A Leading Performance

Head of Kennedy Center aims to improve skills of arts leaders

Michael M. Kaiser often wakes in the middle of the night to leave himself a phone message at work after dreaming up

an idea for a performance. “Sometimes I even say ‘goodbye,’ and I know I’m really sleepy when I do that,” says Mr. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

His alarm rings at 4:40 a.m., and he rises to scan the news, arts, and sports sections of The Washington Post and The New York Times online before hitting the gym. After running five miles and lifting weights, Mr. Kaiser gets ready for work. When the clock reads 7 a.m., he’s already at his desk.

By the time he walks downstairs for his daily chat with the Kennedy Center’s top marketing and press people 50 minutes later, Mr. Kaiser has skimmed five other papers and three arts-news Web sites, marked up his calendar with notes on the meetings he will attend that day, and returned any e-mail messages that appeared since he turned in the night before.

“It’s a very disciplined life that way,” he says. “I am not Felix Unger, but I am organized in my work about what I think is important and making sure that gets the focus of my time.”

Mr. Kaiser needs the extra hours in his workday. In addition to his duties running the six-stage arts complex, which attracts three million visitors a year, he created two management-training programs for arts administrators shortly after taking the center’s helm in 2001. Mr. Kaiser has also advised arts organizations in Mexico, Iraq, and China since being named a cultural ambassador by the U.S. Department of State in 2003. In addition, he has been working to help the Dance Theatre of Harlem, in New York, regain its financial health by advising its new executive director, Laveen Naidu.

Fears of an Impending Crisis

By sharing his strategies for success, learned through 20 years of management experiences at arts organizations including American Ballet Theatre and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Mr. Kaiser hopes to use his platform as head of the nation’s cultural center to strengthen the leadership of performing-arts groups nationally and internationally.

Without better-trained managers, the arts world is headed for trouble, says Mr. Kaiser. “The arts environment gets harder and harder because we can’t increase productivity in the live performing arts — there is the same number of seats in our theaters,” he says. “We increasingly need managers who know how to deal in a sophisticated way with the issues of audience development, fund raising, and financial management to accompany great artistic vision, and we aren’t churning out enough of those.”

To help provide those skills, Mr. Kaiser has created a 10-month fellowship program, known as the Vilar Institute for Arts Management, that enables about a dozen people a year to work alongside Kennedy Center employees on specific projects in several different departments during their time there. In addition, four mornings a week, they attend classes in marketing, fund raising, finance, or long-term planning taught by top staff members at the Kennedy Center. Each participant receives $18,000 to help defray living costs.

In addition, the Kennedy Center’s Capacity Building Program for Culturally Specific Performing Arts Organizations trains administrators whose primary mission is producing work by, about, and for black, Latino, Asian, or Native American people. Participants attend a weekend symposium at the Kennedy Center and then take part in monthly online discussions led by Mr. Kaiser, all at no charge.

Not everyone agrees that the arts world is in need of Mr. Kaiser’s advice. After he wrote an opinion article for The Washington Post that called the performing-arts world “sick” and rife with leaders not willing to take needed artistic risks, the New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini responded by labeling the essay “a self-serving call to action.”

Mr. Kaiser does not let such criticism bother him. He says the real measure of whether his diagnosis of the problems in the arts world — and his approach to solving them — is accurate will be by looking at what his program participants achieve over the next 5 to 10 years.

Music Man

Mr. Kaiser, 51, grew up in a New Rochelle, N.Y., household that valued culture and business. He saw his first show, The Music Man, on Broadway at age 4, and he watched his father run a wholesale lumber business. After studying voice in high school, he majored in economics at Brandeis University and received a master’s degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After founding his own corporate-consulting business, Mr. Kaiser turned to the arts in 1985 as general manager of the Kansas City Ballet, where he retired its $150,000 deficit in less than two years partly by creating a database to track who made annual gifts and setting up a system to ensure that the organization asked donors to give again. In addition, he asked board members to introduce him to potential donors.

Mr. Kaiser then chalked up a string of other successful turnarounds at financially troubled arts groups. Besides working with the Ailey and American Ballet Theatre troupes, he was chief executive of the Royal Opera House, in London.

After more than a decade of putting out fires, Mr. Kaiser moved to his current post at the Kennedy Center, which, unlike his previous employers, was in solid fiscal shape when he arrived.

In taking the job, Mr. Kaiser saw an opportunity to help many smaller arts organizations. Shortly after he came to Washington, he and other fund raisers at the Kennedy Center approached several donors with the idea of starting the training programs for arts managers.

Alberto Vilar, founder of Amerindo Investment Advisors, in New York, agreed to give $50-million to create the fellowship program (as well as pay for a decade of appearances by the Kirov Opera and Kirov Ballet companies at the Kennedy Center). Mr. Vilar says he liked the idea of a training program that helped bright arts managers accelerate their careers and could potentially be copied elsewhere.

He also trusted Mr. Kaiser to use his gift for the maximum effect. “Michael is not going to go to an organization to provide maintenance leadership,” says Mr. Vilar. “He is going to create new ideas.”

The program, which draws about 150 applications from all over the world for the dozen or so annual slots, has 44 graduates so far, including several who now serve as executive directors of arts groups. And the Kennedy Center itself has hired three of the participants.

The cost of the Kennedy Center’s program for leaders of minority arts groups is partly underwritten by a two-year, $500,000 grant from the SBC Foundation, the philanthropic arm of SBC Communications. Mr. Kaiser decided to focus on the leaders of organizations that spotlight minority artists because of his concern that their small budget size hampers artistic growth. Most of the groups have annual budgets of $300,000 to $1.5-million.

Common Theme

While the two management programs differ in size and scope, Mr. Kaiser hammers home his underlying theme to participants in both. The key to health in the performing arts, he says, is to produce great programs and market them aggressively. “What makes a donor want to give is the fact they are excited about what you did do, not what you didn’t do,” he says.

For example, when Mr. Kaiser arrived at American Ballet Theatre in 1995, the New York company had performed Romeo and Juliet for the past seven years to save money. Mr. Kaiser decided to plan for a new production of Othello in three years’ time. Everybody thought he was “insane,” he says, to start the company’s biggest production at a time of great debt. But he persisted.

“The way you turn around an organization is by doing interesting work,” says Mr. Kaiser. “Talking about it ahead of time gets people excited. They start to change their opinion of you, and they realize you are a vibrant organization.” By the time he left Ballet Theatre in 1998, he had erased its $5.5-million deficit.

Sharing such experiences is something Mr. Kaiser clearly relishes. During a weekend seminar in March, Mr. Kaiser spoke to a group of participants in the program for minority organizations with no notes, using a mix of humor, gentle needling, and encouragement while discussing each organization’s struggles, small victories, and recommendations for the next steps.

Mr. Kaiser beamed when the founder of a dance organization announced a decision to scrap plans for a new building to focus instead on the group’s annual fund-raising efforts. Mr. Kaiser believes the door to success opens by raising money from individuals and recruiting strong board members, not by seeking money for capital projects.

“Your mission is to do brilliant programs, not build whirlpools,” Mr. Kaiser told the participants. “I say all this with love. I don’t want you to get derailed spending the next three years deciding where a bathroom is going to go.”

Instead of shutting the door completely on construction projects, Mr. Kaiser advocates waiting for the time when a group has raised its profile through performing and marketing a stellar artistic product, and can handle its performance schedule and annual fund-raising efforts and still have the energy required to raise a large sum for a new building.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, he told participants, spent 14 years assembling a board with deep pockets before going ahead with plans for a $54-million facility, which opened in midtown Manhattan in March. Mr. Kaiser started that process as executive director in the early 1990s when he persuaded half of the Ailey board members to resign, making way for new members who could give or solicit financial support. He takes no credit for the new building, but the company named its archives after him to thank him for his six-figure gift “and also his blood, sweat, and tears on behalf of Ailey when he was executive director,” says Sharon Gersten Luckman, executive director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, who worked for Mr. Kaiser.

Real-Life Stories

Mr. Kaiser’s tales about his personal experience have helped motivate many of his students.

“The difference between Michael Kaiser and many other people who lecture on arts management is that Michael Kaiser is doing it now, he’s running a major performing-arts center, and he has done it with many other groups at different levels,” says Erwin Washington, executive director of Lula Washington Dance Theatre, in Los Angeles, and a participant in one of the Kennedy Center programs. “He’s got credibility, and his ideas come from real-world experience.”

However, not everyone Mr. Kaiser teaches follows his counsel. At least one theater company in the program for minority arts organizations has pushed ahead with its plans to raise several million dollars for a new building, even though the group has only a $600,000 annual budget and nobody has made a big pledge to pay for the building.

The theater’s executive director says it had no choice, since the group is being evicted from its current space and needs to find a new home. Mr. Kaiser, who offers to visit each participating group and provide advice, was disinvited from the theater’s board meeting, he says, when it became clear he would speak against the building plans.

Still, the theater continues to participate in the program and has taken Mr. Kaiser’s advice on other issues, such as asking each of its board members to give at least $2,500 annually, says the executive director, who asked not to be named.

Mr. Kaiser says he only asks groups to withdraw from the program — which he has done on several occasions — if leaders routinely do not participate in the online discussions. Mr. Kaiser uses the monthly discussions to check participants’ progress with board recruitment, fund raising, and other management issues. Participants also ask him questions, and sometimes continue to exchange information among themselves after Mr. Kaiser has signed off.

“I feel sometimes I am a sheepdog nudging people along the path that I think is successful, and the only time I really get mad and bite is when I think people are doing things that are completely off-course,” he says. “Failure in the nonprofit world typically means not focusing on what’s important.”

Such strongly held views have served Mr. Kaiser well. But some scholars worry that his students might not learn a wide-enough range of arts-management approaches to help them in their future careers.

“My concern, not only about the Kennedy Center but about work-based learning, is if they are not cautious it can become insular,” says Andrew Taylor, director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Learning the Michael Kaiser version of cultural leadership is a wonderful thing, as he has proven. But there is a full spectrum of other ways of approaching the very same problems.”

Sharing Lessons

Mr. Kaiser says one way he tries to keep the management programs fresh and effective is by encouraging participants to share ideas with him and with the other participants, both during the sessions and for years after. Mr. Kaiser will soon have a wider audience for his suggestions: This fall the Kennedy Center plans to start a Web site for managers and fund raisers of arts organizations, and Mr. Kaiser plans to write a regular column for it. The site will also include case studies of both successful organizations and ones that have struggled, and will respond to questions about fund raising, marketing, and other topics, says Darrell M. Ayers, the center’s vice president for education.

Mr. Kaiser’s willingness to offer his advice has earned him praise from many of his pupils.

“He is like a conductor with a particularly unruly, headstrong orchestra,” says Paul A. Slee, executive director of Intar Theatre, in New York, who is taking part in the capacity-building program. “Maybe he’s not making a unified concert of music, but he is certainly inspiring us all to do our best.”

Vanessa A. Thomas, managing director of Philadanco, a dance company in Philadelphia, credits the program with helping her build stronger relationships with board members, which has helped increase donations. At Mr. Kaiser’s suggestion, Ms. Thomas now takes 15 minutes at the start of her day to call board members just to say hello, not to ask for assistance or money. “I find that has put a little icing on the relationship,” she says.

Last June, Mr. Kaiser also spoke at the group’s board meeting about the company’s strengths and accomplishments, which Ms. Thomas says instilled a sense of pride in the organization among board members. An October gala raised $100,000, the most the group has generated from an event, she says, because board members were more willing to take Ms. Thomas’s calls and ask how they could help.

While participants in the Kennedy Center programs eagerly jot down his advice, some feel daunted by replicating Mr. Kaiser’s devotion to his job and implementing some of his strategies at their smaller organizations.

Kathryn Colegrove — who took a leave of absence from her job managing Dad’s Garage Theatre, a small group in Atlanta, to participate in the center’s first class of fellows — says she returned to her job energized. But she quickly found that practicing what she had learned was challenging at best.

“It was hard to get people to buy into the time commitment of planning when every moment could easily be taken up to do the next thing to get the next production up,” says Ms. Colegrove, who is now the business manager at the Ferst Center for the Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The tools I learned were wonderful, but difficult to implement in a six-person staff.” Still, donations to the theater doubled the year she returned, and lessons learned at the center helped her plan the group’s first gala.

Mr. Kaiser says that big changes can take many years and that he doesn’t expect to see more than a handful of groups succeed in expanding their operations in the next few years. “The discipline to keep going is so required here,” he says. “I’m making little inroads, and we’ll keep going.”