Category Archives: Music

December 21, 2015 · 9:30 am

The Blend

One of the really special things about the holiday season in my town is the concert put on each year by the high school music department. They held the 75th annual one over the weekend and it was great. It also offered us an instructive business point as well.

Philharmonic Orchestra of Jalisco (Guadalajara...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The school’s band, orchestra, chorale, and choir all perform. While I never played in the orchestra, I did play in my school’s band (saxophone, thanks for asking) and I sang in the choir. When I go to concerts of this sort, I always listen for the one thing my conductors used to emphasize: the blend. If you’ve ever gone to a school concert, inevitably you hear the voice or playing of a really talented kid above all the others. That’s exactly what you don’t want to hear, because it has the effect of distorting the overall sound.  Really wonderful musical groups sing and play as one instrument.  Every component of that instrument is in sync – on exactly the same beat with exactly the same dynamics.  It’s the conductor‘s responsibility to make that happen. I recall how when our musical groups were doing extremely well in rehearsal, the conductor would often walk to the back of the auditorium and listen.  We were all working together so well that we really didn’t need to be lead.

Like that conductor, a great manager needs to be able to make the blend happen.  We need to let individuals sing their parts loudly, but we have to blend all of those parts together in a single, overarching product that’s our brand presented as one. Without the blend, it’s just a cacophony.  It’s not just within your own unit either.  The blending across departments is critical today more than ever.  As an example, think about how marketing and tech have become so totally intertwined. The Chief Marketing Officer must blend with the Chief Technical Officer in a seamless duet or the organization is absolutely not going to sound right.

The next time you hear some live music, listen for the blend and think of your company.  Are you putting out a unified sound that’s greater than the sum of its parts, or does the world hear a lot of strong pieces that are disjointed and not pleasing to the ear?

 

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October 22, 2015 · 10:32 am

The Tip Of The Iceberg

I”m not sure why, but a lyric from the Rush song “Distant Early Warning” popped into my head this morning:

I know it makes no difference
To what you’re going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg
And I worry about you…

I think that’s something we do in business – see the tips of those icebergs – but we also do a very human thing and ignore them. I’ve been part of organizations that were just as guilty. I can clearly recall a sports sales meeting in the 1990’s in which the sales staff laughed at competing with this little cable sports network called ESPN. Buyers were talking about it, even though their numbers weren’t much at the time. It was the tip of the iceberg, except we didn’t worry.

Those tips surface all the time. A decade ago, no one was “worried” about social media taking dollars from mass media (although what could be more “mass” than social media these days?). Having a highly profitable media business disrupted by consumers watching TV on demand and on a mobile device? A good way to get a room full of executives to laugh.

It’s not just the media business. How many businesses have a written disaster plan in case a server goes down, a system gets hacked, or a natural disaster occurs? Why written? Because there is a high likelihood that you won’t have the time to figure it out on the fly, and it’s possible that members of the team will lose communication. We see the tip of that iceberg in other businesses struggling with floods and hacker incursions, but what do we do about it?

You might also ask yourself about the distant early warnings of burnout. Many of us are stressed, and that constant strain can lead to burning out – a state of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.  When was the last time you looked inward as well as outward for signs of those icebergs?  Ignore the distant early warnings at your own peril.

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August 17, 2015 · 11:02 am

Business Jams

Grateful Dead: Backstage Pass

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was driving around this weekend listening, as I often do, to The Grateful Dead. Like them or not, you probably are aware that they were the world’s preeminent jam band, even if jamming as a concept that is as old as music itself. What’s interesting about jamming is that the music is never the same. Oh sure – ideas get recycled from one night to the next, but the entirety of the piece of always pretty different no matter if we’re listening to The Dead or to some great jazz.

What’s interesting is that some bands will cement the better ideas into songs. That is how some bands write. They just start playing until some good ideas surface. Those ideas are memorialized, lyrics added, and voila – a song. It’s not a bad business concept either.

When musicians get together to jam, they come from a place of openness and collaboration. They are there to experiment. While some jams start with the framework of an existing song or just a blues jam in G, most of the time you’re off following musical ideas thrown out there by the other musicians. You’re guessing about what will work at some points. To do that well, you need to keep an open mind.

Brainstorming is business jamming. You need an open mind and a willingness to go where the music (thinking) leads. Sometimes you happen upon a great riff – a fantastic business thought – that can be preserved and turned into a song – a product, or maybe an entire business.  You might think that some brilliant new innovation was the result of careful planning.  The execution probably was, but I’m willing to bet that the underlying idea came out of some mental jamming by a person or a group of people.

When I used to play music seriously, jams were fun.  They involved getting the right people together – people who have both the technical and mental abilities required as well as whose musical styles meshed well with the others in the room.  I can’t think of a better way to lay the foundation of a successful enterprise, can you?

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