Leadership

The July 15th deadline is rapidly approaching!
The Western Museums Association (WMA) is pleased to consider applications for the 2013 Charles Redd Annual Award honoring excellence for an exhibition that furthers the study and understanding of the American West. The award is funded by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University.
The competition recognizes outstanding...
The Western Museums Association, in coordination with the American Alliance of Museums, is kicking off a campaign to increase participation in the Pledge of Excellence. The Western Region, currently has 194 museums that have signed the Pledge.
 
The Pledge of Excellence, the first step in the Continuum of Excellence, is a  one-step, no-cost way to show that your museum is committed to standards...
By James G. Leventhal
Beastie Boy Adam "MCA" Yauch and The Venerable Palden Gyatso, Tibetan Freedom Concert, SF, CA 1996


So quotes my friend Jennifer Caleshu:
These times especially call for more than mere incrementalism. Let’s demand that our leaders get in over their heads, that they remain a little bit naive about what they’re getting into.
It's from WIRED.
And my friend Erin Potts wrote...
by Kristen Olson


"Cutting the pies and cakes at the barbeque dinner, Pie Town, New Mexico Fair"

Imagine a large room, filled with light, buzzing with electric conversations. You hear a shout from across the room, saying "come sit over here!" and someone is waving you over, pulling out a seat to a table. As you navigate through the crowded path of circular tables covered in pieces of paper, you...

Redmond J. Barnett, Secretary of WMA and Head of the Exhibits Dept., Washington State History Museum

By Redmond J. Barnett
Remember the old story about early machine language translation – where the English “out of sight, out of mind” became the Russian “invisible and insane”?
Something similar happened at the general session of the American Association of Museums annual meeting in Houston. ...

MAP Your Way to Excellence
"Our institution participated in the MAP program in 1987 and the experience put us on the road from a small historical society to the regional history museum we are today. At that time we were an institution of 3 full time staff, and a very small budget-less than $200,000.  Today-23 years later-the institution has a staff of 35, and is a major regional museum in...
By Arthur H. Wolf
Several years ago it occurred to me that there might be fewer years ahead than there had been behind me, and I decided to plan for how I might pay back some institutions and organizations that had been formative, instructive, and beneficial to me over the past 35 years or so. In our household we have always supported annual contributions and memberships to museums, food banks,...

Are you interested in strengthening your museum’s governance practices, or want to know about the current governance standards? Do you want help making sense of the new governance questions on the Tax Form 990?
Then, come to WMA Portland session H1: Current Issues in Non-Profit Museum Governance: The Redesigned Tax Form 990, Wednesday from 11:00am – 12:15pm in the Hawthorne Room.
Jim...
Hi! I'm Elizabeth Merritt, your designated museum futurist for the WMA conference in Portland this year. My assignment is to help you imagine many plausible futures that could face museums in coming decades. What are my secret weapons? Well, I won't reveal them all, but one is a Museum Forecasting Tarot Deck which will be deployed in my session on "Forecasting the Future of Museum Sustainability...
By James G. Leventhal
Not too long ago, museums didn't have email. Or websites. Or e-blasts. We've simply incorporated these new technologies as they've arrived. In many cases they've improved our work and made our professional lives easier. Really, it's not even that long ago that we didn't use direct mail and I remember when it was a question as to whether we'd accept credit card donations.  ...

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