A fascinating way of looking at things in this academic paper. A comparison of entrepreneurs and jazz band leaders. Apparently this is quite a common way, in the management literature, of looking at things but it's not one that I had come across before.
You can get the full paper by putting "Leading Entrepreneurial Teams: Insights from Jazz." into Google (although I cannot link to it directly, sorry).
As someone who used to play jazz (badly, admittedly) and someone who has been an entrepreneur throughout my working life (not a billionaire yet but that's not quite the definition of success, is it?) once the connection between the two had been pointed out it was obvious.
Entrepreneurs are like jazz band leaders, Ucbasaran argues, insofar as they have to "build creative tension and give individuals their heads" while working within the framework of a collective. They have to harness the "disparate egos of highly talented people" and somehow keep them working towards the same goal. "To the uninitiated, jazz seems like chaos, whereas the reality is that it's very ordered," she says. "Underpinning the structure is a long tradition of education and practice."
That's certainly true. And pondering upon it you could take the analogy much further as well. For example, music is made up of three components, melody, rhythm and harmony. It tends to be true of jazz that you play with one of the three at any one time. A solo might wander off and do interesting things with the melody but the band itself is staying within the normal rules of harmony and rhythm (much of Louis Armstrong's work perhaps). Or perhaps we might look at Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" (and other such projects) where it is very definitely the rhythm that is being experimented with while melody and harmony are being held relatively static.
An example: Unsquare Dance
Dance music in 7/4 time. You can experiment in harmony as well, keeping melody and rhythm relatively constant. There are forms of jazz where all three are being played with at the same time, freeform for example. But then that's also where jazz rather lost it as a publicly popular music form so perhaps that's also a good example of what not to do in business.
Now quite what you use as analogies from the business world to those three is up to you. I might point to product, delivery and management method but I'm sure that others can come up with better ones than that. The point being though that experimenting with all three at the same time, unless you're extremely good at it, is likely to descend into the chaos that is (bad) freeform jazz. While holding any two constant will allow fruitful experimentation with the third.
Perhaps a better way of putting it would be that us mere mortals need to experiment with only one.
The authors of the paper go on to analyse the leadership styles of three different band leaders.
A recurring theme in stories about Ellington, it seems, was his talent for motivation and inspiration. But it was coupled with what the authors call "a laissez-faire attitude towards the behaviour of his musicians". He saw their foibles as the price to be paid for having access to their talents. For Ucbasaran that raises questions for entrepreneurs. "If you have a creative process, you have to have talented employees. But talent is not always easy to manage. To what extent do you accommodate wayward behaviour? You have to give them freedom and space, but direct them in subtle ways so that the end result comes together harmoniously."
Ellington's laid-back approach meant that he kept a cadre of long-serving core musicians together over several decades. Davis, however, rarely chose musicians who knew each other. As the paper puts it, "he felt that prior relationships might lead to the development of routines which hampered innovation and improvisation". So creative tension was his over-riding priority? Lockett nods. "He was less concerned about stability than the other leaders. If it worked, it would be brilliant. If not, he'd disband the team and start again."
Blakey was much more of a father figure, he says. "His speciality was bringing on young musicians. And he was much more concerned about the decorum and behaviour of his team than the other two." Which of the three offers the best guidance to the entrepreneurs of today? "It's impossible to say. All three offer lessons that can be taken on board."
What could be fun is to try and allocate modern day entrepreneurs to those leadership styles. For example, Steve Jobs would not have been called laid back by any means but there are elements of Ellington's style there. Find the right people, trust them and stick with them. The senior management team at Apple are, in a way like the section leaders of that band.
The style of Google or 3M might be more like that of Blakey. Employees are encouraged, nay tasked, with working on their own projects while continuing to work for the company, just as he encouraged his musicians to move on, even to move out, when they were ready.
Any analogy can be stretched too far of course but an exercise for the comments section: who uses the Davis method of management?
