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"? 

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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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Smaller IS Better

So here's my two-part solution to solve the ever continuing museum money/funding crisis:

1) Stop building gigantic new museums.

2) Fund small "risky" projects instead of "safe" big projects.

Most big museums were unsustainable before the current "financial crisis" and even more so now. Not to mention that many gigundo museums are filled with pockets of mediocrity or plain lousiness that gets ignored or excused or even overlooked because there are other flashier, newer segments of the rest of their elephantine museum building complex.

So why do people keep building giant museums? Sheer ego and "edifice complex" as far as I can tell. It's a lot sexier to say you're building the "world's biggest and best museum" than to actually set up the infrastructure to ensure a continually growing and evolving institution that makes best use of both staff and community resources.

If you really want to see Museum 2.0/3.0/whatever happen, then museum workers and museum organizations should advocate for more, but smaller, museums spread throughout communities like public libraries --- heck why not have every museum (that's not already doing so) partner with a local library or community center to work on exhibits and programs together?

Now, funding.

Here's a modest proposal for NSF, IMLS, NEH and the rest of the governmental alphabet soup of funding agencies: alternate every year between funding "big" projects and "little" projects.

This would have the benefit of breaking the cycle of perpetually funding "The Usual Suspects" of the same batch of museums/designers/evaluators who get funded every grant cycle.
Which would be fine, if the "The Usual Suspects" were turning out wonderful field-changing exhibitions. But mostly the funding process has turned into a gravy train for folks doing the same sort of mediocre exhibitions over and over again.

Why couldn't NSF, for example, deliberately fund 15-20 large exhibition projects one cycle, then 50-60 small exhibition projects the next?

I think part of this big vs. small dichotomy is also an issue of exposure. There are many amazing, innovative museums and museum workers doing their thing in remote or smaller outposts, so they don't get recognized in the traditional incestuous museum conference/funding world.

So, I'm going to do my part to help change that exposure thing, and I need your help. Do you know of some cool projects happening at smaller "non-famous" museums, or do you know an up-and-coming whiz kid who hasn't been able to find a real full-time with benefits job in the museum business yet?

Send me an email at info@orselli.net so I can start giving these small places and some NOT the usual suspects some publicity and the attention they deserve.


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Small Giants (Is Smaller Better? Part 2)

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 subtitle of the book suggests, companies featured in the book (such as Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe companies, Clif Bar, and Anchor Steam Breweries) have come to the conclusion that simply making a business larger is not nearly as important as keeping 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 related to high quality not being directly related to business size by a variety of 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 as a result of 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 often wonder if they couldn't accomplish increased 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"?