Authors: Reynold Levy
When the cochairs of the Lincoln Center emeriti are Bill Donaldson, the former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission and cofounder of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, and Peter Malkin, a major civic leader and developer with substantial interests in the Empire State Building, among other properties, this is a group to be taken seriously.
A second governance model is the Lincoln Center Education (LCE) board. This body of committed volunteers, chaired by Ann Unterberg, focuses on Lincoln Center’s education program for kids in the public schools and on its campus. Consisting of twenty-five members, the board’s efforts to influence government policy, financially support LCE, and offer guidance to its executive director have been invaluable.
The third is a group called the Counsel’s Council, chaired by Judge Judith Kaye, the former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals. It consists of the senior partners of some twenty-five major law firms, whose associates engaged in extremely valuable pro bono projects each year under the direction of Lesley Rosenthal, Lincoln Center’s very able general counsel.
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Yet another is the leadership committee of the Lincoln Center Corporate Fund, chaired by Steve Swartz, the president and CEO of Hearst Corporation. These thirty-two corporate executives are critical to raising in excess of $6 million annually of unrestricted donations distributed directly to constituents. They are an important cadre of supporters.
By extension, we asked ourselves, what if we meet important figures for whom the performing arts was not a philanthropic priority, but who wanted to have some user-friendly form of sustainable involvement? Suppose they were offered an option like this: Please consider joining us for the better part of one half day a year. In a very well-prepared, four-hour session, our leading trustees and staff will present you and like-minded peers of comparable stature with the major opportunities
and threats we see ahead for Lincoln Center. We will seek your advice and guidance on how best to seize and grapple with them. With your help, we may even discover that we have not entirely identified the right things to discuss! We commit to listening carefully to your views based on the briefing papers we distribute in advance and as much dialogue as you would like before, during, and after meetings. We intend to act on your recommendations. In essence, this $50,000-a-year membership on Lincoln Center’s Corporate Advisory Group may well lead to expanded involvement if you are energized by the subjects and people you encounter.
Well, within nine months a very powerful group of twenty members had been assembled. Few boards of directors of nonprofit institutions would hesitate to admit these activists to their ranks.
Of all the areas in the world that might include clients of Lincoln Center Global, our consulting practice, none were as fascinating, as large, or as mysterious as performing arts centers in China, extant and new. As the extraordinarily talented managing director of the fledgling LCG practice, Kara Medoff Barnett worked her magic in tapping networks of private citizen influentials in and around China, she was aided and abetted by Katherine Farley, who was not only Lincoln Center’s chair, but was also Tishman Speyer’s senior managing director, with responsibility for the firm’s business in that nation. Katherine is a pioneer developer in that huge country. She began her work there in the 1970s. Our contacts and meetings resulted in adding three trustees to the board. It also led to the formation of the China Advisory Council.
This council consists largely of Chinese citizens and expatriates who are drawn to the performing arts and who attend events at Lincoln Center with some regularity, often assisted by the fact that they have purchased co-ops or condominiums nearby. All were taken with the idea that Lincoln Center was willing to help broaden and deepen Chinese exposure to world-class talent and reciprocally American exposure to Chinese artists. They appreciated how much Chinese administrators could learn from Lincoln Center staff about the design, building, and operation of performing arts centers. Cochaired by Katherine Farley and a television star in China, Yang Lan, the group’s prominent membership has already been able to help Lincoln Center in many ways:
client referrals to LCG, coordinating special events, offering financial contributions, and briefing us on the whys and wherefores of Chinese policies and practices in the performing arts. These thirty-one prominent corporate executives, business owners, retailers, major investors, prominent private equity and hedge fund operators, and leading artists are the latest additions to the far-ranging advisory forces Lincoln Center has assembled.
If nonprofits are prepared to be flexible and resourceful about how they engage talented volunteers—on a richly populated board of trustees, through other formal standing committees, and on advisory groups—such means of engagement will have a potent positive impact.
For Lincoln Center, the effort to stretch the meaning of governance in the direction of inclusivity and flexibility to accommodate the needs of members has worked extremely well. Taken together, including the board of directors, more than two hundred impressive individuals regard themselves rightly as important members of the Lincoln Center family. They are highly valued insiders whose reach extends far and wide.
I am acutely aware that the vast majority of nonprofits are small and do not enjoy Lincoln Center’s size, longevity, well-known name, reputation, or gravitational pull. However, having an acquaintance with hundreds of nonprofits of all dimensions and types, of all ages and purposes, from all parts of the country, I am persuaded that in general they underestimate their capacity to attract more compelling figures to their boards of directors and as volunteers more generally. I know too well the cost of organizational timidity, lack of ambition, or sheer diffidence. Proportionate to the situational circumstances of the nonprofit, my advice is to be bolder and more flexible in attempting to recruit impressive adherents to your cause. They are out there. They are waiting to hear from you.
Make It Easier for Others to Help
The reporter assigned to an unfamiliar story, seeking not just content, but context. The city administrator on a new assignment needing an orientation to how Lincoln Center operates between the parent body and the resident artistic organizations. The corporation or foundation
executive favorably disposed to Lincoln Center, but too busy to comb through long, prolix requests.
By identifying with the situations others find themselves in and responding quickly and directly in a form that works best for them, relationships are formed or deepened. Favorable results for Lincoln Center ensue.
If this is true of those paid to conduct business with Lincoln Center, the need to make it easy for others to help is even more imperative with volunteers.
Taking advantage of our status as a nonprofit institution in need of voluntary expertise, we have become skilled at project management of pro bono initiatives. Identify and define an institutional challenge. Gather the data needed to better understand it. Then charge a group of lawyers, or business students, or associates of trustees drawn from their firms to propose solutions to problems on a tight deadline, say 90 to 120 days. That was our method. It worked well and often.
From well-known establishments like McKinsey, IDEO, Disney, American Express, and UBS to twenty-five of New York City’s major law firms, from interns drawn from every kind of professional discipline and college and university to one-off arrangements with curious and hardworking volunteers, Lincoln Center knew how to benefit from their time and sweat equity. They, in turn, came away with an insider’s view of how this leading performing arts institution works and what kind of gifted professionals are drawn to it. They also attended more of our performances, struck up friendships, and enlarged their own professional networks.
The success of these task forces and commissions flowed directly from our promise to implement expeditiously sound recommendations that emerge from their work. The idea that Lincoln Center actually desired the informed opinions of outsiders and pledged to adopt them or explain why it would not or could not is a turn-on to many busy professionals.
They wish to make a positive difference to institutions or causes they care about, but they’re often hampered by an inability to find a way to help. By offering a simple and direct route to assist Lincoln Center, we ignited involvement. As a result, the quality of the advice received was of a very high order.
The studies and recommendations that emerged helped to propel Lincoln Center forward and brought new ideas to a full-time staff in need of supplemental expertise and intellectual sustenance. Perhaps the most well-developed and productive partnership was Lincoln Center’s multifaceted relationship with the Harvard Business School.
In a decade, 139 separate studies were conducted by some fifty HBS students and graduates. One can draw a straight line from that body of work to the following concrete examples of change at Lincoln Center, among many others:
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The establishment of the only professional consulting practice lodged in any performing arts center in the world.
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The siting and construction of a public television station on Lincoln Center’s campus, Channel 13/WLIW, yielding handsome annual net revenue and increasing on-the-air exposure of Lincoln Center for almost all resident artistic organizations.
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Maximizing net rental revenue from artistic spaces like the Kaplan Penthouse, the Clark Studio Theater, Alice Tully Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, and from public spaces, indoors like the David Rubenstein Atrium and outdoors like the Hearst Plaza, Josie Robertson Plaza, Tully Plaza, and even the underground concourses leading to and from subways and public parking. Superior ways and means to market these places and to price them were an important outcome of HBS studies.
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Developing a business plan for a Dance in Cinema series that it is hoped might do for the participating companies—the New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballet Hispanico, and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company—and for the art form of classical dance more generally, what the Metropolitan Opera has accomplished in its successful and much-heralded movie project.
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Studies leading to the creation of three new restaurants and the selection of Marcus Samuelsson (The American Table), Nick Valenti and Jonathan Benno (the Lincoln Ristorante), and Tom Colicchio (Wichcraft) to supervise and run them.
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Determining criteria for the background, professional experience, and geographic locations of an expanded Lincoln Center Board of Directors.
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Conceiving a strategy for the redevelopment of Lincoln Center, including access to the bond market and to acquiring state and federal support.
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Documenting the case for the dramatic favorable impact of Lincoln Center and its constituents on the metropolitan area economy, for use in public policy advocacy and fund-raising proposals.
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Studying the feasibility of creating one or more Lincoln Center international advisory councils, leading directly to the creation of the China Advisory Council.
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Assessing the pros and cons and the ways and means of creating Lincoln Center University (LCU), a collectivity of staff that would help to provide technical training to their counterparts in countries around the world, beginning with China.
There was much else, studied but not yet implemented. Should Lincoln Center develop an alternative certification for public school arts teachers? How could Lincoln Center best modernize and upgrade its guided tour program? What tactics might work best to expand Lincoln Center’s global roster of consulting clients? Could Lincoln Center’s Print and Poster program, indeed retail sale of any kind, enjoy a robust future on the campus? Are there other viable new ventures Lincoln Center could pursue that will generate sustained net earned income streams, consistent with its mission? What about social media fund-raising at Lincoln Center? Is there a role for a robust spoken word program here? How can Lincoln Center best identify and train its high-potential employees and prolong their length of stay? Can the parking garage in its promotion and pricing perform measurably better? If and when the Mostly Mozart Orchestra tours or American Songbook is presented elsewhere in the United States or around the world, who are its likely corporate sponsors?
These are among the vital questions answered by the HBS teams and by other groups of skilled professionals working pro bono over the last decade.
This combination of inspiration and perspiration animated much progress at Lincoln Center, turbocharging results or giving us the courage to pursue an initiative.
There remains a huge, largely untapped reservoir of university-based talent in search of real-world opportunities and nonprofit institutions in need of analytical assistance and fresh points of view. Lincoln Center identified that source of intelligence, drive, and curiosity. By selecting volunteers carefully, preparing for their arrival rigorously, designing meaningful assignments vital to Lincoln Center’s future, and either implementing their recommendations or explaining why they were not actionable, we made it easier for others to help. And not just business students. Lawyers. Accountants. Professionals of all stripes. And undergraduates.