This week, I’m offering you a business parable about jazz and innovation excellence. As a generalisation, it probably works, although jazz is an enormous genre, so feel free to agree / disagree / extend the story as you wish. It was written about 13 years ago for my 1st book Best Practice Creativity, and has resurfaced recently, since a University academic published an article on jazz and business in The Guardian. If you enjoy this post you may also enjoy related posts on Innovation and The Flow and Jazz.
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 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?
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.
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
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.
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
This year I have been blessed to meet some fantastic people around the blogging universe. They have kindly offered to send me a Christmas message, so here for your delight are some Rock’n’Roll life and business coaching tips taken from a magical mystery tour round the world:
Doug also offered us the example of Neil Ellwood Peart from the supergroup Rush – for his ability to recover from personal tragedy and his endless thirst for improvement. A class act. Lest we forget:
We must rush on … to platform 9 and ¾ at Kings Cross to join The Flying Scotsman. We are met in Edinburgh by Colin Millar, aka The Ranting Scotsman. Colin cranks it up with a leadership lesson from classic rock: Queen’s ‘One Vision, One Mission’.
Colin rants “The title and lyrics say it all and I think it’s a great message for business people – ‘One Vision’ is first and foremost about the ‘vision’ and extrapolating what that vision is and the unity vision creates, bringing people and cause together. I also like the concept of ‘consensus in eden’ that runs through the song”.
From a big country we then take a passage to India, to hear from Sonia Jaspal, who focuses on the power of music to create and maintain emotions. She says “I think without music, the world would lose the most beautiful power of expressive emotions. It touches the depth of our soul. I am still a person that when I listen to some of the softer numbers I have tears in my eyes. Yeah, I need a box of tissues while watching some movies. Also, without music, one would lose most of the inspirations in life. When one listens to beautiful music it somewhere resonates deep within. It has the capacity to change emotions and thinking.
Sonia’s favorite song is from an Hindi movie titled Safar (Journey). The song is ‘Zindagi Ka Safar’ (Life’s journey) sung in Kishore Kumar. It is portrayed via an actor suffering cancer. He is singing the song:
Moving on to Canada, home of Bryan Adams, Celine Dion and Francois Guay, who leads the Attack Defend Disrupt blog. His choice of music that offers us a lesson in life or business is ‘More than a Feeling’ by Boston:
Francois takes up the story “This song contains my favourite guitar riff ever.“ Editor’s note – I can sign up to that! “Although most people see it as a man disappointed in a having lost someone he loved, the song to me is all about reaching your goal, i.e. When you achieve one of your key goals that is “more than a feeling” it’s sublime and must be reproduced again and again.” Seems like a lot of people agree that music inspires us to focus on and reach our goals.
Back to Blightly to meet Alison Chisnell, HR Director of Informa and author of The HR Juggler. Alison’s song with a message is Billy Joel’s ‘All About Soul’. She takes up the story: “The context is that as an idealistic 18 year old, I had just begun a six month stint working in a children’s home in Zimbabwe as part of my gap year and in the early days I felt isolated, homesick and terrified that I had made the wrong decision. This song resonated as a reminder to commit fully to the adventure I was experiencing, to bring my values and passion to the task at hand, to ‘man-up’ and become more resilient and to accept that standing up and being counted was and is a good thing. Bland is rarely, if ever, good….so don’t be afraid to be you and get stuck in! Just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean that it won’t be hugely rewarding.”
Staying on the theme of soul, we finish with Sharon Howard, who offers us lessons in life and business from Bill Withers about the importance of delegation, support and asking for help. We all need the help of others in order to succeed and they need us too, we all need somebody to lean on A truly inspirational piece:
Coming up, we have more stories from bloggers and cool people all round the world.
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.
Have a great Punk Rock Christmas - Click on the picture for the free book - Picture by Lindsay Wakelin Photography http://lindsaywakelinphotography.com/
We live in lean times. Lean times call for lean thinking. Punk Rock is all about brevity, simplicity and authenticity. So, here for your viewing pleasure are 10 Punk Rock People Management tips (well, there may be more or less than 10!), from some self proclaimed HR Punk Rock gals and HR Rock Chicks, presented in a slideshare show:
We’re off to deliver an HR keynote at the 7th international HR conference in Athens next week following on from Dave Ulrich and Lynda Gratton of London Business School. To warm up for this, let’s finish with some classic punk – Pretty Vacant, a song which clearly predicted the current HR obsession with employee disengagement in its title!
It’s pretty much all been said, but we lost one of our greatest old school innovators this week as Steve Jobs fell prey to cancer. This resonated especially with me as my brother also succumbed to this most resilient of diseases this year. In spite of huge leaps forward cures for cancer still elude medical and pharmaceutical innovation. Having come from the world of scientific innovation myself, I believe that even cancer will be history by the end of the 21st century. Lou Reed sums up the rollercoaster of emotions that cancer represents in his album ‘Magic and Loss’, which examines the demise of personal friends to the disease:
I was talking to Richard Bandler last night and the conversation reminded me of how Steve Jobs describes death as life’s ultimate change agent, in terms of its ability to make way for the new. Check his Stanford University talk of 2005 on this point, shortly after he contracted the disease. It is a breathtaking speech:
Steve Jobs was a remarkable man, so I pondered what he leaves us as a lasting legacy:
Jobs was no friend of market research, preferring intuition as a spur to innovation. It’s a characteristic he shares with Leo Fender, who was not a great guitar player, but designed intuitively great features into his groundbreaking Fender Stratocaster guitar. I’ll be telling the Fender Strat story in a future post. For now, here’s my dead Fender Strat, after its premature cremation by IBM leaders at a business conference some years back.
IBM burnt my guitar
Jobs’ 2nd legacy was his insistence that technology needed to fuse style and substance. This was modelled down to the last detail in Apple’s products, which made Apple products design icons as well as functionally superior. People’s love of the Apple brand and design is evident in their personal tributes this week at Apple stores all over the world. I believe this arises not just out of style for its own sake, but because Jobs fused style with substance.
Jobs’ third legacy is his mantra “stay hungry, stay foolish”. Comfort does not make for great innovation, nor does taking yourself too seriously. All too often hunger and playfulness are driven out of corporate life with disastrous consequences for long term innovation. To read more on the HR issues surrounding innovation check out ‘What’s New Pussycat?” The credit crunch and the recession have exacerbated blame cultures and disputes over pay. Steve Jobs’ last reported yearly salary was $1. Check Dean Becker’s blog out for an excellent personal analysis of the qualities that made Steve Jobs an agile and adaptive learner.
It seems fitting to end this post with a personal consequence of Jobs’ approach to innovation. Here’s a piece of music I wrote and recorded on my beloved iMac entitled “Mars Warming” from the album “Music from the Basement of Cognition“. This music was conceived as a coda to an epic film and is filled with joy, sadness and melancholy. It simply would have not been possible to have recorded this piece of music without Steve Jobs. May he rest in peace.
I interviewed Dave Wakely who works for ASK Europe – a premier HR and coaching consultancy on music, business, life etc. Dave had kindly given the thumbs up to my books ‘Sex, Leadership and Rock’n'Roll’ and the new one – Punk Rock People Management – available for FREE by clicking on the cover below:
Punk Rock People Management - Click the pic for your FREE copy
Firstly Dave, tell me something of what you do for a living?
I manage and edit the ASK blog, providing food for thought for people in a range of HR, L&D and management/leadership roles. My role at ASK is mostly about language and organisational culture: finding and using a public voice for the company that reflects its values and style, but also exploring themes, topics and ideas and posing questions where conventional wisdom seems heavier on the first of those words than the second. (My role here also includes a whole range of other ways in which we put words in front of the wider world. As an occasional sailor, a non-musical metaphor springs to mind: I may not be steering the vessel, but I’m adjusting the cut of the jib and how closely to the wind we sail.)
The remainder of the week I work in web development, scoping and defining website projects, evolving email campaigns, advising on or helping to create content – much of which involves subtly reminding organisations that whoever operates the mouse calls the shots: the web isn’t just broadcasting. Those who don’t work in a similar role would probably be surprised how much of that role consists of asking people about different aspects of their business, including its culture, values and ethics – but I’d counter by saying that you can’t build an effective web presence for a company if you don’t understand that company in the first place. That’s the difference between ‘being present’ and ‘presenting an advert’.
Along the way, I’ve been a poetry librarian, a learning resources database manager, an information officer in many a setting, an author and editor of open learning materials, a senior university administrator, an events organiser: a very 21st century ‘portfolio worker’ CV, although ‘patchwork’ is perhaps closer to the mark than ‘portfolio’. My life is an abstract quilting concept in motion!
What do you gain from music as a metaphor for thinking about business and organisational life
Apart from solo performers (which I shall therefore just duck entirely as an issue!), music is something that requires multiple inputs and some kind of organising principle. (I see even something as general as ‘everyone improvise simultaneously’ as a principle, although I’m aware that I’m the kind of person that starts from a ‘how shall we behave’ point of view – something MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) recently reminded me.
Sometimes music starts with a closely scripted score where everyone’s part is prescribed for them to play, sometimes there’s a general theme and the arrangement at any given point is a matter of interpersonal interaction and negotiation: either way, there are many contributions and at some level an approach to deploying them. If it weren’t for the word ‘music’ at the start of that description, that could easily be a description of work.
Having played in a wide range of musical combinations (including jazz quartets, big bands, orchestras – and working as a session musician), there’s another important element that is about making music rather than about music in the abstract: the relationships between the players. Each group, band or orchestra needs the right mixture of people, just as it needs the right combination of talents; likewise, each musician has situations that either do or don’t inspire, satisfy and so on. (This is the ‘engagement’ issue: if the music, relationships or people don’t inspire, you probably won’t play your best.) Editors note – too true!
Sticking to popular music, most bands have a culture, a defining spirit, which has arisen from the combination of individuals and their shared values. Although most organisations are perhaps more like backing bands: an entrepreneur (read songwriter/singer/front-person) who develops a repertoire and a style, and builds their outfit around them. How much of their total potential contribution their band members get the opportunity to make might make a good metaphorical question to ask of organisational managers? (In other words, are you giving your staff the opportunity to show what they can really do or add, or are you just directing them? Being a supplier feels rather different to being a colleague, even if – in the context of the relationship – your role is pretty much just to supply. I’d brave a rash conjecture that most people want to give more at work rather than less, as being able to give more makes them feel they have a voice and a contribution to offer.)
How do you use these ideas in your professional life? Any favourite examples?
An interesting question – especially having recently completed a series of psychometric questionnaires, which confirmed or underlined my impression of myself as someone who’s more interested in the potential of collaboration than competition. Amusingly, when I interviewed you in 2009, I referred to Brian Eno’s published diaries and the band James. Another idea I remember from the same book is James’ realisation that “an arrangement is when some of the band stop playing some of the time”. Editor’s note – only the tiniest prompt needed to play some of Eno’s music:
To me, in any given working situation, there’s probably one approach that will be more appropriate than others: to me, that’s not so different to the idea of identifying which instruments, arranging in which way, would make the most effective soundtrack to the moment. It’s a matter of understanding the particular contribution that different individuals can make and deploying your combined human resources to maximum effect. It also goes back to the point about ‘making music’ rather than music in the abstract: the masterful conductor knows how to work not just with music but with the musicians. If you want a great example of how someone helped (you could even say ‘lead’) a group of people to realise and actualise their potential, I think George Martin’s work with The Beatles is a classic case. ‘Produced’ is a very broad adjective, that doesn’t convey the other roles – adviser, arranger, and motivator are just some. He could have simply adopted a managerial line, but he chose to adopt more of a coach’s role. Some of the methods may have stretched a few envelopes, but not as far as they were stretched by the money that subsequently rolled in: there can’t have been too much arguing about the bottom line. If he had been more interested in efficiency and control, Sir George could, of course, just have typed up some sheet music and ordered them to play it …
Kant said that music is the language of the emotions. How does music affect our emotional lives and what implications does that have for people in business and organisational life?
I had to pause and read around on Kant before replying, but found a reference to him classifying instrumental music as “more pleasure than culture” – without words, it can appeal to our senses but not to reason. My understanding is that he was awed by its ability to convey or evoke emotion, but had no role as a conduit for ideas. (Kant lived, of course, many years before Late Junction on Radio 3 or the John Peel Show, so perhaps we can forgive him?)
Within minutes of arriving home in the evening, two things will happen: I will put on the kettle, and I will put on music. There are a few thousand CDs in the house, but I’ll spend a few minutes while my tea brews to select something that gives voice to a feeling that has been suppressed throughout the day, or that has been invoked by the day, or to a feeling the day has generated that needs something to counter-act it. My partner has little interest in music, but gets an instant emotional update as he crosses the threshold from whatever is coming out of the speakers in the kitchen. I think of it as akin to hydration: you have water when you’re thirsty, you play fado when you’re rueful or wistful, and you play kora music when you’re optimistic and thoughtful (or you aren’t but you’d like to be). It’s a restoration of emotional balance, or a purging of an imbalance of one emotion.
My musical choices are overwhelmingly instrumental, which might either offend Kant or lead him to dismiss me as tasteless or shallow. That’s fine: he could still stay for a cup of tea, but we’d have to agree to differ. I have nothing against vocal music per se, but I’m too interested in language to accept perfunctory twaddle: I demand a decent lyric.
As individuals, identifying something that we can use to help us to maintain our personal emotional poise has obvious value; this is harder to think through in an organisational context – one person’s ideal background music is another’s fingernails down the blackboard moment. (I’ve promised not to play that John Surman CD in the office again: the finance team are still recovering.) I cringe a little at the idea of the utility of music, but I can’t deny that I do it.
In terms of implications for organisational life, anything that can encourage us to recognise our impact on others – and help us to deal with their impact on us – has merit in itself. (A couple of organisations I’ve worked with have had no problem with people who rarely have to answer phones working with headphones, choosing their own soundtrack. Others would sternly ban this as inappropriate, but if it helps personal productivity and improves people’s mood I’m not sure I can see the harm.)
More broadly, the example of the impact and importance of something as hard-to-define and non-verbal as ‘atmosphere’ is probably a neglected aspect of working life: it was interesting to note that The Work Foundation highlighted a sense of team atmosphere as a common attribute of those leaders most admired by those who work for them.
Music is one of those things that remind us that human beings cannot be boiled down to process manuals, spreadsheets, job definitions and bottom lines: there are ineffable aspects to us that we should not ignore. Even at the broadest level, if the existence of music can remind us that our moods and emotional tone affect others, then that’s a valuable lesson. And very few valuable lessons come with the bonus of a beautiful tune.
What can we learn from the music business about business in general? More importantly, what should we NOT learn from the music business about business in general?
A hard question, having kept my distance from the music business for many years, although I can’t help but feel that mainstream business could probably draw more and better lessons from the art form than from the industry that has evolved around it. I think we can safely learn that management and creativity are distinct skills, and that the music business requires a balance of both. I’d like to think we can learn that authentic branding trounces manufactured branding every day of the week, but I very much doubt that we can. And the more shameless examples of amateurism or lack of skill – and ethics – in the music business are something we’d do well to avoid importing into other sectors.
It’s very difficult to generalise about a business that embraces everything from The Saturdays to Radiohead, Leonard Cohen to Justin Bieber, indie-labels to global corporations and many other dichotomies. But I’m not too sure it generally provides a healthy model in its treatment of its ‘talent’: “build ‘em up, milk ‘em, drop ‘em” and an urgent sense of churn aren’t characteristics that bode well. Each golden goose is expected to lay all its eggs as quickly as possible and then surrender to the stockpot, to be replaced by the next goose: any development on the goose’s part seems to be coincidental, accidental or self-motivated – at least in the mainstream.
Beware laying all your eggs in one session ...
The cricketer Ed Smith has said some very interesting things about striking a balance between the passionate amateur and the schooled, consistent but less inspiring professional, and about the dangers of putting academies on some kind of pedestal. I’m more concerned by the business people within the music industry than the performers, too many of whom seem to be treated shoddily. As an industry, it’s parasitic: the business depends on the performers, without whom there’s no product.
The story of the music business in response to the rise of the net and the iPod is also a powerful lesson in the importance of keeping an eye on the longer-term and being as interested in that as in maintaining an urgent sense of churn in the present. (I was going to say something about the potency of adolescent dreams of glory, but even if it’s harsh it’s fair to say that those are just as prevalent in many other sectors.) It’ll be interesting to see how musicians use the net and structure their careers in future – I think there’s an unexplored parallel there with knowledge workers and their relationship with employing organisations.
It is thought that attention spans have shortened in a world bombarded by media of all sorts. Perhaps that plays itself out in a nation of people that prefer to consume ‘The X-Factor’ over progressive rock that requires longer and more detailed attention. What do you think to this? What might be the implications for people working in the field of human development?
I think you have a good point, and I think we see its effects in many ways – the familiar death by PowerPoint syndrome, the number of times any writer/editor is encouraged to use bullet lists (‘people won’t read this stuff …’), the tickertape nature of rolling news. Lots of pans with lots of flashes in them, and a comparative lack of metaphorical hearty slow-cooked stews. I do see a contemporary world more fascinated by – and expectant of – the ‘instant’ than 20 years ago: I suspect a lot of this is down to technology and the abundance (of ‘information’, to flatter some of it) that it’s enabled us to generate. Waiting more than a few minutes for something now feels not just like an eternity, but an affront. (One of the many points made in Michael Bywater’s excellent and very funny Big Babies, and a point explored more fully in Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity.)
As someone primarily concerned with communication, I can understand the pressures that have produced a culture that’s more heavily slanted to the soundbite, the headline, the nugget, although it’s hard not to be concerned that all this haste might be coming at the price of not just more in-depth understanding, but more especially of nuance and of perspective. We seem more interested in the idea of having news 24 hours a day than in the content of that continuous news (often the same handful of 3 minute clips circulating on a playlist that shifts slowly as the day goes by). While I wonder if I’m turning into a Grumpy Old Man, the questioning approach of such tech-literate commentators as Sherry Turkle and Jaron Lanier makes me feel less alone. And I haven’t forgotten a very ahead-of-the- curve book by Marshall McLuhan’s son Eric, Electric Language, that was first published back in 1998 – and mentioned in an earlier blog – that now feels like a topic in need of a significant update.
(The two things that have struck me most about ‘The X-Factor’ have been the umbrage taken at that cover version of ‘Hallelujah’ – and seeing a performance as fine as Jeff Buckley’s version in the singles chart was an uplifting communal response – but also the lack of longevity of most of the winners. The programme has always struck me as a firework display: buckets of wow, whizz and bang, but precious little left the following morning beyond a lingering bad smell. There’s an immense urgency and drama about something that really doesn’t matter that much, except to the contestants and the programme owners, which seems emblematic of rather too much of our times. )
From the work we do at ASK, in terms of implications for human development, we’re conscious that it’s the transfer of learning that ultimately delivers value and improved performance – both for the individual and the organisation – but that this (and the techniques used to enhance it) takes time. Organisational impatience for instant results means that outcomes are measured at the earliest opportunity (Kirkpatrick’s Level 1 – the proverbial ‘happy sheet’), and therefore don’t measure appropriately. What organisations want is the long-term impact of the learning event, but what they measure is the degree of satisfaction with the event itself. Misleading data feeds back into the process, and allowing time for transfer – or factoring in its importance – take a backseat. I’m not sure how we can counter this tendency – which impacts on more than our approach to learning and training: perhaps the answer is a new series of motivational posters. (“There is no F in magic bullet” springs to mind.) Suggesting an organisational equivalent to the Slow Food movement sounds both fatuous and pretentious – and implies there’s a merit in taking your time for its own sake – but I think most of us would benefit from more frequent reminders that there are multiple timescales in life and that something we might give more attention to is the signal to noise ratio in the ‘messages’ we receive.
Finally, tell me about your personal music tastes. What do you gain from music, both personally and professionally?
My own musical tastes are free-ranging, as colleagues would probably agree. (I often get Amazon to deliver CDs to the ASK Office to save all those cards through the door, and most weeks 3 or 4 albums will arrive. They tend to fall into the jazz or world music categories more than pop and rock, and I have some particular loves (30s/40s jazz songs, fado, Nuevo flamenco, modern tango, gypsy jazz, ambient electronics, a good torch song) and total blindspots (reggae, ‘African desert blues’, klezmer and Celtic folk – the last of which makes me cringe on impact). This week’s stack includes Lokkhi Terra (who describe themselves as ‘Banglafrolatinjazz’), Argentine composer Guillermo Klein, Portuguese guitar maestro Carlos Paredes, Swiss guitarist Nicolas Meier who’s heavily influenced by Turkish folk music, and a Lebanese oud trio, Le Trio Joubran. I’m as obsessive about the guitar as about music, so everything has a plucked stringed instrument of some kind involved, but the styles range very broadly – musically and geographically. Two of these are performers I saw at this year’s WOMAD Festival, where I remember a conversation with an old friend – a singer – about what drew us to different musicians. For her, possibly as one who loves to dance, it’s often a rhythmic pulse, while for me it’s almost always a captivating melody or an interesting way with harmony. (I dance like an Englishman – badly and rarely – so a beat is not enough.) She wants to be moved, while I want to be captivated and entranced.
If I could put fully into words what I get personally from music, I’d have linguistic powers of such astonishing prowess I might be tempted to abandon music – but its music’s ability to go beyond words and to evoke emotions, situations or places that is so compelling. It’s almost like our sense of smell – the way fresh bread can bring back the corner baker’s shop from your childhood, or a particular flower’s scent can recall a grandmother. There are pieces of music that made such an impact the first time I heard them, I could describe exactly where I was when I first heard them – even the stranger stood in front of me in the crowd and the temperature of the room. If we could do that so powerfully with words, music might become redundant!
Professionally, I think I’ve gained at two levels. Given the chance, there will be background music where and while I work, and the soundtrack can really influence the mood: I can enhance – or undermine – my own performance depending on my choices on the day. Less superficially, I think music has taught me about team-work and collaboration, about knowing that there are times to play to the gallery and times to provide thoughtful unobtrusive accompaniment. And that not playing, or providing an unconventional counterpoint, or combining instruments in different are all available options. And, of course, that even the most exquisite harp and flute duet is a waste if your audience want Status Quo, burgers and a knees-up. (No problem, but can the harpist blag it on a Telecaster or how adept is the flautist with a pair of BarBQ tongs?) It’s that point about making music again, but it’s about using your ears as well as your instrument: musicians don’t just play together, they listen very closely to each other too. Might this be their biggest lesson to humanity?
Well, I don’t think I can follow that Dave – thanks everso for your time and we’ll finish with one of the artists you have mentioned here. In the spirit of what Dave has said re premature evaluation, let’s give this piece its proper time and space:
Finally, on the subject of the pace of business life and the need to balance this with life experiences that require more gradual and careful attention, here’s a plug for a one-off concert taking place on October 01 by the musical genius Bill Nelson. Bill produces beautiful soundscapes mixing electronica with his virtuoso guitar work. Just a few tickets left. Here is the master at work at the ‘Sensoria’ art festival in Sheffield earlier this year:
The hard rock band Deep Purple are responsible for millions of young boys camping out in music shops trying to play the riff to ‘Smoke on the Water‘. At the age of 14 I used to sit at the top of the stairs at home in the darkness trying to figure out the riff with my Hofner Futurama guitar and 10 Watt Zenta amp, until my mum would shout me to come down to get my fish finger sandwiches. Aside from these problems, Deep Purple offer us a great example of improvisation and discipline in action in the context of a rock outfit. The Mark II incarnation of the band is generally considered to be perhaps the definitive lineup, but also the most volatile. Much of the conflict within Deep Purple arose from Ritchie Blackmore, their phenomenal virtuoso guitarist and moody maverick. Check out Deep Purple Mark II’s work when jamming here:
In this extract from ‘Mandrake Root’ we see the art of improvisation within a disciplined structure as Blackmore sends musical instructions (using his arms as a baton ! ) to the keyboard player Jon Lord, to repeat and develop certain lines (This is particularly obvious around 48 seconds onwards). He also sends orders to the rhythm section of Ian Paice and Roger Glover with respect to starts and stops within the music (around 1 minute 50 seconds). Blackmore’s signs are perhaps more aggressive than those used by Prince to change direction at short notice within the band What then are the parallel lessons for business from Deep Purple? Here’s three to get the discussion started – Please add your own views by commenting on the blog.
1. Innovation in business requires discipline as much as it does creativity: Creativity to come up with novel strategies; Discipline to execute them, so that ideas turn into profitable innovations. Companies such as Google, 3M and Innocent may seem to be all about creativity at first glance, but a deeper inspection reveals discipline and structure, even if that structure does not emanate from ‘management’ in all cases. Giving people 20% of their time to work on speculative projects is the business equivalent of a free form jam within Space Truckin’, Lazy, Mistreated and many other pieces of Deep Purple’s repertoire.
2. It requires extremely strong leadership and a compelling shared vision to hold diverse people together. To encourage a company that continuously learns / adapts and improvises into the future requires leadership that is precise on the destination, yet loose on the journey. We’ve seen this point before in my blog posts on Led Zeppelin and Prince.
3. Conflict will occur where there is diversity / divergence. It must be handled properly if progress is to be made. Ultimately Blackmore’s maverick behaviour proved too much for the band, especially the singer Ian Gillan, and despite several reunions, the band proved impossible to hold together. There have been many arguments to suggest that what Deep Purple Mark II needed was a manager who could hold the various personalities together and perhaps some time off from touring.
What else do you consider we can learn from Deep Purple about business, innovation, conflict and so on? Share your thoughts by making a comment to this blog.
Editor’s postscript: My thoughts go out to Jon Lord who is currently fighting cancer. Although I am a guitar player, it was Jon Lord’s innovative organ playing that led to my fanaticism with Deep Purple. Hoping things progress well.
To finish, here’s another piece by Deep Purple’s Mark II line up, the famous California Jam performance where Ritchie Blackmore destroys several guitars and sets fire to his amplifiers. I can’t immediately think of a transferable corporate lesson from this sequence but it sure is fun. Takes me back to my teenage years with the Zenta amp on all the way up and me smashing the guitar into the speaker trying to coax some feedback out of the amp!
For more Heavy Metal Business articles – check SPINAL TAP on project management and LED ZEPPELIN on strategy. Check out our conferences and events – where we extract business lessons from the Deep Purple classic ‘Smoke on the Water’ amongst many other things. If you like this post, you will love our books ‘Best Practice Creativity‘, Sex, Leadership and Rock’n'Roll‘ and ‘Punk Rock People Management‘ – Punk Rock PM is available for FREE on application. Why not come along to our ‘Monsters of Rock Business’ event in June, featuring Bernie Torme, who played guitar for Ian Gillan? Details below:
Books on innovation and improvisation in business
Looking for Trouble? Come to "Monsters of Rock" feat Bernie Torme
Last night I had the great pleasure of spending an evening in the pub with Bernie Torme, lead guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister and Ian Gillan of Deep Purple. We have a superb event coming up with Bernie soon – Take a look at Monsters of Rock Business and some of Bernie’s work:
As well as his high profile work with these monsters of rock, Bernie is a talented songwriter and recording artist. As well as a good chat about Prince, Bill Nelson, Gary Moore and other musicians, we spent some time exploring music – business parallels:
1. How the creative process works in music and how that translates into businesses looking to innovate as a source of long term advantage – from songwriting to inventive business thinking. We explored this issue at a global science conference with the Pfizer a while back.
2. How working with rock stars with massive egos has a parallel lesson for people attempting to lead creative / precocious people in intelligent / artistic businesses. This was a key discussion item at London Business School’s strategy summit recently.
3. Improvisation and creativity in music and business – Bernie’s life has been about adding amazing guitar work to polish other star’s performances. He works largely intuitively to do this. How can you tap into a natural intuitive flow? How do organisations such as Google, Imperial College and 3M encourage ‘intuition to order’?
4. Presentation, performance and impact – You have only one chance to make a great first impression on stage with Ozzy! See picture below.
Master of the universe
5. Dealing with conflict and trouble at work – Rock’n'Roll is an excellent arena for learning such skills. Some of Bernie’s stories here are x-rated and outside the scope of a public view!
6. Parallel lessons from the music business for business leaders – contracts, money, changes of plans and so on. I have had personal experience of ‘Rock’n'Roll accounting’ having sponsored a world tour with cult punk rocker John Otway and lost my shirt on the enterprise.
These days Bernie divides his time between his recording studios and work with his band GMT. He is also available for business events and conferences where representatives of your business get to interview him on a range of topics. Bernie also provides cameo performances of his work if an ‘aftershow’ element is required at a conference or event.
On stage Bernie is a mighty force to be reckoned with. Yet, in the pub, he is a thoughtful raconteur with fantastic insights and stories about the crazy world of rock’n'roll. Contact me here or via MUSICAL EXPERIENCES if you would like to book him for an Academy of Rock experience!
Finally, here’s Bernie playing a solo with his band GMT:
Peter Cook leads the after dinner keynote musical experience: Sex, Customer Service and Rock'n'Roll
I had the privilege of sharing the stage recently with Heather Small, lead singer of M-People, as the before and after dinner speakers / performers at the Customer Service Training Network (CSTN) Awards. As well as being a mighty fine singer, Heather works for Barnardo’s and a number of charities. She gave an impassioned speech about the work of the charity, encapsulated in the words of her song ‘What have you done today to make you feel proud?’
This also provided us with the challenge of ‘follow that’, since we had the slot afterwards to fill. Just as well that I took our ‘secret ingredient’ in the form of Sam Laming. Sam has two great passions, extreme sports and playing original music from Ukraine on his 32 stringed Bandura. Here is Sam pictured up Ben Nevis, having hauled the heavy instrument to the top of the peak. Imagine the reaction of 600 corporate executives when we arrived with the instrument at the Sofitel Hotel in Heathrow.
Sam Laming on Ben Nevis with Bandura
During the keynote, I discussed service excellence from several perspectives, dwelling on the work of Tom Peters and First Direct’s approach to banking which puts the p word (personal) back into personal banking. We then turned to the question of personal mastery and unleashed Sam’s Ukrainian folk songs on the unsuspecting audience of 600 people. Watch Sam’s live rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, played on a ukelele.
So, in their completely different ways, Heather Small and Sam demonstrated personal excellence at the awards ceremony. I was indeed proud to have been there alongside them. Creativity, a willingness to exceed personal boundaries and not being afraid to surprise others are all qualities of excellence and the event was an exemplar of this. All thanks to Don Hales for inviting us to speak and perform at the awards. We are delivering another event for the CSTN soon entitled ‘Myths and Riffs of Leadership’.
'Like a virgin' - A delegate experiencing stage fright during the 'Customer Service Blues'
At the Hop (Farm) with Prince - thanks to Stewart Rogers http://twitter.com/#!/TheRealSJR
As you know, I normally post on business and personal development, mixed with music, but I simply could not resist this short post on the Hop Farm and Prince’s superb concert there on Sunday night, just for the music. There are not enough superlatives that can describe his performance, which spanned songs such as Let’s Go Crazy, 1999, Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, U Got The Look, Nothing Compares 2 U, Controversy and Play That Funky Music amongst many others, over a two and a quarter hour set that put all other performances into the shade.As well as a truly fantastic performance, we were ‘taught’ many other things by Prince with transferable value to business and personal life. Here’s a few of them:
Prince on differentiation – Without being pompous, Prince pointed out that his band offered ‘real music’ by ‘real musicians’ – quite a contrast to some of the other x-factor hopefuls and so on. In marketing, we know that you need a ‘unique selling point’ and Prince denominated his ‘difference’ clearly and simply in ways that everyone understood. At 53 years old, Prince proved he could still ‘do the do’, making others half his age look like quivering geriatrics.
Prince on playfulness – When he announced ‘Nothin’ Compares 2 U’ Prince said “I didn’t write that song. That’s Sinead O’Connor’s song”. Later on, he pointed out “I bought a house with that song” to the great enjoyment of the crowd. Playfulness is a vital ingredient if you are to encourage creativity in yourself and others.
Prince on emotional intelligence – There had been quite a few sound problems with other acts during the day. So, instead of coming on and belting out a big hit to start with, Prince came on and played a funk workout to set the sound levels and get things right for the rest of the show – calling off the different musicians to come in and out of the performance to get a perfect mix. This is a big risk to take – effectively starting your show with a jam rather than a crowd pleaser. Read all about Prince’s approach to improvisation at Symbols, Signs and Sex.
The Purple genius in Red - picture courtesy of Stewart Rogers http://twitter.com/#!/TheRealSJR
So a big thank you to Vince Power and the people at the Hop Farm. I never thought I’d get to see Prince on my doorstep but last night all my dreams came true. Check the blog post on Prince and innovation out as well. Also a free download of my U-Log-I to the Genius of Prince.
p.s. My new book ‘Punk Rock People Management – A no-nonsense guide to hiring, inspiring and firing staff’ will be available shortly for FREE as a Kindle book. Please contact me directly here or via the Punk Rock People Management webpage for your copy.
A truly inspirational piece:
