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Nominations for the BCA 10: Best Companies Supporting Arts in America close Friday, February 15.

The BCA 10 recognizes businesses of all sizes for their exceptional involvement with the arts that enrich the workplace, education, and the community.  Know of a business with exemplary support of the arts in your local community?  Work for one?  Nominate them now for The BCA 10: Best Companies Supporting the Arts in America! 

Past winners include Alltech, a leading animal health care company who partnered with the University of Kentucky’s Opera Theatre department to create the largest vocal scholarship competition in the world, First Community Bank who developed the annual South Texas Photo Contest and commissioned artwork for their local branches, and Earl Swensson Associates, Inc., an architectural firm who provided pro-bono design services within their community and sponsored a mentorship program for low-income and at-risk middle and high school students.  For more outstanding examples and to nominate, visit www.americansforthearts.org/go/BCA10.

Winning businesses will be honored at the BCA 10 Gala in New York City on October 3, 2013. 

For more information, visit www.AmericansForTheArts.org/go/BCA10 or contact Patrick O’Herron at poherron@artsusa.org.

Debbie Blais, founder, owner and operator of Debbie Blais Real Estate and Blais Builders, is giving the gift of the arts to a few lucky students.  Inspired by one of her favorite Henry David Thoreau quotes, "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you have imagined,” she has created The Dream Scholarship, offering local arts students $1,000 annually in scholarship funds. 

After visiting the Burt Wood School of the Performing Arts for a craft fair, Blais reached out to school owner Lorna Brunelle, pledging $1,000 in scholarship funds to help children experience the joy of the arts.  Brunelle accepted letters of interest from families in the Middleboro area who felt that their artistic dreams had been halted due to lack of access to arts funding.  Two local children were hand selected for the 2013 award—Alannah Henault of Berkley, Mass. and Emily Travers of Taunton, Mass.  Both students used their scholarship winnings to support a class at The Burt Wood School inspired by the hit television show Glee.    

Blais, a Middleboro, Mass. mogul, maintains a successful empire in real estate, development and construction.  A lifelong resident of Middleboro and a business woman for over 25 years, Ms. Blais has been active in many community projects and events.  As a local business leader, she continues to play an important role in the artistic evolution and education of today’s youth. 

“The Debbie Blais Dream Scholarship is earmarked for students, who because of financial limitations, would not be able to attend,” states Blais.  “I believe in pursuing your dream, regardless of the obstacles; in this case it is money to pay for the courses. As a business woman, I believe that art has a profound effect on the quality of our lives; how we view and interact in the world around us.”

For more information on The Dream Scholarship, visit www.debbieblais.com.

Bloomberg Businessweek recently featured an article on the Mirage Hotel & Casino's new diversity training program. Instead of cajoling employees to participate in the optional diversity training program, the company had employees singing, dancing and putting on a show.

MGM Resorts "Inspiring Our World" from MultiVu Video on Vimeo.

Read an excerpt from the article:

"Roxanne Ramirez usually manages the card and gaming tables at the Mirage Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, but today she’s dancing for her paycheck. “I have no idea what I’m doing up there,” she says backstage at the Mandalay Bay Events Center, where she’s just finished singing and making jazz hands in front of 7,000 co-workers. Ramirez is one of 70 MGM Resorts International (MGM) employees who wrote, produced, and are now starring in their own production, Inspiring Our World: A Musical Journey, which explores MGM’s commitment to diversity and sustainability. It just may be the only corporate training program that involves sequined leotards.

The show, led by motivational speaker Ondra Berry, features all the corniness of a typical company event: group handshakes, mission statements, and claims that the employees work for “the greatest company in the world.” But instead of using PowerPoint slides, MGM has decided to set its spiel to music. It’s a one-shot attempt to get all of its 62,000 Las Vegas-based employees through its corporate diversity program, a voluntary two-day course that attracted only a fraction of MGM’s workers in the past. “We just couldn’t get our message out there fast enough, and we needed a way to reach everyone,” says Patty Coaley, director of diversity education at the company. Jim Murren, MGM’s chief executive officer, agrees. “People think ‘diversity’ just applies to stuff that happened in the 1960s, but we really wanted to broaden the scope to apply to everyone,” he says.

More than 120 employees auditioned to be a part of the show, which had 10 performances over three days in mid-December. Coaley and two other organizers didn’t ask for specific talents—they just had people arrive and do whatever they felt they did best. Ramirez sang Etta James’s At Last during her audition, while Joel Heidtman, a butler in the luxury suites in the Monte Carlo, juggled. “It was just like America’s Got Talent,” he says. “Everyone did something different.”"

Read the entire article at www.businessWeek.com.

Harvard Business Review recentLy published a piece entitled The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals. From creativity, to empathy, to simplifying complexity, reading and writing poetry can help business people succeed in the workplace. Read the full article at Harvard Business Review.

The NABE Foundation, the charitable arm of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) is awarding its fifth annual Americans for the Arts scholarship to encourage the integration of the Arts into the economic education process. We believe that good economic strategy is inherently dependent on our ability to come up with out-of-the box solutions to the challenges that we now face. Our hope is that we enable those with the gift of creative problem solving to further the profession of economics through their unique understanding of the world.

The NABE Foundation Americans for the Arts Scholarship Award was established in 2008 to encourage the integration of the arts into the economic education process. Recipients of the $5,000 scholarship must come from economically disadvantaged households and have attended public school. Successful candidates demonstrate long-term participation in the study of, creation in and/or performance in one or more art forms, including dance, music, theatre, literary, visual/media arts; excel academically; and have formally declared the intent to study economics for policy purposes, or in applications in the private and public sectors.

The scholarship is open to both recent high school graduates and current college undergraduates who are majoring in economics and/or the arts. Students who have not graduated high school and matriculated into an undergraduate program, or those who are in graduate school or Ph.D. candidates are not eligible. The deadline for applications is October 19, 2012.

For more information and to apply, click here.

*Photo via.

The old saying goes, “The only thing constant in life is change.” And with the current pace of change in the workplace, there is a demand for businesses to be ready for anything and everything. In order for business leaders to thrive in today’s market, they must be receptive, responsive, and adaptive. But how can business leaders prepare themselves for the unexpected?

Frank J. Barrett, Professor of Management and Global Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, suggests that business leaders take a cue from jazz musicians and practice improvisation.

In his article featured in Fast Company, the skills jazz musicians develop while improvising can also be helpful working in the office. Through improvisation, one nurtures spontaneity, cultivates creativity, encourages experimentation, and facilitates dynamic synchronization- all traits that are becoming increasingly necessary to succeed in business. By harnessing these qualities, businesses will be better equipped to tackle challenges that come their way.

Barrett proposes the following practices to help business leaders replicate the environment of a jazz band jam session:

Treat each task as an experiment

Every time a jazz musician improvises with a band, he or she tries different combinations of notes and rhythms over the chord changes of a song. As the musician performs, he or she is aware of his or her actions, listens to what works musically, and is receptive to others’ responses. Each spontaneous composition, therefore, becomes a learning process.

By adopting this experimental approach for the office, Barrett believes you will obtain a mind-set focused on discovery. Because you are constantly proposing new ideas and testing new hypotheses, you are more receptive to different ways of thinking and encourage breaking the routine. By consistently approaching projects through this process of trial and error, you become more aware of yourself and your own experiences, and you consequently learn more.

Resist the Glamour of No and Go with the Flow

Wishing the situation was different is one of the greatest hindrances to creativity and improvisation. Instead, do what jazz greats do- assume that you can make the situation work somehow. With this affirmative mind-set, you are more likely to accomplish the task at hand and find a positive pathway.

Encourage Serious Play

Musicians play on stage and you should play in the office, too. Although work and play seem diametrically opposed, the addition of legitimate play into the workplace can be a fruitful and meaningful activity. There is a sense of surrender in play, a willingness to suspend control and give yourself over to the flow of the ongoing events. Playing and practicing in situations where it is acceptable to try new things and fail provokes and open thought process and reinforces the experimentation process.

 Everyone gets a chance to solo

Successful work teams are often characterized by distributed, multiple leadership in which people take turns heading up various projects as their expertise is needed. The same thing happens in jazz bands, where everyone gets their turn to solo. That way, all participants get their chance to shine.

With these tips in mind, it’s time to warm up those chops and have your own office jam session, you cool cat!

*Photo courtesy of Stefan Leijon.

So, an artist walks into an office…

I know, it sounds like the start of a bad joke. But many artists start their careers or support themselves by taking “day jobs.”  Andy Warhol worked in advertising. Modest Mussorgsky was a civil servant. Franz Kafka investigated personal injury cases for an insurance company. But is an artist in the office one of life’s small cruelties? Not necessarily.

A recent article featured in The Globe and Mail by James Martin suggests that businesses looking to become innovators might want to consider hiring artists over those with more traditional business degrees.

Over the past several years, there has been a dramatic shift in the business landscape. Due to the current economic climate and the rapid advancement of technology, businesses are focused on working smarter through innovation. In fact, according to IBM’s 2012 CEO Study, 61 percent of CEOs identify creativity as a key driver of employee success in operating in a more complex, interconnected environment.

Considering the importance of thinking outside the box, bringing artists into the workplace seems like a natural choice. But how well are artists able to translate their artistic skills and sensibility into a corporate environment?

For David Dobson, the director of business development for Victoria-based StarFish Medical, he believes that art school gave him a simple business edge: it changed the way he thinks.

An alumnus of Ontario College of Art and Design University and a graduate of the Queen’s University Executive Business Program, Mr. Dobson believes that his fine art studies helped him translate right-brain ideas into left-brain products. At StarFish Medical, Mr. Dobson helps doctors, physicists, and biomedical engineers realize actual products using their research and technology.

“One of the benefits of a design background in business development is you know how to effectively communicate abstract information,” Mr. Dobson says. “Going to OCAD was invaluable for teaching me how to think broadly and then funnel a lot of ideas down into a better idea, a better option for a customer.”

Similarly, Robert Dimitrieff, the vice-president and general manager of Ontario-based Niagara Energy Products, feels that his degree from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design has been extremely useful in critically working through ideas.

As an art student, Mr. Dimitrieff regularly participated in studio critiques where he learned how to receive, and give, harsh criticism.  “It helped me to learn to separate myself from my work, and to not let ego get in the way of perfecting the work itself,” says Mr. Dimitrieff. “I’ve found that in business this is a skill that is not as common as one might think.”

Mr. Dimitrieff tries to bring that studio critique environment to Niagara Energy, encouraging collective debate on new ideas and concepts for components for the energy and petro-chemical sectors. Knowing that the ideas brought to the table will be critically examined, the initial ideas become stronger. The result is the ideas that actually endure the review are especially robust and are improved through collaboration and group input.

“The more we do this, the better my team gets at finding something wrong with the ideas,” he says. “It makes everything I do better than if I were to just do it on my own.”

So, if an artist walks into your office, it’s definitely not a joke, but is rather a way to bring some fresh ideas and a new perspective into the workplace. 

*This post was originally featured on ARTSblog.

*Photo Courtesy of Grisha_21.

Author: Melissa Quinn

What Both MBAs and MFAs Get Wrong About Solving Business Problems was originally posted on Co.DESIGN

Numbers and bullet points aren’t the only things driving executive decision making. And pretty pictures won’t get you there either. Both designers and MBAs have a lot to learn.

This year marks the third anniversary of the Rotman Design Challenge. It started out as a commendable experiment by the school’s Business Design Club to expose MBAs at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management to the value of design methods in business problem solving. This year, the competition drew teams from a few other MBA schools and some of the best design schools in North America. As a final-round judge, I had a front-row seat to the five best solutions to the competition’s challenge: To help TD Bank foster lifelong customer relationships with students and recent graduates while encouraging healthy financial behaviors.

Both this year and last--the two years that Rotman invited other schools to participate--business school students were slaughtered by the design school students. Of the 12 Rotman teams this year, not one of them made the final round. And while only seven of the 23 competing teams were from design schools (including California College of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design, and the University of Cincinnati), design teams scooped the top three places in the competition, doing significantly better than their MBA counterparts. So what does this tell us?

It might tell us that MBAs significantly underestimate the skill and expertise a designer brings to the table. After all, about 80 MBA students volunteered their evenings and weekends, believing they had a chance of winning a design competition with minimal, if any, design training. Would you go toe-to-toe with even a purple belt in jiu jitsu having never taken a lesson? While the typical design-school competitor has (at the least) studied the design process in depth for several semesters and practiced it in co-ops and internships, for many MBA students, this was their very first exposure to the discipline. So while we should applaud the organizers’ efforts to open MBA eyes to the importance and value of design in solving business problems, it seems that even its most forward-thinking students may not have fully digested that design is a serious pursuit that requires serious training.

The competition outcome might also tell us that designers have reason to be encouraged. With only 15 minutes to convince a skeptical panel of experienced professionals about a new idea that doesn’t exist in the world today, they fared significantly better than their MBA counterparts. Why? Because they shared real user insights to engage us emotionally, used narrative and stories to compel us, drew sketches and visualizations to inspire us, and simplified the complex to focus us. It’s proof positive that numbers and bullet points, while important, aren’t necessarily what drive executive decision making.

Finally, it tells us that we still have a long way to go to develop business professionals who both appreciate and can engage the tools of design effectively. Rotman gets kudos for taking a step in the right direction. But a few workshops and an extracurricular competition won’t produce business leaders with real design-thinking skills. Business education must be completely redefined to include the best, most appropriate principles of design in every curriculum. Marketing classes should teach a deep reverence for the user in context and the power of observational research methods. Finance classes should teach the art of storytelling and information design. Strategy classes should teach systems thinking and synthesis. If the goal is to create great "hybrid thinkers" who will have real impact, design should not be tacked on to existing business education but infused throughout it.

I’m not letting design schools off the hook either. While design students fared much better than their MBA counterparts that Saturday afternoon, I should point out that only the winning team from the Institute of Design at IIT actually charged a fee for the service they developed (a fact that was not overlooked by my final-round co-judge Ray Chun, the senior vice president of retail banking at TD). Some competitors were able to offer a vague notion that their ideas would generally create economic value, but crisp articulations of a profit model and underlying assumptions were hard to come by.

And I was less than impressed with the business-thinking skills of designers the following Monday morning, when I interviewed 10 of them at the Institute of Design in Chicago for jobs at Doblin. To most candidates, I asked of the ideas they presented in their portfolios, “But how does it make money? Who will pay for that? How much would you need to sell to be profitable?” and was met with far too many blank expressions when I did so. Design schools have a long way to go to integrate good business thinking into their programs. In order to make their value known to the world, designers need to speak the language of business--that’s where great ideas get funded and developed. Design education needs as much of an overhaul as business education if we are to benefit from the talents of design thinkers in the business world.

I hope that we see meaningful reinvention of both design and business education so that the business world can realize the true value of design thinking. Until that happens, Rotman’s Business Design Club would be wise to require challenge teams to comprise both designers and MBAs. At least it would level the playing field, and it may improve the educational experience for both--assuming each can decipher what the other is saying.

To view the full article please visit www.fastcodesign.com.

*Photo courtesy of thinkpublic.

In an article in The Guardian, Paul Guest writes about four choirs competing for 2012 Office Choir of the Year.  Here is an excerpt:

"Ruler here, pen there, scanner off to the right side, computer staring straight at me, intray in one corner, photo of daughters in the other, and paper scattered everywhere.

The office seems an unlikely place for a singalong but Music in Offices founder Tessa Marchington thinks otherwise: "I believe in bringing people together and that in times like these, this is an essential and very human need."

A graduate of the Royal Academy Of Music, Marchington formed this unique adult education project in 2006. Music in Offices aims to set up office choirs and provide instrumental tuition for employees around their office hours, as well as facilitating internal and external concerts and an annual Office Choir of the Year competition.

The motivation: bringing cultural activity directly to those who may not otherwise have time to pursue such a hobby. By her own admission, Marchington is neither medically nor scientifically trained, but she is keen to explore the power music has to build confidence and boost wellbeing.

"'I have witnessed over the past few years the positive effect on stimulating the brain's development and the impact on leadership,' she says, adding that her music-scientific experiment stems from her own childhood." 

Guest describes some of the perceived benefits of these types of initiatives including leadership skills, increased focus and productivity, morale boosting, stress relief and team building.

Read the entire article on The Guardian's website and red more about Music In Offices program. 

*Photo Courtesy of Ben Jay.