2,241 stories by "Joe Patti"
A little irreverence today after talking about philosophical questions like “what is art for?” In the past few years, I have done a lot of writing about the need to help people r…
This week Diane Ragsdale wrote a piece addressing the difficultly people have with the idea of Art for Arts Sake. She says when she conducts workshops and asks arts administration types …
I wanted to call attention to the recent return of the Hokule'a, a double hulled voyaging canoe, to Hawaii after a three year voyage around the world that saw the canoe travel 42,000 miles t…
The indemnification clause is a part of a contract that is often difficult to understand. Even after reading this post, you will still want to consult a lawyer, but you will be more awar…
Last month Non Profit Quarterly suggested that organizations undergoing executive leadership transition consider the shared leadership model that many performing arts organizations employ.Â…
You wouldn’t think fishermen needed help telling a story, but according to Non-Profit Quarterly, the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen's Alliance is looking for just that. They are getting…
I visited Fallingwater this weekend. Believe it or not, my impetus for being there wasn’t due to the 150th anniversary Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, but rather because for the l…
Given all the controversy about the depiction of presidents as stand-ins for Julius Caesar, I thought I would offer a somewhat more light-hearted example of how what we think we know about a…
Over the years I have written about studies which have found that the younger generation starting careers in non-profit organizations weren’t content to put in long hours and pay their…
Last week, Non-Profit Quarterly noted that the number of Giving Circles in the US were growing and wondered if this had implications for institutional giving. If you haven’t heard of t…
Pacific Standard had an interesting piece about the misconceptions music teachers and students studying to be music teachers have about the neurological benefits of music and music education…
I recently became aware of the Young Professionals’ Choral Collective out of Cincinnati and was impressed at how they structured themselves to facilitate involvement by a younger demog…
If you have a large physical plant or campus of buildings and aging HVAC, lighting or water systems, you may want to consider an Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC). Under this arrang…
Carter Gillies emailed me a question this morning relating arts with sports which set off a whole cascade of thoughts. First of all, we often talk about how arts organizations and creators n…
Almost as soon as I published my post yesterday about building community around augmented reality, I started thinking about how that might work with live performance. One of my first thought…
Two months ago I confessed I may have misread the impact and potential of the Pokemon Go game on attracting new customers and audiences. However, the Knight Foundation feels that the basic t…
The challenge of being creative in a non-profit environment is that you have big ideas, but few resources. So if you have a great idea for a new project or even an extension of an existing p…
Something I don’t really often see people write about are the benefits of sitting on a grant panel, especially for an organization that funds you. First of all, the organization will l…
In the comment section of yesterday’s post, Carter Gillies warned about succumbing to the temptations of survivorship bias and only holding up a few successful cases as examples to emu…
A year ago on Quartz a list appeared by former Stanford dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, outlining what every 18 year old should know. I briefly toyed with the idea of doing a post about how the …
The Washington Post had a story about an internet company in Korea which started a policy three years ago where all employees would be addressed by an English name rather than their Korean n…
The idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master something has largely been debunked since Malcolm Gladwell first suggested it. Still, I think he did everyone a favor by suggesting this number …
Great ideas can be found and cultivated everywhere. That is the basic message of a blog post on the Center for Small Towns’ website. They note that reporting on rural towns often s…
I have a fairly regular standing appointment on a radio station to talk about upcoming events at our performing arts center. Often the host will ask me to talk about the process we go throug…
Via Marginal Revolution blog, comes a story about a tourist spot in China that supposedly put in speed bumps to force people to slow down and appreciate the scenery. It made me think, is thi…
