Americans for the Arts

The first meeting of the Business Committee for the Arts, Inc.

When David Rockefeller, the CEO of Chase Bank, gathered business leaders together to form the Business Committee for the Arts (now a division of Americans for the Arts) he understood the important role of the arts in advancing business goals.

In this first speech, Rockefeller said, “From an economic standpoint, such involvement can mean direct and tangible benefits. It can provide a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation, and an improved corporate image. It can build better customer relations, a readier acceptance of company products, and a superior appraisal of their quality. Promotion of the arts can improve morale of employees and help attract qualified personnel.”

David Rockefeller is not the only CEO who has understood that importance of partnering with the arts. Countless CEOs, HR managers, marketing executives, and corporate foundation officers have spoken about the benefits that have resulted from these partnerships.

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Booz Allen Hamilton Ralph W. Schrader, said, “The arts inspire each of us in different ways, provoke thought, spur creativity, and connect us with one another in a shared experience. These are essential qualities of a strong and successful business as well.”

Honorary Chairman and Co-founder of H&R Block, Inc. Henry W. Bloch believes, “It is in the best interest of every business--no matter its size--to support the arts. Beyond their intrinsic value, the arts add to the economic vitality and quality of life of our communities. They also unleash creative ideas in and out of the workplace, foster dialogues, and increase understanding among people.”

However, there are too many business leaders who are unaware of the value of partnering with the arts.

Wayne Andrews

The arts have always been a reflection of community -- creating from the cultural fiber of their environment and serving as the original grassroots marketers.

This connection between community and the artist has been the key to building support. In the technical terms of marketing professionals, artists create brand loyalty and businesses have started to recognize the value of partnering with the arts to reach their loyal customer base.

Check any social media site and you will find a wealth of businesses trying to show their support arts and charitable organizations.

Pepsi has their Refresh Project, CITGO offers to Fuel Good, Maxwell House offers Drops of Good, and Tom’s of Maine offered a nationwide promotion entitled 50 States of Good.

This drive to connect is beneficial as the programs offer access to funds for groups both large and small, while providing marketing a media that expands the reach of groups. Yet, many of these programs although seemingly altruistic, are just efforts by corporate marketing departments to create a program that makes a national company feel local.

Still, these programs have value because they encourage smaller, local companies to think about how to support their communities.

Max Donner

Art is more than beautiful. It is profitable.

Challenging economic times have sent financial experts back to the drawing boards. Impressive results from centers of excellence in the creative economy offer a vision for sustainable economic growth.

Arts administrators who need to convince their supporters and their communities to advance the programs that make creative economies work also need to understand what works best and why. These success stories can invigorate this dialogue.

While much daily businesses news is bad news, firms that have chosen art as a core competence and engaged many artists and designers continue achieve impressive profits and growth:

1. Swiss timepiece and design firm Swatch Group reported this summer that annual sales increased 11% and profits grew by 22% over the same period in 2010. Swatch introduced its first “Art Special” at the Pompidou Centre in 1985. Since then, it has continued to commission innovative art by leading contemporary artists such as French painter Grems and sculptor Ted Scapa. The Swatch corporate strategy of building a company on a foundation of artistic talent has also built expertise in art business, for example, using sophisticated models to calculate limited edition amounts.

2. BMW employs more artists than all other auto manufacturers combined. The results speak for themselves. While General Motors and Chrysler have experienced chaotic bankruptcies and Toyota reported its first losses in decades, BMW sales and profits have continued double digit growth. This summer the company launched the BMW Guggenheim Lab together with curators from the Guggenheim Museum in New York to learn more about the foundations of the creative economy. BMW also reported record financial results: annual sales increased 17% while net profits nearly doubled to $2.5 billion for the spring quarter, the equivalent of $10 billion a year.

Ebony McKinney

This post is part of a series on emerging trends and notable lessons from the field, as reported by members of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council.

Increased creative freedom, autonomy, and flexibility have come with a more precarious work style. This is becoming the new normal, even outside of the creative realm.

Does this make artists and creatives "new economy pioneers" prototyping the workstyle of the ‘conceptual age'? If so, what advice can we offer? Can we create a roadmap for resilience?

In this post I’d like to consider how arts incubators play an important role in not only supporting innovation and risk taking, but also by cultivating our most important assets -- social and human capital.

BAY AREA VIDEO COALITION (BAVC)

In 2007, Bay Area Video Coalition’s (BAVC) Producers Institute for New Media, began in San Francisco. The institute was developed because BAVC recognized that traditional cinema didn’t inspire people to take action. Also, new media was becoming more prolific and gradually more accessible.

What a great look into the future of the arts and business partnerships!

Thanks to our bloggers Neil McKenzie, Bruce Whitacre, Tom Tresser, John Eger, Krista Lang Blackwood, Donald Brinkman, Kelly Lamb Pollock, Christine Harris, Mary Wright, Janet Brown, Jim Sparrow, Nancy Glaze, Michael Gold, Michelle Mann, Giovanni Schiuma, Michael Wilkerson, Sahar Javedani, and Emily Peck for writing such thoughtful and provocative pieces!

Thanks are also due to all the other commentators, Tweeters, and Facebook friends.

There were so many insightful blogs this week.

Michael Gold

For any individual or culture to change it has to want to change.

Arts based interventions that have the potential to affect real change are engaged when someone inside the corporate culture sees the need and the potential. It is essential that such interventions be very carefully designed.

There must be a thorough and agreed upon understanding of the client’s “pain” and how an art based intervention can be applied to catalyze that pain into specific productive results. A good starting place for practitioners is Giovanni Schuima’s book The Value of Arts for Business.

The only thing that will convince corporate interests that its management needs the resource of the artistic perspective is word of mouth based on experiential results. One cannot blame Chief Learning Officers and CEOs for being skeptical.

Christine Harris

You see more and more reports indicating that creativity is a critical issue facing our world -- and that there is a serious lack of it throughout the business environment.

No wonder we celebrate and even venerate the life of Steve Jobs because he demonstrated a heart and soul connection to his personal creativity that we don’t see too many other places, and many of us feel is missing within our own lives.

So -- you would think with all of this concern about our ‘creative capital’ we would be increasing our commitment to arts education, not pulling further away from it, right? What is wrong with this picture?

I think we have both a communication issue as well as an outcomes issue.

First, the  communication issue is that despite decades of research showing the positive personal and academic impact of arts education, we haven’t moved the needle in terms of school curriculum strategy, educational budgets, or civic and corporate commitment. So, let’s stop using the same language because no one has been seriously listening for years.

Jim Sparrow

In Fort Wayne, IN, the arts are an active part of the downtown redevelopment. One of the anchors to this involvement is the new Auer Center for Arts and Culture, which is aligned with our vision of integrated partnerships.

These partnerships are both traditional, such as the ballet, an arts gallery (Artlink), and the administrative offices for Arts United, as well as non-traditional, including a small business partnership with Pembroke Bakery and offices for Fort Wayne Trails.

We have also formed a Cultural District Consortium with our organization, the city, our CVB, and our Downtown Development Group that has a presence in the building. Its focus includes development of business, activities, and public art within the downtown core.

The center’s concept includes fully-integrated business services; financial, insurance, IT, phones as well as shared common space and business service staff and operational space. It is also structured with the objective of changing the operation and relationship of the arts with the community and its development.

The Auer is a community center with activity focused less on events and more on active arts and cultural space. Our model defines arts in a very broad manner, but has high-quality traditional arts at the center.

Michelle Mann

Over the past 7 months, as a loaned executive from Adobe to 1st ACT, I have gained a new appreciation for the difficulties arts organizations face when raising money.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, with its corporate giants and start-up millionaires, there is very little investment in the arts and culture ecosystem. That’s because 70-80% of Silicon Valley’s wealth leaves the region.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised -- understanding the global nature of business. But I am disappointed that more of my peers and former colleagues in corporate philanthropy don’t include arts and culture in their giving portfolios.

Study after study have demonstrated the link between creativity and the arts to higher academic achievement, to attainment of 21st century skills, to brain development and early literacy, and social and emotional development.

Corporate leaders talk about creativity being an essential skill for the 21st century workforce. They want  to hire people who are problem solvers, are flexible and can adapt quickly to new situations, are culturally competent and open to working with others.

Bruce Whitacre

“Our projects have to have a beginning, a middle and an end.”

“Don’t bring me your menu of options, A-level for $10,000, B-level for $15,000. Let’s just talk about what you’re doing and let me figure out how we can be part of it.”

“We’ve been tasked to put the A for Arts into STEM for the next Clinton Global Initiative meeting.”

These are not foundation executives or nonprofit executive directors talking. These are community relations executives at three Fortune 500 companies.

I also saw this phenomenon at the IEG sponsorship conference last spring, when GE and Xerox explained how they are using sponsorship to enter a new country or demonstrate logistics prowess through a sports franchise. Or a company that uses its pro bono work on behalf of a nonprofit to develop in-house expertise that will be resold to the commercial market.

What does all this mean to me?

Emily Peck

All week, ARTSblog has been featuring stories about how and why the arts can help businesses achieve their business goals.

We know from talking to all of you at conferences, on webinars, by email, and various other ways that these partnerships have been happening everywhere to enhance the critical thinking and creativity skills of the corporate workforce and help businesses achieve other goals including recruitment, retention, and team building.

But don’t take my word for it, check out these videos:

Looking to enhance team spirit and encourage teamwork, some companies participate in battle of the bands. These competitions take place in local communities and at the Fortune Battle of the Bands sponsored by NAMM. Check out this clip from Progressive Corps band “The Messengers.”

For 25 years, Kaiser Permanente’s Educational Theatre Program has partnered with theaters to teach more than 15 million people lessons that impact the company’s bottom-line about healthy eating, peer pressure, drug and alcohol abuse and more. Watch excerpts from the program and hear from students, teachers and doctors about the results:

Neil McKenzie

There is a lot of buzz right now about how the U.S. is in a creativity crisis. Even businesses are getting into the act as a result of the poor economy and an uncertain future.

In a recent study conducted by IBM, executives cited creativity as the key to success, "chief executives believe that -- more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision -- successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity."

My guess is that businesses are looking for people who can think "outside the box" while being able to work in a team oriented and collaborative environment. Most organizations require or even demand conformity and the shift to developing a creative business atmosphere may not come easily.

When things are going well in a business the problem is fulfilling demand and increasing productivity to get more goods going out the door. Today the problem seems to be to grow demand in a slow economy and create new products and services for today's global economy. The days of achieving a good bottom line through cost cutting are probably over.

I wonder if Apple has a creativity crisis?

Kelly Lamb Pollock

At the end of August, when the staff at COCA (Center of Creative Arts) in St. Louis, MO, is typically enjoying a rare moment to breathe -- between the end of a busy summer of arts camps and before the dance, theatre. and visual arts students return for fall classes -- we were in high gear hosting an unlikely population of arts participants.

COCA’s new program, COCAbiz, was hosting its first Business Creativity Conference “Play @ Work,” which attracted the likes of Boeing engineers, architects from Cannon Design, and Nestlé Purina and Anheuser-Busch executives.

Accountants, marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, and business managers from St. Louis’ top companies listened to nationally regarded speakers on innovation and rubbed shoulders in arts-based learning sessions.

After more than twenty years of focusing almost exclusively on students with a penchant for dance, theatre, or the visual arts -- for arts’ sake -- we at COCA have come to understand that developing skills through the arts, using the arts as the vehicle to learn the lesson, instead of just as the lesson itself, is the key to our relevance, sustainability, and impact.

Tom Tresser

On Saturday, January 15, 2011, I started teaching “Got Creativity? Strategies & Tools for the Next Economy” at the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

I had twenty master’s degree students, almost evenly divided between those born in the United States and those from abroad (China, India, Saudi Arabia).

There are many compelling reasons for a business school to offer classes on creativity and innovation. We now live in what has been variously called the creative economy, the experience economy, and the age of creative industries.

It’s no secret that America makes more money and employs more people in the creative sectors than it does from making and moving stuff.

The total revenue of the U.S. copyright industries in 2007 was $1.5 TRILLION. That’s 1 point 5 followed by 12 zeros! In 2005 the U.S. copyright industries had foreign sales of about $110 billion. That dwarfed the foreign sales for the U.S. auto industry, which was about $70 billion.

John Eger

Picasso once complained: “Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the song of the birds?”

He once is alleged to say he would’ve been a writer but he’s not; he’s a painter, so don’t ask him to explain anything about his work.

What an artist does, what a painting or sculpture says, is not something most artists want to explain in any great detail. The work speaks for itself.

What arts role is in society, however, is a little easier for the artist to do. Talking about the relationship art has to economic prowess is not so easy. Not for the artist. Not for the business executive.

Yet, the future of business is art some say.

At least that’s what The Conference Board said when it released Ready to Innovate, a study which states, "U.S. employers rate creativity and innovation among the top five skills that will increase in importance over the next five years, and rank it among the top challenges facing CEOs." And IBM, after interviewing 1500 CEO’s said creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking.

Krista Lang Blackwood

How often do we artists walk into a company supportive of the arts and ask, “What can we do for you?”

Do I hear crickets?

Yep. Those are definitely crickets.

Here’s how it usually happens; we walk in and immediately start defending our existence, and then we ask for money. We tell companies what kind of a public relations boon it will be to give to the arts, outline how we’ll use the logo in our materials, talk about wording for sponsorship, and then wait for them to write the check.

If they don’t write the check, we grumble about how they just don’t understand. Then we come back in a couple of months and try again.

What we should do is find a way to serve the businesses who serve us with sponsorships. The former mayor of Kansas City, where I live, commenting on nonprofit/city government partnerships, said, “I love nonprofits and think they deserve city support. But only if they provide a service better than the city can.”

So how can we provide a service? And if we start to think along those lines, will we lose our art?

Neil McKenzie

Our economic growth is stuck at a snail’s pace and at the same time our federal government seems unable or unwilling to find any meaningful solutions. States and local governments across the nation are scrambling to develop their own economic development plans and strategies to fill this void.

In the past, local economic development usually had a large public expenditure component that involved raising money (taxes) to build public works projects such as roads, bridges, and public venues. Many of these efforts were also based on subsidizing new businesses through tax incentives or direct subsidies. The problem now is that public money is in short supply and using these methods are limited if nonexistent.

While most businesses have experienced less demand for their products and services and have reduced their workforces, there are many companies that are expanding. There has been a fundamental shift in the goods and services we produce as the world has become flatter through international trade and new technologies.

Many of these companies are part of what has become to be known as the “creative economy.” The creative economy is characterized by companies whose products and services have a high content of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Arts and culture can play an important role in attracting companies in the creative economy to a local area.

Michael Wilkerson

I have a genius idea to fund the arts, but my grown-up son doesn’t like the work I’m doing.

As a researcher I like to solve problems, chief of which is how to fund the arts. What makes arts management exhilarating to me is the art itself; what makes it exhausting and even demeaning is the constant obsession with money.

Ideal fundraising is a meeting of minds, especially when a for-profit business, say a bank, comes to understand that its clients really want to see a performance by actors or musicians; while the artists appreciate that their sponsors – those bankers! – want to be part of the same community.

Those kinds of partnerships are as rare as they are beautiful. More typically, the arts organization is wrung out from trying to find a business that’s willing to support their real work. Thus, my dream remains that the next generation of arts managers will have a life that centers around the arts more than it centers around the lack of money.

I have a plan for a new system to create significant increases in public funding for the arts. (Read the details in my earlier post). I told my son about my plan, and how it would enable artists and arts organizations to accomplish so much more than is now possible. He shattered my evangelical fervor, saying, “It’s not going to help anyone I know about.”

Michael Gold

Art is language. It expresses dimensions of human sentience that words cannot.

But the language of art and the language of spoken word co-exist in a dialectic -- they both influence and change one another.

The languages of the arts are much more sensitive to change than spoken language, but both the language of art and the language of words are tremendously impacted by technology.

Virtual communications technology has the capacity to radically alter the rich nuance of connective qualities that spoken language has garnered from the language of art and vice versa over millennia. Look, for example, at how quickly language is being transmogrified by young people who engage in a constant flow of multiple conversations 12 hours a day through texting devices.

Technology will profoundly affect the artistic landscape in the coming decades. And debating the intrinsic value of a work of art will become even more critical as a means of combating the attention deficit that comes with digital society. But will the notion of “arts for art sake” mean the same thing that it did in the past in a culture structured by virtual reality? And, if not, what will arts for art sake possibly mean?

Bruce Whitacre

In this economic climate, reaching out to high-net-worth individuals, or the companies that seek to engage them, can be a touchy subject for the arts.

The fact is, income inequality and the incredible wealth accumulated by a small percentage of our population have created great opportunities in terms of prospects and their passions. But we must temper our pursuit of these individuals with an appreciation of our broader public purpose. It can be challenging to face these facts and see an opportunity in them without losing our focus.

First, the facts: arts audiences are substantially wealthier, more influential, and better educated than the population as a whole.

At the recent Innovators Forum, organized by the National Corporate Theatre Fund (NCTF) and The Nederlander Organization for theatre marketers and corporate relations staffs, we heard from two experts in the luxury marketing field, the incredible Jim Taylor of The Harrison Group and Greg Furman, founder and president of the Luxury Marketing Council.

We sought their views on the perspective of the affluent on theatre, and their observations were quite insightful.

Michael Wilkerson

Sometimes big ideas grow from small experiences.

One of my first encounters with corporate sponsorship was at an artists’ retreat, Ragdale, near Chicago. Located in a wealthy suburb, Ragdale occupied beautiful grounds that everyone wanted to see. We had standards. We didn’t do weddings and we didn’t allow private parties.

But at one point, I thought I had convinced a bank to sponsor an artistic event for us. As the planning grew more and more out of control and became the kind of loud corporate overdressed networking thing that would prevent artists and poets from ever believing they could create quietly at our “retreat,” I told the bank to scale it back, that it would not help us. “We need to sponsor organizations that will help our clients,” was the response.

The partnership ended.

Years later, as chair of a theatre company, I knew we had great plays, in the hands of a remarkable artistic director, on the horizon. Already we had been invited to take our one-acts to a Vaclav Havel Festival in New York; other literary and dramatic powerhouses were in the works, including a new play by a famous contemporary writer.

Giovanni Schiuma

Today many organizations have discovered the benefits related to the use in business of the arts in order to explore and solve business issues.

Unilever has largely used arts-based initiatives (ABIs) to spur people’s change and to develop organizational culture. Nestlé has used ABIs to enhance marketing team’s creativity and to develop communication skills and collaboration in terms of ideas and expertise sharing.

Atradius has captured brand value by developing a partnership with Welsh National Opera. Price Waterhouse Coopers has used ABIs to unlock employees’ creativity energy, inspiring and challenging people to think and act differently.

Indeed the arts, in the form of ABIs, represent a powerful management tool for developing workforce and organizational infrastructure that can drive business performance improvements.

Examples can range from the use of art forms to entertain organizations’ employees and clients, to the deployment of arts to develop ‘soft competencies’ of people in the organization, and may include the exploitation of the arts to create intangible value to be incorporated into products or to transform and enhance organization’s infrastructural assets such as, for instance, image, identity, reputation, culture, and climate.

Donald Brinkman

I am a painter and writer who makes a living as a researcher and software developer and I believe the noisy intersection of these domains is the point of genesis for some of my most successful ideas.

As recently as the late 20th century there were notable initiatives to bring art and research together such as the sadly-defunct Xerox PARC PAIR program, the ongoing Art + Code program at Carnegie Mellon University, and Leonardo, MIT’s journal on art and technology.

The link between art and science still exists but I wonder how significant it is in modern day ‘serious science.' It is astounding and distressing that this approach is losing out to a technolinear approach.

The discipline of computer science in particular suffers from an emphasis on mastery of mathematics and logic with little regard to creativity. There are still bastions of creativity in the computer science education world such as Brown University, where seminal 3D and hypertext pioneer Andy van Dam encourages his graduate assistants to orchestrate elaborate skits on a weekly basis. These skits are performed ‘flash mob’ style during his entry-level computer science courses. You can find a sampling of the skits here. I hope that we see more of this in other schools.

Nancy Glaze

Valerie Beaman asked all of the Blog Salon writers several question prompts regarding the intersection of arts and business. The following are my answers to a few of them:

How can the arts best convince the corporate world of their value to business?

Half of the residents in Silicon Valley view themselves as artists and participate in either formal or informal arts activities regularly. Silicon Valley’s residents are incredibly diverse and the region is home to the largest proportion of arts and culture organizations focused on ethnic or cultural awareness among comparable regions in the United States.

Those who work in technology are interested in learning about other cultures and connecting with their own. The nature of the more than 650 arts and culture organizations as well as the diverse workforce seem a natural fit and a win-win for arts groups and businesses that want to engage and enlighten employees.

Creating partnerships between the arts and the private sector within a framework of diversity and cross-cultural understanding supports an authentic need that springs naturally from the way we do business here and who is in the workforce. Silicon Valley is viewed as a global technology leader and is the birthplace of innovations and inventions that have changed the world.

Jim Sparrow

Some of the greatest growth in formal arts institutions has taken place in the last 40 years. Why?

As we look at budget growth, sustainability, and growing gaps in earned revenue vs. contributed, was something flawed in this growth?

The Rockefeller Institute report on the performing arts from 1961 identified trends that sound eerily familiar today. Decreasing audience and demand, continued struggles with aging infrastructure, need for increased revenue, and new earned income were all outlined.

Ironically many of the traditional arts organizations used as baseline examples in 1961, had guaranteed weeks and production schedules that were much less then they are today. There were no 52-week orchestras nor were there guaranteed contracts, production or administrative staffing at levels that are even close to today -- even with adjustments for today’s inflation.

So why have we grown in many cases without apparent demand, but in spite of it?

The recommendations from that report advised focus in key areas, growing access and infrastructure to build appreciation and understanding and using foundations such as the Ford Foundation for growth as part of a Great Society vision for the arts.

Mary Wright

In preparation for writing this post, I came across this:

“Don't hire intelligent, creative people. Creative employees are nothing but trouble. Don't hire them, I tell you. Let the intelligent people go back to college or start their own business or bother someone else with their constant ideas and questions and high energy. You can live without that trouble.”

This was written by Fred W. Spannaus, principal of Spannaus Consulting. He proceeds to give a list of reasons (they talk back; they never listen; they can be right frequently; you need to earn their respect, etc.) all of which of course takes time and effort on the part of supervisors and colleagues.

As I read this tongue-in-cheek piece (at least I hoped so!), I realized that many of us have worked at organizations where we probably were convinced that the managers didn’t want any new ideas, or to be challenged on existing protocols, or to have to continue to prove their worth -- because if we hadn’t, where would the phrase “think outside the box” have come from?

Yet, we are also pretty sure that there isn’t a company who would admit to wanting to crush every new idea, make their employees feel constrained at every turn. In fact, most companies, regardless of industry, probably use the word “creative” or “innovative” to describe their products, offerings, or staff.

Krista Lang Blackwood

This past summer I sat in a room at the Americans for Arts Annual Convention on a beautiful afternoon and listened to folks from Memphis talk about how art and business have created a partnership that works (you can find a longer blog post about it here).

The conversation wasn’t what I expected to hear.

I expected to hear the tired old platitudes about the ROI arts can provide; pie graphs, bar graphs, numbers galore. Bottom line revenue creation. Profit points. Cost projections. Economic development. Blah, blah, blah...

But as I stiffened my spine to sit through another pile of accounting  buzzwords, the corporate guy got up and said, “When we’re trying to hire quality people, the town’s cultural footprint is important in attracting the right kind of people.” In short, “I don’t really care about the arts themselves or the money the arts can make;  I only use them as a tool to make sure we get quality employees.”

There was a palpable, audible, unified grumble that cascaded across the room. However, I leaned forward in my chair, newly in love with this guy who cut through the bull and told it like it is.

Michelle Mann

As the former Director of Corporate Social Responsibility at Adobe, employees often shared with me their passion for giving back. More than just helping at the food bank once in awhile, they sought to spend time in the nonprofit sector, to make a difference.

Recently, I’ve had an opportunity to do exactly that and I’d like to share with you my experiences and view of the arts from a corporate perspective.

For the past six months, I have been a loaned executive to 1st ACT Silicon Valley, a catalytic organization whose mission is to inspire leadership, participation, and investment at the intersection of art, creativity, and technology.

Adobe’s former CEO, Bruce Chizen, had been a founding board member of 1st ACT in 2007 and the Adobe Foundation has supported the organization’s efforts to increase the vibrancy of Downtown San Jose (Adobe's headquarters) and support the arts ecosystem.

Neil McKenzie

For years the arts have received the support of patrons in order to grow and prosper. Today the role of the patron is increasingly being replaced by support from the business community.

To many in the art world, this trend is a welcome sight in an era of strained sources of traditional funding.

Ironically, even while businesses are viewed as a source of arts funding these same businesses are faced with shrinking budgets. One of the challenges that businesses face is that they are being asked to support a multitude of organizations and worthy causes including the arts.

As the competition for corporate support increases, arts organizations must be able to prove that they provide measureable benefits. Businesses are in their comfort zone when they can quantify the outcomes or benefits associated with an expenditure or investment.

The problem is that many of the benefits associated with the arts are “soft” or intangible and thus difficult to measure -- this is a major challenge for both business and the arts as they seek to develop partnerships.

Have American business schools failed America? I think they have.

Have these very expensive and prestigious institutions taught our best and brightest the wrong things? Have they placed too much emphasis and focused our appreciation of value in the wrong place? I think they have.

But it’s not just me. Harvard Business School scholars Srikat Datar, David Garvin, and Patrick Cullen have written a book, Rethinking the M.B.A.: Business Education At A Crossroads. And the conclusions are grim.

Here’s how Paul Barrett, an an assistant managing editor at Bloomberg BusinessWeek interpreted their findings:

“After studying the nation’s most prestigious business schools, the authors conclude that an excessive emphasis on quantitative and theoretical analysis has contributed to the making of too many wonky wizards."