Accumulation
Every theatre I work in seems to suffer a super-abundance of accumulated stuff.
I worked in one where, after swamping the floor-ceiling 10' x 20' storage area full of costumes, I had to post a dichotomous key to help people decide whether to keep an item or get rid of it.
I worked in a university where, after a semester of disposing of 20 years' accumulated detritus, I finally met the manager of the physical plant, who congratulated me on filling three dump trucks full of crap. He had been wondering when all that stuff was going to reappear...
In theatre, as well as other businesses, ideas also accumulate. Some are good, some are not; some ideas have been around forever (like a bucketful of Wise lash-line cleats) but were never, or are no longer used.
Unfortunately for many theatres, the dual-executive of Managing Director/Artistic Director tends to encourage accumulation - almost inevitably.
This is the mechanism: if you have something (an item or idea) that you think is good - as an executive staff member, you have a prerogative to keep it. You may have to explain it, justify it, etc., but your co-executive is unlikely to veto it because his own ability to exercise the same prerogative hinges on his protection of yours.
Take, for example, a box of documents (and let's assume you have limited storage). You want to keep it. Your co-manager has no use for it, and would as soon throw it out - but will no doubt defer in most instances, because he has a box of his own that he would like to store in which you see little value.
The result? Throw both boxes away? Never! Keep both. Same goes for ideas.
Stuff and ideas are similar in that they both require resources to use and store. Anything requiring resources tends to accumulate inertia of its own. After years of this accumulation, most companies have more of both than they can effectively resource, and the stuff and idea becomes a drain - but there is still no effective mechanism within a co-executive for arbitrating the storage while retaining the necessary executive prerogative to sort and keep.
Peter Drucker advocates rethinking your business by sitting down and asking "if I started my business today, what am I doing now that I would not do?" If you apply the above mechanism, you will get somewhere north of one and somewhere south of two sets of answers from an MD/AD executive. One will cherish ideas the other wants to toss.
Most of us have experienced the hands-on deficiencies of supercilious accumulation: legacy programs draining the budget, overstuffed prop rooms, threadbare curtains in plastic bags crammed under the stage. Before we come to accept them as business-as-usual, consider a metaphor of "super-accumulation": accretion.
At a certain point, your organization will achieve this level of accumulation and simply collapse into nothing under its own weight - not necessarily dead, but rather than light, issuing only cryptic squirts of indecipherable energies while steadily sucking down resources.
I worked in one where, after swamping the floor-ceiling 10' x 20' storage area full of costumes, I had to post a dichotomous key to help people decide whether to keep an item or get rid of it.
I worked in a university where, after a semester of disposing of 20 years' accumulated detritus, I finally met the manager of the physical plant, who congratulated me on filling three dump trucks full of crap. He had been wondering when all that stuff was going to reappear...
In theatre, as well as other businesses, ideas also accumulate. Some are good, some are not; some ideas have been around forever (like a bucketful of Wise lash-line cleats) but were never, or are no longer used.
Unfortunately for many theatres, the dual-executive of Managing Director/Artistic Director tends to encourage accumulation - almost inevitably.
This is the mechanism: if you have something (an item or idea) that you think is good - as an executive staff member, you have a prerogative to keep it. You may have to explain it, justify it, etc., but your co-executive is unlikely to veto it because his own ability to exercise the same prerogative hinges on his protection of yours.
Take, for example, a box of documents (and let's assume you have limited storage). You want to keep it. Your co-manager has no use for it, and would as soon throw it out - but will no doubt defer in most instances, because he has a box of his own that he would like to store in which you see little value.
The result? Throw both boxes away? Never! Keep both. Same goes for ideas.
Stuff and ideas are similar in that they both require resources to use and store. Anything requiring resources tends to accumulate inertia of its own. After years of this accumulation, most companies have more of both than they can effectively resource, and the stuff and idea becomes a drain - but there is still no effective mechanism within a co-executive for arbitrating the storage while retaining the necessary executive prerogative to sort and keep.
Peter Drucker advocates rethinking your business by sitting down and asking "if I started my business today, what am I doing now that I would not do?" If you apply the above mechanism, you will get somewhere north of one and somewhere south of two sets of answers from an MD/AD executive. One will cherish ideas the other wants to toss.
Most of us have experienced the hands-on deficiencies of supercilious accumulation: legacy programs draining the budget, overstuffed prop rooms, threadbare curtains in plastic bags crammed under the stage. Before we come to accept them as business-as-usual, consider a metaphor of "super-accumulation": accretion.
At a certain point, your organization will achieve this level of accumulation and simply collapse into nothing under its own weight - not necessarily dead, but rather than light, issuing only cryptic squirts of indecipherable energies while steadily sucking down resources.
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