AUGUST 2017 16 | FRONTDOORSMEDIA .COM Ward spent over a decade working with legendary film director George Lucas in a private-sector creative environment so the idea of running the nonprofit Phoenix Symphony represented a new turn in his career. “This is primarily an entertainment business in a different form,” he said. “I love working in a creative environment and I’m working with 66 professional, Julliard-trained musicians who are phenomenal. So that transition wasn’t really hard. Naiveté is always a good thing because I just know how to run things, which is to run it like a business and so that’s the approach that we’ve taken here right now.” Ward believes in artistic vibrancy. He said he wants people to experience an emotional impact at the Symphony, even if it is negative. “We want them to experience the craftsmanship of an art that has been performed for hundreds of years,” he said. “But we want to deliver it maybe in a new way that stimulates them to think in different ways. There are a number of different kinds of experiences one can have but at the end of the day we want an emotional and engaged impact. And we also want an interactive one. We don’t want it just to be passive.”

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