Improve your museum productivity with advice from business, hollywood and history

In early blogs I have advocated an inactive approach to management, but that is a specific strategy that I believe is helpful to museums, not to capitalism in general. Sadly it appears that the worldwide influence of my blog and the inevitable misinterpretation of my message has had its consequences for commercial productivity in general. In the USA their Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported a full point drop in productivity for the first quarter of 2015*.

We all have distractions as Conservative MP Nigel Mills highlighted by being spotted playing Candy Crush during a Parliamentary Commons Committee debate at the end of last year. ** All motivation is internal. We can have bosses shouting at us, customers complaining, families disowning us and police investigating your museum accounts, but all that is meaningless unless you find the motivation within yourself to get on with things.

Fortunately for us Harold Bloom the Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University compiled a brief list of what he called “thought productivity nuggets” from history.

1. “Think not long, but do; do not long, but think.” --Confucius

2. “There is nothing wrong with complaining about work; but do the work first, and then the complaints will be all the more worthy to be heeded.” --Socrates

3. “Never hitch a pig to a plough or expect an ox to provide bacon.” --Virgil


Confucius and Socrates are clearly sensible productive men. Virgil was clearly an idiot and I will never look at his 'Aeneid' again in the same light.


In a more modern context Ofir Sahar is the chief digital strategist of Cogniview, (apparently the company converts PDF files to Excel - who would have thought that as a job 30 years ago). He has also collected productivity quotes from the less intellectual figures that show-biz provides:

4. “You may catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but you’ll get them to work harder if you use a flyswatter.” --Jerry Lewis

5. “Measure twice; cut once.” --Harrison Ford

6. “Measure results, not hours.” --Emma Thompson


It seems Jerry Lewis deserved his 'hard task master' reputation, Mr. Ford is betraying his background as a carpenter and/or his wooden acting technique, whereas Emma Thompson's attitude explains the large budgets needed to make feature films.

Now a couple of heavyweights, Tim Cook is CEO of Apple and the young tyro Donald Trump is now a prospective US President.

7. “The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.” --Tim Cook

8. “I use my brain as a playground, not as a calendar.” --Donald Trump (does that explain his hairstyle?)

Apparently Cook will not hold a staff meeting longer than 10 minutes (it takes that long to argue over the biscuits in my organisation) and Donald Trump doesn't spend more than 10 minutes combing his wig which is why they are both very productive individuals.


So what have we learnt from all this? How can I be more productive? Well you can you can think about complaining whilst eating a curiously tasting bacon butty - that's how the ancients did it apparently. Or you can take forever whilst beating people with a stick, which is the Hollywood method. Or never spend more than 10 minutes doing anything to be more productive in business. The choice is yours.



*http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity - it has subsequently recovered so I might not be to blame after all.

**http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/6162232/VIDEO-Tory-MP-Nigel-Mills-caught-playing-Candy-Crush-during-key-Commons-meeting.html

Whither collections?

As I constantly strive to maintain the relevance of the Museum of Unreason to the modern world I regularly muse on the collection taking up the space in our stores, corridors, basement, cupboards, office desks and my garage. Occasionally, my mind drifts towards what a local museum collection will consist of in 50 years time?

Visitors of a certain age coo over our 7" vinyl records, 'Dandy' comics and Dungeons and Dragons games (or is that just me?). Does anyone else have dreams of entering a room filled orange and brown wallpaper to the sound of Mud's 'Tiger Feet' whilst wearing polyester slacks? Perhaps that is my equivalent of a near death experience of heaven. Sadly as my previous blog on religious observance confirmed there is a special place of torment waiting for me.

"But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, museum managers and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” (Revelations 21:8 ish)

Anyway, will the next generation of children coo over a Spotify screenshot, an RSS feed url and a cyberspace fantasy avatar? It is getting to the stage when the present is increasingly object free, increasingly globalised, increasingly generic. We are gradually freeing ourselves from material culture. Our social culture is becoming increasingly 'immaterial' in the many senses that that word conveys.

What will the role be of the local history museum in Britain now that we drive Japanese or German cars, eat in American fast food 'restaurants' and the rest of the things that define our existence are made in China and those which aren't are so niche they cannot be legitimately collected for their universality.

How do we depict the call centre service industry that employs 25% of the working population of Unreason? Even the Unreason football team which plies its trade in the Midland Olympian League Division Three has a Swedish manager called Sven and has had a recent influx of players from Syria who coincidentally appeared the day after my annual lorry delivery of cheap booze from Calais.

Two thirds of our ground floor space is given over to storing our collections at the moment, in the future will all I need is an iPad?

In 2000 the philosopher Hilde Hein wrote,

"Like most contemporary institutions, museums have descended from the heaven of authoritative certainty to inhabit the flatlands of doubt. That move could have inspired venturesome individuality and explorative novelty; in most instances, however, doubt has led to cautious self-censorship and timid understatement. It has brought progressively more uniformity as museums hedge their bets by covering all possibilities. The more they celebrate diversity, the more indiscernible museums have grown from one another and from other public institutions; the more emphasis they place on professionalism, the more standardized their practice becomes."

As I tweeted back in May,

"Has the drive to increase audiences led museums to become the cultural equivalent of a Big Mac and fries?”

What is the answer? If the headlong charge towards diversity and professionalism has led to uniformity and  standardisation. Must I repeat my message of proactive inactivity that I proposed in my Museums Association Conference keynote speech (see blog posting 'Impassioned Plea' from Feb 2013), or revise my manifesto towards virtual activity.

If I make a start by coming into work less and just having a picture of the museum in my head where I work, that might help. But a revision of the museum's collecting policy is needed.

For any donation the first question must be, 'is it local?' - preferably said in as threatening a League of Gentlemen way as possible.

Reject

• Anything created outside of Earth (no meteorites, no religious artefacts)
• Anything made outside of Europe (China may reach the GDP per head of the USA within the next 300 years, that is a blink of an eye in museum terms - it is not a museum's job to help them get there any quicker)
• Anything made outside UK (anything relating to democracy, theatre, the rule of law etc. - all nasty foreign imports)
• Anything made outside of the Unreason hinterland (the hinterland is defined as a circle of 400 yards around the post box)
• Anything touchable (If it is real reject it on the grounds of limited space, if it exists as a sequence of computer code accept it without question)
• Everything else

Accept

• money
• free help
• sympathy

In fact I'm thinking of  revising the museum website headline to;

Don't touch the things, this is a local museum for local people, there's nothing for you here.

This Be The Museum Verse - warning EXPLICIT

The English poet Philip Larkin famously turned down an O.B.E. in 1961 and the position of Poet Laureate in 1984 following the Marxist theory (Groucho not Karl) to refuse any club that would have him as a member. 

What is much less well known is, in 1955, he also turned down the role Principal Librarian at the British Museum (the post was renamed 'director' following the separation of the British Museum from the British Library in 1973) to join the University of Hull library. 

He never explained why, although one of his most famous poems 'This Be The Verse', gives a hint. It is possible that the deeply jaundiced view he had of his parents may have been veiled criticisms of the destructive establishment ideology that museums present and represent.

This re-reading is highly illuminating. When he described his father as 'nihilistically disillusioned in middle age' we can easily see the quote as a metaphor for the British museum sector as a whole. He described his mother as a "...kind of defective mechanism...Her ideal is 'to collapse' and to be taken care of" - that could be the Museums Association definition of a 21st Century British museum. 

Thus I have made it my duty to bring out the truth about museums in the famous poem. I take as inspiration the infamous credit of the 1966 film version of The Taming of the Shrew 'By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor'

This Be The Verse*

by Philip Larkin with additional words by Frank Rason

They fuck museums up, your museum managers. 

They may not mean to, but they do. 

They fill exhibitions with the faults they learnt 

And add some extra, just for you. 

But they were fucked up in their turn 

By curators in old-style hats and coats, 

Who half the time were soppy-stern 

And half at one another's throats. 

Museums hand on misery to man. 

It deepens like a coastal shelf. 

Visit them as little as you can, 

And don't work in museums yourself.

* The original is available for you to read at http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm

Can a museum follow strict religious regime?

Faithful reader I am back from a summer sojourn touring around Engalnd's motor museums on my bike. I meditated deeply while pedalling to Beaulieu. Certainly I began to understand the Buddha's philosophy that all life is suffering. Even a new padded saddle purchased from Halford's on the M3 at Winchester failed to ease my pain. Are saddle sores a barrier to achieving Nirvana? Undaunted, in true Buddhist fashion I do cherish the (museum) world and love it without limit, so a sore bottom is a small price to pay for the knowledge that I will be reborn as an object in one of the world's great museums, I'm not being picky, but the Smithsonian will do nicely.

These spiritual meanderings have led me to think I should review our museum practice based on religious doctrines. Given that my museum operates within a Judeo-Christian culture I should stop following the pathway of Buddhism by trying to make all museum visitors suffer. But can the wisdom of the Bible help? I only quote from the King James version which is the greatest, best and only version worthy of God's true wisdom. I would recommend a quick perusal of the book of Leviticus for some eye watering religious requirements, but I will start more gently with St. Paul's first epistle to Timothy in Ephesus.

1. Dress code (1 Timothy 2:9)
"...that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;"

Not really a problem, but it is tempting to try and confiscate the pearls from the necks of some of our regular visitors which might help balance the budget. 

also (Leviticus 19:19)

"...neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee."

Oh dear, many of my suits are consigned to the dustbin as well.

2. Canteen menu (Leviticus 11:4 & 11:29)

"...shall ye not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you."

"These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind,"

I have no problem taking camels and mice off the cafe menu, although foregoing the occasional weasel butty may be more of a hardship.

3. Personal Appearance (Leviticus 19:28)

"Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you:"

Sadly I'm going to have to let our 16 year old work experience girl, Wendy, go as her penchant for 'body art' condemns her to hell. A quick trip to get the likeness of Simon Schama removed from my left buttock is already pencilled in the diary.

4. Remuneration (Proverbs 23:4)

"Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom."

This is not usually a problem in the museum world, but a swift cut of volunteer expenses should suffice. I interpret, 'cease from thine own wisdom' as 'don't think about it too much', which will be my retort when they complain.

5. School Visits (Psalms 137:9)

"Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."

I can but dream.

6. Sunday opening (Exodus 31:15)

"...whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death."

That puts an end to that argument 

7. Staff Room Manners (Ephesians 5:4)

"Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks."

That should cut down the ribald conversation from my blue-rinse volunteers at tea breaks

8. Respect for senior staff (Leviticus 19:32) 

"Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man,"

It is already on the noticeboard in the staff room. 

9. New interpretation strategy? (Leviticus 19:16)

"Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people:"

Remove all object labels and interpretation panels and see what happens?

10. Homosexuality is OK in a museum (Levitics 18:22)

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

Given the prevailing view to interpret the bible literally, we have general policy that there should be no lying down in our display areas. That means no sleepovers in the galleries which is a bit of a shame, but it does mean that everyone is welcome in our museum.

You may think I have selected randomly from the bible and removed the context of the quotations (just like a museum collection) and can be open to criticism. 

Such criticisms are irrelevant as they will confirm that I am already on the express train to eternal damnation and that many of you are on the train with me, so let's enjoy living life and the myriad of experiences that the world has to offer; the alternative is less attractive:

"Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword." (Deuteronomy 13:15)

 God help us all.