Executive Director and CEO Massimo Bergamini, chatting with staff during the June staff retreat in the new boardroom. From left to right: Massimo Bergamini, Dnyanesh Kamat, Rebecca MacKenzie, Nathan Sells, Louise Pitre and Stephanie Danyluk.

A Message from the Executive Director

Wear Sunscreen

Massimo Bergamini

This is my last column for Muse. Before sitting down to write it, I had been thinking it would be an opportunity to reflect on my tenure as CMA’s (interim) chief executive officer and maybe dispense some advice to my successor and to anyone else interested in reading it.

After all, I reasoned, the last year provided plenty of lessons — personal and professional — for me to draw advice from.

I quickly filled a page in my notebook with gems like:

Focus on the big picture. Goal one must be ensuring the survival of the CMA — the museum sector needs a strong, representative, pan-Canadian voice. Absolutely everything else will follow.
The CMA is not financially sustainable. Develop a multi-year strategic operating and budget plan to grow revenue and capacity and bring the organization to a place of fiscal balance (see goal one).
Invest time and energy in understanding how government works, how decisions are made and why, and in what makes good and bad public policy. Offering the federal government to write its new national museum policy is not the way to do it.
Respect, respect, respect. Respect your colleagues, respect your members, respect your partners, and most of all respect your staff — they’re the ones doing the work needed to achieve goal one.

As I powered up my MacBook Air, I remembered a 1997 Chicago Tribune column by Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Schmich — my mind meanders like that sometimes — and decided I’d Google it first.

The column, titled Advice, like youth is probably just wasted on the young, is presented like a 1997 commencement speech the author would have given had she been asked. If you’re not familiar with Mary Schmich’s column but were around at the turn of the century — this century — you’ve likely heard the spoken-word hit song it inspired: Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen). Sorry for the earworm.

While the column is chock-full of good advice like “keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements”, “stretch”, and “dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room”, it’s the author’s caution about dispensing advice that gave me pause.

“Advice is a form of nostalgia,” she wrote. “Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

I certainly didn’t want my final column to be a collection of recycled advice or of nostalgic musings about my time with CMA. After all, the past is what it was, and as far as the future is concerned, to quote Doris Day, que sera, sera.

And anyway, who is going to argue with a Pulitzer Prize winner whose column spawned a Billboard-topping-hit-single AND an urban legend about a commencement speech Kurt Vonnegut never gave?

Not me.

So, Class of 2022, I leave you with but one piece of indisputable advice:

Wear sunscreen.

Final few words

As I prepare to leave CMA, I want to acknowledge what an honour it has been to have provided staff leadership to the organization at such a pivotal moment in its history, and I want to thank the Board for their confidence and support over the last (almost) year and a half.

I also want to acknowledge the outstanding work and professional commitment of CMA staff. I was privileged to be on the front row, able to see every day how they delivered value for members, the larger museum community and for Canadians. I witnessed their commitment to their work, their colleagues and to the organization in the particularly difficult days last year when because of financial constraints many had to do the work that had been done by two or more.

Finally, to everyone who reached out to me to offer advice and support, or to share their experiences and perspectives on the place and role of museums in Canadian society, thank you. You made this an unforgettable learning experience.