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Are You Near Your Altamont Moment? How Catastrophic Surprises Transform Business Identities

This article is more than 8 years old.

On December 6, 1969, the Rolling Stones took the stage as the final act of the Altamont free festival in northern California, which they had organized. The festival was largely improvised and had been chaotic from the start. The location had been changed a few days before when the organizers realized the initial set was too small, but the alternate venue had not been prepared to receive the surprisingly large crowd of 300,000. It was later estimated, for example, that the organizers provided about one-sixtieth the required toilet facilities need for the crowd. Medical facilities were also minimal.

Thanks in part to these chaotic arrangements, tension had been building all day and at the end of the concert violence erupted. By the time it ended, 850 people had been injured, and four people were dead: three by accident, and one stabbed by a Hell’s Angel, as the motor cycle gang had been hired to maintain security. Dubbed “rock and roll's all-time worst day” by the magazine Rolling Stone, Altamont has become a symbol for the death of the Woodstock spirit, a similar counterculture festival that had gone smoothly, if chaotically, only four months before at the height of the ‘summer of love’. Rolling Stone would later write, in a scathing piece about the whole Altamont event: “Altamont was the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity.”

In 1970, the ill-fated concert was the subject of the documentary Gimme Shelter by filmmakers Albert and David Maysles. From the documentary, it is clear that the organization of the concert was amateurish: For instance, the Hells Angels were hired as security by the management of the Rolling Stones but the Stones didn't know what kind of people they were dealing with, and the agreement with the Angels wasn’t clearly laid out. They were apparently paid… in beer, which they kept drinking all day. Worse, it turned out later that nobody knew exactly who “the management of the Rolling Stones” actually was.

Transforming Identity

What is also clear from Gimme Shelter is that after the event, the Rolling Stones realized that they couldn’t go on as before. Though they had recently released an album Let It Bleed, that adolescent pose was shattered by the reality of violence.   According to one associate of the band, "I cannot overemphasize how depressed and down [Mick Jagger] was with the way it turned out... When they knew about the murder — it shook them." And apart from any emotional impact, it also changed the band as a business. They realized that weren’t an amateur rock band anymore, and they had to manage their concerts in a professional way.

The singer David Crosby said at the time: "The Rolling Stones are still a little bit in 1965." But this was 1969, they were rock stars, and their playing could draw hundreds of thousand people in a few hours; everything was now different. The Rousseauan dream of Woodstock was over, but the Rolling Stones’ identity had not shifted. It took a disastrous performance, the death of four people, and injuries to scores of others for the realization to sink in.

Similarly, it sometimes takes a dramatic event for less glamorous business organizations and people to realize that though their world has changed, they have not. Researcher Karl Weick uses the term “cosmology episode” to characterizethis sudden loss of meaning, which is eventually followed by a transformative phase to make sense of the changed environment.

Altamont Moments

After dramatic losses and a near-death experience in 1991, for example, IBM realized that being a hardware manufacturer of mainframes was a dead end, and that services was the future. After 9/11, the US finally admitted that al Qaida was a real threat. But sometimes the transformative phase does not happen: the cosmology episode shatters one’s identity for good. Nokia was once the leading manufacturer of cool smartphones. Then came the Apple iPhone launch in 2007 and Nokia ceded the high-end to focus on low-cost phones for developing countries, before sinking to oblivion. After a catastrophic shock in 1991, Nokia, then a conglomerate producing everything from pulp paper to cables and tyres, had been able to reinvent itself, shedding everything to focus on mobiles phones. But it did not repeat the feat in 2007.

So maybe an Altamont moment is in the making for your organization. Are you sure you want to wait until the final stage of the concert to make sense of your changed environment?  You’re probably not outsourcing security to Hell’s Angels paid in beer. But nevertheless, being alert to the profound changes in your environment and mobilizing in the face of these changes might ensure your concert ends in applause, not a funeral.

Sources: Wikipedia on the Altamont concert, the Gimme Shelter documentary, and Rolling Stone article "The Rolling Stones Disaster at Altamont: Let it Bleed".