Escondido’s Arts Chief Left Last 2 Jobs Under Cloud

The newly hired executive director of Escondido’s Center for the Arts was asked to leave his two previous positions at public arts organizations, with his previous bosses accusing him of poor communication skills and ineffective management.

Oleg Lobanov, 57, was hired at a $100,000 annual salary in August to bring the yet-to-be-completed, $73.4-million Escondido center on line. But some of his previous employers at the last two public arts institutions where Lobanov had been the top administrator criticized him as being extremely disorganized and treating staff poorly.

“He was asked to leave here because he had more of a demoralizing effect than anything else. I felt he was insincere, and he did not work hard,” said Harold Kulish, a board member of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where Lobanov had been president from 1982-88.

“We lost certain funding because of deadlines that he had not met and we did not find out about until he was gone and it was too late,” said Virginia Dill, who was vice president of the board of directors of the Ballet Chicago, where Lobanov was executive director for nine months after his stay in Detroit.

But members of Escondido’s Center for the Arts board of directors who hired Lobanov looked at the picture differently.

“We knew he was controversial, and we discussed that with the leadership of the board (in Detroit), and he got very high marks in a lot of areas: fund raising, organization and a variety of management skills,” said John Armstrong, a member of the board’s selection committee.

Escondido City Councilwoman Carla DeDominicis, who also sat on the board’s selection committee, said the panel knew of the negative perception some people had of Lobanov.

“All of us who have worked in any business have critics, and, if you don’t, something isn’t right,” she said. “There was criticism, and there was praise. The praise to us seemed more sincere and meaningful and in track with our own observations of the individual.”

Much of Lobanov’s difficulties in Detroit stemmed from a 1987 musicians’ strike in which the musicians complained that Lobanov had gotten a $47,000 pay and benefits increase shortly before they were asked to take a pay cut. The National Labor Relations Board also issued a complaint against symphony management during the strike.

Lobanov said his difficulties in both jobs stemmed from circumstances beyond his control.

“The first five years in Detroit were just fine,” Lobanov said. “The last year gets put into that wonderful category of ‘a learning experience.’

“My job was to represent the board in that strike. When the whole thing was over, it was so hard, and it was such a difficult situation, there was no way I could stay or continue,” said Lobanov, adding that he had no regrets about his actions in Detroit.

Lobanov called his nine-month stint at the Ballet Chicago a “major mistake.”

“I think it’s questionable whether a ballet company would ever be able to start up in Chicago because it has become such a mecca for touring groups,” Lobanov said. “Every major company in the world comes through, and it’s almost an impossible task to get a toehold in that community.”

Ballet Chicago remains in operation, though still struggling financially.

Although he has had difficulties in his two previous public arts jobs, Lobanov comes to Escondido with 30 years’ experience with arts management, fund-raising and foundations.

After graduating from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in pre-law, he studied business administration for a year before deciding on music. Lobanov, the son of a Russian immigrant who taught history at UCLA, began managing community concerts in Detroit shortly after leaving school.

He also served with the National Symphony from 1977 to 1980.

Lobanov has been involved in making grant decisions during stints with the Ford Foundation, the Oakleaf Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust, but said he has always found the other side of the arts business more interesting.

“I’d make the grant to the organization, and then I’d get out, and, from my perspective that’s when the fun started, that’s when it really got intriguing with the actual day-to-day process of getting here from there,” Lobanov said.

Lobanov moved to Escondido with his wife, Susan, and 9-year-old daughter, Alexandra.

Even some of Lobanov’s harshest critics agreed that he has a strength in fund raising. Lobanov most recently specialized in fund raising as a partner with the Middle America Division of Jerold, Panas Young & Partners, a management consulting firm.

“His skills really lie towards fund raising, but not as the general manager or the chief executive. He should have been the development director here. Development is really his strength, but everything else are weaknesses,” said Bryan Kennedy, a French horn player with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra who was on the musician’s negotiating committee at the time of the strike.

“He’s an excellent fund-raiser, no doubt about it,” said Paul Papich, vice president for development at the orchestra. Papich declined to comment on Lobanov’s management skills.

The executive director at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Del., where Lobanov had been executive director for several months before leaving for Detroit, said: “He had done a number of very impressive things to bring together disparate arts areas in this community.”

“He was a catalyst for a great deal of very positive community interaction on the long-term need for funding of the arts,” said David Fleming, who succeeded Lobanov in Delaware.

Even in the jobs he lost, Lobanov had his supporters.

“He was an outstanding manager. As far as I was concerned, he handled things well,” said Donald Mandich, who was co-chair of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra board of directors. “What it boiled down to was that he wasn’t giving the musicians what they wanted, and so they wanted to get rid of him.”

Directors for the Escondido center said they found the supporters more believable.

“I personally studied the Detroit situation in great detail, talked to a lot of people, reviewed the (newspaper) clips and satisfied myself that he was involved in a labor dispute and he was right and the union was wrong,” said Armstrong, who is president and publisher of the Escondido Times-Advocate.

Lobanov had worked to “put a halt to skyrocketing salaries and benefits” in the orchestra and the musicians retaliated, Armstrong said.

Armstrong said he did not speak with anyone connected to the Ballet Chicago and did not know of anyone on the committee who had. The New York-based headhunter agency employed by the center to do background checks on the candidates, Opportunity Resources, also did not contact anyone with the Ballet Chicago, said Freda Mindlin, president of the firm.

Walter McCarthy, former chairman of the board for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, had also spoken highly of him, DeDominicis said. McCarthy, who brought Lobanov to Detroit and announced his resignation as chairman at the same time Lobanov submitted his resignation, could not be reached for comment.

But other board members had only harsh words for Lobanov.

“As far as the board of directors was concerned, his main interest was just talking to the people who pulled the strings. He was not effective, and he ran into all sorts of snags while he was here,” said Kulish, who is still with the board.

“When it came to working and doing things, we found out after he was gone that it was just a lot of lip service that he gave,” Kulish said.

Dill, a board member with the Ballet Chicago, where Lobanov was executive director from February, 1989, to November of the same year when he was asked to leave, said, “He could be very charming,” but that to them it turned out to be a facade.

“Although he did obtain some rather large contributions from certain organizations, we found that he antagonized some of our major supporters to the detriment of the company,” Dill said. “He did not do well with the bread and butter of nonprofit organizations, which has to be the large numbers of small donors. He did not build a good team with workers. He had good workers, but he did not communicate with them in a way that they could understand what he needed, nor did he treat them with respect.

“He would rehash old ideas and present them as new ones, none of which were particularly effective in the situation . . . . I just had the feeling that he did not have the organization’s best interest at heart over his own personal interests,” Dill said.

The musicians with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra were equally outspoken against Lobanov.

“He had terrible interpersonal skills, he created a system of administration that seemed to never hold him accountable. He had a setup where there was always someone else to blame. Finally, there came a time where there was no one else to blame but him,” said Kennedy, the horn player.

“He’s a smooth talker, and he tried to charm people. But it just got to the point where it wore out very fast here,” Kennedy said. “The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has come a long way since he left, and, I would add, for the better.”

Now Lobanov faces the task of developing the $73.4-million Escondido center that will include a 1,500 lyric theater, a 400-seat community center, an 800-person meeting center and a visual arts center that includes galleries and workshop space.

As executive director, Lobanov will be responsible for every aspect of the center’s operation, including fund raising, programming and management.

“I view this as the job where I can pull together everything I have had, all these disparate parts, and focus it on one thing that I really care about,” Lobanov said.

His $100,000 annual salary for doing this is considerably less than the $168,000 he made with the Detroit Symphony.

The center, to be completed by late 1993, will require significant contributions from the North County community in its initial years to cover an annual operating deficit that could reach as high as $1.3 million. The City Council has already pledged to meet one-third of the operating deficits.