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When Being Wrong Feels So Right
Two weeks ago this morning, I was sitting just outside the Java Cow in Park City, Utah sipping a latte and reading The New York Times. It was a gorgeous sunny morning, I was comfortably ensconced at a sidewalk table. When I glanced up at the mountainside, I noticed that the quaking aspen trees were just beginning to don their Autumn colors. It was glorious. I wondered how life could get any better.
Then it did.
I flipped the Arts Section over and right below the fold I saw a big, color photo of Pittsfield, Massachusett's Colonial Theatre. I admit it. I couldn't believe my eyes.
Somehow, all the magnificent possibilities that this little theatre in the Berkshires represents wiggled and wormed their way onto the pages of the Gray Lady. To say it was a "Wow" moment for me is an understatement. I was convinced it would never happen, but it did.
More importantly, it was deserved. At a time when performing arts centers are opening all over the country, to make the cover of the Times is no small feat - especially for a restoration project in an old industrial town in Western Massachusetts where there are arts organizations behind every tree and under every rock.
I'm ahead of myself, so let me give you a little history and background:
We spent the better part of last year working in Pittsfield with the Colonial's staff and Board. Thanks to Halsey and Alice North's recommendation, we were engaged to help the Colonial identify how and where it might develop and find its audience. The organization wanted to make sure that it made the most of its opportunities when it finally opened its doors. When we finished the first engagement, we were re-engaged to help develop a brand, communications, and audience development strategy.
Pittsfield is the largest town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, a county that is renown for being the nation's premiere arts and culture destination. Pittsfield is little more than a stone's throw from Tanglewood. In a half-hour driving radius, it's possible to encounter a hundred or more cultural destinations, ranging from Jacob's Pillow to Mass MOCA to Barrington Stage to Shakespeare and Company.
As I got to know the Berkshires - and the engagement forced me to get to know the area very well - I wondered how in the world such a large, high-quality critical mass of cultural enterprises existed in such a small area? The area's year-round population base is only 135,000 souls! I subsequently learned that cultural tourism fuels - to a very great extent - the Berkshires' economy.
It follows, then, that arts and culture are very important to the area. As important as they are, however, each of the organizations must perform at a high level. And they do. People who are used to hearing the Boston Symphony Orchestra one night won't accept a lackluster experience the next. In short: it's a fast track and everybody's doing their best.
I asked myself many times, "How will the Colonial compete against such an august, well-established competitive set of cultural organizations?" It's not as if they were counting on meeting a set of unfulfilled needs. In the Berkshires, there are plenty of places that audiences can get their arts "fix."
As if competing in the Berkshires wouldn't be hard enough for any arts organization, the Colonial Theatre had other obstacles to overcome, one of which is its hometown setting.
Unlike Lenox - a village so exquisite, graceful, dignified, and precious as to make it seem like angels groom the grass at midnight, Pittsfield is an old blue-collar, industrial town with more than its fair share of gritty hardluck stories, the most heart-breaking of which was the loss of a large General Electric presence.
When GE shut its Pittsfield plants down, boom went to bust and the city shrunk from a high of 57,000 people to approximately 46,000. It was like some cranky New England God forced Pittsfield to live out George's nightmarish sequence from "It's a Wonderful Life."
Make no mistake about this, however; Pittsfield is a town with heart. It's a town with moxie and it's a town where the leadership - from the Colonial's Board of Directors to Major Jimmy Ruberto - is willing to be unreasonable with itself.
Knowing what I know about him, I'd vote for Jimmy Ruberto for President. Here's a guy who actually designated a million bucks of public redevelopment money for the Colonial, despite knowing that he'd be roasted on a slow spit over a coke fire.
He wanted to jump-start the town's economic renewal, and it's happening. Restaurants are opening. Real estate is selling. Condos are being developed downtown. Go figure. Leadership does indeed matter.
There are so many amazing leadership stories associated with the Colonial's restoration that it boggles my mind. I don't know how to write about them all, especially in this blog context.
There is a Board of Directors who refused to give up on an unreasonable dream, despite a struggling economy, public skepticism, media scrutiny, and fundraising disappointments.
When the project suffered the loss of its Executive Director and Board Chair at a crucial time in the project's construction and financing phases, another board member - Sharon Harrison - stepped up, put her life on hold, and demonstrated amazing savvy and grace in her role as the Colonial's Interim Executive Director.
Former banker Gary Scarafoni came out of retirement and assumed the Chairman's role at a time when many people thought the whole project was going to implode. He put his name, his reputation, and his money on the line for the project and did no little pushing for others in town to do the same.
Along with many other construction management and planning tasks, Pittsfield lawyer Mike McDonald cobbled together financing strategies that leveraged every fundraised dollar - and he did it all pro bono.
And lest anyone think that leadership happens only among volunteers, Becky Brighenti, the Colonial's marketing director worked harder and smarter than many of her professional peers who have a decade or two more experience. As resilient as they come, Becky built the marketing airplane while she was flying it, and she did her work without letting the tension and occasional acrimony get to her.
Backing her up was Greylock Federal Credit Union's Marketing Vice President John Bissell - yet another Colonial Board Member whose capacity for work and focus seemed inexhaustible.
When you do brand consulting work, you pray that you have someone on the client side who really understands marketing and public relations strategy. You need their championship and the trust that their peers afford to a fellow board member that they won't easily give to a consultant. John was the answer to our prayers and a big part of why our engagement went as well as it did.
People see these projects and they think that it somehow magically comes together. "How could such a good idea not happen?" Well, if the people I've just mentioned didn't do their part, the "good idea" likely would lie in the good-idea cemetery along with zillions of others.
Truth is that it takes a lot of people and a lot of sweat to bring these projects to fruition. Pittsfield has these people. It's nothing short of inspiring to me.
In Pittsfield, gumption is not in short supply. Folks like Becky Smith - the redoubtable Thaddeus Clapp House Inn Keeper - believed all along that the Colonial would make The New York Times. Over breakfast, Becky insisted more than once that the Colonial would be written up in the Times. I was so worn down by her stubborn insistence that it would happen that I finally just kept my mouth shut. I thought to myself, "With everything going on around the country in the arts, why is the Times going to pay any attention at all to some little project in New England? It ain't gonna happen."
Hell, Becky Smith wound up making it happen. When New York Times reporter Hubert Herring stayed at her Inn, she marched his ink-stained derriere over to see the place and the rest is history.
I've never been happier to be wrong.
Posted on September 12, 2006 01:10 PM | Permalink
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Comments
This may be the only time I ever get to say this to you... congratulations on being wrong.