The art of management
Guardian Work
Published on Saturday May 19, 2007
Arts and Books | Business | Careers | Education | Features | Media
The MBA is no longer just for bankers – the new media boom is fuelling a demand for leadership skills in the creative sector. Chris Alden reports.
Which side are you on? That has typically been the question for graduates with both creative and analytical skills. Do you become a creative – an artist, writer or media type, destined to be seen as a flouncy character with little financial sense? Or do you become commercial – an analyst, marketer or money manager, destined to work absurd hours and see nothing but pound signs when you close your eyes?
If the choice seems difficult to make, welcome to the world of those who straddle creativity and enterprise, but who find it difficult to find postgraduate qualifications that reflect their mix of skills.
Recently, however, thanks partly to the rise of new media, there has been more respect for the skills of managing a creative enterprise. In 2005 the Cox review of creativity in business recommended that universities do more to provide courses mixing management, technology and the creative arts.
Now universities are responding, by providing “creative MBAs” – specialist courses aimed at providing management skills to people in the creative sectors. “You need to have your ideas,” says Clare Thomas, course leader on the arts management MBA at Trinity College Carmarthen, “and you need to be able to engage with the world, to be able to sell them and promote them.”
Jon Wardle, who helped design the media MBA at the University of Bournemouth, says people in the media sector also benefit from improving management skills. “Most of the people who come through to a management level in media companies get through because of their creative ability – so our job is to help them move from being a creative leader to being a leader of things like HR and corporate strategy as well,” he says.
At the moment, UK universities offer “creative-only” MBAs on a part-time basis only. They include Bournemouth’s media MBA, which involves distance learning plus classes in London; Cass Business School’s two-year part-time MBA in the business of film; and the part-time MBA offered by Trinity, which plans to go full-time from next year. By offering a close focus on issues facing the creative industries, the courses mean greater relevance for students.
“When we’re talking about corporate strategy, we won’t talk about ICI; we’ll talk about Google and ITV,” says Wardle. Richard Kingsbury, channel head at UKTV Drama, who has a background in accounting and marketing at Unilever, says the strategy module at Bournemouth has been useful. “We’re called upon to write strategies which we present to the CEO, and to be able to do that confidently makes a lot of difference,” he says.
At Trinity, meanwhile, Thomas says a business brain is just as vital in the arts. “It’s not an airy-fairy environment, you’ve got to be accountable.” The Trinity MBA includes modules in “culturepreneurship” – comparing the qualities of artists and entrepreneurs – plus the business of creativity and how to find funding.
Another option for those seeking a creative element to their MBA is to do a traditional, full-time MBA which has an elective option in a creative field. These include the Judge Business School at Cambridge, which includes a “cultural management” elective, and the Said Business School at Oxford, where the media management programme offers an MBA elective in “media strategies for a networked world”.
Dr Allegre Hadida, who teaches the cultural management option at Judge, says the elective is popular even among those who don’t take the course as a credit – and says traditional business can learn as much from the creative sectors as the other way around.
“The entrepreneur and the artist share this fundamental craving to differentiate their offering to the rest of the world, through uniqueness, through original designs and ideas – through creativity,” she explains.
Students agree an MBA is an opportunity to take time out from the short-term pressures of management. “Your day-to-day life is almost like ER,” says Kingsbury. “You’re rushing around solving stuff, and your diary is like a barcode – having something like this forces you to take time out, think more deeply and learn new things.”
From choir stall to consultancy
It was 24 years ago when Andrea Encinas, then aged 25, started work as an arts manager running the London Community Gospel Choir from a back room. “The telephone was ringing, people wanted to book us,” she says. “So I did the organising. We needed fundraising, we needed publicity – I educated myself to get the skills needed.”
Now Encinas, founder and arts director of British Gospel Arts, which provides gospel music courses and events in Britain and abroad – travels every Tuesday from London to south Wales for the arts management MBA at Trinity College, Carmarthen.
While studying the “culturepreneurship” module, she found she shared characteristics of a successful entrepreneur. “I had never put the title entrepreneur to myself, but there it was in black and white: strong vision, passion, never taking no for an answer, finding ways round obstacles, self-belief.”
Encinas, who arrived in Britain from Trinidad aged 18, is also a poet – and hopes to establish herself internationally as an arts consultant. “I want to set up a Caribbean arts foundation,” she says. “A lot of traditional cultures of the Caribbean, the old songs, the stories, handed down from generations – the young people don’t know them,” she says.
“I’d like to go home to with my skills and set up arts projects,” she says. “They have the same issues there we are having here with young people.
“The MBA is a chance for me to validate what I do, consolidate my learning, fill in the gaps, share other people’s experience about art in their world – and to excite myself again.”
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