Ming Min Hui on Luck, Leadership, and Wall Street

Advertisement: At Nel Shelby Productions, we give dance a life beyond the stage. We’re a full service video production team. We live stream performances, film with multiple cameras, make stunning trailers and tell stories through film. My team of dancers-turned-filmmakers know how movement feels and we capture it with heart, intuition, and joy. From intimate studios to grand theaters, we bring your vision to life. Visit NelShelby.com to check us out. We are ready to discuss your next video project.

Monica Holt: Welcome back to CI to Eye. I’m Monica Holt. My guest today is Ming Min Hui, Executive Director of Boston Ballet. Ming identifies her love for ballet starting with a rainbow tutu at age four—something many of us can relate to. But her journey back to ballet takes a path many arts administrators are less familiar with, including a detour through Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis. Now Ming approaches her role and leadership with both her love for the arts and her savvy business mindset. She builds her own financial models, opens up strategic decisions to staff input, and delicately navigates the tension between preserving a 400 year old art form and making it relevant for contemporary Boston. We also explore what it means to lead with humanity in a time of great uncertainty and why telling arts leaders to put their oxygen masks on first might be the critical advice that our field needs right now. Let’s dive in.

Monica Holt: Ming Min Hui, welcome to CI to Eye. Thank you so much for joining me today. It is such a pleasure to be chatting together.

Ming Min Hui: Thanks for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

Monica Holt: It’s just great to see your face. You have such a rich story that I think is a little different than one that folks have heard about journeys through the arts world. But let’s take it back to the beginning just to have a little bit of fun. I believe you began ballet training when you were maybe four or so and danced with Harbor Ballet Theatre. What first drew you into dance? What was it that felt appealing that you wanted to grab hold of when you were little?

Ming Min Hui: Yeah, this is a little known fact about me I think, but there’s an amazing picture of me in a really rainbow fru fru tutu when I’m about four, and I think that was my first ballet recital with the tiny little satin slippers and everything. I was always apparently twirling and wiggling around and dancing. So this was clearly just sort of in my DNA. My arts exposure was multifaceted. I also liked creative writing. My mother was a portrait artist, so I had a lot of visual arts appreciation, but dance and ballet was my thing. It was my main extracurricular all the way through my childhood into high school. It was really my safe space. It was the thing that I spent the most time on outside of school and academics and I think I just loved… I loved the beauty of it, I loved the discipline of it. I loved the rigor and, I don’t know, the magic of how all of that kind of comes together. And I just sort of saw this outlet for myself to express myself and find myself in my body and kind of get out of my head and get out of language barriers — I grew up in an immigrant household, and was kind of just shy of being ESL myself. And so I sort of knew that dance was going to forever be in my existence and I just had no idea that it was going to become my career.

Monica Holt: That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s beautiful. What you started to touch on is just the language of dance itself being something so universal, but also as you spoke about both the beauty but also the rigor and discipline. Do you feel that dance really taught you some kind of fundamentals that still shape how you move through the world today?

Ming Min Hui: Definitely. I think it taught me things like how to be comfortable in my own skin, how to present myself in front of audiences, right? Strangers, people you don’t necessarily know, and to have a certain amount of grace of conduct, a certain willingness to put yourself forward out in the light and under scrutiny and to be confident still, right? That if you know yourself and can kind of really feel authentically yourself, that you can present yourself as such. And ballet really helped give me a lot of that structure I think, and confidence to do that. And in ballet, the mastery of a craft is really something that’s born out of the day to day. So what you see as the end product is usually years and years of devotion and training and just showing up every single day even if you don’t feel totally up for it. And I think that mindset has now really translated into everything else that I sort of hold dear in my life. That practice of showing up every day, I really think I got that from ballet.

Monica Holt: That’s a great way of thinking about it, the showing up everyday piece. I think also when I think about your career path and looking at investment banking and corporate strategy and taking both those skills and also the very presentational skills that you were talking about being comfortable, talk us through so that the listeners understand what that education to career journey looks like. Because I think it’s unusual for a lot of leaders who are in positions like yours.

Ming Min Hui: It really is. In some ways, if you look retroactively at my education and my early career, there’s sort of both these seeds of evidence that I was always kind of a left brain and right brain person. In college, I was an English major, so I sort of indulged that literary humanities love, and so I super valued that. But I think that I saw in myself relatively early on that I was never going to be the best at one thing. I was always going to be a little bit of a renaissance person, kind of interested in all, curious about all. I’m also very much an enabler of others — that I loved, at the end of the day, thinking of myself as someone who could catalyze and make possible everyone else’s incredible expertise and points of view. And look, crassly put, my mother, again, is an artist, and I think she was the one who pretty early told me that being close to the money is smart.

If you can figure out how money works, no matter what you do in life — including being an artist, right? — you’re going to have just a better way to understand how to make something of that and work within the system that we all live in. And so I ended up pivoting pretty 180 from being in my English major artsy space to going after an investment banking internship as a junior in college. And so most people I think looked at that pivot and were like, what is going on here? How do you explain this? But that gives you some sense of the underlying thinking was that it might not be the industry that I was the most passionate about, but I certainly could stand to learn some of the things that I would then be able to take with me no matter where I went afterwards if I wanted ultimately to lead large, sophisticated organizations. So that’s a very roundabout explanation for how I ended up at JP Morgan covering financial institutions in 2009, which is a really wild story in its own right. It was the height of the financial crisis. And I went straight into the heart of the beast. So covering financial institutions, specialty lenders, banks, mortgage companies… that was what I was doing.

Monica Holt: That is wild timing.

Ming Min Hui: Wild timing. So I did that for a while and it was brutal. I’m not going to lie. That lifestyle is not easy, but you learn a ton. And so to this day, the skills that I learned back then, I’ve taken it with me and I use it to this day. That number sense and the ability to manage high intensity workloads, think about deal making, think about executive presentation, think about financial statements, how do you read them and understand the health of a company? I mean, all of that I can trace back to that training. And so I wouldn’t trade it for a thing.

Monica Holt: It’s so good to hear you talk about those tactical skills and mindsets that you bring to your executive leadership in nonprofit arts. Now, that’s a theme that has emerged through a lot of these conversations is, how do we bring more of those skills into our marketplace? Particularly because it is ripe with people who have this enormous work ethic but maybe weren’t given the systems-based approach as a start. I’m curious, so I understood that you came to Boston Ballet through the Harvard Business School Leadership Fellows program. Was that the moment that you started thinking about, ‘Okay, how do I move back into this arts nonprofit space?’ Or was that kind of brewing already before then?

Ming Min Hui: That’s a really good question. So after a few years at JP Morgan — I was in investment banking. I switched to corporate strategy. So after that experience, the sort of natural next step was to go to business school so that I could have more of a forcing function to explore what else is out there. And while I was at HBS, it was already with this thesis that I did not want to go back to professional services, strict corporate… That was already brewing. That was sort of the thesis for why I went to business school, was that I wanted to return to something that felt more meaningful to me, that felt like I could apply my skillset towards something that had just more inherent interest to me and was more aligned with my values. But I didn’t know it was going to be the arts necessarily. But so here we are at HBS, I’m graduating, I’m having an existential crisis because I can’t figure out what I want to do.

And the job at Boston Ballet kind of emerged out of nowhere. So this is the point in my story where I really emphasized that I got lucky. I wasn’t looking for it, and it found me, and it changed my life. And so my advice generally to others is that there’s a lot of trying to make your own luck and then when you identify that luck, also having the guts to step through it and take it. So this program through the HBS Leadership Fellows to do the chief of staff role for Max Hodges, who was also an HBS grad, at Boston Ballet emerged. And the way it was getting framed was, Max was trying to bring a more data-driven approach to arts management. And the board at Boston Ballet was really behind her in this thesis and she needed a chief of staff to help enable that vision. And it was just this incredible job that I didn’t even know could exist and just landed on my doorstep at the exact right moment in my life that I was looking for something like that. And thus began the decade-long journey to where I’m now.

Monica Holt: Yeah, and you talked about luck before, and I do think some of it is the making your own luck, but I think it’s so important what you said about having the guts to say yes. And I think as I’ve reflected back on the opportunities in my career, I’ve talked a lot about the luck of it. Someone leaves or there’s a change and you can’t anticipate that, but you can be prepared enough for when it happens to jump and to know that that’s something that could suit you or piques your interest, and you have the preparation and are ready to take the leap. So I will allow you that luck is an important part, but I’ll also say you happen to have put in a lot of work to be able to get to the point where you could take advantage of that lucky opportunity. So you start as chief of staff at Boston Ballet pretty early in your tenure. You were leading several pretty major infrastructure digital upgrades. There was the website revamp, you expanded the Newton Studio… How did you, as someone newer to the organization, start to rally staff around those ambitious projects using your kind of approach that you had honed so well and so carefully at B-School or on Wall Street before?

Ming Min Hui: So the thing that I sometimes joke I came away from Wall Street with is when I was in investment banking and then subsequently corporate strategy, I was really just a PowerPoint Excel monkey. So I was building a lot of financial models in Excel and pacing them into PowerPoint and then finding ways to translate what those said into slides that could be read horizontally and put in front of a CEO, who could then digest the insight quickly. And so it meant that I was thinking a lot about executive communication and what it meant to take complicated detailed analysis and distill it into clear insights that could be actionable for someone making a decision. And that was the skillset that ended up helping tremendously with a lot of these capacity building projects that we were doing at the time, because there might be an enormous amount of complexity under the hood.

For example, when we were moving our Newton studio: What kind of revenue and expense might you assume based on what kind of enrollment, and what kind of space parameters could lead to different kind of enrollment, and how do you have to staff that…? But at the end of the day, all of that has to get crunched into a: do we go forward or not? And framing those decisions for Max, for the board, for senior leaders who are stakeholders in the project, for donors who are investing in the project… That was a lot of the skillset that I had learned at JP Morgan and at HBS that I was then able to take with me into the chief of staff role.

Monica Holt: And I think you’ve told this story before, but in 2019 you had invited staff across departments to pitch ideas for strengthening the business based on the financial position of the institution. That’s very — I would say that’s unusually transparent — democratic for a legacy arts institution. What made you lean towards that approach of really opening the doors, opening for a group think, and what did that experiment teach you about organizational trust and collaboration?

Ming Min Hui: Oh gosh, beautiful question because it continues somewhat to this day. I mean, I think that it’s not an uncommon matter for arts nonprofits, I think, to struggle with a structural deficit with ambitions that outstrip their organic resources. This is a shared problem across the entire sector. I’m pretty sure every single leader that you’ve invited onto this podcast has had to deal with some variation of this problem. So obviously, certainly the case at Boston Ballet, where for a long time and continues to this day, just the nature of our ambition and the artistic product that we put forth and how excellent it is, it just requires an enormous amount of resources. And then the sources of how that gets funded has its ebb and flows, and it’s not always so guaranteed what the full nature of that is. And so even though it really is ultimately the responsibility of leadership, of the board, to address these problems at a strategic level and at an organizational level, we sensed that interest from the entire organization to be part of that solution and to find productive ways to offer their perspectives and be part of that conversation.

And we wanted to respond to it and find vehicles then to enable those voices to be heard in the process. And so that was one of those sort of last things that I did as chief of staff was to enable something we affectionately call the business plan competition just so that we could hear people’s great ideas and let that come into the thinking and also make it an opportunity for us to also share back out, what are the real ingredients for what these strategies have to look like? So that it wasn’t just sort of this thing that was happening in some guarded back room. We could explain to people, these are the criteria. These ideas have to leverage, for example, existing assets rather than go out and acquire new ones and capabilities. In theory, they should be ROI positive, and what does that mean? What does it mean to have sustainable revenue that is greater than the expenses that you have to incur in order to make it possible?

And it just helped people, I think, appreciate the nature of what we were up against and at the same time be able to feel like they had a voice in the process. And we actually did get a number of really amazing ideas. It was time consuming to democratize the effort, but I think worth it too. To your point, you sort of concluded this naturally that these are things that also then help to gain trust when leadership reaches out and invites others in an authentic way into the work because it’s not being handed down, right? You’re actually seeing yourself included and involved in these questions that influence the outcomes for everybody. And so I found that that was a really powerful moment, I think, for me to witness what happens when you enable it. And it’s informed my leadership ever since.

Monica Holt: And what a terrific opportunity for on-the-job career learning. I mean, what you’re talking about, giving a problem to solve that everyone is personally invested [in], giving a set of parameters, giving an understanding of what you’re looking for in terms of outcomes… Such a powerful kind of professional development tool that is also in service of the organization as a whole. I think it’s absolutely terrific. And then at what point were you then looking at moving into the CFO role? Because it wasn’t so long after you had started, is that right?

Ming Min Hui: It wasn’t. Yeah, I think so. After about three years, it did feel like we’d reached a point where there wasn’t a ton of new activity for me to really own and run with. And at the same time too, chief of staff is really sort of a nebulous role. You don’t actually have any direct power. Everything you have in terms of influence and management is all by proxy and sort of indirect. And so I think I was hungry at that point in my career for the next step that would give me more of a P&L or functional responsibility and more of a true C-suite experience. It naturally coincided that Max would create space for me to be her CFO and be really a strategic CFO and leverage the fact that I’d been on Wall Street. It’s not exactly the same, but at least I knew my way around a P&L and a balance sheet.

So that ended up taking place about four years after I’d started as chief of staff, and it was right on the eve of the pandemic. So even though I in many ways felt like I was up a very steep learning curve, in a sense the pandemic being this massive crisis meant that everyone suddenly was coming together and talking and sharing and trying to reinvent all of these best practices because I didn’t have a lot of baggage on the way things needed to be done. I could just get really scrappy and sort of do things from first principles in a way that I don’t know that I would’ve gotten without that kind of crisis. So it was just incredibly stressful, but also in some ways kind of a miracle that it coincided with this moment where I also was just trying to figure out what to do and had a lot of embedded support, weirdly, in terms of being able to share and learn.

Monica Holt: So as you came out of the pandemic, you were brought into the role as executive director as interim, and then in 2023 you were appointed the executive director of Boston Ballet. Can you take us back to what decisions you were weighing as you were considering both the interim and the permanent seat, and what that felt like from your perspective having been in this organization but also outside this industry?

Ming Min Hui: Yeah, the real way the story went down is I had been working for Max for eight years, and I kind of knew that her contract was coming to a close at some point in the subsequent year and that there was a non-zero chance that she was thinking about next steps. That seems like a natural thing to expect of a leader who’s been around for a decade. And she a little bit fulfilled that thought that I had in my head earlier than expected. She ended up taking a job to be CEO of The Shed in New York, which is an extraordinary opportunity for her on so many personal and professional levels. But she did ask me — I was probably the second person she called, and she did ask me immediately if I would consider being interim and that she had already recommended to the board that they ask me to be interim.

So I didn’t get a ton of time to think about it, is what I’m trying to explain with this.

Monica Holt: Of course.

Ming Min Hui: That I had maybe started to noodle on the idea that it was coming one day, but I just hadn’t thought too seriously about it. And then suddenly it was on my doorstep and I had to decide. And I think the incredible thing that Max had done in service to the organization was to really line me up in a way that I felt equipped with a lot of the tools I needed to step into that role fairly seamlessly. I had already been blessed with a lot of the insight into the strategies and finances and operations of the entire organization. I knew a lot of the board very well. I’d been very much privy to a lot of what it was to do her job in many ways. And so I didn’t think too hard about it. I wanted to be interim because it did seem like the best thing that I could do for this organization that I’ve come to love so much. And it seemed like such an incredible opportunity for me to also just see if it made sense for me to think of myself in the CEO shoes at any point in my career.

Monica Holt: But if I may, credit to Max for creating that internal succession. There are a lot of leaders who either can’t or don’t exercise that muscle.

Ming Min Hui: Exactly.

Monica Holt: And when you’re being that thoughtful about what the future can hold as you’re building towards something, and then of course, again, you were showing up for the organization, for the dancers, and for the board and the community at large, to be able for them to have that inherent confidence in all of that work to continue moving the organization forward.

Ming Min Hui: Yeah, definitely. And then the board didn’t take too long — they intended to do a search and then they aborted that search pretty quickly, I think largely because everyone understood the track that we were on and the trajectory that we were taking as an organization. And an internal succession story always sort of makes the most sense when you are happy with that trajectory and want to stay on it. So it was an opportunity of a lifetime, and that was actually a fast turnaround too. There wasn’t some long kind of search process. I think Max told me in June, I took over for her at the beginning of August, and then a week later they called me and said, we’re not doing a search, you’re just going to have to do the job. But I was able to make the decision pretty fast to take it because again, I knew a lot about this organization, I knew how much I loved it and how well positioned for success I was going to be the board, the team, my partnership with Mikko, all of that was in a really strong place. And I knew that if I was ever going to experiment with being a CEO, being an executive director, this was basically the best way to ever try that and be as well positioned for success as you could possibly imagine. So I’d be a fool not to.

Monica Holt: For sure. Is there anything particularly in the first six months or year of the role that surprised you that you weren’t expecting?

Ming Min Hui: Yeah, a lot of how I experienced the role was really shaped by the fact that I was navigating, on the one hand, the benefit of really understanding the organization extremely well. And that was useful. I didn’t need any time before I could just jump right in. I knew how to do all the materials for board reporting. I knew a lot of the politics. I understood how a lot of the economics worked. I probably understood our audit financials way better than anybody in the organization could claim to. There was sort of very little learning curve in that sense, but then there was a massive amount of learning curve in other senses because this was my first time as executive director. I was also having to reposition myself relative to the organization, relative to my team, relative to all these relationships that I had been part of for eight years up to that point, in a very different kind of format. And so learning, I think, in the first six months, really learning how to find my own voice as a leader, as an executive director, and stop being in this position where I’m trying to promote the Max Show and figure out what the Ming Show is and how to put forth the Ming Show is actually the hardest part. It really was.

Monica Holt: Yeah, I can imagine. And so you lead Boston Ballet in partnership with artistic director Mikko Nissinen. What does that partnership look like? And particularly when you’ve grown through the organization, so you’ve known Mikko… how did the two of you not just work in balance, but also balance the artistry and the business side in service of the organization’s mission?

Ming Min Hui: I took this very seriously when I was making this decision about accepting the executive director position because I think this is true at artistic companies across the entire sector, particularly ballet companies, where there is this executive director, artistic director, co-CEO logic that jointly reports to the board. It really has to feel like a marriage, I think, for it to be successful and for it to be something that the organization really benefits from versus it gets held back by. Mikko as artistic director really owns what I’ll call the product and the vision. He really is responsible for selecting the repertoire and the dancers and all the design work that goes into sets and costumes, all the production questions. And then in accordance, I’m really responsible then for how we operate as a business, as a entity, as a sustainable institution that has stakeholders it’s responsible for and revenue that it has to earn in order to fund all of this.

And that sort of pairing then of what I’m responsible for and what he’s responsible for, they really are — they’re impossible to extricate from each other, and therefore we have to be in constant communication and we have to deeply trust each other. And so I think it’s got a lot of pros and cons as a structure. It makes it so that this balancing act that a nonprofit ought to be doing between its mission and between its financial sustainability, that balancing act is sort of necessitated by this idea that neither of these roles are supreme over the other. But at the same time, it means too that if this balance and this tension that exists, kind of the healthy tension that should exist between these subjectives, isn’t being born out well by the relationship between these two people in these roles, it can be really disruptive and damaging for an organization.

Monica Holt: Yeah. Well, and I imagine particularly as I know you all are continuing to grapple with the relevance of ballet and the feel of what it means to be in a gilded opera house versus wanting to be welcoming, wanting to break down some of the elitism, some of the whiteness that comes with people’s thoughts when they think of a ballet company. And so both in partnership, but also more broadly, how are you approaching that kind of shift in how we look at ballet through a historical perception versus a modern day context?

Ming Min Hui: Yeah, it’s a great question. And again, this is where I think there’s some of the evidence of our partnership is how this thinking has continued to shape and bear out. I think we all appreciate and understand that in order for ballet to persist, its relevance then to the contemporary society that we live in and operate within means that we have to interrogate a lot of the historical context in which ballets have been made and what bodies are they being put on traditionally, and what narratives are being shared traditionally to think critically then about what gets presented to contemporary audiences. And so Mikko has always been interested in creating a company that doesn’t just celebrate the classics and classical technique, but also is really pushing the art form forward. And so he’s always been able to prioritize commissioning new work by emerging voices and really kind of exploring the bounds of dance and movement vocabulary that benefits from classical training, but pushes it to a very different envelope.

And so I think that what I’ve also then been able to do to supplement that thinking and that work is really encourage a lens on how that applies more broadly. As you think about all the stakeholders that wrap up into the entire organization, how do we ensure that when we do present a piece of work that — For example, La Bayadère. Not something that we really want to present in its entirety to contemporary audiences, because of a lot of the problematic themes that narrative explores, and [it was] made during a time when there just wasn’t that literacy, there was sort of an othering of peoples because the people that it was created by and for just didn’t have that understanding at that time. And so I’m part of that conversation, helping him influence the repertoire selection to say, were just going to do Kingdom of the Shades, a very abstracted excerpt of La Bayadère, and then how are we also communicating that decision to the broader public and creating some of the context around it so that that decision has some framing and people are understanding the rationale behind it, the history behind it, and the sort of context in which we need to understand this art.

So that’s one micro example, but this is sort of the broader narrative then of how we’re working together and how we’re thinking about this complicated art form and how we need to preserve it and present it.

Monica Holt: And I’m sure that that also translates into the equity and inclusion work that you’re doing throughout the organization, behind the scenes, as well.

Ming Min Hui: Yeah, exactly. And so, right. Other examples of how this shows up is things like caring about diversity on our boards and among our staffs and our audiences and our school, just ensuring that if we are an unbiased kind of selector of talent or an unbiased presenter of programmatic work, we ought to see some reflection then in the people who create the art, who are part of the organization, who are being served in the communities that they should be reflecting. And we know that this is, in Boston, an increasingly diverse population that — I think that there was a stat that came out in the Boston Foundation’s Indicator Report a few years ago that said one in every five babies or something is mixed race. My baby is part of that equation. I have a little half-Chinese, half-Puerto Rican Cajun baby. And I think about that all the time, then, in terms of who is this art form for going forward? There are going to be these questions of identity that we have to match and mirror or else we’re just going to get increasingly displaced and considered irrelevant.

Monica Holt: And it’s also that access point to the art form. One program that I’d love for you to just chat a little bit more about in terms of building access to ballet is Citydance, which is your partnership with Boston Public Schools. Can you tell us a little bit about the program and why you’re excited to be forging ahead and create these new entry points?

Ming Min Hui: Great example, right, of what we mean by access. This is actually a very old program. It’s been in place for over 30 years. It’s one of the ways that we ensure that the youth of Boston are getting exposure to dance, are getting exposure to the arts. And basically we’ve been partnering with Boston Public Schools to deliver free dance education to third grade students across the entire district. And the number of people that I’ve run into across Boston and beyond who’ve said, ‘Oh, I know Boston Ballet. You came to my classroom when I was in third grade and we learned Chinese fan dance or hip hop,’ and that was their way that they got exposure to this. It’s not necessarily — the Opera House is an intimidating space. Not necessarily everybody has the time, energy, to go make something of that experience. And so these are the other ways that we are really trying to ensure that our community is part of this is sort of broader movement, so to speak.

Monica Holt: That’s exactly right. When you think about the future ahead for Boston Ballet, what do you most hope for your staff or audiences that folks will say about the organization that you’ve helped shape?

Ming Min Hui: Oh, that’s a beautiful question. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. There’s just so many things that really are challenging for the entire nonprofit sector, for the arts and culture world. And I think I just hope though that Boston Ballet will remain this beacon of both incredible inspiration — I think that what we do is just, it’s defining the art form at this moment in many ways, and I’m so proud of that. But I think we do it too with a level of humanity, and that’s something that’s super important to me, to have a lot of empathy and compassion with why this art form is important and who we’re meeting and where, and that we then have that spirit of we’re not this sort of pristine box of just sort of a perfect ballet company, that we’re a really human, breathing, living, evolving organization that is touching lives. And it’s a little bit messy and imperfect, but as long as it’s very compassionate, that to me will be success.

Monica Holt: What’s a piece of advice that you might give to someone who’s earlier in their career in the arts who’s looking around at the landscape now, a little bit trepidatious about what might be to come? Is there any piece of advice that you’d want to give them thinking back on your career?

Ming Min Hui: Oh my gosh, yes. Well, first is hang with it because that’s what I did.

Monica Holt: Completely.

Ming Min Hui: And it’s rewarded me. And so I hope it rewards everyone else who is trying to figure out their path forward. And at the same time too, I think given how varied my background is, don’t be afraid of having some variety in your career and letting those different experiences kind of inform each other. That’s something that I also like to promote or remind people is the jungle gym, the sort of multihyphenate career is increasingly a thing. I think the millennial generation is the first to really bring that in full force, and I see it speeding up, if anything, with Gen Z and beyond. And this sort of reflects the nature of the society that we’re in now, and I think how important it is that there be an enormous amount of variety and experience and perspective that you can bring to bear that is ultimately, I think, what makes us really human and makes us highly relevant.

Monica Holt: That’s right. Before we get to quickfire culture, you are executive director of Boston Ballet, but you were once the tiny girl who loved to twirl in her tutu at dance class. As you sit down and watch the curtain rise on a performance in Boston, what feelings wash over you as you think about growing up and getting started in ballet and dance?

Ming Min Hui: Oh, Monica, that’s getting me emotional.

Monica Holt: I gotta try a little.

Ming Min Hui: I know, that’s so beautiful. Gratitude is honestly the most dominant emotion that I tend to have these days, particularly when I get to be in the theater and seeing the curtain rise on opening night and the sense that this is an incredible privilege that I’ve been blessed to have with stewarding an organization that’s putting forth something that’s so meaningful to me and has been my entire life. So I’m usually just incredibly grateful for the village it took to help me get to this point and continues to help me.

Monica Holt: That’s beautiful. So we like to end all of our podcast episodes with a little bit of a quickfire culture questionnaire. So what’s one piece of culture that you are currently obsessed with?

Ming Min Hui: Oh my God, so easy. K-Pop demon hunters. Another one of my Asian American best friends is deep in the fandom with me, and we were talking just a week or two ago about how incredible it is to have seen a Halloween where all of these kids want to dress up as an Asian pop culture figure. Like, the strong Asian woman being this dominant in pop culture in America today is bringing me to the edge. I am stunned by the thought of what it would’ve been if I had been able to grow up with something like that.

Monica Holt: It’s so great. Okay. If you could go back in time, what is one performance or live event that you would’ve loved to attend?

Ming Min Hui: Actually, I don’t think I have to go back that far. I am really bummed that I missed Misty Copeland’s last performance at ABT.

Monica Holt: Well, that’s very fair and all the same, she continues to be part of our lives. We just saw her and Cynthia Erivo do their duet video for Wicked and… Gorgeous. We love Misty. What is one free resource in any field that everyone should check out or avail themselves of?

Ming Min Hui: Yeah, this one’s fun. I had the privilege of seeing Suzy Welch do a book talk for her latest book, and she has a free resource on her website called The Values Bridge, and it’s basically a quiz that you can just take and it identifies effectively across 15 different values that you could have in your life, what is your lived reality? What values are showing up in your life, right? Like, versus what you’re aspiring to? And the values are great because it’s really about stuff that you can genuinely have be different person to person, no judgment. And so things like: beholderism is a value. Beholderism is how much do you appreciate your environment and your dressing and the people around you and what you see around you being aesthetically pleasing? [It] might at first rub you as like, ‘Oh, isn’t that kind of shallow?’ But if you think about it, that’s a value that some of us really have and some more than others.

That appreciating the aesthetics of your environment, appreciating beauty, appreciating great art… You can have that be of value in your life. And how much scope do you want in your life? In other words, would you rather have a bigger impact on just people very close to you and have that be a very deep impact? Or would you rather have broad impact across society, larger communities, whatever that might be? You can imagine nonprofit leaders probably tend to score pretty high on scope as a value. That’s what’s being tested in this free resource, and I think it’s just a fascinating amount of personal insight that you can then derive from it on how you’re living and how you want to be living.

Monica Holt: That’s great. Yeah, I can’t wait to go check that out myself. Okay. And then we’ve come to our final question, which is your CI to Eye Moment. If you could broadcast one message to executive directors and leadership teams and staff and artists and boards at thousands of arts organizations, what would that message today be?

Ming Min Hui: Yeah. Oh my gosh, I have so many, but the one that’s resonating for me most right now is probably one of, take care of yourself in the process. This was something said to me when I had my baby, was put your own oxygen mask on first. Right? I think that this field, this industry, lends itself to people who want to do so much. We care so much about it. There’s always so much work to be done. There’s sometimes a little bit maybe of a culture of martyrdom that comes with that. And so we’re closing out the year, we’re in Nutcracker season, it’s incredibly hectic, but it’s also a season of thanks and love, and I think that that’s a message I’m trying to tell myself more. And so to whatever degree it helps everybody else who’s living in this field and working these really hardened hours and really putting themselves on the line in a time of great turmoil and uncertainty, put your own oxygen mask on first. Make sure you take care of yourself in the process.

Monica Holt: Beautifully said, especially in this season. Ming, thank you so much again for your time. What an absolute pleasure to talk to you today.

Ming Min Hui: Thank you, Monica. It’s always so nice to see you too.

Monica Holt: Thank you for listening to CI to Eye with Monica Holt. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover the show and hear from leaders in the arts and beyond. If you haven’t already, please click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve got some pretty incredible episodes coming your way, and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen McConarty and myself, Monica Holt. Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are our incredible designers and video editors. Our music is by whoisuzo. Don’t forget to follow CI on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for CI’s newsletter at capacityinteractive.com and you’ll never miss an update. And you can always reach out to let us know who you’d like to hear next from on CI to Eye.