Strategy at the Getty: Not Just Our Art, but All Art
Saturday, May 17, 2025
Love this passage from Richard Rumelt‘s “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.”
In 1983, Harold Williams — who had once been dean of the UCLA management school — became chairman of the $1.4B Getty Trust. Rumelt explains that Williams grew the Getty “from a small elite collection to a major force in the art world.” The two spoke in 2000, three years after Williams retired. Williams explained his strategy this way:
The Getty Trust was a very large amount of money, and we had to spend a considerable amount each year. Our mandate was art, but I had to decide how to actually spend the funds. We could have simply built a great collection—that would have been the obvious thing to do. Buy art. But I wasn’t comfortable with that as a direction. All we would really accomplish would be to drive up the price of art and move some of it from New York and Paris to Los Angeles.
It took some time, but I began to develop the idea that art could be, indeed, should be, a more serious subject than it was. Art is not just pretty objects; it is a vital part of human activity. In a university, people spend a great deal of effort studying languages and histories. We know all about marriage contracts in remote tribes and the histories of many peoples. But art has been treated as a sideshow. I decided that the Getty could change this. Instead of spending our income on buying art, we could transform the subject. The Getty would begin to build a complete digital catalog of all art, including dance, song, and textiles. It would develop programs to educate art teachers and host advanced research on art and society. The Getty would host the best conversation talent in the world and develop new methods of conserving and restoration. In this way, I decided, we would have an impact far beyond simply putting art on display.
Rumelt provides this coda:
With $65 million to spend each year, Williams could have simply bought art or given money to schools and universities for their arts programs. But by aiming to transform the study of art, Williams designed an objective that was novel and nicely scaled to the resources at his disposal. Put simply, he invested where his resources would make a large and more visible difference. This is the power of concentration—of choosing an objective that can be decisively affected by the resources at hand. There is no way to know whether Williams’s strategy created greater good than a simpler strategy of giving away more money, but it did make a bigger bang and, thereby, attracted more energy and support from employees and outside organizations.