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In this episode of Leading the Way, Jill S. Robinson talks with Seth Godin about strategic leadership in the arts. Together, they explore how cultural leaders can bridge immediate operational demands with long-term vision, embracing adaptability, empathy, and purpose to create meaningful, audience-centered institutions that thrive beyond today's challenges.
Drawing on insights from Seth’s lates book This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans the conversation touches on the urgent need for leaders to step out of reactive cycles and into proactive, strategic modes of thinking. They discuss how to define success beyond sellouts, build deeper audience loyalty, and lead with intention; not just passion.
For more insights, past episodes, and to sign up for our newsletter, visit trgarts.com/leadingtheway
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Creators and Guests
What is Leading the Way with Jill S. Robinson?
Leading the Way with Jill S. Robinson is a journey into the international arts and culture industry. Join Jill, a driving force in the sector who has counseled arts leaders for more than three decades, for conversations with some of the most insightful and daring minds leading the way to a resilient 21st century.
We all have a strategy, but we often rightly focus on the immediate needs of our organisations.
Let's join Jill Robinson as she talks to Seth Godin about how leaders can ensure their strategies remain adaptable to current and future needs in this special episode of Leading the Way.
Seth Godin, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me about arts and culture on our Leading the Way podcast.
It's a series of communications that is a blog and a podcast and e-mail.
And we last spoke in New York City for the APAP conference and that group got to hear you talk about your arts origin story, but are leading the Way listeners don't know it.
Can you ground them in your origin story of love for arts and culture?
You know, the purpose of life isn't to support capitalism.
The purpose of capitalism is to help us have culture, culture of art and leaning into possibility and contribution and connection.
If you don't have that, then I'm not sure what the point is.
And I grew up in Buffalo, NY, which used to be one of the most important cities in the US in the late 1800s.
A lot of Frank Lloyd White Houses, the Albright Knox Art Museum, Klein Hands Music Hall, and my dad was the volunteer head of the United Way.
My mom was the first woman on the board of the Art Museum.
My dad also was the president of Studio Arena Theatre.
Rest in peace.
And I grew up thinking all this was normal, that you could live in a small place.
Buffalo's is pretty small town, and artists would come to the house for dinner.
I still run into people who remember my mom decades after she passed away.
And what I learned from that is that the arts often are about status, who's on the board, who's fancy.
But that's not what it's for, and that's not really what it's about.
It's about the liminal space and possibility, creativity, and most of all, human connection.
I couldn't agree more.
And the folks who watch this Leading the Way podcast would agree with you emphatically, Seth.
They are the leaders who may have not read this book, but they are the leaders who really are wanting to make transformational big change within their organizations and on behalf of the communities that they serve.
These are the folks who through TRG Arts will be watching our conversation and your book, This is Strategy, which you know, I have so enjoyed.
It's a playbook for how to think about strategy.
And there are sort of four threads that you weave through with the beginning.
They are time and games and empathy and systems.
And just I want our listeners to have some context before I bring us into some more specificity here.
So can you just give us a primer on those 4 threads and what they mean to leaders?
Well, let's let's talk a little bit about tactics first.
The people who are listening to this are really good at tactics.
Tactics are what you do when it's your turn to make a move.
You didn't get as far as you got by not getting good at knowing what your choices are when you make a move and making the best move.
I don't need to help anybody with tactics, but strategy.
Strategy is deciding that waiting for your turn isn't necessarily the right choice.
Strategy is deciding what the possible options are.
Strategy is the hard work we do before we do the hard work.
And many people in the arts are insulated from strategy, right?
There's another show to put on next season.
Here we go.
There's another opening next week.
Here we go.
But someone else is setting your agenda.
And it's OK to be in the tactics business as long as the choices are working for you.
But, you know, if we think about a place like Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Hall, right in the name is about a building.
That building 80 years ago was the most important arts building in America.
Over time, that can't keep being true.
So how are you going to decide?
How are you going to decide what the place is even for how we're going to use it?
Where else are we going to use the possibility that we have?
And so every day we don't do strategy is a day we are sacrificing opportunity.
So with that said, it's easy for someone in the arts to dismiss because they have so many tactics they have to go work on, or because I'm an outsider and I don't know what I'm talking about, or because the board will never go along with it, or or or or.
But at least understand it before you decide not to have a strategy.
So with that said, the four elements are time.
Because the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, too late.
The second best time is right now.
When we build a strategy, we're not doing it to solve today's problem.
We're doing it to create a future that we want to live in.
What will the Jill of five years from now thank you for doing today #2 is empathy.
And plenty of people in the arts have certain kind of empathy, an awareness and a care for the way others are.
I'm talking about the radical empathy of realizing everyone who disagrees with you is correct.
Nobody acts against what they think of as their best interests.
The people you're hoping to serve don't care what you want.
They care what they want.
And if we can go to where they are with humility, we have a better chance of serving them.
The third one is systems, and this one we get about all day.
Systems are things that feel normal the way things are around here.
So it's weird.
If you go to DC and you walk into a Smithsonian museum, they don't offer to charge you anything.
And if you're used to the traditional museum entry, that that feels off.
While they have a different system of paying for everything than other places.
There's a system that Marcel Duchamp broke when he started to create Ready Made because there was an expectation of what a piece of art was.
System.
The way things are around here, it's changing.
And the fourth one are games.
Games or any situation where there's scarcity and human beings, you do this, someone else does that.
If you make a move and it doesn't work, doesn't mean you're a bad person, just means you made a move that didn't work.
And So what we seek to do is play the game better to understand that when the other components are in place, we have enough agency to make a difference.
OK, so we're together now in front of a field that has been through it.
I've said I haven't found a sector, a field that has been as radically hit as arts and culture.
The the, the, the, the medium to small size venue.
Think 5000 seats and smaller medium to small size exhibit space.
This framework that you've offered, these tools, these threads, I don't know that you could have anticipated, but this book was published when?
Three months ago.
Four months ago.
In October.
In October, so much has changed since October, and every week things change.
And I enjoy reading your daily e-mail.
And I wonder if your perspective is that now is just a wave in the inexorable tide.
But this book, your Rovocation, is that we must think strategically.
And this is a field that would say to me, would say to you, Yeah, Jill, that's right.
And I'm struggling to make payroll.
I've just come through a pandemic and now economy, and now politics and now divisiveness and now even global realities can have an impact on who I book in my in my halls.
So what do I do, Seth?
How can I possibly prioritize strategy when I've got so much right here in front of my face?
Well, I'll start by saying it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction.
So it probably pays as hard as it is for people to ask for directions.
To ask for directions #2 if you want to see if someone's a good surfer, watch which waves they pick.
That's what makes someone a good surfer.
And you're picking waves without thinking about it.
Which wave is worth riding?
The third thing I would say is that a tree falling makes way more noise than a forest growing.
What really pays off, what we're going to remember in a in a few years is, is the forest growing and where are you planting it?
So when we think about the venues you're talking about, what are they even 4, right?
Many of them were built before streaming before 1,000,000 channel universe.
Many of them were built when the only way to get an idea to somebody was to have a place where they would go and find that idea.
So the question is, what are we doing putting this live thing on in the 1st place?
Because it has a purpose, but it's not the purpose.
It used to be the same way before Amazon.
A local retailer could say if you're looking for a paperback book, we have paperback books and there weren't many other choices.
But you can't out Amazon.
Amazon, there better be a good reason for me to go to the movies because I got the movies at home and you can't out Netflix, Netflix.
So there better be a good reason for me to go to a museum other than seeing pictures behind glass because I can see pictures behind glass in lots of places.
And if the audience can't tell if it's an original or a fake, it doesn't matter if it's an original or a fake, but we need to make it so they could tell.
Something has to happen in those holy spaces that we are running spiritual institutions, not access to information.
And we can do that on purpose.
And that intent comes with our strategy.
How do we describe the change we seek to make?
And in many of my conversations with curators and museum presidents and people who program classical music, when they're telling the truth, they're saying I just want people to see what I see, not I need to go to where they are and create a life changing event for them.
Those are two very different ways of looking at the world.
Those are two very different ways of looking at the world.
You had a really wonderful story of your mother and an event that she wanted to make happen.
I mean, she had one idea and another thing happened.
Can you tell our listeners that story real quick?
OK, so if you've ever been to the Albright Knox, they've rebuilt it.
The old one is this beautiful classic piece of architecture and it's a magnet for brides to go get their photos taken on their wedding day.
And my mom who was one of the Co founders of the museum store association and was at the museum every day.
It used to bother her that these folks would come stand on the porch of the museum and never go in.
And over time she came to understand the museum had many functions and if that's what people needed from it, that's OK.
But in order to get people to come inside, she came up with this idea before the Antiques Roadshow.
She called up Sotheby's and she said, can you send a couple appraisers out here?
And I don't know how she got them to see this, but they did.
Yeah.
And then she did a little bit of PR with the Buffalo News.
And there was 1 little article.
Come to the Albright knocks on Saturday morning.
Bring your candlesticks.
Bring your family heirlooms.
Someone from Sotheby's will tell you if it's worth anything.
My mom came home on Friday, and I could see that she was a little tense.
I was like 14.
And she said, I'm a little worried about tomorrow.
What if no one comes?
And then she said, well, if no one comes, no one will know that no one came.
And the next morning, she and I went to the museum and there were 5000 people waiting in line to get in.
And so the question is, when you think about your institution, you've thought of things like that and rejected them.
You have very good reasons to reject them.
But if no one comes, no one will know that no one came.
So this is a great segue.
Now these leaders that we talked to at TRG Arts, they are asking these questions of their institutional destination and purpose.
They are thinking about what is the change that I need to drive or help create.
They are thinking those things and they have really palpable and tangible annual needs, needs to balance budgets, needs to needs to pay people, needs to pro all kinds of annual needs.
And at TRG, we're a management consulting firm in this sector.
And the people we work with in these organizations are the business side of these nonprofit, charitable, some commercial businesses.
They're boards too.
And increasingly it includes the artistic leader curators because those thoughts have to be joined up.
I can tell you at the beginning of our business, they weren't so joined up.
That artistic team lived over here and there.
Silo and the business side worked over here, but not so much anymore.
They came even closer during the pandemic.
So with that as context, there are 4 focus areas that in 2025, our firm is elevating to the field and the people we work with and these leaders to focus on.
And I want to talk with you about the four.
They are these things, recency, which is about the maintenance of relationship demand, which is about the definition of success of demand people, which is about seeing people when you see any number of things from revenue projections to plans.
And the 4th is discipline, which you're going to enjoy talking about all of them, but I know you're going to enjoy talking about that one.
So I want to start with recency.
OK.
Little bit of context, TRG works globally.
We work in the UK, Australia, Canada, the US have for 30 years prior to the pandemic, we ingested customer data, consumer data.
During the pandemic, we opened those portals for free so that the field could see and benchmark itself in the context of this crisis we had never seen.
We called it the COVID sector benchmark.
Today we call it the arts and cultural benchmark because we've seen the power of the field's ability to say how am I doing compared to my peers in the UK, other parts of the regions, or how am I doing compared to how other theater operators are doing or Symphony orchestras or dance companies, etcetera.
So that continues to be free.
Here's an interesting and powerful statistic.
On an aggregated basis, 80% of the accounts in any organization's data set database Cream do not have one future booking on the calendar 80.
80 I thought it would have been like 97.
Well.
That so, so hang with that.
Another statistic, first time buyers, their numbers prior to the pandemic, their churn rates were 7580%.
Now it's 8590%.
So Seth, we have a relationship issue in arts and culture.
So I've got 2 questions for you.
The first is what's your observation about why the relationship between arts and cultural organizations and their customers is so fragile?
And 2nd and fragile is a word I'm using very purposefully.
Second, is there an industry that you've either been involved with or seen that has transformed its relationship with customers from fragility to strength?
And what happened there?
I'm going to turn this upside down.
I hope that's OK.
Yeah.
Of course it's OK.
It's what you do.
It's what you do.
Yeah, Yeah.
The Broadway theaters producers hired me to come give a talk.
They sent me a 50 page research document that no one had ever read given them.
And it was all about who goes to the Broadway shows.
Yeah.
And I ran the numbers and I did the math.
And if you talk to producers or just watch what they book, celebrities, Spider Man, the ads they run on the sides of buses.
The entire New York City theater business of Broadway is built around how do I get people to come to a Broadway show who never come to a Broadway show?
How do I get tourists to come to a Broadway show?
How do I get people in the door?
And if you do the math, what actually is true Is this.
In any given Broadway show, half the people in the room have been to two or more shows that year, and 15% of the people in the room have been to four or more shows a year.
The stats you just gave me, say one out of five of the people you seek to serve have already decided to come back.
Congratulations that vibrant five 1015% of the people count on you as a key part of their cultural life.
Shun the non believers, you're not here for them.
How do you get someone who comes three times a year to come 6 * a year?
How do you become the institution they would miss if you were gone?
Right?
So I was at the Guggenheim for the Sonia Delaney show 2 weeks ago, and I would miss Sonia Delaney's work and her husband's work and the other pieces that were there if they vanished from the face of the earth.
But if you look at my attendance records at the Guggenheim, I only go like every 3-4 years because they're organized for people like me to go every three or four years.
And that means that they have to keep hunting for new people as opposed to farming, and farming is so much more productive.
Who's it for?
What's it for?
What's the smallest viable audience that a local theater that has 2000 subscribers will never run out of money, It will never go bankrupt.
That would be fine.
But if you're constantly running around putting on A Christmas Carol and trying to get new people to come or whatever.
It's not going to work because the cost of getting a stranger to trust you enough to come is too high.
So we need to think about the milkman, right?
The milkman does their job beautifully when they have a route they don't want to, like knock on doors, say need any milk today.
They want people who they know they can deliver to because now they have leverage with the farmers.
Now they can go back to the farmers and say, I got 400 people who need milk every single day.
What do you got for me?
And they don't understand this in Hollywood and they don't understand this at Lincoln Center, except Jazz at Lincoln Center totally understands this.
It's almost impossible to get a ticket to go see Jazz at Lincoln Center if you wait for the star to have a big show.
Yeah, because the subscribers have filled the place up.
Yeah.
Week after week after week.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what we're seeking.
Yeah.
Well, your words are the message that we are sending to the field and our firm is obsessed about this relationship that arts and cultural organizations have with their customers, customers, an aggregated word can be a donor ticket, buyer to a gala.
We we are obsessed about these this relational focus.
The economics of of running these buildings though is a thing, Seth.
And I'm really curious.
I think what you're saying to me is actually the field is asking the wrong question.
Correct.
So let's talk about photography.
50 years ago, some engineers in Rochester, NY invented digital photography.
Kodak got all the patents.
They were the pioneer of digital photography.
My friend Lisa built a a digital photo company, sold it to Kodak and became advisor to the president or CEO and sitting in his office and she's saying, look, you know, the future is digital.
You're getting completely killed by Nikon and Sony and Fuji and eventually Instagram.
What are you doing?
And he said, Lisa, how many processes do you think are involved in making a roll of film?
She says, I have no idea.
He says, I'm guessing here 19.
He says, do you know how I know they're 19?
Come over here.
And it's on the 5th floor, the biggest building in that part of Rochester.
And he walks over to the window and he says this is our campus here.
How many buildings do you see?
I'll give you a hint.
19 There's one building for every one of the processes.
And they would just wheel the film from building to building.
He said I can't shrink a little.
I have to either be in film or not.
And my board doesn't have the guts to not.
And now Kodak's bankrupt.
So you've inherited from Andrew Carnegie this infrastructure, this establishment of who has which jobs and what they defend.
And if you're in the business of defending a thing that doesn't serve the core group of patrons that make the whole thing work, you're a Kodak.
It may feel like you have no choice but to balance the budget and keep all these people employed and keep all these buildings filled, but acknowledge that when you do that you have just walked away from your future.
It's hard but it's important because they are not just defending a legacy of a building they've inherited.
They're building buildings today.
There's a belief, there's a belief and the buildings that are being built tend to, not exclusively, but tend to be built in traditional city centres.
They tend to be bigger than they consistently need.
So the segues to this conversation about demand, everyone in this sector, whether it's a museum or a Performing Arts Center or a producer, defines success by the percentage of capacity sold.
By how close was I to a sell out?
Do they like me?
And you talk a lot about the long tail and I think you will have some tough love and maybe it's more of the same, but maybe not.
Like how could this sector get comfortable with the both?
And because we believe they can and we work to try to help them.
You can have a 5000 seat venue and scale and organize it for 500 people that feel glorious and it feels great.
But we are not comfortable with that long tail.
Really, Netflix is comfortable with the long tail, so how could they get comfortable with it?
Yeah.
What are your observations about that?
No, I think that you are absolutely correct that you're not locked in to the physical infrastructure.
The thing to understand about Netflix is that Netflix made a bet about the long tail and it's built into their infrastructure.
Uh huh, Uh huh.
Yours might not be built into your infrastructure.
So there's always going to be this challenge of we have the assets that we have, we have a potential audience that we have.
What are the hard decisions?
Let me give you an example of a hard decision.
I went to a conference two months ago and it was at a well known spa and resort and there were eighty of us there.
And the purpose of the thing was two days for people to engage and it took place in a tent.
So everyone slept in their own rooms.
There was sometimes other places we connected, but mostly it was a tent.
And the Feng shui of this tent was horrible.
If you said anything, it just disappeared into the ether.
It was environmentally, architecturally, everything about it demeaned the energy that people were putting into it.
And I was talking to my friend who is the organizer.
He said well that's the only thing the hotel could do for us and the answer in that moment is OK well then I'm canceling the event not we'll make it work because you can't make it work because the only thing you were selling was the magic that was going to happen in the space.
If you can't make magic happen, don't show U.
And so when I think about putting on a performance of any kind, you've got to think from the beginning to the end and from the end to the beginning.
After this is over, are people going to say, well, they did their best with what they had?
Or are they going to say, that changed everything for me?
I can't wait to go do it again.
Because if it's the first one, people don't have that kind of empathy for you.
They don't care that you did the best with what you had because they have choices.
So the radical empathy here is to say they don't know what I know.
They don't see the compromises they have to make.
And that's OK.
Given who they are and where they're coming from, what would matter?
And so, yeah, if you've got a 5000 seat theater, how do you regularly program 200 person things that, well, you don't have to say, well, but we're 5000 seats.
So you have to 1st forgive us for the lack of energy you're going to have to create.
And you've so many options here, right?
Like if I think about Carnegie Hall, how many other places in New York could Carnegie Hall rent to put on just the right size performance on a regular basis, right?
Or the flip side of that is every afternoon at 3:00, Carnegie Hall is empty.
How many private organizations want to do an event at Carnegie Hall for their employees or their team?
And we'd be delighted to use Carnegie Hall at 3:00 in the afternoon, right?
So we can reshuffle and rethink what are we doing with our assets and what assets don't we have that we need to go get?
But when you build the museum like they just built in LA, you're stuck with that.
Well, if you don't build flexibility into it, it's hard for me to feel bad for you.
Yeah, if you don't build flexibility into it, it's hard to feel bad.
And we see that these venues, you know, most of the largest venues are two or 2500 seats and you can do 750 people, the smallest viable and define success and build an exciting and fulfilling experience.
You can do this.
So I went to see 5 just before COVID 7 years ago.
Fiddler on the roof in Yiddish?
Hi.
What's the Yiddish speaking population of even New York, Right.
I don't speak any Yiddish, but it was transcendent.
Yeah.
Because if you wanted to see something like that, this was the only place to see it.
Yeah.
What I mean by smallest viable audiences, it doesn't mean it's small.
It just means the group that I am addressing is small and I need a lot of them.
As opposed to saying I got something for everyone, it's the circus, please come.
You may notice that almost no one goes to the circus because it's not specific.
You need to be specific in what you do, not general.
Now let's think about who's listening here.
It's chief executives, department leaders, marketing development.
And when they're putting together their plans, they're looking at their expenses and their revenues, we focus on how to use that expense as fuel for recurring sustainable revenues.
That's our thing because we want the field to be able to take the risks you're talking about.
And when we talk to the CEO's and and their planning teams, all of our clients have either enormous dependency on that consumer income or need to grow it because government sources are changing or something's changing in the landscape.
I've been at this for 30 years, Seth.
We've been talking about the people who are active.
Focus on them.
You heard my over prospecting under retaining it is our mantra.
You are more experienced than I am and whip smart and you think in many ways like we do on this particular subject show if you're in front of you have been the CEO of Carnegie Hall or the Barbican, these organizations where in fact the CEO would say I've got people to think about the people and I do think about people because I think about major donors.
I know people.
I know who we serve, but they don't.
And part of what we want to do is shift the culture so that they're thinking more radically about the people whom they serve.
What question would you ask that CEO to get them to think differently, to spark their imagination?
One of the reasons there's drama is that one of the things this industry produces is drama.
And this industry has industrialized.
What does it mean to industrialize?
Well, that's what Kodak did.
They went from making film inefficiently in one building to super efficiently in 17.
That the folks in Hollywood figured out how to build a machine over the course of 100 years to turn out movies that cost $120 million, that have a certain Sheen to them, that we build in these processes, but we forgot what's the change we seek to make and how we doing it.
So I'm walking down the street in New York on a hot summer night nine years ago, and I hear this noise and I track it down, and it's a drumming circle.
I don't know if you've ever been to a drumming circle.
It's.
Transcendent 5101520 Sometimes I've seen them as big as 100 people in a circle.
Everyone brings their own drum, there's no score, everyone is listening and playing at the same time.
Why doesn't your musical institution have a drumming circle line of business which would cost you exactly 0 to launch and could become one of the pillars of how you're serving part of the community?
Well, I know why because the factory that you run works on tactics and repeatability and architecture and assets, and one of the main fuels of your business is status adjudication.
At Carnegie Hall, we know whose name is in the Playbill at which level, and we know who's sitting at the opening and who's not, and we know whose name is on the building and who's not.
You are the adjudicate.
The only reason anybody gives $5,000,000 to a cultural institution is status.
Because, you know, there are very few concert halls called anonymous, right?
Because what it means to go to the gala is you're going non anonymously.
And there's nothing wrong with this.
If you can create tension among rich people to get them to give you money for status, that's a great transaction.
I'm in favor.
But it's not the same as your mission.
It's just fuel for your mission.
And we need to be very clear.
Are we doing this for the high status donors so we can get more high status donors?
Are we doing this because we had a mission of bringing transcendent art to people who are enrolled in the journey?
And the number of ways you can bring art to the unenrolled, create that tension and resolve it, turn on the lights, have people feel something is enormous and you don't need money to do it.
You need money to put on a Broadway show.
You don't need money to bring the transcendence that we see from three people doing improv in the subway.
So what is happening, because the culture is changing so fast, is those transgressive forms of art tend to be done by gorillas on the outside and the institutions wait until it's mainstream and then they put it in a building.
And if that's working for you, I'm in favour.
If it's not working for you, you need to think about how far upstream do you want your factory to go?
And that's why strategy so important.
So here's a story.
I was in the room after Yahoo bought my company.
I was one of five VPS there.
I was in the room when they had the chance to buy Google for $15 million, not 15 billion, not 150,15,000,000.
And they said no.
And in that moment they were correct to do so, because Yahoo strategy was the Internet is a wild and woolly, unpredictable place.
People don't really want to go to the Internet, come to Yahoo, stay at Yahoo.
And there were 183 links on their homepage, almost all of which led deeper into Yahoo.
Yahoo Kids, Yahoo Finance, whatever Google strategy was, the Internet is going up.
And there are only two links on the Google homepage.
Come to Google and leave.
That was their strategy.
So Yahoo couldn't figure out how to buy someone whose strategy was the opposite of theirs.
Well, we know what happened, and Yahoo lost.
Now Google is sitting on this asset that says we have a search engine.
And so when they developed, they invented AI and large language models, and they did not release them because they knew that if they released them, their core business would falter.
And so now their competitors, Claude and Anthropic and Perplexity are killing them because the same thing just happened.
And if it can happen for these multibillion dollar companies, why do you think it's not going to happen to you?
The last thing that we are promoting to this field is and, and really talking about and trying to help action is discipline.
And in the book and in our conversation, you said something about passion and passion is something that the people listening to this conversation have.
They recruit often, Seth, based on passion because they can trade on it.
I can trade on your passion and pay you less than you would make outside my organization.
Passion is a thing, and yet you say it isn't enough.
You know, it's very interesting because arts without passion are just decorations.
And if you go to a museum, I talk to the guards all the time when I go to museums, mostly because they're bored out of their minds.
And it's a nice thing for me to do for them.
But part of it is because I learned interesting things.
And every once in a while you meet one who's there because they're actually passionate about the work and it makes the visit better for them.
And for me, passion is right next to authenticity, and authenticity is something the Internet wants us to prize, that the way to win on social media, the way to win on stage is to be authentic.
And I find in the arts this is particularly amusing because there's just no way that the 500th time some guy is playing Abraham Lincoln on stage, he is authentically happy to be there.
He's not.
It's his job.
It's called acting, and what we want when we engage with any service is professionalism, and professionalism means consistency, and consistency means make a promise and keep it.
So I don't know how many times Jackson Pollock was authentically expressing his inner turmoil when he made a painting, but I'm guaranteeing it wasn't every single time with every single drip.
But he was consistent, and that's why he's a legendary artist.
So what we're looking for from our team is passion for the mission, passion for what it is to be together to make a difference.
But I've seen passionate plumbing supply companies.
But what we cannot trade in is authenticity, because that's reserved for Divas, It's reserved for friends.
But if you're going to be a professional, you got to figure out how to produce with consistency.
Yeah, the consistency and the choices about what to not do in this field are really there.
That's almost two of the most important variables that lead to annual success.
And it's the hardest thing.
If you're a nonprofit organization, you feel like you have to do, you have to say yes to everything.
It's a complete and utter false economy.
Yeah.
Choosing which leads me to strategy so that wrapping us back to to that strategy is as much about deciding what to not do as what to do.
And you, you said something provocative that I want these leaders to hear because in arts and culture, I hinted at this when we were together in arts and culture strategic plan.
Seth, you've probably participated in them.
They are year long activities and there are key stakeholders and there are committee meetings and there are task forces and there are people and people and people and people and opinions and opinions and opinions and big, big binders of plans.
And where do they go?
Where do those binders go?
They go on that shelf behind you.
Yeah, they're needed.
They are not strategic and they are not planned.
Yeah.
And you said something like, you know, bring three people together, say what you said there.
The approach to planning what you provoked is so different than how the field traditionally approaches it.
Well, this part of this is, again, adjudicating status.
Who gets a seat at the table, who feels participation and ownership?
And you need to do those things to weave together the fabric because no one's getting stock options, right?
Right.
But let's think about the last time your organization changed its logo.
When an organization's changing its logo, everyone chimes in because everyone has looked at a logo, so everyone has an opinion.
That's not a good way to change your logo.
You shouldn't change your logo, but it's also not a good way to do it.
When you want to articulate or change your strategy, you want the tiniest number of people involved as possible and then you want to announce the strategy and challenge the team to come U with tactics that support the strategy.
O Part of our strategy could be that visiting us is thrilling.
OK, well, now the ticket department and the emailing department and all these other people can say, OK, we get what we need to do here, but you just decided this isn't a cost center, it's profit center.
So now we're going to go do our part.
So what we're looking for in plans is not deniability, but responsibility.
We say this bus is going to Cleveland.
Who wants to be responsible for this part of the journey?
What are you on the hook for?
Make a promise.
Go keep it.
And a lot of people on your team don't want that to happen because they signed up for this work.
They like being in a room of people doing interesting work in a warm, fuzzy environment.
They don't want to take responsibility.
They would rather have the institution take the blame and they just do their best.
Yeah.
But in times of change, someone needs to figure out how to get this part of the segment done, because what about isn't helpful?
What about this and what about that?
What about this?
Well, now we're paralyzed.
We're not going anywhere, right?
What we're looking for is an impresario, A producer.
If I'm waiting in line to get into a small museum in Greenwich Village, what happens in the next 60 seconds in line is going to determine so much of what the next hour is like.
And the next hour is going to determine if I become a donor, right?
So that person, the senior vice president of ticket taking, needs to take responsibility for what is going on there.
And, you know, back when I worked with Kodak, it was fascinating because you'd walk into the organization, everyone who got there had flown in because it's in Rochester.
And the receptionist, so always the same woman for the entire corporation.
And by the time you got to her, she already had your name at her fingertips.
She would tell you something about the person you were meeting with.
You know, Tom's dog had puppies last week.
She just was informed she was a receptionist.
She was making you feel received.
And the question is, do you think the meetings at Kodak went better for Kodak because that woman cared enough to be in charge of improving reception as opposed to just doing your job?
And we can do that with every element from programming to casting to the care we send fundraising emails to.
If you're sending an e-mail to someone who gave you any money last year, even $100, how dare you do a mail merge, right?
Is your are you so busy that you can't send that person a note that you would send to a colleague or a friend?
Well then why should they bother sending you more money, right?
So I want our our listeners to hear a leader designs, maybe with a small group of colleagues, how we where we're going and how we do things around here.
Yeah.
And the how we do things around here informs the rest of the team.
And I also heard accountability and that that ties in with the discipline piece, right.
And in an environment where I want to encourage our listeners to be fierce, yes, about their destination and achieving it.
And if if team members don't feel like they can or deliver in the ways that we do things around here, then it isn't the right place for them to be.
Yeah, it's hard in arts and culture, I think, because of this passion piece.
But she loves the art so much.
They love the art so much.
How could I, especially now, get anyone else to come into this crazy, zany place?
Let's just work with them.
Let's just see if we can't make them better.
Yeah, and people can be better if they want to be better.
And one way that people often choose to be better is when they realize they don't have a sinecure, when they realize it's optional.
You didn't have to come fill this seat today.
And if this isn't working for you, it's not working for us either, and vice versa.
So please earn this spot because this work is important.
We're not just doing it for the money.
We're doing it because it matters.
And if it doesn't feel that way to you, we get it.
But don't do it here.
This is the way we show up here.
This is how we do things around here.
Seth, it's such a pleasure to be with you again and to talk with you about the things that you know matter on the daily with these folks who are doing the the yeoman's work of creativity and reminding them that the boundaries in which they operate today do not have to be, might not, shouldn't be the boundaries of tomorrow.
And to your point about innovation and technology probably won't be the boundaries of tomorrow.
Seth Godin, thank you for joining me on our Leading the Way.
Podcast.
Thank you, Jill.
You show up and show up and show up and it's paying off.
I really appreciate you.
Perhaps we'll talk again another day.
Beautiful.
I'm looking forward to it.