What Duke Ellington and Miles Davis teach us about leadership
How do you cope when faced with complexity and constant change at work? Here’s what the world’s best leaders and teams do: they improvise. They invent novel responses and take calculated risks without a scripted plan or a safety net that guarantees specific outcomes. They negotiate with each other as they proceed, and they don’t dwell on mistakes or stifle each other’s ideas. In short, they say “yes to the mess” that is today’s hurried, harried, yet enormously innovative and fertile world of work. |
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| This is exactly what great jazz musicians do. In this revelatory book, accomplished jazz pianist and management scholar Frank Barrett shows how this improvisational “jazz mind-set” and the skills that go along with it are essential for effective leadership today. |
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| the principles of jazz thinking and jazz performance can help anyone who leads teams or works with them to develop these critical skills, wherever they sit in the organization. |
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| What Leaders Can Learn from Jazz http://bit.ly/1RHWIh1 |
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| And I just put my head down and thought, oh my God. And I’d started to play, at first tentatively. And then I thought, I just kept saying to myself, just keep the beat going, so everybody else can come back in at the right time. And all of a sudden, I guess I got going. I let go, and I started to play with a little bit more confidence. |
just keep the beat going, so everybody else can come back in at the right time. |
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So we’re constantly faced with a barrage of possibilities that could go in several directions. And so it’s kind of a mess. And the manager’s instinct often, a leader’s instinct, is to try and control it. And there’s a certain degree in which that’s true.
we are always facing incomplete information, and yet we have to take action anyway.
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| jazz is interesting because it’s a group activity. You’re making things up as you go along in a sense. And then you’re having to do it in the context of others who are also creating on the spot. So you’re acting and creating on the spot, which means you’re responding in the moment to each other. You’re being responsive to each other, and pulling on– responding to the best ideas with the hope that if we work together, the best will emerge, something good and creative will emerge. That’s what happens when jazz bands are improvising. |
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one of the principles that jazz musicians live by is what I call mastering the art of unlearning because the enemy to jazz improvisation is your own routines and habits and success traps . . jazz musicians have to sort of trick themselves into unlearning their own routines and habits so they don’t automatically fall back into cliches.
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the art of unlearning |
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When we say followership is a noble calling, it’s a way of saying we make each other happen. And if you step back again, and look at all these books and stories about Steve Jobs and these leaders who have become demigods in our culture, in a way those are all the fictions. They’re lies we tell ourselves and each other because all of those people had great followers. They all had great listeners around them who helped them be more articulate and helped them think out loud. And we need to tell stories like that in organizations.
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followership is a noble calling |
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provocative competence in art is you disrupt them just enough so that you demand that they have to be receptive in new ways. But not too much, you don’t want to disrupt them too much because then they become more reliant on routines [INAUDIBLE] the leadership skill we need to take seriously.
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disrupt them just enough . .. .
don’t want to disrupt them too much
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| MJ - in my opinion he is missing the importance of defining Risk. First an assessment of the risk of the consequences of failure has to be articulated. For a successful business if the whole project went to zero, what would be the effect on the company? What steps should be taken to see early warnings of failure ? What are the protocols for keep risk within acceptable bounds. |
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