In their recently published book, Two Beats Ahead: What Musical Minds Teach Us About Innovation, Panos Panay and R. Michael Hendrix argue that “the mindsets developed by musicians make them good entrepreneurs.” Panay is currently Senior VP for Global Strategy and Innovation at the Berklee College of Music. On June 22, he was appointed Co-President of the Recording Academy effective August, 2021. Hendrix is a Partner and Global Design Director at IDEO.
“[T]he creative mindset is more than a unique approach to entrepreneurship, more than drawing upon the improvisation of jazz or practicing until our fingers bleed,” write Panay and Hendricks. “As musicians, we believe that there is something instructive here for our work as entrepreneurs and business leaders. Musicians know how to create moments that break patterns, fill gaps, capture our attention, and inspire not only because of skills they have developed at a keyboard or a microphone, but because they have honed their ability to listen.”
The book is based on interviews with musicians, songwriters and producers who’ve succeeded as both performers and entrepreneurs. The authors interviewed a number of musicians, including Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams, Imogen Heap, T Bone Burnett, and Desmond Child. In addition, they surveyed the careers of Björk, Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, Gloria and Emilio Estefan, and others who’ve had a major impact on the music industry as creative artists and business leaders.
Over the past few decades, creativity and innovation have received increasing attention in the business world. For example, the overriding finding of a Global CEO Study conducted by IBM in 2010 was that creativity is the most crucial factor for future success. The IBM study interviewed more than 1,500 CEOs from 33 different industries and 60 countries, who overwhelmingly said that creativity, - even more than management discipline or strategic vision, - was the key leadership quality required to navigate an increasingly volatile and complex world.
More recently, a 2018 report by Deloitte advised companies to deploy automation technologies to free up their employees so they can concentrate on identifying and addressing unseen problems and opportunities. As routine tasks and processes are automated, companies will be able to capture more value by leveraging the unique human capabilities of their workforce, including curiosity, imagination, intuition, emotional intelligence, and creativity.
Two Beats Ahead includes chapters on listening, experimenting, collaborating, connecting and reinventing. Let me share some brief comments on the first three.
Listening: The Space Between the Notes
“A musician understands that listening to the world, drawing ideas and inspiration from outside yourself, is only the first part of innovation. It also requires listening to yourself for points of resonance between the world and your own vision and values,” note the authors. But, like any skill, listening takes practice. Both successful musicians and business innovators have learned to listen to the world around them, as well as to their own internal sense of what works. Both involve being present and open to the unexpected.
“For many songwriters and creatives, as well as entrepreneurs, the question of where to begin can seem daunting.” Creative individuals generally have lots of ideas rolling around their head. How do you know when to reach in and pull out the right idea, the one with a thread you can follow? Icelandic singer and composer Björk, for example, “is deeply committed to the idea of listening to the natural world around her and interpreting what she hears into art.
“She has spoken in interviews about walking along the pier in Reykjavik, listening to the noises of the harbor: waves lapping on the shore, the cries of seagulls overhead, the horns of ships in traffic. To Björk, this is more than background noise; it is music. … Over time, Björk has honed her habit of listening to a reflex. She makes it sound easy. But just like learning to play an instrument takes years of practice, it takes years to make the skill of listening effortless. Her antennae are always up, like a satellite dish catching waves from distant galaxies, separating the signal from the noise.”
This reminds me of my personal experiences leading IBM’s Internet Division back in the mid-1990s. At the time, a lot was starting to happen around the Internet, but it wasn’t clear where things were heading, and in particular what the implications would be to the world of business. Our job was to figure and articulate the true business value of the Internet amidst all the surrounding hype. The Internet job was different from just about any other I previously had. It soon became evident that the strategy had to come from the marketplace, not the R&D labs.
We eventually came up with what became our successful e-business strategy by closely listening to the marketplace. We learned that the key value of the Internet for our customers was the ability to now be in touch with their customers, employees, suppliers and partners regardless of time or location. Companies were thus able to engage in their core business activities in a much more productive way.
Experimenting: Dare to Suck
When starting a project, whether writing a new song or launching a startup, artists and entrepreneurs should trust their ability to see and act on opportunities. However, we’re all wrong sometimes. How do you know when it’s time to change direction? “Again: the key is to stay open and keep listening. … Taking a song from idea to completion is a relentless commitment to trying ideas - testing and proving them or discarding them. … Unlike athletic or scientific experimentation, musical experimentation doesn’t start with a research plan and a fixed method. The more options that an artist tries, the more likely she is to discover an idea worth building upon.”
“The key is to keep writing,” said Justin Timberlake in his interview with Panay and Hendricks. “I have only one rule in the studio, and it’s this: dare to suck. … There are no wrong answers when it comes to creating art because each idea is only going to lead you to what feels good. And for you to connect to other people, it has to feel good to you first. When a song comes out, it’s mostly because I can live with it at that point. If a song of mine comes on the radio, I can tell you what I could have done better, what line I could have sung better. It’s not meant to be perfect, but you do have to feel like it’s great because that’s what is going to give you confidence to take it out into the world.”
An equivalent in today’s business world is agility. An agile culture is essential to help a company survive and thrive in a constantly changing environment. Such a culture must include a relentless focus on market innovation; a spirit of experimentation and continuous evolution; rapid responses to technology, market, and user requirements; and a shared common strategy and vision.
Collaborating: Merge to Make
“Have you ever found yourself on a project, unsure of exactly where you are going or how to get there, but in good company?,” ask Panay and Hendricks. “That’s how a collaboration should feel. You start with an idea that is so ambitious, so new, or so different from what you have done before that you are acutely aware that you can’t succeed on your own. Other people’s skill sets and talents are needed to pull it off. There’s a sense of fumbling forward in the dark but also that there’s strength in numbers.”
While the music industry has long embraced collaboration, business has only done so in the past few decades. In the industrial economy of much of the 20th century, the prevailing innovation model was closed and proprietary. But, with the advent of the Internet-based digital economy over the past few decades, the closed innovation model started to fall apart. The elapsed times to take an invention from lab to market were no longer competitive, especially against a new generation of startups with significantly shorter time-to-market for new products and services.
Companies realized that there are considerable more innovation capabilities in the wider world than they could create on their own, no matter how big and powerful the company. They had to embrace an innovation model based on open collaboration, a transition that has proved difficult for many companies. This is not surprising.
Working with different groups, - both within and outside the company, - to achieve common objectives requires a change in the culture of the organization - and cultural transformations are arguably the hardest of all. A culture of collaboration requires a certain degree of humility, that is, an acceptance of limitations in ones ability to get things done without help, which then makes it emotionally easier to reach out and work effectively with others.
“A great collaboration is about trusting one another, using creative fluency to be fluid in roles, and so creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts,” is how Panay and Hendricks nicely captured the essence of collaboration in Two Beats Ahead.
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