OPERA America’s Mentorship Program for Women teams emerging female administrators with established leaders. At the 2019 Backstage Brunch at the National Opera Center, I led a discussion with one of the initial pairs of participants: Stacy Brightman, vice president of education and community engagement at LA Opera, and Mitra Sadeghpour, who was recently appointed education director at Minnesota Opera after …
Innovation for Music Entrepreneurs: Get Creative with Implementation
One of the hallmarks of my class at the Yale School of Music, Creating Value Through Innovative Projects, is that students learn by taking action. My seminar’s focus is how to generate innovative solutions to the most pressing problems in classical music today. Over the course of the past semester, my students worked collaboratively on four different creative projects. Three …
Ideation and Incubation: How Music Entrepreneurs Expand and Improve Their Creative Ideas
When we last left the students in my Innovation and Collaboration class at the Yale School of Music, they identified the key problems of their audiences. The next order of business was to come up with some creative ideas for solving these problems. We entered the phase of creative problem solving known as “ideation” where students have brainstormed using a variety of …
Creative Problem Solving for Music Entrepreneurs: Defining the Problems of Classical Music
My class at Yale on Creating Value Through Innovative Projects is off to a great start! The focus of my seminar is how musicians can generate innovative solutions to the most pressing problems facing classical music today and to work in collaborative groups to solve these problems. My goal is to make my students better thinkers so that they can lead …
How to Jumpstart Your Creative Success: Take the Creative Success Assessment
I am passionate about empowering creative success! In fact, my mission is to help creative people achieve success so that the world is teeming with creativity. Why? Because I believe that when we put our passions and talents to work in the service of spreading creativity throughout the world, we are making the world a better place. The goal of …
Bang on a Can: Inspiring Innovation for Today’s Music Entrepreneurs
Last week, I had the privilege of participating on a panel examining the music powerhouse, Bang on a Can, as a case study in successful arts entrepreneurship. The panel, a Career Development session for composers and other musicians, was sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra as part of the Underwood New Music Readings, a program that discovers today’s brightest orchestral composers and …
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 …
Conducting and Leadership: Lessons for Today’s Arts Entrepreneurs
What lessons can today’s arts leaders glean from conducting and leadership? Conducting is a terrific metaphor for leadership since you have a large number of highly-trained and gifted people (the musicians) who must come together to produce a great product (music) which they can only do with skilled leadership Conducting and leadership provided the backdrop for a call that I …
Design Thinking for Music Entrepreneurs: How to Generate Creative Solutions for Audience Engagement
How do we solve the problem of attracting millennials to classical music events and building an audience for the future? My students at Mannes College of Music at the New School might have an answer! Through a class project that lasted less than a week, our students used the 5-step Design Thinking process to understand the needs of their millennial peers …
Design Thinking for Music Entrepreneurs: Using Empathy to Connect with Audiences
This semester, I am teaching The Entrepreneurial Musician at the New School, Mannes College of Music, a required entrepreneurship course that helps master of music candidates to explore how to create meaningful and sustainable careers in the arts. Last week, we learned about design thinking, a 5-step human-centered design process whose aim is to design products and services that fulfill …