They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (7 page)
Authors: Reynold Levy
That car had 20,000 miles on it the year of his death. When it was finally retired, at eighteen years of age, it approached 165,000 miles. And whenever I drove that Mercury, we communed, my father and I. His presence was palpable. That compensated a lot for the ribbing I received when driving his monstrously oversized, ten-mile-a-gallon relic through New York City streets.
People have asked me what was best about being the president of Lincoln Center. I replied, as you would expect of any self-respecting New Yorker, “parking.” The job came with its own space. Who could ask for anything more?
My hours of work at Lincoln Center were long. I often left Riverdale, about four miles north of the George Washington Bridge, bordering on the Hudson River, at 6:00 a.m. or earlier. At that hour, it took me only twenty-five minutes, door to door, to arrive at my office. I’d breeze down the Henry Hudson Parkway and connect to Riverside Drive, taking it to 96th Street, where I would hang a left, then a right onto West End Avenue. Even at that early hour, I’d see a substantial number of pedestrians, fifteen or twenty at least, standing in front of their co-ops, condominiums, and rental apartments, trying, often in vain, to hail a cab. West End Avenue was not a place taxis frequented, for reasons I never understood, because demand for them always seemed to exceed supply.
With the passing weeks, I began to notice that people on the street seemed to be waving at vehicles behind me. I looked in the rearview mirror but saw nothing. I checked my lights to see if I had left the brights on, and my seat belt to see if the door had closed with the belt caught in it, or whether the door itself was slammed shut.
One morning, in a light rain, while stopped for a red light at 87th and West End Avenue, I saw a man in his fifties waving right at me. He ran across the street and knocked on my window. I opened it warily. What, he wished to know, would I charge him for a “quick hop” to 48th Street and First Avenue?
It finally occurred to me that I was being hailed as a driver of a gypsy cab, one of New York City’s many illegal vehicles, always large American sedans. Their drivers cruise the streets for fares at all hours, when Yellow Cabs are scarce and when many customers find radio cabs difficult to reserve or unaffordable.
Parents adversely affected by the Great Depression often encouraged their daughters to learn to type. Having acquired that skill, should unemployment ever loom, they would have a job to fall back on. My dad would have loved knowing that he had supplied me with an employment safety net. Should Lincoln Center not work out, I could do worse than cruise West End Avenue for readily available customers each weekday morning. To 48th Street and First, I’d charge $50.00. After all, that’s way across town. It was raining, which by rights should carry a premium. And gypsy cab drivers are rarely tipped. It’s best to build a gratuity into your base charge.
One Sunday morning, soon after I was appointed and before I was given a red plaque with my parking space, number 39, imprinted on it to put on my dashboard, I approached the entrance to the Lincoln Center parking lot where senior executives pull in.
A security guard I hadn’t yet met stopped the car and asked for identification. I told him I was the new president of Lincoln Center. He looked very confused. Stepping back and taking in a full view of my (Dad’s) car, he mentioned that Gordon Davis, my predecessor, drove a new convertible Audi. And Nat Leventhal, who held the job for seventeen years, always drove a new Lexus. The guard’s look of consternation begged for an explanation, but I was speechless.
Suddenly his confusion turned to a smile. Ushering me into the garage with a sweeping hand gesture, he said, “I know. Your other car. The one you drive every day. It must be getting a tune-up and some repairs.”
In this way, I learned early on that even a beat-up old Mercury Marquis could find its proper place at Lincoln Center.
And if it could, perhaps I could as well.
Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
—JUDY GARLAND,
The Wizard of Oz,
1939
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ny new CEO must spend time becoming acquainted with the dynamics of the organization he or she is asked to lead. I believe strongly that leadership is a collective endeavor. It is well observed that there is no “I” in the word team. Winning the trust and confidence of my staff colleagues and the trustees at whose pleasure I served was therefore fundamental.
There were three other priorities to attend to in the early months of my tenure as president of Lincoln Center.
First, its governance structure had to be fixed. Lincoln Center consisted of twelve world-class, independent artistic and educational organizations, called constituents, and the parent body. Each possessed its own board of directors, mission, workforce, annual budget, balance sheet, and distinctive methods of operating. Each focused relentlessly on achieving excellence in its art form. Such close attention to perfecting craft works well. It explains why Lincoln Center’s family of cultural organizations is world renowned for producing and presenting the highest quality of performing art and for unsurpassed teaching of the next generation of artists.
The common challenge was identifying ways and means for these proud organizations to work together to achieve objectives beneficial
to all. Most often, the individual parts function admirably. But taking fullest advantage of the scope, scale, proximity, and potential synergy of the whole remains a tantalizing and arduous challenge. Collective action requires consensus. At Lincoln Center, there is no central command and control headquarters. The more consequential the issue, the more onerous the task of fashioning agreement.
Second, the economic model that drove Lincoln Center’s operations was simply not adequate for the twenty-first century. Highly dependent on both ticket revenue and annual donations, it needed an overhaul. And the trustees and staff who could offer the necessary intellectual capital to help modernize it had to be identified, recruited, and mobilized.
Third, even as I engaged in my own extensive listening tour to replace suspicion with trust and confusion with clarity, I knew I needed to devise a formula that would jump-start redevelopment.
Assuming the mantle of professional leadership at Lincoln Center during a particularly tumultuous period was daunting. But hardly unique.
I invite those who think of Lincoln Center’s incapacity to direct all of its parts to work together as singularly dysfunctional to consider university presidents. They cope daily with school deans; individual faculty; alumni committed more to a component part of the enterprise than to the whole; and the athletic department, its coaches, and its adherents. The strength of a school’s divisions has its virtues, to be sure. But it also poses a major barrier to timely cooperation and collaboration.
The CEOs of many national organizations, such as the Audubon Society, Planned Parenthood, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the United Way of America, and the American Red Cross, must deal with extremely powerful chapters. Often they prefer to determine their own fate.
Hospital presidents are also beset by parochialism and a diffusion of authority. Ask them about the competition for space; research funds; and reward and recognition between and among the departments of, for example, medicine, surgery, radiology, and cancer.
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So Lincoln Center’s aptitude for dysfunction was not unique, even if it was often on public display.
The heavy and lonely burden of responsibility for overcoming the powerful forces of the status quo helps to explain why so many
candidates shy away from accepting tough jobs in forbidding environments. All large nonprofits, in the absence of energetic, purposeful, results-oriented leadership, run the risk of having the centrifugal forces that separate and divide overwhelm the centripetal forces that might pull the parts together. Is it any wonder, then, that nonprofit CEOs of sizable institutions complain of frustration and burnout, and that the average length of stay at the very top of these organizations is only six to seven years?
Changing institutions is hard work. Overcoming the status quo takes time. It requires persistence. The forces of resistance, both active and passive, are strong. Leaders must accumulate influence by understanding the interests of others, gaining their trust, and identifying the common ground that serves all parties. It is forming such a consensus that moves nonprofits (and corporations and nations) forward.
But my concern is not with the plight of the weary and wary CEO. It is with those who often get completely lost in day-to-day organizational struggles and preoccupations: the student, the patient, and the audience member.
The actual performance of private institutions intended to serve the public good often undermines their stated purpose. What in theory should fully deserve government subsidy and philanthropic support may be far less deserving in practice. Frequently, it is only the president and members of the board of directors who can insist on an institutional direction that draws its meaning from the outside in, not the inside out: student-centered learning, patient-centered care, audience-focused arts centers.
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F ACHIEVING FORWARD-LOOKING
consensus is the end, the means is the organization, how it is composed, and how it operates.
At Lincoln Center, one important, sweeping reform that could propel progress was to expand the board of trustees numbering forty-three in 2002 and ultimately increasing to eighty over the next decade. The reasons to do so were compelling. Our agenda was ambitious. We aspired to physically transform Lincoln Center. To fix all that was broken. To replace all that was beyond its useful life. To renovate and build new public spaces and artistic facilities. To remove Lincoln Center from its pedestal and have it embrace the cityscape all around it. Concurrently,
we wanted all of our programs to continue to flourish. And we hoped to attract many more first-generation Americans to enjoy what Lincoln Center has to offer.
Accomplishing all of this would not only be expensive, it would require expertise from many fields: real estate, finance, law, accounting, engineering, entertainment, hospitality, public relations, advertising, high-tech, and consulting, among others. By expanding the Lincoln Center Board of Directors/Trustees and raising expectations for giving funds and acquiring them from new recruits, we could take a giant step forward in successfully launching a capital campaign. Simultaneously, we could approach our trustees as partners in figuring out how best to address the dozens of challenges and opportunities generated by an enlarged and modernized campus.
By increasing the number of trustees, the board’s nominating and governance committee could also recruit leading hedge fund, private equity, and money-centered bank businessmen and women. We could spread our geographic targets to include trustees hailing from Miami, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as from abroad—Switzerland and China, for example. This expansion would raise the metabolism of the board, diversifying its ranks by age, profession, gender, ethnicity, and location. As a result, the board’s perspective on Lincoln Center would be fresh and holistic.
Of the forty-three trustees I inherited, fourteen were the designees of constituents. They generally viewed the trustee role as protecting and advancing the interests of the resident artistic organization each represented. The natural tendency of those trustees was not to think of Lincoln Center as a whole but about the piece each cared most about. As a consequence, an intense and vocal minority of the board were present to prevent any act that might adversely affect a particular constituent and to advance any act that could strengthen it.