The Long View by Brian Fetherstonhaugh

Author:Brian Fetherstonhaugh [Fetherstonhaugh, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781682302927
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2016-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

PROFILE:

From Baryshnikov to Boardroom

Name: Rachel S. Moore

Age: 50

Role: Former CEO of the American Ballet Theatre, and now president & CEO of The Music Center, Los Angeles

Sweet Spot: The arts meets business

Rachel was born in Davis, California to parents who were both economists. An aspiring professional ballet dancer in her teens, Rachel’s first career crossroads arose at age eighteen. The prestigious American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York City invited her to dance under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov. Should she go on to college in California, or become a professional dancer in far-away New York? Some of the people back home worried. “New York is too scary. You are doomed.”

Rachel chose dance, Baryshnikov, and the ABT.

Rachel’s early career as a ballerina flourished until age twenty-four, when she severely injured her ankle. Faced with the prospect of only being able to perform at 95 percent capacity and in constant pain, Rachel knew she needed to leave the ballerina life for something new. But what? Since she was twenty-four, most traditional top colleges would not accept her. Brown University was more open than most and offered her a scholarship in Philosophy. Not everybody back home thought it was a great idea. When Rachel graduated, she knew she still wanted to do something to help the arts—maybe become a lawyer. But a lawyer friend gave her some good advice: “If you really want to have impact on artists and the arts, help them with the business side. Work with arts organizations so they’re running as good businesses and allowing artists to do their work.”

So Rachel applied to business schools and earned her Masters in arts administration from Columbia University. For the next decade, Rachel built her early career as an arts administrator in Washington, DC and New England. To pay her dues, she helped mayors integrate the arts into their communities, ran a small ballet company, taught at a classical music school for children of color and worked at the Boston Ballet. Along the way, Rachel learned some tough lessons, like the time she needed to tell her vendors that the payments wouldn’t just be a little late—the organization had absolutely no money. “Experiences like that teach you who you are.” One of her saddest career lessons came during a nasty HR dispute between a board member and staff. “The board didn’t do the right thing. I lost faith, and had to move on.”

Rachel’s career came full circle when American Ballet Theatre, where she had debuted as a professional ballerina almost twenty years earlier, approached her as a candidate to become their executive director. The ABT job was big, prestigious, and demanding. The budget was $45 million, the staff numbered seven hundred, and the organization was facing some serious challenges. Rachel was a dark horse candidate. She was the youngest candidate, and the ABT had never hired a woman or a former dancer into the top job. She won the role and spent the next eleven and a half years stabilizing and building the ABT.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.