The Royal Ontario Museum and its new CEO, Joshua Basseches, seem made for each other.

The place needs a shakeup and a way into the 21st century, and he comes across as just the charismatic and articulate makeover expert to lead a transformation, as I discovered over breakfast the other day.

Basseches was paying a flying visit to Toronto just days before moving here from Boston, along with his wife of 26 years, Amy Perry Basseches. He starts work Tuesday at a (relatively modest) salary of $380,000.

They will be looking for a house to buy, preferably within walking distance of the ROM, big enough to accommodate visits from their son, who is already at university in Connecticut, and their daughter, currently in high school but soon college-bound.

I was pumped for my first face-to-face, sit-down interview with him. I’d carefully planned my hidden agenda, which was to nudge him into talking about what I’d heard were top secret plans for $50 million of revisions to Daniel Libeskind’s controversial Crystal.

I had no idea he’d be completely open to sharing visionary dreams for the glorious future of the ROM in the digital age, already kick-started by the ROM board. Not only that, but Basseches confirmed that he recently spent time in New York with board members, looking at museums there for ideas on improving public spaces and visitor services with the goal of dramatically increasing attendance.

We were meeting for breakfast at the Park Hyatt Hotel. Not so easy for him, since in his soon-to-be-former life he had to get out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to catch a flight to Toronto. And on the day after the Brussels terrorist attack, anything to do with airports could be highly problematic.

Yet somehow he had been seated at our table for 15 minutes when I arrived at the designated time. Showing not the slightest sign of fatigue or frazzle, exuding energy and wearing a creaseless perfectly tailored suit, he managed to come across instantly as welcoming, smart, funny, open and eloquent in an unscripted way about his aspirations and the challenges he faces transforming the ROM into one of the world’s leading museums.

I stuck to my planned script and began with getting-to-know-you small talk. First question: How is your name pronounced? Answer: It almost (but not quite) rhymes with “passages.”

I knew the family was originally from Vienna and to me the name sounded as if it could have courtly links.

“There was no courtly history,” he replied with a laugh. “I’m Jewish and my family came to Ellis Island.”

Born in 1962, Basseches was lucky enough to spend his entire childhood in Washington, D.C., one of the world’s great museum centres. That’s because his father was a clerk for a Supreme Court justice.

He went north to get a BA in fine arts from Amherst College and then an MBA from Harvard Business School. After working at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, he became executive director of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, where he expanded everything from education and outreach to staircases and the gift shop, all of which paid off with a 70 per cent increase in attendance while he was there.

But it was later, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., where he was deputy director and chief operating officer, that Basseches truly emerged as someone capable of landing a job running a large and important museum.

After the merger of two historic museums, the Peabody and the Essex, the Peabody Essex under director Dan Monroe became one of the top 20 museums in the U.S., drawing the attention of the Wall Street Journal. And Basseches played a key role in raising about $600 million, most of it for its endowment fund.

As Basseches told the Journal in 2013: “To dramatically increase earned revenue from sources other than admissions and retail is hard to do.”

Upshot: the Peabody Essex finances almost 60 per cent of its annual budget from its beefed-up endowment fund. The ROM should be so lucky.

Basseches arrives in Toronto at a promising moment, almost exactly a year after his predecessor, Janet Carding, returned to Australia.

While the ROM has had its troubles since opening Libeskind’s Crystal addition almost a decade ago, during the past 12 months its fortunes have started to look up. Attendance at its Pompeii exhibit (273,494) exceeded expectations and the Tattoos show, which opens April 2, is creating great buzz.

As for the rationale of what he calls “the welcome project,” Basseches says: “It’s a way for the museum to build on what it already has.” Its purpose is to enhance the degree to which the ROM can engage the public in a variety of ways.

“Good architecture should work to serve a museum’s vision,” he argues, “not the other way around.”

The Toronto architectural firm Hariri Pontarini has already drafted plans for structural changes to comply with that philosophy.

Basseches sees the ROM job as a huge opportunity and it’s a perfect fit, because his background encompasses art, culture, natural history and because, beyond his curatorial skills, he’s proved to be a highly successful manager and financial strategist.

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“There are very few museums on the scale of the ROM that can tell the story of the world,” he says with an air of excitement. “I’ve spent a lot of time looking at museums around the world, and this is one of the few that has the curatorial strength, rich collections and programming capacity to encompass art, culture and nature, and show how they’re intertwined. The ROM has a lot going for it, including a wonderful staff and financial stability.”

But he’s ready to embrace the revolution of the 21st century rather than cling to the past.

“There’s a paradigm shift going on in terms of how people use their time and they engage with institutions. The public lives in a digital world, especially young people. They want to be able to create their own experience, especially in museums. That gives us an opportunity. Many museums were set up according to 19th-century ideas, with separate disciplines. Very few museums have the potential to integrate. But institutions that do not meet these challenges will find themselves at the side of the road.

“A great museum visit should be transformative,” he adds. “It should give visitors a broadened sense of themselves and the world around them. And it should include experiences that make people want to come back again and again. That’s the exciting challenge. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think the ROM was singularly equipped to meet those goals.”

After breakfast, the ROM’s new boss was scheduled to spend the afternoon meeting both of the museum’s boards: its board of trustees and its board of governors. Then he’d be sprinting to the airport for a late flight to Boston.

He’ll return to Toronto, this time to settle in, over the Easter weekend. Basseches moves into his new office on Tuesday.

The ROM’s welcome plan

Although plans to improve guest services and visitor experience are still in flux, and possibly years away from construction, here are some changes we can enjoy looking forward to:

A street level cafe at the ROM’s northwest end (near Philosopher’s Walk) taking advantage of the lively activity on Bloor St.

Something completely different on the top floor where the ritzy restaurant, C5, with its astonishing views, has closed except for private affairs

A dramatic and flashy makeover for the gloomy old entrance on Queen’s Park Crescent

Repurposing of the vast and confusing lobby that confronts visitors entering the Crystal

A dramatic new window increasing light from the Bloor St. side