Category Archives: Governance and management

Delaware Offering Lessons on Museum Management of the Wrong Kind IMHO

I’m a 1980s graduate of the University of Delaware, which is a great place to learn about museums because of its affiliation with Winterthur, Hagley Museum and Library, and Longwood Gardens. Now we’re all discovering it’s also a great place to learn how to mismanage a museum.

If you haven’t been following the story for the past year, the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington is selling some of its collections in an effort to pay off a $20 million debt for the construction of a museum expansion in 2005 and refill its endowment. They first sold a painting by William Holman Hunt a few months ago and they’re getting ready to sell a couple more items soon, including a painting by Winslow Homer and a sculpture by Alexander Calder. Their actions were censured by the Association of Art Museum Directors (a group that’s typically reluctant to criticize its members), but the Delaware Art Museum doesn’t care. In “Museum Under Fire for Selling Its Art,” Deborah Solomon of the New York Times provides the latest painful details.

This case study isn’t finished (and it’ll be a doozy), but we’re learning plenty of lessons already:

1. People visit museums and historic sites to have a great experience with the collections, not Continue reading →

How a Classic Business Matrix Can Help Museums and Historic Site

In the 1970s, Bruce Henderson at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) introduced the “growth-share matrix” to help its clients better manage a portfolio of business units and products. The matrix facilitates management decisions by rating each product according to their share of the market and their potential for growth. Putting each product in one of the four quadrants of the matrix graphically showed which ones were the stars, cash cows, question marks, and pets (cute but worthless). More importantly, it showed the overall position and health of the company and suggested next steps. For example, “cash cows” should be maintained and used to invest in “stars” but “pets” should be abandoned (sorry for offending pet owners, but calling them “dogs” probably won’t make it any easier).

During the past 40 years, the BCG matrix has become a classic tool for business strategy and Harvard Business Review recently named it one of the frameworks that changed the world. Yet it is rarely used by museums and historic sites, who seem to favor the much more limited SWOT exercise. It may be because non-profits are unaware of the matrix but it’s more likely that “market share” and “market growth” are unfamiliar or impracticable concepts. I do like the idea of assessing our work in ways other than attendance and income, so I’ve revised the framework to make it more useful to museums and historic sites.

In this “mission-sustainability matrix,” Continue reading →

Delaware’s Strategic Plan Meets AAM Standards

AAM’s “Continuum of Excellence.”

A couple years ago, the American Alliance of Museums introduced the Continuum of Excellence, a “multi-program structure [that] offers opportunities for various levels of assessment, feedback, and recognition that build on one another.” It’s a significant expansion of the Museum Assessment Program and Accreditation process because it now includes additional intermediate steps, including verification of five core documents, including a strategic plan.

Last year I worked with the Historical and Cultural Affairs Division of the State of Delaware to prepare a strategic plan that would meet or exceed AAM’s standards for professional museums. The planning process was more complex than usual because it involved a state government agency that is responsible for over forty historic properties, five museums, a conference center, welcome center, historic preservation, and archaeology and has numerous local partners and affiliates. They also wanted a strong emphasis on team work and a heavy reliance on staff expertise, so the process included large and small group meetings, staff surveys, and community research to create a vision, core values, major audiences, goals, implementation, evaluation, and a budget within eight months. Whew!

I facilitated the meetings and provided general direction, but the staff wrote, revised, and developed the strategic plan from beginning to end while still working their regular jobs. I’m incredibly proud Continue reading →

How Museums Can Optimize Revenue Through Dynamic Pricing

Optimizing revenue by increasing pricing for special exhibits or peak times (e.g. weekends) is widely adopted in the performing arts (e.g., matinee vs evening performances at the theater) but rarely used by museums. A few museums, however, are beginning to experiment with dynamic or demand-based pricing to maximize their revenues. For example, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art increased their price $2 for the last four weeks they were open before renovation began and received no complaints. In 2008, the EMP Museum dropped its admission fee from $30 to $15 and it did not affect visitation, so in 2011 they increased prices and in 2013 they moved to 2013 to dynamic pricing. During the last 3 weeks, they earned an additional $15,000.

In “What Price is Right?”, a session at the recent AAM annual meeting, Heather Calvin (Museum of Science), Jill Robinson (TRG Arts), and Jessica Toon (EMP Museum) discussed how museums can use demand-based pricing strategies to set admission prices, service fees, discounts, and membership dues. It was a wide-ranging presentation so I’m sharing the highlights here to Continue reading →

Is Planning Giving You the Creeps?

This afternoon at the annual meeting of the American Alliance of Museums in Seattle, Washington, I’ll be part of “Strategic Planning Made Simple,” a panel session discussing approaches to designing and implementing strategic plans with Liz Maurer (National Women’s Museum), Laurie Baty (National Capital Radio and Television Museum), and Steve Shwarzman (Institute of Library and Museum Services). I’ll be highlighting four ways to overcome “planning creep,” the seemingly inevitable and invisible force that pulls you away from your goals:

1. Adopting a Meaningful Purpose and Vision. Strategic plans have been with us for nearly a century, first for military purposes and then adopted by businesses in the 1970s. It’s now pretty clear that planning without a purpose is a wasted effort and now you’ll find both businesses and non-profit organizations adopting “mission statements.” While mission statements are needed, not all mission statements are helpful. I’ll be outlining the six elements of a Continue reading →

Grease the Gears of Your Next Meeting

We are in meetings regularly but how many of them are productive? The minutes grind by slowly as the group argues over what it’s supposed to be doing and everyone is anxious to get back to their desks. A couple weeks later, you repeat the same meeting because no one remembers what was decided or who was responsible. I’ve been there hundreds of times but it improved about fifteen years ago when I began following the principles in How to Make Meetings Work by Michael Doyle and David Strauss (1993). It introduced me to the value of agendas, the decision-making process, and the important role of a facilitator. The facilitator is a neutral third party whose sole purpose is to manage the meeting process and ensure it is productive. He or she doesn’t make decisions but helps the group discuss issues collegially to arrive at decisions thoughtfully. The facilitator makes meetings easier, putting grease on the gears that would otherwise grind and bind. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you are probably serve as a facilitator from time to time.

Over the years I’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of facilitation, especially as organizations move from a top-down, command-and-control form of management to Continue reading →

The Future of Leadership: A Perspective from Business Workforce Trainers

What’s the future of leadership look like? Five leaders in the field of business workforce training and development shared their perspectives at a session at the 2014 ASTD conference yesterday (and just renamed itself the Association for Talent Development). In the conversation, Debbie Blanchard (Ken Blanchard Companies), James Kirkpatrick (Kirkpatrick Partners), Halley Bock (Fierce, Inc.) and Tacy Byham (Development Dimensions International) discussed their experiences and observations as consultants who work with companies around the world. The session was presented in a question-and-answer format, but I’ve synthesized and distilled their responses to highlight key ideas.

1. Leadership is not a “soft skill”; it is an intentional practice to improve organizational performance and profitability. You cannot thrust people into leadership to see if they can swim, instead it has to be initiated, conducted, and practiced intentionally.

2. Leadership has moved from a hierarchical, single command-and-control structure to Continue reading →

Corcoran Dismantlement Offers Lessons for Museums and Sites

The recent news that the Corcoran in Washington, DC, will be mostly dissolved and its parts distributed to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) and George Washington University (GWU) is generating lots of discussion on whether this is a good thing or not, and who should take the credit or blame. For those unfamiliar with the Corcoran, it’s an unusual museum because it’s a combination of art gallery and art college. Students use the art collection for study and inspiration, and the art gallery exhibits student and faculty artworks along with historic American paintings and sculpture, connecting past and present. It’s a great approach for providing a rich environment for the study and appreciation of art for both students and the public. Other museums have followed similar paths to create deeper places of learning, including the Henry Ford Museum with its charter school, the Academy of Natural Sciences in its merger with Drexel University, and the American Museum of Natural History offering a Masters of Arts in Teaching. Yes, museums and historic sites can offer more than just an hour-long tour or a morning field trip.

The Corcoran was created in the Gilded Age, the era of the first major public museums. Unlike its contemporaries such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran seems to have gone asleep in the mid-twentieth century and like Rip Van Winkle, it couldn’t wake up. It made attempts to move out of its slumber, including Continue reading →

Museum Advocacy Day Highlights

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Last week was Museums Advocacy Day and this week is Historic Preservation Advocacy Day, so Congress is getting lots of visits from people who care about our nation’s history and culture.

Museums Advocacy Day has improved each year. The schedule is well organized and the training and materials are thoughtfully assembled to give everyone a clear idea of what might happen during a congressional visit and the priorities for requests (with lots of good background information so you can speak about issues confidently). At the top of the list was a request for “robust funding” for the Office of Museum Services at IMLS, protection of the charitable deduction, and permission for museums to be eligible with schools for federal teacher training funds. Even if you weren’t able to join us, the American Alliance of Museums provides lots of information and ideas for advocacy at home (although the handy “Issues at a Glance” from the Advocate Handbook doesn’t seem to be available online).

IMLS, NEH, NPS, NFS, and NEA talked about their needs but they didn’t seem to be aware Continue reading →

Engaging Places

Strategies and ideas to connect people with historic places