As I mentioned when I began this blog, the ideas I write about here may eventually wind up in a book. With that in mind, that blog has served its purpose for me: I’ve begun to lay out the main ideas that I’ll develop. At this point, I am dealing with some exciting but demanding life changes that are going to require my full attention.
For those of you who might have found yourself intrigued by some of what you’ve read here, I offer you a short bibliography that you could use to continue your explorations. These are the books I have found most helpful in arriving at my ideas. They will allow you to continue your journey.
Annotated Bibliography
I have written a lot about Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. It is a good book, but an awful lot of it provides examples of various business models, and it may not be relevant to theater. My recommendation would be that you get a handle on the “business model canvas,” which is described in many videos on YouTube. Once you understand the canvas, I do think that there value in reading Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want and Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation which are more about application.
I’d also recommend that you read the Introduction and first couple chapters of Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, which I found eye-opening. The authors use Cirque de Soleil to demonstrate their concept, so right off the bat it is relevant. If you prefer videos, they are also available, but I think the book is worth getting from the library or used (get the previous version, if it’s cheaper–the main idea doesn’t change.
Then read Steve Blank’s The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company because this seems to me to describe exactly what the step that theater people fail to make. Basically, this is a description of a process for finding an audience before you spend a bunch of time and money on a production.
To see all this in action (though intuitively), read Michelle Hensley’s All the Lights On: Reimagining Theater with Ten Thousand Things. This will show you that not only is all this possible, but it can be inspiring and powerful.
And speaking of inspiration, here are three books I recommend to keep you motivated:
- Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? will provide you with a great deal of encouragement.
- Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Fully Revised and Updated for 2018 will provide you with a new way of thinking about your relationship to money.
- Shannon Hayes’s Redefining Rich seems to follow up on Robin’s ideas (the chapter on health insurance seems worth the price of the book alone).
