Rather than consulting the company’s disaster playbook, then-CEO Tony Hayward and his fellow top executives might have done better heeding the advice of former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. “Everyone,” Tyson once said, “has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This book is about building a mind-set for our complex, fast-moving world in which even the best-laid plans are likely, figuratively, and sometimes literally to get punched in the mouth.
The management guru Peter Drucker imagined the twenty-first-century business leader as an orchestra conductor who, following a prescripted score, coaxes great performances out of an orchestra not necessarily composed of great musicians. Adequate talent would do so long as the musicians produced at their peak after “rehearsing the same passage in the symphony again and again until the first clarinet plays it the way the conductor hears it.”1
My admiration for Drucker is almost boundless, but I believe his conductor metaphor fails to account for the enormous ambiguity and turbulence in the current environment. I’m drawn instead to the model developed by Karl Weick in his influential paper, “Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis.”2 As Weick argues, organizations consist of a group of diverse specialists who, under great duress, make fast, irreversible decisions, are highly interdependent, are dedicated to creation and novelty, and act with little certainty where it’s all going to end up.
Surely that’s the situation BP executives found themselves in after the Deepwater Horizon explosion: great duress with virtually no certainty where it would all come out in the end and, critically, accompanied by little comfort with or training for the enormous ambiguity that engulfed them. The stumbling, fumbling results speak for themselves, but just as surely, the heads of many different enterprises looked at the daily media circus swirling around BP and thought, there but for grace and blind luck go I.
This is the way things are today. Big goofs end up on YouTube, but even modest mistakes can go viral in hours and take months to overcome. Products and services are almost instantly replicable; competition is ferocious and likely to emerge from any point on the compass; and thus price points, margins, and market share evaporate overnight.
What are the models for surviving and prospering in such a climate? In medicine, not the relatively controlled and sterile environment of the operating room, but the sometimes frantic triage of a field hospital, where wounds and diseases are constantly novel, conditions are always at least slightly chaotic, and the outcome is wildly unpredictable. In football, not the near-infinite permutations and combinations on basic formations—the offensive guru Al Saunders can throw 700-plus different plays at an NFL defense—but the madcap, scrambling genius of a quarterback like Michael Vick, who prospers best when the protection breaks down, his receivers are all covered, and it’s every man for himself. And in entertainment, not the prescripted and approved yuks of situation comedy but the often desperate lurches of stand-up comics at the local improv, where a really bad outing might actually bring on Mike Tyson’s punch in the mouth.
Admittedly, my sense of comic timing is strained at best, and my gridiron days were never particularly pretty. As for surgery, I’m semicompetent at splinter removal, nothing more. But there is one improv field that I know about deep in my bones, and I happen to think it’s the best model of all for business in the twenty-first century: that great American original art form known as jazz.
I come with a bias—I’m a jazz pianist. I have traveled the world with the Tommy Dorsey Band and led my own trios and quartets. I’m also a management professor, and it’s safe to say I’ve learned as much about leadership and organizational behavior—and what it takes to excel as a performer—from my riffing at the piano as I have from my academic experience.
My piano training began, inauspiciously, with formal lessons at age eight. Try as I might to play, say, the B-flat minor scale with correct fingering—thumb crossing under, elbow tucked in tightly—I would repeatedly flub it. Eventually, the teacher told my mother to stop throwing good money after bad, and the lessons ended. But when I wasn’t practicing rigid scales and chord productions, I found I could perform complicated duets with my grandfather, Arthur E. Hagan. He was a ragtime piano player and as a teenager had played the piano for silent movies in Cleveland theaters. For a fumbling, restless eight-year-old boy, my grandfather was a perfect teacher—kind, patient, and humorous. In fact, I taped some of those childhood sessions, and when I now listen to that schoolboy, syncopated version of “Bye Bye Blues,” I hear a fairly advanced sense of time and rhythm, not to mention facility with the keys.
What was so different in my two styles of “practice”? Well, I learned boogie-woogie piano not by reading sheet music and practicing rote, but by mimicking my grandfather—the way he sat, his unusual footwork on the pedals, the runs and licks he played. Even when I couldn’t hit the exact notes, I echoed his rhythms and gestures, and when I’d imitate his playing, even when I hit “clunker” notes, he would simply delight in my efforts. There was no such thing as a mistake. Unbeknownst to my young self, that mimicry was setting down the hardwiring that would later allow me to become a more than competent jazz musician.
My training in management was nowhere near so much fun as learning to play the piano—especially when I was mastering “Maple Leaf Rag” at my grandfather’s elbow—but it contained many of the same elements: both formal education and imitation of mentors and wise old hands who were as sympathetic about my vocational clunker notes as my grandfather had been about my earlier piano ones.
Still, it took an “aha” moment early in my teaching career to show me just how interrelated the two pursuits are, or should be. Truth told, I wasn’t much of a professor when I first started out. I knew exactly what lessons and insights I wanted my students to get. I devised tests and exams that reinforced my “truths,” and I spared little effort in letting students know when they were getting it wrong.
Then one day a student interrupted me with a question that had nothing to do with the teaching plan, and out of exasperation—he was disrupting my plan after all—I said (and in memory, almost shouted), “Why are you asking that?” He answered honestly, “Because I’m curious.” That stopped me in my tracks long enough to say to myself, “We want students to be curious. That’s good. Maybe I should see where this leads.” So I surrendered and let go of my plan. We started in on the question the student had raised, and thirty minutes later, I realized we had covered the original topic in a deeper, more creative way than I ever could have imagined. What’s more, I saw how often I had been more loyal to my teaching plan than I was to the students and how, as a result, I had been blocking the learning process.
Before long, I was searching for moments when my students’ grasp of a problem departed from mine, and pursuing their questions, not just my own. With that, my entire experience changed. Simply put, I began to love teaching the day I found out that I was also learning—perhaps more than the students. Students and teachers, I discovered, can be collaborative witnesses and catalysts. Together, we can bring new, unanticipated elements into the conversation, riffs that deepen our mutual experience and knowledge. These aren’t teachable opportunities that can be planned for in advance. Rather, they are moments of learning that just happen along the way if—and “if” is the key word—we let them. And that for me was the real “aha” point of connection, because this is exactly what happens in jazz. The great moments are always the ones that happen along the way, if we let them.
In the years since, as I’ve honed the skills of my teaching profession and musical avocation, I have found more and more parallels between the dynamics in organizations, the tasks of leadership, and the improvisational nature of jazz. Moreover, I have come to see the powerful ways that jazz can help us in all our pursuits to be better leaders and innovators. The old models of organizations as command-and-control systems are outdated.