have to frame the future and your compelling vision for it before you go out and raise the funds.” Fair enough. So why is it so difficult? Even its staunchest proponents admit that the Institutional Vision program had a mixed success. Morris reckons that the program scored major success with “maybe two or three” orchestras and had some significant impact on another ten. Why so few? Nygren thinks the issue was mainly “whether the orchestra teams could come together on a unified vision.” Then, if they did that, “were they able to effectively convey it to the rest of the organization?” Another critical factor, he says, “was continuity of leadership.” Departure of a key leader often undid progress. Perhaps the biggest hurdle was internalizing a vision so that it becomes part of the culture of the organization. Culture is difficult to change. But just as difficult, evidently, is rebuilding it strong enough to imprint itself on everyone in the organization to the point of surviving turnover of key staff. The fact that success seems so fragile, depending so heavily on the right individuals being in the right jobs, would seem to belie the premise of the program’s systemic vision approach. Indeed, looking at successful orchestras around the country, one might conclude that a common characteristic of success is the need for a “super-leader” who performs at an extraordinary level. Has the business become so difficult that the only way it can work is having an extraordinary, over-performing chief executive? Does that mean that merely competent leaders are a ticket to failure? Noteboom rejects that premise. “The danger of a super-leader is that everyone defers to him or her. And that can be trouble,” he says. Current thinking on leadership models is moving away from the super-leader notion toward one that stresses teamwork and less hierarchical decision-making. Organizations are much stronger in the long term when leadership is shared; success takes buy-in from a community.
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Case Studies: Michigan, California, Florida
Three years ago, when I first wrote in Symphony about the Institutional Vision program, I attended a five-day seminar in a suburb outside Chicago, and profiled three of the participating orchestras. Of the three, the tiny Adrian Symphony seemed to have gotten everything right.
Orchestras in the Institutional Vision Program came from a broad swath of the industry— from small orchestras with budgets of only a few hundred thousand dollars to orchestras in the $10-million-plus category. In an economically depressed Michigan town, the orchestra had articulated a compelling vision, connected deeply with its community, and reinvented itself in that community’s image. But when Executive Director Susan Hoffman moved to a new job at the Cleveland Orchestra, a series of board leaders cycled in and out and the orchestra’s fortunes went into a deep stall. Music Director John Thomas Dodson says things got off track and the orchestra lost its focus for a while. It didn’t help that unemployment in tiny Adrian, located deep in the Rust Belt, had soared to 15 percent. “But I’m absolutely convinced,” says Dodson, “that had we not done the work of defining our goals and thinking more strategically, we wouldn’t be around now.” By all reasonable measures, Adrian should not be able to afford an orchestra. But it defies the odds, Dodson believes, because its values come from those of the community: “They’ve told us what they want.” To get there, the orchestra had to rethink itself. It went out into the community, performing not just in the concert hall, but in other spaces. It started programs to make attending the orchestra more of a social experience, began engaging with the community to better respond to the music it wanted to hear, all
the while articulating everything it did in terms of values and experiences you can’t get anywhere else. If there’s a star of Institutional Vision, it’s the San Diego Youth Symphony, which also entered the program in 2009. The orchestra had been doing well. So well, in fact, that it was looking for ways to expand. One thought was to get a new home and rebrand itself as a conservatory. Executive Director Dalouge Smith says that the orchestra knew it was ready for a bigger challenge, but “our idea was an inwardly, selfishly focused question. We asked what kind of growth we wanted. What we really needed to ask was what did the community want from us. It was the essential question, and it changed our whole organization.” Instead of constructing a new building, the orchestra began partnering with the community and local schools, offering music programs where music instruction had been cut. The trial project was so successful that the orchestra went from serving 250 to 600 students, and the city’s school district asked the orchestra to expand the program. In 2010, SDYS adopted the long-term goal of “Making Music Education Affordable and Accessible for All Students,” using its resources to help build support for returning school-day music to the public schools. This winter, SDYS’ school partner, the Chula Vista Elementary School District, announced it will begin returning full-time music teachers to all 44 of its schools beginning in 2013-14. It makes for a rare win-win situation—a win for the community, and a win for the orchestra as the catalyst in bringing music to San Diego school kids. The orchestra also made a strategic partnership. The University of California San Diego Neurosciences Institute signed up to work with the orchestra’s students as part of a project to study the effects of music and learning music on the brain. The notion of a neuroscience research center working with a youth orchestra is a new one, and it shows the recent thinking that partnerships between orchestras and healthcare might yield major benefits. symphony
SPRING 2013