By then, Salesforce.com had become public and had 2,000 people. “Great company, I made some fantastic friends and learned a ton, but after a few years my ‘education’ there was starting to slow down. I had won a couple sales awards, I started the wireless and OEM programs and was managing them successfully, but, by the end of 2006, I wasn’t feeling challenged to my full potential. It wasn’t the same to wake up and get to work in the morning. The company had gotten big and grown up and like all such situations, the job functions started to shrink.”

Why an MBA, and why at MIT? Multiple reasons. He says, “I wanted a change of pace from NorCal and to see what the MIT/HBS/Boston ecosystem was like, to develop a new set of smart friends, to build a new network of partners and professors. Also, although I had learned a lot by transitioning from engineering to sales, I felt I needed to solidify my academic credentials, get an education in finance, and generally speaking, structure what I had learned on the job.” Frederic’s experience at MIT met his expectations, and after only 18 months there, he admits that he feels “more loyalty to MIT than to Stanford.” He points to the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition – which over its 20-year history has spawned successful companies like Akamai Technologies, Zipcar and Guitar Hero – as a perfect example of the entrepreneurial fabric inherent at MIT. “The $100K has enabled me to sharpen my entrepreneurial tool set immeasurably, both as a successful participant and as the competition’s lead organizer. The competition has forced me to focus my ideas and to understand how to build a team, a product with a truly sustainable competitive advantage, a differentiated marketing plan and realistic financial forecast, and all of the other aspects that are essential to a successful startup venture.” 

Frederic considers that he was not only able to acquire a theoretical literacy he felt he needed, but also to expand his knowledge in two favorite areas, sales and entrepreneurship in general. He raves about a course offered by Howard Anderson, the founder and former president of The Yankee Group (http://www.yankeegroup.com), who also co-founded Battery Ventures (http://www.battery.com): Technology Sales and Sales Management (http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/entre_courses.php#15387). Frederic believes that this may still be the only real technology sales class in any of the top five or ten business schools. This class is part of a still relatively new program called Entrepreneurship and Innovation that leads to an MIT Sloan Certificate in Entrepreneurship & Innovation in addition to the regular MBA degree (http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/E_and_I_electives.php). One of the highlights of this program is the January five-day tour of Silicon Valley for first year students, in which Frederic enthusiastically participated again, but this time as lead TA, helping to manage the 70 participating students – a trip reported by the local edition of ABC News: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_bay&id=6592297

As Frederic puts it, “you don’t need an MBA to start a company, but getting an MBA from MIT Sloan not only doesn’t hurt, but can strengthen your determination to become an entrepreneur while providing you with tools that might take years to acquire otherwise. In last year’s class, out of 370 students, 25 started or were part of the founding team of a company – which is a much higher number than you’ll find at Harvard. This year, there will be about the same number of entrepreneurs in my MIT Sloan graduating class. The Harvard entrepreneurs hang out with us at MIT. We have built a good ecosystem and we all meet at a bar in Cambridge. It’s fun and energizing.” 

What’s next? “I will start a new software company, in Northern California. I have a number of different ideas that I am working on and testing. I have started to put a team together. It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur. The whole world is falling apart; there are lots of great people ready to start fresh, and change the world. Obviously recessions are not good, but this is also a necessary time to weed out companies that shouldn’t be in business in the first place. It’s a great opportunity. Look at Cisco, Sun Microsystems or Google – they were all started during economic downturns.”

I have worked with quite a few entrepreneurs. Honestly, I have no doubt that Frederic will succeed. I met him a few months ago when he was a Summer Associate at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (http://www.humwin.com). This job is more complex that one would think. You are in the awkward position of having to sound credible to both the entrepreneurs who visit the firm, and to the venture partners that sponsor your internship. I noticed that he was definitely more than your typical associate through small, yet revealing questions, focusing around execution and goal measurability. Good sign also: he wasn’t pontificating about “sales models” in general, but wanted to know more about the actual selling to customers. I look forward to telling you one day what the product will be about!

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information about the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition: http://www.mit100k.org/

Eric Benhamou started to teach at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading business schools, in 2003. He recently completed his fifth year. “I am just beginning to get a feel of what it is to be a professor there, and every year, I enjoy it more,” he says.

You have an impressive arsenal of degrees, and one of them is a Master of Science from Stanford University’s School of Engineering. How did you end up teaching MBA courses at INSEAD?

It was a coincidence because I did not go to the INSEAD. I had met Gabriel Hawawini, then Dean at the school, and he talked me into teaching there after a casual comment I made in a cocktail party about considering something like that. What I found interesting is that when you have to really teach something, this is when you have to figure out whether you know something or not.

What is the focus of your course?

The title of my course is “From start-up to Fortune 500,” and its subtitle is “Lessons in management and governance.” Over the years, I figured that what would be the most valuable to teach is a practical perspective on creating, building and growing high-tech companies. INSEAD has a very good reputation as a strong academic institution, and, as most top business schools, was short of practitioners. I can’t teach people in advanced finance or theoretical strategies, but I can teach them about practical cases which I have lived through, and I can make them feel what business is really like. As I was building the plan of my course, I came to the conclusion that I should focus on the times when a business is in crisis, because you always learn much more under such conditions than when everything is going well. Also, having been on the receiving end of many lectures, I don’t like when people tell me about their great accomplishments. I prefer to hear about their failures and what they learned from them. So I decided to approach my subject by focusing on the failure mode and on failure modes that I personally experienced and where I was not necessarily at my best.

Can you give two typical examples of such “failures,” one in a start-up, one in a Fortune 500 company? Let’s start with start-ups…

A funded start-up can have a bunch of VCs on its board and the Board is often dysfunctional. VCs don’t know how to function as Board members, nor do they know how to coach the CEO. There are hidden agendas between the venture firms and oftentimes, the CEO is caught in the crossfire. One VC supports the CEO and another VC wants to fire him/her. This happens much more frequently than people suspect. I was caught in a situation like this when I was relatively new as a venture capitalist and I found that it was too late for me to make a difference, because I had failed to raise the bar on governance and the level at which I expected directors to operate. By the time a crisis hit, it was too late. I could not appeal to best practices and best behaviors, because they had never been upheld in the company. From this example, I teach about the importance of setting the right type of governance at the various stages of the life of a company. Even when you have a small fast-moving start-up, it is still important to have a real Board, a Board that is disciplined, and someone has to take the leadership of that Board. It can be the CEO, but it can also be an experienced Board member.

And in a Fortune 500 company?

Most examples are true regardless of the size of the company, but yes, I also teach about the biggest mistake I made as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. In 2000, when I was still the CEO of 3Com, my Board became very impatient about growing the shareholders’ value at the same pace as the young high-flying startups. They were criticizing the company for not executing as well as Cisco in the enterprise market, and basically wanted to deconstruct the business: “we like this, we like that, but we don’t like this piece of it, so we think you should get rid of it.” My gut was telling me this was the wrong thing to do because we could not just separate out the large enterprise piece without contaminating the whole business. However, I wasn’t sure exactly how to build my case. I handed the matter over to very smart McKinsey consultants who threw in a whole bunch of interesting analyses that validated the Board’s perspective. My gut was still telling me that there was something missing, that this approach was too simple, too simplistic, and failed to take into account the synergies between the businesses, but I could not explain my position forcibly. So I basically gave up under the pressure of smart but under-informed board members.  I should have said instead: “I am the CEO. I set the strategy. I disagree. I can’t prove my case with numbers but my judgement tells me we should stay in this business…” That mistake proved to be costly, because we proceeded with the sale of that large enterprise business. It created such a fracture in the company that it caused it to go into a tailspin. It turns out that this happened at a time when I had already planned to retire from my job. So I said to myself: “well, I may not feel great about this decision but if everybody else, included my appointed successor, does, so who I am to just say “no”? I have to live with it. I’ll go and set this in motion.” This proved to be a very costly mistake and from this I derive a key lesson I teach my students. If as a CEO, you don’t feel completely 100% comfortable with a strategy, you cannot execute well. All your instincts have to be in line; if they are not, it’s better to press the Pause button than the Go button. You must think about it until it feels right. You can hire a group of McKinsey business consultants to support any point of view. They will come up with interesting arguments, they will develop them cogently with great slides, but ultimately, you’ve got to lead from the guts, as Jack Welsh used to say, and if the guts don’t respond, you are not in a position to lead.

How do you see teaching versus mentoring?

The way I approach my course, it’s very close. The reason why students take my course is because they expect that. Many students come to my course for mentorship. They value the experience of a practical perspective. Basically, at the end of the course, students have a flavor of what it’s like to grow a company through different stages and understand the typical failure modes that are looming at each stage. I try to integrate this human dimension in every situation. For example, when I teach a case study, I explain who the actors are, what their backgrounds, and what their basic personality traits are, so the students can anticipate how they will behave in a similar situation and make intelligent analyses. It typically comes home when the students see that the people who teach the case, actually lived the case and are not just professors who pick a case from the Harvard Business Review. I teach very practical things, such as how to create a dashboard. I give them five companies and tell them to imagine that they are the CEO of one of them and need to present at the next Board meeting a dashboard that the Board members will understand. They have to prepare it in 5 slides, no more. So at the next session, I ask for 10 volunteers to present the dashboard and we critique them. They see how I would react and they see it in real time. This is what they expect. The people who take my course have a very high propensity to start a business. When I ask them: “Do you expect to start your own business in the next 5 years?” More than half of them do. Also, 10% of them are already true entrepreneurs who go to INSEAD to prepare for their next start-up, and about 20% of my students plan to take over a family business at some point.

Who are your students?

There are about 50 of them. I always spend a few minutes in the first session to know more about them and I keep some stats. The demographics have not changed all that much over the last five years. The average age is 29 when they start. By the time they graduate, it’s 30. It’s more senior than the MBA course at Stanford or Harvard. It is a diverse group. This year I had students from 13 countries  - which is fairly representative of the overall population at INSEAD, because they have a recruiting policy such that no single country will represent more than 10% of the enrollment. This ensures a level of diversity that I could not get in other top business schools. And I get countries that are hard to get, such as Uzbekistan, for example. I even had a student from Papua New Guinea. This is not like at Stanford where you have primarily Americans, Indians, and Chinese.

Given that a major advantage of business schools is to be able to build a business network, how valuable will it be to build a geographically diverse network?

It’s a good question. It turns out that it will. First of all, persons from a small or less developed country may very be the ministers of commerce or industry one day. And also, if they do not go back to their home country, they are likely to become very successful in mainstream economies somewhere. These people are bound to be very successful. The school is not super-old, but it’s old enough to have a solid track record, so you know where these people are and how far they have been able to go.

What do you learn from teaching?

I have learned that even when you know something, for example a case that you teach every year, there are always angles that you have overlooked or that only come out through discussions with people who bring a fresh perspective. When you walk into the classroom, you have to be humble enough to realize that you have not answered all the questions yet.

Why would you recommend INSEAD?

First, of the top business schools, it is probably the best return on investment. It is a very intense 12-month program rather than a more typical 18-month program. The salaries after graduation are very comparable worldwide to the salaries of graduates from other to the top business schools. And yet, you invest far less in time, in money and opportunity cost. Secondly, it is a great human experience. Harvard, Stanford, or Columbia are US business schools with foreigners attending. INSEAD is truly a global business school – where speaking three languages is a requirement, even though all courses are taught in English. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

To get an overview of Eric Benhamou’s highly successful business story, I suggest that you read the bio on his web site: http://benhamouglobalventures.com/web/long_bio.htm, and Srmana Mitra’s extensive series of interviews: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2007/08/20/eric-benhamou-the-turnaround-of-3com-part-1  

For more information about Gabriel Hawawini, Professor of Finance and former dean of INSEAD (2000-2006), visit: http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/profiles/ghawawini/

For more information about INSEAD: http://www.insead.fr/home/

Non-profit organizations (NPO) are all the more fascinating as they must be, if not “profitable,” at least capable of operating on budget and offer some form of moral earnings and satisfaction to their patrons. Just as any business, they must show real numbers in order to justify their existence and the continued involvement of donors (think of them as angels or VCs with a passion.)

The University Musical Society (UMS) in Ann Arbor, MI (which grew from a group of local university and townspeople who gathered together to study Händel’s Messiah in 1879) is one of the oldest multi-disciplinary performing arts presenters in this country and certainly also one of the most energetic, having recently successfully concluded a $25M eight-year fundraising campaign. The amount is impressive by itself, of course, but even more remarkable are a few additional numbers reflective of the vitality of the organization during the campaign. Here are some of them:

• Attendance at UMS performances: 770,973
• Public performances offered: 582
• Total number of new works commissioned during campaign period:  30
• Educational events offered: 1,224
• Number of artists presented: 14,110 (0f which 5,998 were Michigan artists)

 Just as in any company, the key to success of a NPO is the team, and most importantly its leader, in this case Ken Fischer. I simply do not know where to start to describe this man[1]. He became President of the UMS in 1987. He breathes music. Everybody in his family is a musician or deals with music one way or another, including his son, Matt Fischer, now Director, Marketing and Partnerships, of iTunes at Apple. Ken seems to know virtually everybody in the performing arts industry and, although extremely busy, he always finds a way to make himself available to meet new people.  UMS’s inclusion policy is EINO – “Everybody In, Nobody Out” – passed down from Ken’s mentor Patrick Hayes, the legendary impresario of Washington DC.  Also, like all top players, he surrounds himself with other top players, be they employees or the multiple interns that the UMS welcomes every year.

 (Photo David Smith): Ken Fischer with Leonard Bernstein in the conductor’s dressing room at the Ann Arbor Hill Auditorium following the October 29, 1988, Vienna Philharmonic concert. All 4,192 seats were occupied, 550 of them by students who paid $10 each for a ticket. “This was the first concert I heard in Ann Arbor,” Director of Programming Michael Kondziolka, says. “I was 23 years old. That day, I knew I was not to leave this town.” 

As a newly appointed member of the UMS National Council, I was able to see for myself how well this organization is run, and how constructive budget discussions can be when a director of programming (Michael Kondziolka), a director of marketing and communications (Sara Billmann), a development director (Susan McClanahan), an education/audience development director (Claire Rice), a production director (Doug Witney) and an administrative director/CFO (John Kennard) unambiguously share the same goal of sustaining the distinctive quality of an organization as well as the continued and recurring satisfaction of its audience. A lot of VPs of marketing in for-profit companies may want to listen to Sara Billmann’s thorough reflection on the results of an extensive study she co-chaired on the motivations that drive attendance and donations for the performing arts.  She is a former oboist herself, as well as a Stanford MBA, and she gets it. She knows that, contrary to a lot of businesses, the margin of error in live arts is extremely small. And so does clarinetist Michael Kondziolka, who started his business life as the operations manager of a Merrill Lynch subsidiary in Minneapolis. No matter how you slice it, he says, “empty auditoriums show that you are not offering the right product line. This does not mean that you should only present what the public already knows. This means that you must creatively balance the season between performances that are accessible while preparing the audience for more cutting-edge productions.” The team obviously excels in risk modeling and quantification: The UMS is a recognized leadership organization that transforms Ann Arbor into a much sought-after stop for both world-class performers and music loving audiences. 

And when a NPO shows great management and great traction, it attracts not only big donors, but also a large number of smaller ones (more than 3000 individual donors made over 16,000 gifts during the Campaign).  A performing arts NPO is like a non-stop startup. You make revenues from ticket sales, but you constantly need to raise money. The minute you meet Ken Fischer and his team, the chairs of his most recent campaign (Ann and Clayton Wilhite), his Board (currently headed by Carl Herstein), or anyone who has supported the UMS, you want to contribute (and will most likely continue to do so). You are not pouring water in a sieve. You are securely investing in a sustainable enterprise that demonstrates the extraordinary appeal of live performing arts to people of all walks of life, who did not realize they “would like it so much.”

From left to right, Jerusalem Symphony with Leon Botstein, conductor, Robert McDuffie, violin (Nov. 2008); Tenor Lawrence Brownlee who will be accompanied by
Martin Katz, piano (Feb. 2009); Compagnie Marie Chouinard (April 2009). Full calendar of events: http://www.ums.org/s_current_season/default.asp

More about Ken Fischer:

[1] http://www.culturalalliancesemi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=57&Itemid=0

More about the UMS:

http://www.ums.org/

http://www.ums.org/s_make_a_gift/

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis