Sunday, April 25, 2010

“Pulling the Reins (a Bit) on Hefty Salaries for ... - New York Times” plus 3 more

“Pulling the Reins (a Bit) on Hefty Salaries for ... - New York Times” plus 3 more

Pulling the Reins (a Bit) on Hefty Salaries for ... - New York Times

Posted: 25 Apr 2010 04:35 PM PDT

For years chief executives at many major cultural organizations in New York City enjoyed salary growth that was buoyed by a booming economy and rivaled that seen in corporate America. Compensation increases of 25 percent to 50 percent over five years were not unusual, and in some cases packages nearly doubled.

Reynold Levy's annual compensation to run Lincoln Center topped $1 million. Carnegie Hall began paying Clive Gillinson more than $800,000. Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, earned $2.7 million in the year that ended in June 2008, including several one-time bonuses and the cost of his apartment in the tower beside the museum.

But in the past 18 months these cultural executives and many others have frozen their salaries or taken cuts as arts budgets have shrunk. Mr. Lowry, for example, has twice agreed to salary reductions, and last year he received a package worth roughly half of what he took in during 2008.

"Most people in senior leadership roles at cultural institutions are at or below where they were in 2008," said Jennifer Bol, a consultant at Spencer Stuart, an executive search firm. "Growth in these compensation levels really stopped."

At the Metropolitan Opera the general manager, Peter Gelb, cut his $1.5 million salary twice starting in December 2008 in response to declining donations, ticket sales and endowment, and recognizing that the opera's budget would have to shrink across the board.

"An example had to be set," said Mr. Gelb, whose salary is now $1.3 million. "As the head of the institution, I felt it necessary that it begin with me."

The New York Times surveyed dozens of arts organizations in New York City and elsewhere in the country, reviewed their federal income tax returns, and interviewed many of their managers and several leading compensation experts to evaluate how executive salaries have fared in the tumult of the recent recession.

Those interviewed generally said any reductions were primarily a response to economic forces. But several noted the increased scrutiny these days of all nonprofit spending. The Internal Revenue Service guidelines are tighter this year; the charitable tax return was overhauled beginning with the 2009 filings, and arts organizations are increasingly being asked to validate the reasonableness of what their executives earn.

"We have made governance a much more formal topic," said Alan H. Fishman, chairman of the Brooklyn Academy Music, where the top people received modest raises last year. "The times demand it. Our board demands it."

Maxwell L. Anderson, a former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, writes in the March-April issue of Museum magazine that the new tax-return form for charitable groups "effectively stripped away the fig leaves of our cultural executives."

"It is a foregone conclusion that excessive compensation and first-class travel will need convincing explanations from here on out," writes Mr. Anderson, who now runs the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Certain events also have drawn public attention to cultural compensation in recent years. Lawrence M. Small departed the Smithsonian Institution in 2007 amid revelations that he had spent its money on chauffeured cars, private jets and catered meals. The year before, the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, Barry Munitz, resigned amid an investigation by the California attorney general's office into his travel and expenditures.

Even after the recent salary jumps, though, cultural executives still generally earn less than their counterparts in the private sector who manage equivalent-sized organizations. Top pay for cultural executives typically runs from $300,000 to $500,000, which can include benefits and allowances. Occasionally institutions will also pay bonuses tied to performance or longevity, like the $3.25 million given in 2006 to Philippe de Montebello to recognize his 30-year service to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Compensation for executives at cultural organizations has long been something of a delicate subject. (A quarter of the groups surveyed by The Times declined to provide current salary information.) On the one hand, the executives are often highly educated people running important institutions that face complex problems. But they are also at the helm of nonprofit organizations that depend on the generosity of others and, often, on government support. And, as a group, the leaders are expected to be more concerned with elevated matters of beauty and the spirit.

"People who go into these careers are not that interested in money," said Jay W. Lorsch, a professor who studies governance issues at Harvard Business School.

Mr. Gelb said he had earned four times as much as the president of Sony Classical record label before he came to the opera. "I took this position at the Met not because of the salary to begin with, though I certainly realize my compensation running a nonprofit is on the high end," he said. "But it's the largest performing arts company in the country, if not the world, in terms of budget."

Running an art institution can be glamorous, but it can also be grueling work that requires a capacity to manage budgets, buildings, programming, artists, contributors, audiences, trustees and public officials across a day that routinely stretches into nights of performances and donor events.

Several board chairmen said that if someone can be found who can do all that, and do it well, it pays to retain that person, especially in tough times.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington recently made clear just how much it values its president, Michael M. Kaiser. "Michael achieved his maximum bonus that was permissible," said Stephen A. Schwarzman, the board chairman. "The performance has been terrific."

Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

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Seeking Cultural Subtlety in 10 Questions - New York Times (blog)

Posted: 25 Apr 2010 01:29 PM PDT

The Vietnamese version of the 2010 census questionnaire used the words "dieu tra" to describe the population tally — but what the words really conveyed was something like a communist government investigation. On Korean forms, "county" was translated into "nation." And the Chinese hot line offered information only in Mandarin at first, although elderly Chinese immigrants, who are less likely to be proficient in English, speak Cantonese.

Then there was this: In some questionnaire assistance centers in Queens, where people could get help filling out their forms, census workers instructed countless Bangladeshi to check "Indian" as their ethnicity.

"To have someone identified as something they're not is not only offensive, but it also drives a misallocation of resources and representation," said Glenn D. Magpantay, director of the democracy program at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, an advocacy group based in Manhattan.

So it goes, as the 2010 census tries to count and record New York's richly and often complexly mixed neighborhoods. There have been mistakes.

Mr. Magpantay and his colleagues were prepared. They wanted to be sure that, among other things, Asians would be counted appropriately — Indians as Indians, Bangladeshi as Bangladeshi, for example — and that the language on the forms matched the nuances of the words used in immigrant households.

The Census Bureau is preparing to send out census takers to households that didn't return the forms, and they are training the takers to be especially attuned to these cultural differences — and subtle word meanings.

It has tried to hire immigrants as takers and place them in the communities they represent. But the lines and the boundaries aren't going to be 100 percent clear all the time. Case in point, Mr. Magpantay said, is the Guyanese man who has been assigned to knock on doors in Maspeth, an overwhelmingly white neighborhood in Queens, even though there is a huge Guyanese community in nearby South Richmond Hill.

Lester A. Farthing, New York's regional census director, said the plan was to match heavily immigrant neighborhoods with census takers who speak the predominant languages there and understand its cultural nuances. That, he said, can go a long way into making people comfortable sharing personal information with the stranger at the door.

Should census takers encounter a person whose language they do not understand, they are to show this person a language card to see whether the language can be identified. Someone who is fluent in that language will contact the home later to finish the job.

Mr. Farthing acknowledged that, with 30,000 questionnaire assistance centers providing help in 60 languages nationwide, mistakes were bound to happen. Still, he took issue with the misinformation given to Bangladeshi in Queens, saying that the centers where the problem happened were staffed by people who receive two days of training at best.

"We tell them that the census is all about self-identification, but there are people who come in and ask, 'What box do I check here?'" Mr. Farthing said. "The concept of picking a race or an ethnicity for non-American-born folks is not common."

Mr. Magpantay said that no one knows how many Bangladeshi identified themselves as Indian in the questionnaires, but that the undercount could have meaningful consequences. "If we don't know the real size of the Bangladeshi population in a neighborhood, how are we going to know if the local hospital needs to have signs in Bangla?" he asked.

He said his organization was exploring legal options to see whether the forms could be tracked and the mistakes corrected. And that they will continue to monitor the operation once the census comes knocking.

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Catherine Pepinster: The PM may welcome the Pope, but ... - The Independent

Posted: 25 Apr 2010 03:59 PM PDT

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Who are Minnesota's Radical CEO's? And Why We Need Them ... - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Posted: 25 Apr 2010 08:38 PM PDT

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My definition is: a CEO who (a) understands the effect that their company has on the socio-economic, political and cultural circumstances of their workers, customers, investors and partners and (b) is able to articulate and share a credible vision ...
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