I was to play with such a gifted musician who consistently pushed me to play beyond my capacity. Little did I know then that Ken was destined for such accomplishment. Most recently I’ve been honored to play with my friend and colleague Colin Fisher, assistant professor of management at Boston University. I look forward to many more collaborations with this gifted friend. To all those with whom I’ve shared the bandstand—thank you. These learning experiences have been joyous, occasionally transcendent, sometimes painful, always humbling, and the catalyst for my own reflections and theory building.
CHAPTER ONE
All That Jazz
Mastering the Art of Unlearning
Businesses have plans for everything: sales (in one-, three-, and five-year projections), mergers, acquisitions, R&D, doomsdays and glory days, and just about every eventuality in between. Indeed, the only plan that’s missing, it often seems, is the one for things as they actually happen.
Let’s take BP as an example. The British-based petroleum giant definitely had a plan for what to do if a wellhead blew in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, it had two of them: a 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf generally and a 52-page plan specific to the Deepwater Horizon site. But as became painfully evident in the weeks after the fatal April 20, 2010, explosion at the Deepwater rig, both plans were riddled with problems.
The regional response plan, for example, contained instructions on how to keep walruses from being affected by an oil spill—important to walruses, but a species unknown to such temperate waters. Among the go-to people the plan suggested calling was Miami sea-turtle expert Peter Lutz, but Lutz had changed location two decades earlier and was no longer reachable in any event—he had died in 2004.
Deepwater oil reached the Mississippi River delta in nine days, although BP’s computer modeling had given it a one-in-five chance of getting there within a month, patchwork solutions serially failed, and BP’s carefully cultivated image as a global petro “green giant” lay shredded on the Gulf seabed.
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
