Choose jazz over the symphony to best understand 21st century businesses
If you want to understand how to run a successful business today, you might want to study jazz.
Why jazz, and not accounting, business administration, finance, international relations, or some other discipline, including another genre of music, such as classical? Because, as the acclaimed record producer Milton Gabler wrote in the Preface to “Frontiers of Jazz,” Ralph de Toledano’s important book on the topic, jazz involves the simultaneous exercise of both cooperative teamwork and freewheeling innovation.
“Here are three men taking off,” Gabler wrote in “Frontiers,” describing a trio of veteran horn-players launching into their performances. “To listen to any one of them individually is enough to make you melt inside, but three at a time and each of them going his own righteous way, Hell, that’s better than any straight music you’ve ever heard.
“Imagine, three composers, all with the same feeling, all in the same groove, writing and playing in the same instant, playing new thoughts simultaneously, and interweaving them without ever getting in each other’s way. Brother, that’s music.” Brother, that’s business.
As John Clarkeson predicted some 30 years ago, such symbiotic improvisation is exactly what 21st century companies need to succeed.
Clarkeson, whose name you may or may not be familiar with, was one of a breed of serious thinkers we once referred to as “futurists,” like the legendary Herman Kahn, author of such books as “The Coming Boom”— published in 1982 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the year at 1046.54.
Some of these crystal ball-gazers were unusually prescient, others spectacularly wrong, predicting, among other things, global energy scarcity, a new ice age and a Malthusian population crisis that would result in massive starvation around the world.
To his credit, Clarkeson, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 76—and with whom I had the honor of working under for nearly a decade—was among the more assiduous of these thinkers: careful, thoughtful, modest and, as a result, far more often correct than not. This enabled him to consistently gaze into the future with uncanny accuracy.
Grounded more in practice than in theory, Clarkeson—who served as BCG’s CEO from 1985 to 1997 and as chairman or co-chairman from 1998 to 2007—predicted as far back as 1990 that the company of the future would need to adapt more quickly and readily to change, operating, as he put it in an essay called “Jazz vs. Symphony,” like a jazz combo rather than a symphony orchestra.
The symphony, while it may produce exquisite music, is highly scripted. There is a set piece of music, with variations for each section, and the conductor leads the performance in accordance with his or her preferred arrangement, perhaps her own.
While there may be solo performances, you won’t find the musicians in a symphony “taking off” and going their “own righteous way.” If it sounds much like an old-school bank, factory or brick-and-mortar retailer—everybody has a specific, set role and function in the organization, from which they are expected never to deviate—you get the picture.
The new school version of these same organizations is fluid, facile, driven by information —“current, rich, and available to all,” as Clarkeson put it—and technology. Leaders are “in the flow, not remote.” Teamwork and cooperative support “encourage risk-taking.”
“There are no set pieces anymore. The distinction between composer/conductor/ performer are eroding.” The best leaders “make leaders of their team members,” he wrote.
The terminology changes—today we call it agile —but the concept Clarkeson was describing three decades ago remains the same. The leader gets everybody in the same groove and encourages them to feed off each other, each member of the team bringing the ensemble to new heights.
The “late-great” William Safire , a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, made a game of crystal-ball gazing, giving readers an opportunity in his year-end “Office Pool” column to free-style as pundits.
I’m not in the prediction business, and I’m not the next William Safire, or the next John Clarkeson, so I won’t even try to guess where we go from here.
But I do know that Clarkeson pointed us in the right direction. To win in the 21st century, companies will need to be less rigid and more improvisational than they’ve ever been in the past. To understand how all the pieces, each going its own “righteous way,” can fit together and create the perfect whole, you need to go no further than the nearest jazz club.
