Into the Mountains of the Mind

A good place to spend a day when the temperatures are hitting record highs, Lance decided, is in an air-conditioned car speeding southwest down Route 79, sailing south through West Virginia and Virginia, then west into the Blue Ridge mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, all the while listening to the full Saturday lineup of NPR programming. A friend had suggested Asheville as his next destination after a four day stint at Leadership Maryland held at Rocky Gap Lodge near Cumberland, MD. Lance decided rather than stretch out the eight hour drive over two days, he'd leave at 8 AM and devote one whole day to the trip so he could spend two nights in Asheville. It almost worked.

Thanks to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville is cooler by ten degrees than anywhere heading East. It is also blessed with a remarkable wealth of arts, culture and cache as Lance fondly remembered from his three-day conference at the Biltmore Estate many years ago. The Biltmore Estate, known as "America's Largest Home" was was built in the 1800's on 6,000 acres in including a winery, farm, orchards, livestock and and dairy. inspired by French Chateaux architecture. it is an American palace, furnished with European and Asian treasures heralding from the days when when northern aristocracy came down to the cool Carolina mountains for the restorative spring waters and natural beauty. During that conference, his group left the Estate grounds and went into downtown Asheville where Lance was astounded at the cosmopolitan, creative, downright quirky street scene. He vividly remembered looking west out of the huge windows on the top floor of an office building into the mountains at sunset and thinking, now THIS is a place I could learn to love. That is a very rare infatuation for Lance and he knew then he would have to return someday. Yesterday, it all came back to him.

Lance knew that Asheville was known as a Mecca for "half-backs", retirees from the North East who went to Florida, and when understandably disappointed at what they found, came running halfway back to North Carolina to reclaim a better quality of life. But he didn't know Asheville is also home to a major UNC campus, 4,000 craftspeople, an orchestra, a lyric opera, several museums, multiple theaters and a great section of town known as The River Arts District housing over 100 artists working in a a strip of renovated warehouses lining the shore.

As fate would have it, Lance wandered into town on the first day of the three day Bele Chere celebration, the largest street festival in the Southeastern United State. Blocked off streets, no hotel rooms and more young people than he'd seen on his whole trip jammed downtown shutting down any possibility of staying there until Sunday when they all would start to leave. So that became the plan. Finally settled in a Days Inn outside of town, one mile from the same Blue Ridge Parkway he had driven northward over a week ago, Lance unearthed a robust, un-airconditioned restaurant called Ruby's Italian Smokehouse, specializing in the rare combination of cold beer, hot pizza, full Italian entrees and excellent BBQ with 20 different sauces, all served up on sheets of paper,,,no plates. Lance finally got the BBQ he had been looking for since he left home.

And while it had been a long day of headlong travel, beneath the noise, Lance found new ideas and leads he would follow in the coming days about destiny, possibility and positioning. A cellphone conversation Friday afternoon confirmed things were going smoothly back at the office. Several more cell conversations with family in England, Barcelona and a skype call home indicated that the sense of dependency Lance assumed imprisoned him was more HIS mental construction than anyone else's. To be missed is human. to be irreplaceable is apparently more rare than any of us wants to admit.

Worry allayed, his thoughts drifted not to what wasn't getting done without him, but to what he could now see he could do better by bringing a new perspective home with him. It all started with a question that popped into his mind, "Do I actually need an office when I return?" Maybe not, Lance thought, now that he'd have been entirely mobile for three months. That led to the larger question "Should I automatically return to what I used to do every day or should I stake out new and expanded duties that use my existing skills and relationships more effectively than I've been able to over the last 5 years? " The damn gates were opening and heretical, outrageous, incendiary ideas poured forth. To wit:

The first draft of a new job description, The Five B's, leapt forth in Lance's mind (He's always been a fan of such lists...almost went into advertising, remember?) He would focus on Big Bucks, Best Practices, Board Development, Business Opportunities and the Big Picture for his not-for-profit institution. These seemed to be the big priority boulders, as Steven Covey would say, that will determine the long-term success of his enterprise. Day-to-day operations were now well established and highly competent people were in place, performing admirably. Lance's future value did not lay in duplicating their efforts just as they would be unlikely to excel in his challenges.

Big Bucks would require consistent,high-level relationship building with the many people in his community capable, but not currently engaged in, capitalizing future growth and quality programming. The development department was exceeding their own targets in five figure and lower memberships, sponsorships and and foundation giving. But the big money at hand had been tapped out and new fields needed to be plowed and planted. Lance knew that to raise that kind of money wasn't as much a problem of asking, but of envisioning and selling the compelling need for that level of support to the right people at the right time. (He could see Yoda nodding.)

Best Practices would be include creating an employee knowledge exchange utilizing the gifts of our own employees to teach each other skill sets other staff might need within working hours. It could also reach out to our many talented Board and business friends to bring their wisdom and techniques to bear on our staff and programs, With a well-established culture of moving interns up and into staff positions, the will is there, just not the efficiencies. The Academy should be open to all of the staff in the building and the course catalogue should come directly from the staff. This had been previously discussed but was pushed to the side by the press of other priorities. And, Lance decided it was high time to work out a modern, functional flex-time program for everyone who wants it including compensated time for creative thought and professional growth. What if all staff agreed to be on site every Tuesday and Wednesday for meetings, joint project time and face-to-face availability, but the rest of their schedule would be up to them and their specific workload. To hold it all together, everyone would have to agree to be reachable at any time, fully accountable for getting their job done, and always respectful and supportive of other staff's need for their own flexible work schedules. Perhaps a trial period of say, 3 months could precede formal adoption, Lance thought. Empowerment starts with self-management. If you can't manage yourself, the rest is futile.

Board Development is one of the most critical indicators of future success Lance had learned in his first 30 years of non-profit management. It is a vastly underrated art, until it blows up, that is. With a brilliant set of Board members, Lance had seen the deep and lasting value of smart people, drawn from business and government, advising and assisting his organization. They were not there by accident, but Lance knew not enough attention had been paid over the years to setting up future generations of Board members. It is a confidential, strategic, political enterprise requiring a few knowledgeable connected souls and someone has to coordinate the search, This is not something Lance could delegate since it lay at the heart of the integrity and sustainability of the corporation. Above all else, it requires close and continuing communication with the Board Chair. And it needs dedicated time.

Business Opportunities seemed fairly self-explanatory until Lance realized how tradition-bound his own profession had become over the years. New ideas like the Stars/Circles revision, multiple seasons, Friday Night Eclectic and One Portal had all been resisted by some as much out of inertia as logic. The very definition of an Arts Center as the concept of "a place for only for art "or the very "concept of Creativity long captured and held hostage exclusively by the arts" despite its value in every walk of life, these were fighting words to Lance. How strange, that right here in the cathedral of open-mindedness, lies a hallowed ground wherein Thou Shalt Not make money outside of tickets and begging. Thou Shalt Not seek other self-sustaining enterprises for Thy Sacred Stage. Thou Shalt Not covet other like-minded businesses who could mutually benefit from shared overhead, marketing and governance. Aside from obvious legal restrictions on not-for-profits, there lay before Lance a vast horizon of business opportunities, most of which could nurture the mission and market of the original dream. Other ideas came to his fertile mind but he decided they would be too inflammatory to prematurely publish before they were ready. But in the sanctity of his car, his mind was breaking the speed limit,


And that left the Big Picture. Who can look around the corner, over the horizon, beyond the quarterly report and envision a place and program that doesn't yet exist? Often, when Lance was asked to describe the creation of the Concert Hall and Education Center to visitors, he fell back on the metaphor of constructing a scaffolding of a vision and then, as opportunities came along, one could pick the right pieces to hang on the framework. If you have no scaffolding, you don't even know what pieces are going by or where to put them. What is the next scaffolding? Sure, new little things will still come. Big things need focus. And it can't be the last thing on your To Do list everyday or it will never get done, That is a fact Lance knew from life.

"Five B's. Not bad for a first draft" Lance chuckled as he drifted off to sleep.