What is the Business of Museums? Ideally more of them should think like the National Geographic Society whose mission is simple: “to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge.” True, fulfilling the mission has complex aspects, but this perfect, brief mission statement allows them to focus their energy on one concept: that the success of their business depends on how well they explain what they know. The fact most museums don’t have a similar mandate explains why the bulk of them – believing instead that their “purpose and reason for existing is contradictory” – struggle. Wouldn’t the sector’s organizations be further ahead if they infused their respective mandates with some similar sense of simplicity? Namely, determine an area on which to focus (narrow or broad), develop expertise, then tell people about what you know better than any one else.
That’s the essence of leadership – and its leaders who audiences want to associate with and support. Museums should be, as Greta suggests, “places of the muses where we can think deeply about important things.” But they get dragged down by fixating on place and programming, and forget about projecting. To me, the business of museums is striving to develop expertise through new research, and explaining that expertise; disseminate; diffuse. Everything else – who visits, who joins, who donates, who buys your merchandise, why the media pays attention to you – stems from that. So your success is directly related to how broad- or narrow-minded you are at allowing people to access the stories about your expertise. People have to be able to connect with your expertise regardless of where they live.
