lunker
08-06-2008, 03:46 PM
I ran across an interesting article in IEEE Engineering Management Review: "The Conductor-Less Orchestra" by Harvey Seifter (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/46/4534150/04534331.pdf?isnumber=4534150&prod=JNL&arnumber=4534331&arSt=c1&ared=c1&arAuthor=, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=4534150 -- sorry, looks like you have to order reprints of the article).
It's an interesting article about how the "New York City based Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has become a model for [a] new kind of loose and flexible organization." Quite interesting to me, since my day job is as an Engineering manager at a rather large high-tech company.
What really struck me, though, was the following statement:
Orchestral Musicians are a notoriously unhappy class of employees. Paul Judy reports that when Harvard Business School Professor J. Richard Hackman studied job attitudes among people working in 13 different job groups, he discovered that symphony orchestra musicians ranked below prison guards in job satisfaction. Further, when asked about their satisfaction with opportunities for career growth, symphony orchestra musicians fared even worse, ranking 9th out of the 13 surveyed job categories.
Wow! Any symphony orchestra musicians on this forum who can verify or dispute this statement?
PS -- The article "The Behaviors of Jazz as a Catalyst for Strategic Renewal and Growth" by Michael Gold and Steve Hirshfeld in the same issue was also really cool. Who would have thought that such stuff would make it into an Engineering journal?!?
It's an interesting article about how the "New York City based Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has become a model for [a] new kind of loose and flexible organization." Quite interesting to me, since my day job is as an Engineering manager at a rather large high-tech company.
What really struck me, though, was the following statement:
Orchestral Musicians are a notoriously unhappy class of employees. Paul Judy reports that when Harvard Business School Professor J. Richard Hackman studied job attitudes among people working in 13 different job groups, he discovered that symphony orchestra musicians ranked below prison guards in job satisfaction. Further, when asked about their satisfaction with opportunities for career growth, symphony orchestra musicians fared even worse, ranking 9th out of the 13 surveyed job categories.
Wow! Any symphony orchestra musicians on this forum who can verify or dispute this statement?
PS -- The article "The Behaviors of Jazz as a Catalyst for Strategic Renewal and Growth" by Michael Gold and Steve Hirshfeld in the same issue was also really cool. Who would have thought that such stuff would make it into an Engineering journal?!?