TAG: leadership

Work/Life Balance for Busy Arts Professionals

Last week, I had the privilege of appearing on a panel at the Dallas Symphony’s Women in Classical Music Symposium. The Symposium is the brainchild of Kim Noltemy, the fabulous CEO of the Dallas Symphony. Over the course of four days, the Symposium features an amazing array of speakers discussing topics relevant to women in today’s classical music world. My …

Leadership For Arts Entrepreneurs: 4 Key Elements of Your Leadership Style

In my last post, I dissected the lessons of leadership from Itay Talgam’s TED Talk on conducting and leadership and Marin Alsop’s interview at Yale, and highlighted 4 key elements of a leadership style: Be Yourself Find a Mentor Learn from Failure Create a Relationship of Mutual Respect These lessons  provided the backdrop for a call that I recently led with …

Flow Passion and Purpose: The Keys to Inspired Leadership

Last spring, I was honored to have been selected by the students of the Yale School of Music to speak at Inspiring Yale, a one-day campus-wide event showcasing the work of thought leaders from the 13 graduate and professional schools at Yale. While my work at Yale centers on launching the brilliant and talented musicians and arts leaders at the …

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Collaborative Artistic Leadership: 3 Tips on Leveraging Strengths to Enhance the Power of Your Team

Recently, I conducted a leadership training at Ensemble Connect, the wonderful fellowship program at Carnegie Hall that prepares young professional classical musicians for careers that combine excellence in performing with teaching, community advocacy, entrepreneurship and leadership. Our session focused on helping the Fellows develop an authentic leadership style in team settings, using strengths and communication styles.  The Fellows particularly enjoyed discovering their strengths …

How Arts Leaders Manage Failure: 4 Strategies to Learn and Grow

Failure. The true “F” word. So many people are afraid of failure, particularly smart, talented ambitious people who set very high standards for themselves and worry that if they ever fail, they feel they just are not up to the job. It’s particularly difficult hard to admit failure in a world where the opportunities are perceived to be scarce and …

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The Art of Collaboration: Top 10 Skills for Creative Success

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This semester, I am teaching a new course at the Yale School of Music using the collaborative project as the vehicle through which to teach arts entrepreneurship and innovation. Arts entrepreneurship involves coming up with innovative ideas that create value to society and actualizing those ideas. Collaboration is more than teamwork, where there is a leader to set the agenda and …

Using Music to Solve Problems: How Music Entrepreneurs Discover Solutions in 3 Steps

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How can the process of learning how to perform music help music entrepreneurs and arts leaders solve difficult leadership problems when the answers are not obvious? This was among the questions under discussion at last week’s Opera America’s Leadership Intensive Next Steps (LINS) program, which brought together 15 talented mid-career opera managers to provide advanced leadership training in order to retain high-quality leaders …

Turning Arts Entrepreneurs into Inspired Leaders: Know Your WHY

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My project in working with musicians and arts leaders is not only to teach arts entrepreneurship—the mindset, skillset and process of actualizing an innovative idea—but also to take entrepreneurship to the next level of cultural leadership To do so, I have my students articulate the greater purpose underlying WHY they make music, teach, perform and then communicate that purpose to the …

The Life-Long Journey of Music Entrepreneurship: Where are you now and how can you improve?

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We hear a lot today about “arts entrepreneurship” but what exactly does that mean? Let’s start with “entrepreneurship”:  the process of transforming an idea into an enterprise that creates value—economic, social, cultural, or intellectual– through innovation risk-taking and actualizing an idea. To me,  “arts entrepreneurship” is:  applying the entrepreneurial mindset (including taking risks, creating and recognizing opportunity, grit and growth) …