- About the Lecture
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About the Lecture
If anyone deserves the moniker of ‘arts miracle worker’, it’s Michael Kaiser. He’s turned around any number of blue ribbon organizations teetering on the edge of bankruptcy -- from the Kansas City Ballet, to England’s Royal Opera House, and the American Ballet Theatre. Now he’s taking his lessons and management techniques around the world, a virtual one-man ambassador for arts innovation and solvency.
Kaiser’s talk focuses on marketing, the kind that “creates excitement around an organization.” In his efforts to restore flagging dance, theater and opera groups, Kaiser often contends with boards that assume paring down performances and cutting labor costs is the only way back to fiscal health. Kaiser advocates a contrary strategy: an artistic group can thrive only by taking artistic risks, investing in bold ventures and communicating inventively to the public, what he calls “dense institutional marketing.”
He offers a case in point: the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, which in 1991 was $1.5 million in the red, and on the verge of laying off dancers. He generated a series of special events to spotlight the dancers and choreography. The two-year effort included landing prime appearances on the Phil Donahue show and at Bill Clinton’s first inaugural gala, an exhibition at the Smithsonian, a sponsored performance in Central Park, and multiple books, including one edited by Jackie Onassis. Kaiser’s persistence paid off, with a doubling of private fundraising.
He frets that a lot of arts organizations in the U.S. began “falling down after 9/11, pulling back on creativity and innovation, afraid of losing their audience.” Kaiser is emphatic: “When you pull back on risk taking, you pull back on the revenue stream. That’s why arts are suffering today.”
His success in reinvigorating performing arts groups, as well as his ease in both the corporate and non-profit worlds, has earned him the role of cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department. He travels widely to lend his expertise to groups abroad, who find themselves with dwindling or no government support. He’s helping Chinese art administrators learn to raise money, since their government invests in infrastructure, but not in artists. He also found himself in Egypt recently: “140 Arab arts leaders from 17 countries, coming to study with an American Jew at Arab League headquarters—sort of astonishing, but absolutely no political problem.” He has few qualms about working in non-Democratic nations, if he can work freely with organizations to “make them strong,” which he believes helps spread rather than hinder democracy. “Voices become potent by becoming better financed. Dissident voices need access to capital,” Kaiser believes.Related Videos
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- About the Speaker
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About the Speaker
Michael Kaiser SM '77
President, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Michael M. Kaiser is responsible for the artistic programming and financial health of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Under Kaiser, the nation's center for the performing arts has increased its broad educational efforts and established cross-disciplinary programming with opera, theater, symphony, and dance. He has established an institute for arts management and arranged for 10 annual visits from both the ballet and opera companies of St. Petersburg, Russia’s Kirov/Mariinsky Theater, which began in 2002. The unprecedented Sondheim Celebration, with six productions of Stephen Sondheim’s works during the summer of 2002, the exclusive United States presentation of the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera on a single stage, and a five-year annual commitment of visits from London’s Royal Shakespeare Company are among Kaiser’s programs. He planned multidisciplinary festivals celebrating composer P.I. Tchaikovsky (winter 2003), the arts of France (winter and spring 2003), and a festival presenting works of playwright Tennessee Williams (summer 2004).
Kaiser also works closely with the National Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director Leonard Slatkin and its Board of Directors. He arranged, in conjunction with the U.S. State Department, the historic concert in December of 2003 at the Kennedy Center of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra with the National Symphony Orchestra. - About the Host
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About the Host
MIT Sloan School of Management
The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the world’s leading business schools — conducting cutting-edge research and providing management education to top students from more than 60 countries. The School is part of MIT’s rich intellectual tradition of education and research.
MIT Sloan began in 1914 as engineering administration curriculum in the MIT Department of Economics and Statistics. The scope and depth of this educational focus have grown steadily in response to advances in the theory and practice of management to today’s broad-based management school.
A program offering a master’s degree in management was established in 1925. The world’s first university-based executive education program — the MIT Sloan Fellows — was created in 1931 under the sponsorship of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., an 1895 MIT graduate who was then chairman of General Motors. A MIT Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with a charge of educating the “ideal manager.”
Video Player
Marketing the Arts: The Secret Weapon
- Michael Kaiser SM '77
- June 9, 2007
- Running Time: 0:52:02
