Ming Min Hui at Boston Ballet

This case asks how Ming Min Hui, the newly appointed executive director of Boston Ballet, should ensure that the company stays true to its art form yet relevant to its times. Hui stood out among ballet leaders as a young, Asian American woman with a Harvard Business School MBA and a background in finance. She had worked at the Ballet for eight years as chief of staff and chief financial officer, and she had helped steer it through the double crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning of Black Lives Matter. Now at the helm of one of the foremost ballet companies in the United States, she confronted evolving demographics, shifting audience habits, and a financial environment that was becoming ever more challenging. Hui and the Ballet were also committed to making an historically exclusionary art form more inclusive. How could she get the balance between past, present, and future right?