“The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

Today I’m looking at the qualities that led to the success of The Factory as a music innovation incubator, with parallel lessons for businesses wishing to make innovation part of their business as usual activity.  My epiphany came about after many years of teaching an MBA programme in creativity and innovation for the Open University Business School.  I noticed that the example of The Factory has useful parallels with the four ‘P’s of innovation: Person; Place; Product; Process. To help tell the story of Andy Warhol and The Factory to the uninitiated, I’ve linked these to music from the great retrospective album by Lou Reed and John Cale “Songs for Drella”.  Note “Drella” was a nickname for Warhol – a combination of Cinderella and Dracula!

Person – The song “Open House” makes reference to the grating tension between the Velvet Underground’s personalities – e.g. Reed – Cale and Warhol’s role as a creative leader – demonstrating permission giving behaviours and creating a climate where different things could happen.  Many creativity experts only emphasise the positive aspects of creative people, yet much creativity comes out of struggle, sometimes with the task, but sometimes through tensions between the people.  This also occurs in corporate life:

“Because of the trust and respect we’ve built up, like an old married couplewe are able to rubbish each other’s ideas. Yes we have to kill our babies – it’s the only way to arrive at a viable idea”

Simon Kershaw, Creative Director for the Land Rover Discovery

Check “Open House” out and listen carefully to the words:

Place – For me, the idea of ‘Place’ refers to the physical and psychological environment that encourages innovation.  The parallel is in seeing The factory as a business incubator or ‘innovation hothouse’.  John Cale said:

“It wasn’t called the Factory for nothing. It was where the assembly line for the silkscreens happened. While one person was making a silkscreen, somebody else would be filming a screen test. Every day something new”

Andy Warhol clearly understood what business schools would call ‘innovation climate’, building a physical and psychological environment where people would be inspired to think great ideas and then convert them to finished product.  The principles behind innovation climate are neatly summed up by a rich picture designed by one of my MBA Alumni.  Mail me for more background on this highly condensed view of innovation research.

Precepts for developing an innovation climate

Warhol cared less about traditional boundaries of art and this is what the rich picture calls ‘explore the givens’.  This is epitomised in Reed and Cale’s piece “The trouble with the classicists.”  Take a listen:

Product – The Factory produced uncompromising real life ‘art’ that dealt with subjects largely untouched by the art world – at the same time Warhol’s protégé’s produced an unending supply of sensational pop art, such as the images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup.  Despite the huge diversity, whatever emerged was instantly recognisable as coming from The Factory.  In effect, The Factory was an ‘anti-corporate brand’ much in the same way that punk rock and punk clothing quickly became mainstream music and fashion.

Cale and Reed epitomised The Factory’s unending art production line in their words and music to the wonderously grating and dissonant piece “Images”

Process – Andy Warhol was a workaholic, contradicting the view that creativity was about waiting for inspiration to arrive.  He favoured perspiration above inspiration and this is poetically summarised in Cale and Reed’s words to their song “Work”:

Finally, we finish with some questions to provoke your own innovation factory:

1. Have you got the right people in the right balance to make innovation regular and frequent?  Inventors, Innovators and Entrepreneurs?
2. Have you got a physical and psychological environment that encourages creativity and calculated risk taking?
3. Do you seek constant innovation in the products and services that you provide?
4. Have you got reliable strategies and processes for divergent thinking (creativity), convergent thinking (deciding) and converting decisions into innovation (implementation)?

In the spirit of pop art and punk for punk’s sake, my latest micro book “Punk Rock People Management – A no-nonsense guide to hiring, inspiring and firing staff” is available for FREE.  Simply e-mail me with punk in the title (peter@humdyn.co.uk) for your copy.  A full colour illustrated print version is also available and an Amazon Kindle version.  If you like the preview, you will LOVE the full feature ‘Sex, Leadership and Rock’n’Roll’ – so ‘BOGOF’ – Buy one and get one free!  Contact us to book your next conference keynote based on our heady mixture of business leadership and music.

We cannot conclude without visiting Lou Reed’s classic “Walk on the Wildside” which tells stories of many of the personalities at The Factory – Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallessandro, Candy Darling etc.   Coming up soon an interview with the illegitimate Godfather of Punk and confirmed Velvet Underground fanatic Richard Strange.

This week, I have a great opportunity for writers, musicians and business leaders.  I have just been appointed “Rock’n’Roll Innovation Editor” for a US based Global Innovation Company called Innovation Excellence.  The company is run by Julie Anixter, who worked with Tom Peters and Seth Godin amongst other leading business thinkers around the world.  Innovation Excellence is the most popular innovation website in the world with over 10 000 readers per day and counting.  As part of my job there, I am planning interviews with people in the coming year such as Ahmet Ertegun’s biographer, CEO of Atlantic Records, Bill Nelson, Professor Adrian Furnham, Bernie Torme, Sir Richard Branson and Sir Paul McCartney.  We’re starting shortly with a piece about the enigma that is Richard Strange, leader of proto-punk pop-art group The Doctors of Madness and perhaps punk’s godfather,

So, what then does the Rock’n’Roll Innovation Editor do?  Good question!  You don’t see many RNR Innovation Editors on the staff at the Financial Times or the New York Herald Tribune!  My job is to interview, write or commission articles with any of the following types of people:

• Innovative musicians – Names that spring to mind include Robert Fripp, Lady Gaga, Brian Eno, Madonna – people who have either innovated within music or are gamechangers in the music industry.

• Innovation leaders – Especially those who get the idea that innovative leadership requires both discipline and improvisation – Virgin, Toyota, First Direct, Google, 3M, The Eden Project spring immediately to mind.

• Innovation authors and academics – Again those who have a ‘Rock’n’Roll outlook’ on the subject – Brian Clegg, Tom Peters, Adrian Furnham et al are on my list of suspects here.

Innovation Excellence is also open to sponsors who wish to help build the best educational resource in the world for innovation.  Contact me via e-mail at peter@humdyn.co.uk to see what’s on offer.

So, in the warped words of the hymn “Come all ye faithful … and also a healthy dose of firestarters …”  Drop me a line and let’s see if we can create a guest article or interview.

Speaking of firestarters, time to finish with a bit of that…

Black Sabbath came not from leafy suburbs of Surrey, nor did they study classical music at Oxford or Cambridge. They crawled out from the gutters of the industrial heartland of Birmingham, with three degrees in classical rock. Their music reflected a much harsher upbringing. Pioneers of the music genre called heavy metal, their music conjured up images of grime, paranoia and … devil worship, according to some. Let me explain.

Sabbath’s title song from their first album ‘Black Sabbath’ contains a musical riff that uses the musical tritone, or the so-called ‘devil’s interval’ – the sixth note of the musical scale. Unlike the major scale (do re me fa so la ti do for the non musical readers) the tritone was considered so powerful that the Catholic Church attempted to ban composers from using the note in the 16th Century. Remember that music was largely an act of patronage at this time, the monarch and the Church were much more connected, society was much more superstitious and the enlightenment had not happened. Put simply, physics had not happened. Had the Catholic Church followed the work of Maxwell, Hertz, Faraday et al they would have realised that you cannot ‘ban’ electromagnetic radiation!

So how did Sabbath get the “Riff” and was there a devilish intervention at work?  Guitarist Tony Iommi had an accident in which he lost the tips of two fingers on his right hand and he almost gave up playing the guitar. He capped the missing digits with thimbles made from plastic and covered in leather. He had to use lighter strings and detune them so he could grip them easily with the capped fingers. This combination gave a dark and foreboding sound and Iommi came up with the riff after a comment from Butler as he watched people queue to watch a Boris Karloff film.  He said it was “strange people would pay money to be scared” The rest as they say is history with Osborne and Butler adding powerful lyrics.

Black Sabbath’s ‘riff’, when written down in musical notation, sort of makes up the number 666, hence the notion that it would summon up the devil.  That’s why you won’t hear Kylie Minogue or Katy Perry using the tritone …  Whilst popular rumour suggested that Sabbath conducted live sacrifices and so on, they were more into drinking in pubs than drinking blood! Ah well, that’s music marketing for you. Here’s a little video I made that proves for the first time that the devil’s interval is harmless to animals:

Just to add more to this fascinating story The Rockefeller Foundation conducted research into psychosocial stress to produce “mass hysteria” and found the sound wave that caused this to be A=440/741hz.  Which is the same note as the Solfeggio (That’s the Devil’s Interval to you and me) banned by the Catholic Church and by coincidence the riff Iommi came up with for the song Black Sabbath. So was there devilish intervention at work or not?

Nonetheless, it’s interesting that music has such power. I will leave you with another Sabbath Classic, which also contains another ‘evil’ riff, using the flattened fourth, in the middle of the song:

Special thanks to Tom Hughes for co-writing this blog – Tom is a leadership trainer, enthusiasm generator and general music fanatic – Find him on Twitter @Thomas2BHughes

For more Heavy Metal Business articles – check SPINAL TAP on project management, DEEP PURPLE on improvisation, LED ZEPPELIN on strategy

Let’s warm up with a bit of Herbie Hancock:

The Jazz Band – a metaphor for more innovative organisations

The Jazz band is a loose association of individuals that need no sheet music, since they share a common love for the music, achieved by careful selection of musicians, based on ability and empathy within and on the edge of the band’s style. There is scope for musicians to ‘blow their own trumpets’, whilst recognising the need for the ‘solos’ to be consistent with the overall musical direction.

The informal band leader helps band members reach new heights of musicianship and encourages the swapping of instruments to broaden skills. The band is paid on the quality of the group performance although random bonuses are allocated by group consent for outstanding individual performance from a ‘slush fund.’

The band’s repertoire is wide and both well rehearsed and unstructured, for the performance has both elements of formal musical structure and improvised chaos. Some performances are unremarkable, yet there are indefinable moments when the band seems to know exactly what to do to take the music in a new direction that has never been rehearsed formally in a state of ‘flow’.

Although the band get great enjoyment out of playing the music when practising or performing, off stage the members often disagree vigorously about many issues concerned with the music. In some cases, individual members are not great personal friends, yet this is subsumed to the greater ‘task’ of the music itself. For example, the guitarist tends to be simultaneously gregarious yet aloof, whilst the bass player will often be the one to arrange social events. The drummer is always late for rehearsals as he has to get a lift from the piano player since he is never organized enough to buy a car.

Competitiveness manifests itself in a positive way, in so far as individual soloists attempt to outdo each other with the aim of moving the general level of performance upwards. Although each person could probably play a very impressive piece on their own, the results that the band achieve somehow add up to more than the individual players could achieve on their own. The band also has to compete with other bands for gigs and one of the members carries out the job of getting the band gigs through advocating the band to club owners and using any tricks to make them more visible than other jazz bands.

The jazz band occasionally get asked to play requests. These are done in a dutiful way but often fail to reach the heights of performance achieved when they are in free flow. They claim to be unaware of anything around them including the audience when they are in this state, and they could be said to be creating music in a highly selfish way at these times.

The jazz band parable highlights the need for businesses and organisations to:

• Balance structure and chaos according to the needs of the various stakeholders.

• Learn continuously and adapt to change through the use of signposts which are understood by all.

• Let creativity happen rather than trying to force it.  Technique and training helps, but no amount of engineering will necessarily produce the intended result.

• Make personality differences irrelevant by a consuming mania with a shared purpose.

Speaking of improvisation and innovation, I have just been appointed Rock’n'Roll Innovation Editor for New York based Global Innovation Website Innovation Excellence.  Run by Julie Anixter,  who has written with Seth Godin and worked with Tom Peters.   I have been asked to write a number of prestigious articles and interviews – for example, the CEO of Atlantic Records, Sir Paul Mc Cartney, CEO’s who play music and more.   Innovation Excellence is the world’s most popular innovation blog with over 10 000 reads per day.  I am therefore offering guest interviews and articles to:

• Innovation authors
• Innovative musicians
• Innovative businesses
• Innovation leaders
• Innovation academics

If you wish to publish an article or interview, let me know via this blog or mail me at peter@humdyn.co.uk

Do check out the website All About Jazz for much more on Jazz.  To finish, the master of improvisation and innovation, Wes Montgomery:

In 1994 I developed ‘The Virtual Bookreader’ – yes I know it’s not a snappy title!  An extract from the patent document reveals the purpose:

The virtual bookreader offers a user friendly way to read books using computer based technology.  This will be of particular use to frequent travellers who wish to save on luggage space, libraries for multiple book loans and book publishers wishing to enter electronic book distribution.

I registered the design for a year, to enable me to have commercial discussions with a number of large companies about the concept. Unsurprisingly, I got many rejection letters.  Even the computer giant IBM even sent me a letter telling me that they did not think it had much commercial potential.  Oh dear – how wrong could they be!

I did not sufficient money to develop the idea at the time, so I decided to let the patent lapse and publish the idea in my 1^st book ‘Best Practice Creativity’, in the hope that someone would take the idea further.  It seems they did.  Take a look at the original drawing and the modern day Kindle:

The Virtual Bookreader and the Kindle - Extracted from the book 'Best Practice Creativity' - given a personal affiliation by Professor Charles Handy

What are the innovation lessons we can learn from this?

1. Since the Kindle only came out in 2007, it is fair to say that my concept was ahead of a market demand.  This serves to demonstrate the importance of timing in innovation.  Doh!
2. The concept was rejected by many serious companies.  This points to the fact that new ideas are inconceivable before they have entered the market.  Double Doh! )
3. Whilst creativity and invention is relatively easy, innovation takes blood, sweat, tears and money.  Without sufficient cash to drive the innovation train, it is often better to sell your idea.  Even then one needs the skills to crack the corporate hierarchy and persistence / resilience to continue after many tries.  In my case, I had a startup business to run, so made the decision not to pursue the invention.  Focus matters when running a business.  But for a different time …. Doh !

Feel free to check out Best Practice Creativity – we have a few copies for sale directly.  Or mail us (peter@humdyn.co.uk) for a free copy of the new book ‘Punk Rock People Management‘.  Our previous books are acclaimed by Professor Charles Handy and Tom Peters and, oh yes, the book is available on Kindle at a very attractive price.

Buy Two, get One FREE

Some interesting observations:

1. The film covers several quite distinct musical genres:  funk, soulful love songs, acoustic beatbox music plus Prince’s classic anthem Purple Rain.
2. The band is a genuine meritocracy, irrespective of gender, race and so on e.g. women taking on less traditional roles of bass and sax.
3. The show is meticulously rehearsed and this leaves room for a little bit of on the fly improvisation, mostly conducted by Prince himself, who gives signals to the rest of the band to extend passages, put solo segues in and so on.

How many artists could you say this about?

The potential downside of Prince’s desire to play so many different styles is that this may have lost him some of his audience along the way.  Some people prefer a repeat performance rather than something different?

Turning to business, feel free to make a contribution on the blog around these questions:

• If you decide to change your product or service, how do you keep your customers whilst acquiring new ones?
• How do you genuinely make diversity and meritocracy work to your advantage?
• How do you combine structure / discipline / preparation with creativity / improvisation / spontaneity to keep the customer experience fresh?
• What can we learn from Prince about resilience, excellence and becoming a learning company?

A book extract about Prince from my last book ‘Sex, Leadership and Rock’n’Roll’ is available for FREE.  Simply e-mail me with Prince in the title (peter@humdyn.co.uk) for your copy. Contact us to book your next conference keynote based on our heady mixture of business leadership and music.  To read a previous post on the genius of Prince, check out the Hop Farm.

Sex, Leadership and Rock'n'Roll - contains a U-LOG-EYE to Prince

In terms of 2012, if we are to turn the UK plc round, its going to take every bit of adaptation, learning and innovation.  You may care to reflect on some of the more popular posts of 2011 - Lady Gaga and adaptive strategy, Deep Purple, improvisation and innovation, The Beatles on creativity, Prince on excellence, Britney Spears on becoming a learning society, Hendrix v Clapton on innovation and Personal mastery in business and music – lessons from Jeff Beck, Les Paul and Bill Nelson.

So, what does 2012 hold in store for us?   Well, here’s some views taken in the course of my travels recently, with the themes linked to pop and rock songs of course!

There is power in a union?

2011 was marked by a resurgence of industrial relations unrest in the UK.  However, the recent public sector strikes was marked not by braziers, banners and protest songs, but by the best shopping day in 2011, as retail sales soared.  I saw people leaving local government picket lines to go to Costa Coffee at 10 am.  Is shopping for Ugg boots and flat screen TV’s the hallmark of the new rebellion?

Can we look forward to more industrial unrest?   From talking with people in local government, it seems that there is still plenty of scope for downsizing and it also appears that quite a few people are basically happy with their pension, so it appears that the current industrial unrest may not develop.  When I talk to my self-employed friends, there appears to be little sympathy with the strikes – as one remarked “Pension, what pension?”  One thing is for sure, in an age of unrest we can expect more performances by proto punk protest singer Billy Bragg:

What’s new pussycat?

During 2011 I met Evan Davis of BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills.  During our conversations we touched on the vexed question of what we should do to rebuild Britain.  There are no easy answers here and a debate has since been raging on Linkedin over this issue.  There seems to be broad agreement that the UK plc desperately needs more innovation, especially the type that can be exported and that which builds out of our strengths in ways that are hard to copy or appropriate.  At the same time the service sector needs to shrink, whether this is through a smaller public service component to the economy or in service industries that merely consume wealth at a local level – for example tanning rooms and burger bars.  The change is going to be hard to swallow for some.  Doing more of the same will not do, we need to do things differently.  Musically, it’s more a case of ‘What’s new pussycat’ rather than ‘Do the standing still’.

We’ve got a meeting with the Department of Business Innovation and Skills to explore some of the ramifications of the UK’s innovation needs coming up.   More on innovation coming up in future posts.

What are your hopes and fears for 2012?  Post a comment on this blog.

Creativity in business can be a slow, incremental process, as Wallas identified in 1926:

1. First insight – problem/opportunity finding and redefinition
2. Preparation – the groundwork is often done here
3. Incubation – in many cases, this is where unconscious processes play their most important part
4. Illumination – often described as the ‘aha’ experience
5. Verification – where the idea is validated and accepted by others

In other cases, creativity can pour out of people, at the speed of sound and almost to order.  Such was the occasion about 6 years ago, when I wrote a song and recorded a demo of the song all in less than an hour.  The piece was inspired by my 8 year old son James, who seemed to demonstrate an ability to wrap my wife and I around his fingers at a level of competence well beyond his years and quite different to my older boy.  One day, the idea of a song called “Cowboy James” came to me – words and music flowed and the whole thing was finished in minutes.   I previously wrote about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the state of flow and this is a good example of flow in action.  I recently re-recorded the piece with my friend dannylee on piano and percussion at his custom built studio-34 (mail@studio-34.co.uk)  Please take a listen to this product of naïve and rapid creativity:

The business lessons? 

1. Sometimes the first thing we do is the best thing.  Resist the temptation to refine and overanalyse if your creativity feels right the first time.
2. Steve Jobs was known to trust his intuition as much as a spreadsheet.  Balance head and heart if you want to convert creativity to innovation
3. Read Bill Nelson’s principles for continuous creativity to gain an insight into how to create the flow state – More on this in the book ‘Sex, Leadership and Rock’n'Roll‘
4. As part of my MBA teaching and innovation consultancy over the years I have practiced with a suite of about 120 creativity techniques which improve the speed and effectiveness of brainstorming.   Technique is only part of the equation to get an innovative climate, yet it can help produce creativity ‘on demand’ and certainly more reliably than a poorly run brainstorming session.   Contact me via e-mail at peter@humdyn.co.uk to find out more.
5. Bill Nelson has just released a beautiful box set album covering 40 years of continuous creativity and flow.  It is a testament to an intuitive approach to creativity, matched by discipline.  Check it out at The Practice of Everyday Life

The Practice of Everyday Life - Picture by Martin Bostock www.martinbostock.co.uk

Rockin' all over the blogging world - Life and Business lessons from the world's top bloggers

This year I have been lucky enough to meet some fantastic people around the blogging world.  They have kindly offered to send me a Christmas message, so here for your delight is part 2 of our Rock’n’Roll life and business coaching tips taken from a magical mystery tour round the world.

We left the last blog back in London with Alison Chisnell and we start there again – great minds think alike and when I asked people for suggestions for music with meaning, two people offered me the same song.   Wesley Gransden agrees with Colin Millar from our previous post.   Wesley goes on to say:  “For me it’s got to be Queen’s ‘One Vision’…. This powerful piece of musical perfection inspired me to focus on ‘one vision’ & ‘one goal’ and was used with great effect in bringing together a team, setting targets and then achieving that goal. Will have to use it again one day.”

Over to Northern Ireland to meet bass supremo and consumer data specialist Jason Bell.  Starting from a completely different musical place, Jason arrives at a similar ‘destination’.  Jason offers us ”Discipline” by King Crimson.   “To me this is a perfect example of team players striving towards a common goal.  Every member is doing something very different but when it’s all put together the end result is astounding.  Remove one of the team and the impact is not the same.”

Ellie Becker runs Ellie Becker PR, a cool inbound marketing and PR company in New York.  Last time Doug Shaw mentioned Neil Peart from Rush as a great example of someone who has persisted against the odds.  Ellie takes up this theme:

“The musical artist who inspires me most is my friend and client, drummer Ray LeVier. Ray has unbelievable chops. He tours around the globe with urban jazz singer/songwriter K.J. Denhert and has recorded with vibraphonist Joe Locke, guitarists John Abercrombie and Mike Stern, saxophonist Dave Binney and bassist Francois Moutin.

When Ray was 12 years old and had just started playing drums, he suffered severe burns over much of his body in a camping accident. His fingers were reduced to small nubs and he pretty much lost his thumbs. His face was left with scars that would not get most folks thinking in the direction of the performance stage.

What did Ray do? He followed his dream to become a professional, performing drummer, and challenged himself to play jazz – arguably the most nuanced and difficult style to play. He underwent risky surgery to fashion a thumb on one hand and devises whatever creative ways he needs to hold and work with sticks. According to Joe Locke and the other musicians and teachers he’s worked with, Ray has never exhibited one moment of self-pity. I’ve never seen any either.

Ray’s website is HERE  Click the ‘Video’ tab to view two videos – Ray laying down a mad groove with K.J. Denhert’s group and giving a drum clinic to some aspiring young drummers.  Listen and watch. You’ll find it tough to ever again complain about anything in life!

Onwards to Canada now to meet Tibor Shanto – a sales guru, author and agent provocateur – Find him at Renbor.  Tibor chooses the awesome Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull as his inspiration:

“Half way through Thick As A Brick, at the start of side two when these things had sides, Ian Anderson offers us the following:  ‘We will be geared to the average rather than the exceptional’ – this has always driven me to look for and be the exceptional.”  I can testify that Tibor has lived up to this particular maxim!

Leaving on a jet plane, headed down under to Australia to meet Dr Timothy Pascoe, a leadership guru and author of the Leadership Potshots blog.  Timothy chooses Beethoven’s 9th symphony as his inspiring piece of music.   “Beethoven’s 9^th is about the brotherhood of man.  Interestingly, the theme of the last movement is the anthem of the European Union.  I hope its leaders live up to his expectations.”

He goes on to offer us a leadership lesson from one of his favourite artists:  The Greek Soprano “Maria Callas didn’t just sing the notes of her operatic roles.  She changed her voice style and tone to convey what an aria was meant to be conveying.  We all need to think about the intended (and hidden) messages sent via our body language and voice tone.”   here we see a slightly different take on Maria’s genius, nonetheless with the same skill of body language from Mr Bean:

Back home to Blighty.

Back home to Blighty to meet Chris Glennie.  “So, I was driving to fetch my daughter from school yesterday and thinking what to write back to you when Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow’ came on the radio. As a believer in things happening for a reason, I’ll pick that song.

The song expresses a great lesson. It says:

• Focus on the future (‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’)
• Don’t waste time (‘It’ll soon be here’)
• Keep a positive outlook (‘better than before’)
• Learn relevant lessons from but don’t dwell on the past, you can’t change it (‘Yesterday’s gone’)

It may now have become slightly over-used and cliched, but things do become cliches for a reason…”

Editor’s note:  Somehow, I had failed to notice just how sensible the lyrics of this song are for businesses.  Perhaps that’s because I’m nota huge Mac fan.  However, it’s simply true that companies like Apple, Unilever and First Direct have succeeded by following principles like this.  Business strategy is indeed writ large into rock songs!

We’ve spent much of 2011 wondering about the state of the economy and it’s becoming clearly that we need more of different rather than more of the same.  Lucy Brazier, owner of Executive Secretary magazine turns our attention to the need to be different rather than the same with the exquisite Stephen Sondheim song ‘Everybody says don’t', performed here by Barbara Streisand.

Lucy also responded powerfully to my question “what would the world be like without music?”  She put it plain and simple:

“I learned to read music before I learned to read.  I have an ipod full of music that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. There is something that enhances or supports every emotion. I would rather lose my sight than my hearing – I couldn’t bear to lose music from my life.  My son is 19 and equally passionate about music. We quite often have evenings where he’ll say ‘Let me play you this one.’ and then I do the same to him. The excitement at hearing new music we haven’t heard before is palpable and I can’t think of a more perfect way to spend an evening than to play and listen to music with someone as excited by it as you are.

Hope you have a Rock’n’Roll Christmas! – if you have not yet treated yourself to a free copy of my new micro book Punk Rock People Management, get an electronic copy by mailing me at peter@humdyn.co.uk.  I look forward to hearing your comments on this blog, suggesting other songs that have meaning for you.

A manifesto for straightforward, simple and authentic people management - Click on the picture to get your free copy of Punk Rock People Management

The full piece may be found at our Music Site.

Wishing you a peaceful Christmas and a happy new year.

Peter