Three cool lessons we can learn from jazz and apply to business

I just watched a talk given by Google Ventures partner Ken Norton about what we can learn from jazz music and how it is created. Below are the three ideas.

1  Get uncomfortable but not too uncomfortable

“Miles Davis nudged his musicians into a place where they were uncomfortable, the zone of optimal anxiety. What Larry Page calls “uncomfortably exciting.” When Duke Ellington challenged Clark Terry to play like Buddy Bolden. When Ella Fitzgerald thought, “uh-oh!” What Frank Barrett calls provocative competence: triggering people away from habit and repetition. Where there are no such things as mistakes, only missed opportunities. Embracing uncertainty when we make software, which is inherently unpredictable. We don’t know how our users, or our audience, will react, and that goes with it.”

While it is important that we push ourselves outside our comfort zone, it is also important that we don’t overstress ourselves to a point where we are unproductively worrying about being unproductive. Norton also mentioned the importance of making sure the team is not too stressed. As leaders and teammates, we sometimes need to make sure we pull team members back up the stress curve, making them feel less anxious, by making them feel more confident, competent, and part of the solution.

2 Listen carefully.

“Jazz is a continual conversation where listening is more important than talking. Big Ears encourage empathy, knowing where others are going, and helping them get there. Looking for mistakes that can become new opportunities. You can help by listening more than talking, by being willing to ask questions when you don’t know the answers, even when you think you do. Celebrate following and listening in addition to leading and talking.”

On this note, check out this Marc Abraham post on Socratic questioning.

3 Let everyone solo.

“In jazz, everyone takes turns both leading and following. Psychological safety means everyone knows their voice is valued, and that they’re not afraid to try something risky. You can create this for your teams by demonstrating engagement, making sure each person speaks and is heard, picking up on unspoken emotions, and showing your understanding.”

I think this idea is important and speaks to everyone’s individual need to feel like our work and contributions matter in the world. We all need to feel like we can offer something to the world and that we are thus valuable for these contributions. As leaders and managers, I think it’s important that we help make our team members and colleagues feel this way. It’s what good humans do. 🙂

 

Great stories are…

I recently attended a presentation by Jeff Gomez, who is the creative mind behind many well-known Transmedia fiction stories, and he gave some interesting insights into what great stories are. I have translated them a bit to be more relevant to the business focus of this blog:

  1. Storyline has to be something worthy of devotion. A good story simply has to be compelling and grappling enough that it moves us emotionally. Ideally, so much so that we share it with others.
  2. Story has to create a world with a past, present, and future.  This is more mechanical, but great stories set the context that helps us understand why the vision is relevant.
  3. Creative visionary & but align to the brand.  It is great think outside the box, but make sure everything aligns to the brand strategy.

McKinsey Quarterly interview with Pixar award-winning Director, Brad Bird

In the McKinsey Quarterly interview of Brad Bird, the award-winning Pixar film Director shared very interesting insights relevant to anyone leading highly-creative innovation work.   Below are some quotes from the interview and takeaways that are worth sharing.

Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit.

In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Takeaway:  It is how people feel that determines their productivity!

Our goal is different because if you say you’re making a movie for “them,” that automatically puts you on an unsteady footing. The implication is, you’re making it for a group that you are not a member of—and there is something very insincere in that.  If you’re dealing with a storytelling medium, which is a mechanized means of producing and presenting a dream that you’re inviting people to share, you’d better believe your dream or else it’s going to come off as patronizing.

So my goal is to make a movie I want to see. If I do it sincerely enough and well enough—if I’m hard on myself and not completely off base, not completely different from the rest of humanity—other people will also get engaged and find the film entertaining.

Takeaway:  It is critical to believe in what you are trying to create.  It therefore makes a lot of sense to make something that you yourself find valuable, and then trust your own judgment to represent preferences of a larger group.

[At Pixar] Steve [Jobs] put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.  So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

Takeaway:  In this information age, with more sophisticated new ideas and technologies swarming around us than ever before, small simple things are still elemental to success.  People making eye contact for example is necessary above and beyond simply being physically near one another.  Communication, engagement, sharing of information, and connecting with colleagues are fundamental elements that lead to effective collaboration and timely execution.

I don’t want him to tell me, “Whatever you want, Brad,” and then we run out of resources. I want him to tell me, “If you do X, we’re not going to be able to do Y.” I’ll fight, but I’ll have to make the choice. I love working with John because he’ll give me the bad news straight to my face. Ultimately, we both win. If you ask within Pixar, we are known as being efficient. Our movies aren’t cheap, but the money gets on the screen because we’re open in our conflict.  Nothing is hidden.

Takeaway:  Don’t waste time with interpersonal conflict.  Seek to identify points of conflict within the team and discuss it right away.   It sounds like, at Pixar, they don’t waste a lot of time and resources building movie parts that don’t ever make it onscreen; rather a large proportion of the work produced ends up in the final product; and this is because the team addresses conflict immediately, without letting it live subsurface, which is distracting and energy-consuming.

Why “TV” is on the way out

You know how commercials are played at louder volumes than the programming segments between which they are played.   I can’t help but think this is done on purpose as a means for trying to make the commercials more affective advertisements.  This is just one of the six major reasons I think internet-deployment of programming content will the business model of the future.   Frankly, why most all the players in the TV commercial industry are not sprinting towards an internet-deployment model, is beyond me.

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dumb question?

If there is no such thing as a “dumb question,” why is there apparently such thing as a “great question” or an “an interesting question”? Over and over, I hear really smart people say things like “that is a great question”, and I think this must mean that the speaker is judging a question on a scale of quality. My question is thus do “dumb questions” really exist, and can they be identified as that question which is not followed by “that’s a great question”?

A Fog Index < 21

Apparently (I read somewhere) you don’t want a Fog Index score greater than 20 if you are giving a speech to a live audience.  This is important to those of us that feel we should write as if we were going to read our writing to a live audience, because this implies our writing should also have a Fog Index score not greater than 20.

The Fog Index is a type of readability test for your writing that essentially indicates how long–on average–your sentences and words are.   The longer the words and sentences, the more difficult it is for readers to read, and the higher the score will be.

If you want a quick tool that calculates multiple readability tests (including the Fog Index) for your writing, check out:    The Readability Test Tool.