Can a Museum Become a "Small Giant"?
In the excellent book Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, author Bo Burlingham contends that there is more to "growing" a business than getting bigger (and getting bigger quickly!)
As the book's subtitle suggests, companies featured in the book (such as Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe companies, Clif Bar, and Anchor Steam Breweries) have concluded that simply making a business larger is not nearly as important as maintaining high standards and not confusing one goal for the other.
One interesting aspect of Small Giants is that the different companies came to their conclusions about quality and size by various paths. Some companies and founders/directors/employees seem to have always had an intuitive sense of the mission of their particular business and were willing to pass up growth if that meant sacrificing their original principles. Other people running companies that grew too fast or grew for the wrong reasons only came to embrace "quality over quantity" after suffering personal and business disasters due to growth for growth's sake.
I often think of this constant tug of war as it relates to museum expansion projects.
Sometimes, upon hearing of a campaign to make an existing museum "bigger and better," I wonder if they couldn't increase visitation and income by "just" becoming better. Admittedly, that is hard and incremental work that doesn't lend itself to sexy capital campaigns.
What do you think?
What are some of your favorite museum examples of "small giants"?
Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!
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