The Creative Entrepreneur



book review_TAM

The Artful Manager
Book Review by Andrew Taylor | The Creative Entrepreneur
www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/

Business planning meets mixed-media

Business planning books are generally linear things, stepping you through the motions of starting or extending a business from insight to implementation. But we all know that reality is not like that, particularly in artistic enterprise. When artists and creative individuals consider starting their own business or profit-generating activity, vision, business, purpose, life, passion, and self-expression are all part of the mix.

Which is why I appreciate Lisa Sonora Beam's book on the subject of business planning for artists and creative individuals: The Creative Entrepreneur. While it contains many of the same core elements as any business planning book -- define your business, carve your niche, know your customer, know yourself, and so on -- it brings a truly hands-on approach to exploring those deep issues in non-linear ways.

Beam offers a visual journaling approach to engaging goals, strategies, tactics and barriers -- posing questions to be answered not just in your head or in spreadsheets, but on paper, with clippings, paints, markers, pens, scraps, and photos. And each essential question gets multiple treatments, as you go back to your original thoughts and highlight the essential bits with more layers of context.

The result is unique to business planning, and a uniquely beautiful book. If you think visually, learn with your hands, and bristle against traditional tomes on business, consider this alternative. I've already grabbed my crayons.

Link to review on artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/:  http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/main/business-planning-meets-mixed-.php

Andrew Taylor is Director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration, an MBA degree program and research center in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. An author, lecturer, and researcher on a broad range of arts management issues, Andrew specializes in business model development for cultural initiatives and the impact of communications technology on the arts.

As founder and president of arts/axis consulting--a communications and management consultancy--he has worked with the International Society for the Performing Arts, American Ballet Theatre, StreamingCulture, the Center for Arts and Culture, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the League of Historic American Theatres, among others. He helped develop the pro forma and operating plan for Madison, Wisconsin's $205-million downtown arts district, and led the business model development team for a proposed Digital Dance Library initiative.

Andrew is currently the president of the Association of Arts Administration Educators (an international association of degree-granting programs in arts and cultural management, research, and policy), and is a consulting editor for The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society. He received his master's in Arts Administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


Like a good Wisconsin citizen, he enjoys cheese.


You can find out more about Andrew, and download some of his longer writing, on his Bolz Center home page.