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A year ago Charles Handy opened his post to find a letter from Assis Carreiro of Dance East. In it she set out her plans for a ‘rural retreat’ of ballet directors, and explained that she was seeking a management specialist prepared to take part. Would Handy help out, she asked.

He wrote back and politely declined. It was not his natural territory and, besides, he knew little about dance. But Carreiro persisted and followed up her letter with a phone call. She explained that ballet directors belonged to a relatively closed and introspective community. Could Charles Handy explain to them how ideas from the management sciences might be applied to running a ballet company? Handy relented and so it was that he began to attend several ballets a week, to talk to people in the ballet world and to watch classes at the Royal Ballet School.

Handy is one of Britain’s best-known business academics. At the London Business School, he ran the MBA programme and had previously worked for Shell. Nowadays he describes himself as a social philosopher. He was a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.

Increased individualism

Handy was one of a handful of outsiders at the artistic directors’ weekend at Snape Maltings in January. His brief was

“People want to be treated as individuals and are not so obviously willing to be the obedient human clones that classical ballet seemed to require.” Charles Handy

to stimulate discussion and to present the directors with ideas about how better to manage their companies. He told them that their problems were not unique. Increased individualism was an issue, not just in ballet, but also in work places everywhere. “People want elbow room. They want to be treated as individuals, to be recognised for their contribution, and are not so obviously willing to be the obedient human clones that classical ballet seemed to require.”

Artistic directors would have to adapt not only to a different kind of dancer, but also to a changing audience. Like it or not, Handy told the directors, they would have to contend with the increasing ‘privatisation of desire’. In other words people wanted to be treated as individuals and not as mass consumers. In Handy’s view ballet directors needed to

“It might be to their advantage to ‘prostitute their art’ a little to find other ways of reaching the individual, if they could bear to do it.” Charles Handy

reach a larger market, well beyond their “cathedrals of the theatre” in city centres. “It might be to their advantage to ‘prostitute their art’ a little to find other ways of reaching the individual, if they could bear to do it.” But how? Air travellers preferred to watch their own DVDs rather than a feature offered on a single cabin screen. Perhaps, Handy says, ballet directors should think if they are fully exploiting the possibilities of video dance.
 

Company boards and their calibre

The directors at Snape had much to say about their relationships with the boards of their companies. Handy had considerable sympathy with them. “Most boards are pretty dreadful, and it is even worse in the not for profit and

“Most boards are pretty dreadful.” Charles Handy

voluntary world.” Members were often appointed because they were friends of the chairman, and for reasons of status. Handy accused boards of being over-ready to meddle in the present, properly the artistic director’s domain. Instead they should help the director to think about the future and provide useful connections with the world outside. “Talk to Boris Akimov of the Bolshoi Ballet. He’s in his office at 10.00 am every day. And he leaves it at 11.00 every night. There is no time to be in the other world. And they’re all like that. They live and breathe dance with a wonderful passion. But they need someone to help them manage the future.”

Charles Handy with Assis Carreiro Photograph by Elizabeth Handy ©

Boards and artistic directors often speak a different language. Take the word ‘success’. For a board this probably means growing revenues and more ‘bums on seats’. Handy conducted an experiment. He sent the directors at Snape into small discussion groups to discuss their measures of ‘success’. When they reconvened, they agreed that it meant ‘growing the art form’, ‘growing our confidence’, ‘growing more experimental’, ‘growing the community.’

Risk averse cultures

This was all very well, Handy said, but artistic directors needed to inhabit two worlds. They were artists and creators, who also ran complex businesses. Little in their past prepared them for that. When they were dancers, directors were subject to a tight discipline, their lives strictly determined by someone else. Suddenly they are thrust into an “enormously complex job” where they have immense discretion. This is where a board needs to help the director with a common definition of success. Boards should encourage risk and experiment and tolerate failure, “as long as you don’t fail too often, because we know you are trying very hard.” However, as Handy sees it, the ballet world does not

“They hire in creativity, go out and hire in a choreographer. They try to manage it. But often the organisation is not creative.” Charles Handy

encourage a culture of risk and experiment. “That has been drummed out of them. They hire in creativity, go out and hire in a choreographer. They try to manage it. But often the organisation is not creative. They were saying, interestingly, that one of the things that dancers value in the ballet world, that is now absent in almost every other world, is security. It is quite impossible to grow up, as these poor people have had to do for 25 years in organisations, doing as they were told, and then to be told ‘the world is your oyster – create things’.”

Charles Handy with Marc Jonkers Photograph by Elizabeth Handy ©

It is an interesting tension. Open cultures are a precondition of creativity. But, taken to its conclusion, is the discipline that produces 24 disciplined swans in the corps-de-ballet incompatible with creativity? Handy replies, “It is. This is the huge dilemma. Combined with the fact that new young people coming in want to dance, but don’t want this imposed discipline. This is the individualism I talk about. As individuals people want space but as dancers in classical ballet they are not allowed space. Unless they are choreographers, where they are licensed to be creative.”

Investing in the future

Charles Handy warns against defining creativity exclusively in terms of new choreography, or new productions. Creativity must be embedded in a company’s existence. All human activity, he told the directors, had a development

“I asked one or two of the directors where ballet stood: they said it was at a peak but not going anywhere.” Charles Handy

period, a success period and a decline, and ballet was not an exception. “I asked one or two of the directors where ballet stood: they said it was at a peak but not going anywhere.” This was why ballet companies, even those with flourishing audiences, needed to take risks and to have two cultures, one experimental, the other very traditional. “This applies whether you are making motorcars too. You have to produce slightly outdated models very efficiently while other people are having a lot of fun making the new ones.”

“I’m pretty bloody sure and a few of them agreed with me privately I think, that in 25 years time the ballet world will not be as it is now.” Charles Handy

Learning management skills

Can directors prepare in advance for their roles? There was an interesting consensus among the directors at Snape that formal training before the event made little sense. Charles Handy agreed with them, saying there was little point in stockpiling learning. “The only way you learn to swim is to swim. What they need are people who can help them to swim”. This meant mentors outside the company, and the board who were unequivocally ‘on their side’. Directors lacked these mentors.

After Snape this may have changed. Many directors met there for the first time and were enthusiastic about their newfound alliances with senior colleagues in leading companies. Handy encourages this. It is right, he says, that artistic directors seek mentoring from colleagues in other ballet companies, because they understand the context so well. However they needed to go further. He advocated the experience of the UK organisation Business in the Community, which had set up mutual mentoring between business managers and head teachers. They were both managers but in different

“Most of them did not have the confidence that their boards would support them if they took a risk and it went wrong.” Charles Handy

contexts, who could import concepts from one area to another. Ballet directors also needed reference points in the world outside.

Handy was struck by the lack of cohesion between many of the directors and their boards. “Most of them did not have the confidence that their boards would support them if they took a risk and it went wrong.” This would have to change, particularly as the financial climate for dance was likely to be more, rather than less difficult. There would be less government subsidy and private subsidy would have even more strings attached. “Freedom comes with earning your own money. They have to be much more innovative about how they earn their own money. Not just expect it that people will think it wonderful and sit in dark cathedrals in city centres at inconvenient hours in the evening. They have to change the way they earn money, the way they prepare people and the way they operate. It will take place slowly and of they don’t change they will die. They have to have boards to encourage them to take risks, explore new alternatives, back them and help them to manage the future.” He also advised them to have a sharp look at their property holdings. “Why don’t they use the empty space in their theatres, as airports do with shopping malls? An unused asset of that value is criminal.”