I mentioned we plan art to budgets too much. I want you to do the opposite. I want you just to dream. I want you to sit in a nice cool room, relaxed, cool, particularly in Dallas, with a glass or wine or whatever it is you drink, I'm a Sprite Zero person, as you can see down there, and just relax and drink, say, what would we really like to do? What have we always wanted to do? Not what can we afford, don't worry about the money to start with, and for those of you who think I'm a spendthrift and I spend money I don't have, it's just not true. I've run arts organizations for 30 years. I've never had a deficit in any of those 30 years, I don't do deficits. I don't believe in deficits. I'm not saying spend money you don't have, but the way you get the money is to dream big. Sit in a room and say what have we always wanted to do? What would be remarkable, truly remarkable? And then don't place that on the calendar for this year, put it three, four or five years out and give yourself the time to make that happen. But have the discipline to make it happen, don't just sit back and say, it's on the chart, so it's necessarily will happen. I like the longer trajectory because it really makes joint ventures easier and I love joint ventures. One of the ways to make art interesting is to do art that your organization can't do by itself. One of my favorite projects I did when I was in the Kennedy Center was a festival of Shakespeare. I really want to do something to embrace the whole arts community of Washington and I said which artist really influenced the most art forms? I came up with Shakespeare because obviously, the plays of Shakespeare but there's also dance based on Shakespeare and there's music based on Shakespeare and there's visual arts based and poetry and chamber music. You go down the list, Shakespeare is there somewhere. What we did was we put out a call. Any arts organization in the Washington area, I mean Washington, Northern Virginia, Southern Maryland, that want to participate could, name the project they want to do that's Shakespeare related. We just serviced as a clearing house A, for the overarching institutional marketing, but also just to make sure that no one duplicated efforts. And 65 arts organizations participated in our Shakespeare Festival. So much interest that even our local visitor's bureau that only in Washington cares about cherry blossoms and monuments, they were willing to put some money into marketing this festival because it was so broad. The measure of it for me was, we decided to open the festival on January 6th, which is 12th night and the local Shakespeare company had a reading at the play Twelfth Night, which is not one of Shakespeare's biggest hits. But they did a reading and we decided to do at the Kennedy Center and we made the gamble of putting it into our concert hall, which is our largest theater which has 2,400 seats. Sort of nervous, who’s going to come to a reading of a Shakespeare [SOUND] of Twelfth Night, not a play they want to see in January where the weather is not so great. But we decided to do it anyway, we figured we put people in front of the orchestra section and we'd see if we needed more seats. There was so much attention to this Shakespeare Festival, because so many arts organizations were engaged, 7,200 people showed up for a reading of Twelfth Night. This was a way of making something bigger than the Kennedy Center could do by itself, by embracing others. We can do that. We can do projects that are in our imagination, that are way beyond our normal capability, if we find others who have other skills. Other families, other boards, other donors, other audiences, other artistic knowledge, other educational knowledge. But when we do a big venture with someone else, all of a sudden, we have an ability to make something bigger than what we can do ourselves, but it takes time to make that joint venture work. When joint ventures don't work, it's almost always because the contract is not a good one, it's rushed, and you didn't really think through all the eventualities of what could happen. I like this longer term because I can actually think through, what can I do, with some more time. Another reason I like this approach, has to do with strategic plans. I mentioned that we need a strategic plan for the Kansas City Ballet. I've read literally thousands of strategic plans for arts organizations and most of them I would characterize as really wishes rather than plans. Our plan is to increase individual fundraising. That is not a plan, that is a wish. You wish to increase individual fundraising, but I'm always looking at the document, how are you going to do it? We are going to increase ticket sales. We are going to strengthen our board. All of these are great wishes, but they are not plans. The plan is what are we going to do to get a stronger board? What are we going to do to sell more tickets? And I frankly don't know how to plan for how to do any of those things unless I know what the art is. because to me, it's all art focused. How do you get stronger board members, if you can't tell him what's going to happen? In fact, in the arts, we tend to talk our history too much. We tend to look backwards too much. I'm all for history. My brother is historian. I'm all for saying a few things that build credibility for our organization. But the truth is when you go to a perspective board member or a donor and you tell them all the great things you did over the last ten years, all you're telling them is what they missed. You're not telling what they're going to enjoy. You missed the most wonderful time, [LAUGH] is that what you're saying, give me money. >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] It's not a great fundraising tool. >> [LAUGH] >> I'm saying to them, look at all the stuff you're going to get, all the great things ahead. Now don't you want to be apart of that? To me, that's a stronger message. For all of these reasons, I want to be able to talk ahead. I also want to look ahead because I like doing pro forma budgets for each year as I look forward, at least, the next two or three. And I like to say you know what, this year has too much that's risky. Let's take this project and move it over here and let's take this project and move it over here. I do balance the risk year by year by year and I also make sure that I have a few astonishing things each year. I don't want to have a year with nothing astonishing, I think of my year as a portfolio and I'm trying to balance a portfolio. Some things I know are surefire winners, some things are a luxury. I have at least one luxury every year. The luxury is the one I know is going to lose money. We're doing it because it's important for our field, it's important for our reputation, it's important because we want to do it but I also know it's going to be a hard one to sell. But I balance that with a few others in there that I think are going to be a little bit more easy and I make sure each year is balanced and I look at that years ahead. By the way, I do this in pencil, I'm constantly changing things, I'm erasing things. I have a great idea for a project, and after a few days I go it's really not so great. It sounded good but not so much, and I take it off. That's fine. My least favorite word in arts is the word slots. You know slots, you have the Christmas slot, the family slot, the risky slot, the new work, the community slot. You know what I'm talking about and think of your year as a combination of slots and every year is the same slots, it's just different, one name pulled out and another name pulled in. As a result, every year looks the same and we bore people. We just bore them and they go after 14 years, do I need to do it again? Do I need to see it again? Our staff gets bored. Our donors get bored. Our board gets bored. We are doing it to ourselves by making every year exactly the same as the year before. Take out Beethoven's 5th and stick in Beethoven's 7th. It's not that different enough to keep people engaged. I love Beethoven, don't get me wrong. But we have to surprise people. One of my favorite nights running the Kennedy Center, every year, was the night before we announced the season to the press, I would have 15 or 20 of my major donors come to my apartment in my little living room. I'd feed them a glass of wine and a peanut and I would tell them the ten or 15 major things to happen the next year. And they were always so surprised, like where did you come up with that one? That's so exciting. And just to see their eyes and to realize what this whole year was going to look like. That was A, worth the price of admission for me, because I spent five years planning that list, but also I realized that my group was really engaged and excited and surprised because every year was different. One year, we did the ten plays by August Wilson together in one month and the next, we do a big Arab festival. Everything was different. Every year was different and that difference, that surprise got people. They always wanted to know what's coming up next, what's coming up next? And that's how we keep our staffs interested and our boards interested and our donors interested and the press interested is by always surprising people. And if we plan far enough in advance, we can make that happen. Does that make sense? For all of these reasons, I like looking in advance and then there's one more reason that I want to talk about. And that is, we all have mission statements, which is great and our mission's critical, obviously, in the arts because I would say in the for profit world, it's easy to know what your mission is, tt's for profit. In the not-for-profit world, we know what we're not for, but what are we for? And that's our mission. How do we measure success? I's really important for us to be really clear in how we measure success. But the truth is to the public, those words are empty. What is really important to them is this and so I look at my programming plan for the next five years and I say, does this really define my mission? Does this explain who we are? And if it doesn't, then our mission statement probably isn't right or our program planning is wrong. When I got to Kennedy Center and I did this for the first time with my staff and I looked at the list and I said, it's great but there's no really exciting jazz work and jazz is meant to be a big part of who we are at the Kennedy Center. I said there's something wrong with this or there's something wrong with our mission. We went back to the drawing board and we really thought through and what we realized was we hadn't been pushing ourselves hard enough in jazz to think about what could be really special and we created some amazing jazz moments and changed this plan. To me, this is a check on our mission. For those of you who are on boards, this is something that I would love for you to ask for from your staffs because it's going to make you feel more comfortable about the way forward. Rather than looking at each year and typically, when you just look at each year, everything's already been agreed to, the contracts have been written by the time the board approves it, so it's really too late. This gives the board a chance to look ahead and say I'm comfortable. This is exciting, this makes sense or we need to do more or what else could we do? Let's make it more interesting. I'm not just talking about our ticket sales activities here. I'm talking about everything we do, our outreach, our education. Everything is on these lists. But, if we really do this well, the whole organization is going to get excited about what these next five years look like. It's so much easier to engage your board members if they're really excited about what's coming, rather than if they're just looking six months or three months or two months ahead.
