Conductor as CEO, blog

Friends hire friends. Our industry runs on transactional relationships. And everyone knows it. We all feel it.

We are incentivized to befriend someone because of what they could give us. And we promptly stop investing in people when we stop believing they can benefit us.

Arthur Brooks calls these deal friends, not rea...

Our industry has a positivity mandate. We need to be happy all the time. Feeling lucky and grateful. Only smiles.

That's not real life. And it's called toxic positivity.

Toxic positivity is a form of gatekeeping - one that masquerades as optimism but is actually a behavioral conformity requirement. The industry is...

A few years ago, a friend asked me for advice. She’d been asked to direct Madama Butterfly and she was afraid to say yes because she was not Asian.

This happened at a time where Madama Butterfly is in the industry hot seat - both to be surgically examined for cultural authenticity pitfalls and as a vehicle for greater D...

There's a behavior that's so common in orchestras that most of us don't even notice it anymore. Someone in power enters the room and something shifts. People become a little more agreeable. A little more careful. A little more eager to be seen as helpful, competent, or likeable. We call it sucking up. And we may even resent the people who do it....