Leadership Lessons From The Geniuses Of Jazz
Frank J. Barrett, a professor of management and global public policy at the
Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., is also a jazz pianist who has
led his own trios and quartets and traveled with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. In
his new book, Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from
Jazz (Harvard Business Review Press, $27), Barrett riffs on the themes
that improvisational jazz and enlightened corporate management have in common.
The book is breezy and fun, and offers vivid real-life stories from Barrett’s
musical career and observations about some jazz greats, all juxtaposed with
anecdotes from the business world.Here are the lessons he imparts:
1. Improvise through the chaos.
Barrett tells about playing at a
club in Cleveland with a jazz quartet whose members he didn’t know, including a
singer he had never accompanied. In the middle of a bebop tune, it became clear
the singer hardly knew the song. As the saxophone stopped playing and the other
players balked, Barrett persisted, hitting a few notes and then the original
melody. Soon the sax jumped back in and the singer started making up words.
“Within a few seconds, we were grooving again,” he writes.
That tale leads him to the story of
GE’s experience during the financial crisis, when the company’s hugely
profitable financial arm, GE Capital, suddenly hit a wall. GE wound up
improvising with its other businesses, from manufacturing light bulbs to jet
engines. The company recovered on the strength of its ability to adjust to
change.
2. Embrace errors as a source of
learning.
Barrett quotes a favorite saying of
jazz trumpet legend Miles Davis: “If you’re not making a mistake, it’s a
mistake.” Endemic to jazz, errors push musicians to reach beyond their comfort
zones. “Jazz musicians assume that you can take any bad situation and make it
into a good situation,” writes Barrett. “It’s what you do with the notes that
counts.”
A story about errors from the
corporate world: When Alan Mullaly became chief of Ford Motor Company in 2006,
the company had lost billions. Mullaly asked his vice presidents and department
heads to come to progress meetings with color-coded folders, including green
for good, yellow for caution and red for problem areas. At first, the managers
only brought green folders until Mullaly insisted that there must be an
explanation for the billions in losses. Finally a vice president, Mark Fields,
spoke out about the production and distribution problems of the Ford Eagle.
Mullaly applauded Fields’ decision to come forward. At the next meeting, many
of the folders were yellow and red and Ford was able to start working on fixing
its problems.
3. Perform and experiment at the
same time.
Barrett includes a quote from
trumpeter Wynton Marsalis about what it’s like when he asks his father, master
pianist Ellis Marsalis, to play on a recording. “I can tell him, ‘I don’t like
what you played on that,’ and he’ll just stop and say, ‘Well, damn, what do you
want?’ Then I’ll say, ‘Why don’t you do this’ and he’ll try it. That’s my
father, man.” Barrett calls that exchange “a microcosm of a provocative
learning relationship that nurtures an aesthetic of openness and surprise.”
For a business example, Barrett
highlights a quote from one of the inventors of the inkjet printer at
Hewlett-Packard, John Vaught. He and another inventor, Dave Donald, “considered
and built numerous combinations of inks, resistors, slides, electrodes,
explosives, lasers, and piezo-electrics” before they developed the final
project. It was a case of improvising and performing simultaneously, that
produced a breakthrough product.
4. Rely on minimal structure and
maximum autonomy.
Jazz bassist and composer Charles
Mingus once famously said, “You can’t improvise on nothing. You gotta improvise
on something.” In other words, musicians need structure, a song or a set of
notes, on which they can embellish. But Barrett says the best jazz is made up
of “orderless order,” where players are in constant dialogue, while doing their
own thing, and relating their creations to what other band members are doing.
In business, Barrett likes the way
Toyota runs things. The company has four simple rules that provide minimal
structure, including, “the pathway for every product and service must be simple
and direct.” Barrett says that aside from those rules, workers have autonomy to
improve their techniques and suggest improvements. He tells about a bottleneck
problem arising at a Prius factory, that caused the production line to halt. As
the supervisors supported them, the line workers solved the problem in seconds.
5. Jam and hang out.
Barrett tells the story of a 1936
Charlie Parker jam session when drummer Philly Jo Jones got upset with Parker
and threw a cymbal at Parker’s head. Parker said that the incident prompted him
to practice 15 hours a day for the next several years, learning standard tunes
in all 12 keys. Then in a subsequent jam session, Parker discovered a way to
build solos on chord changes and intervals he had been hearing in his head.
That experience led him to write his classic song, “Ko-Ko,” a hugely
influential jazz number.
Barrett’s business examples: Thomas
Edison’s famous research lab in Menlo Park, N.J., where he collaborated with
10-15 engineers at a time, who jammed and came up with the electric light bulb
and other inventions. He also describes Steve Jobs’s design of the Pixar office
building, where a central atrium facilitated random encounters and
collaboration.
6. Lead using “provocative
competence.”
On March 2, 1959, Miles Davis led a
recording session that would produce the most popular jazz album of all time,
“Kind of Blue.” Davis had been immersing himself in innovative classical music
by composers like Bartok, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, which led him to put
together some unconventional arrangements, which he presented to his fellow
musicians when they arrived for the session. One of the songs, “Blue in Green,”
had ten bars instead of the usual eight- or twelve-bar form. Without rehearsal,
the quintet just went ahead and played. Not only was the result amazing
and original, but it led three of the quintet’s members to go on and create
their own bands, including Bill Evans, who transformed the piano trio.
For an equivalent corporate example,
Barrett describes Toyota’s decision to make the Lexus LS 400, the first
Japanese luxury sedan. For Toyota, the company’s regular music was its credo of
making cheap cares for everyone. Eiji Toyoda, president and chairman of Toyota
at the time, pressed his employees to produce a car that measured each part
against the best in the world, including the best transmission and the best
audio system, and to have a high fuel-efficiency rating to boot. “Just as Miles
Davis had asked his musicians to play a song no one had ever played, in a key
no one had ever heard, using a mode that was yet to be invented” writes
Barrett, “Eiiji Toyoda had issued a seemingly impossible challenge.” The LS 400
evolved from some 450 different prototypes, which included thousands of
innovations.
At the end of the book, Barrett
admits a certain idealization of the jazz improvisation method, and concedes
that it has its limits in business. Not all executives are like Miles Davis or
Charlie Parker, and not all businesses can tolerate and remedy errors the way
Ford Motor Company did.
The most important lesson: managers,
like jazz musicians, need to, in Barrett’s words, “interpret vague cues, face
unstructured tasks, process incomplete knowledge and take action
anyway.” As Barrett writes, “Musicians prepare themselves to be spontaneous.
Managers and executives can do the same.” You might say not only can, but must.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/08/10/leadership-lessons-from-the-geniuses-of-jazz/2/
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