System dynamics applied to music

One of the project teams from last year's system dynamics class in the Information School at the University of Washington will be presenting their work at the International System Dynamics Society Conference this summer in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Look on the tentative schedule for "Exploring the Dynamics of Music Piracy" by Trond Nilsen, Brian Houle, Douglas Kuzenski, and Arpan Sheth, or check out their abstract, paper, and models.

Congratulations Trond, Brian, Doug, and Arpan! For the rest of you, check out their work. Perhaps it will shed light on a subject you've talked about.

The Creative Value Network

Ralph Windle has started a new blog. I'd like to welcome him and to feature his work, because I think he's focused on an important area: creating dialog, innovation, and progress at the intersection of the realms of science and the arts. Both groups (and more; the world doesn't lend itself to being divided into only two such groups, as classic as that grouping is) have much to offer the vital and urgent challenges we face, and the synergy of the two mindsets and the two sets of approaches could be vital for a number of reasons.

In times such as this, we have to work together to figure out our values and our priorities and to work together on the tough problems we face. I learned that over many years of work: you need to know your objectives, your goals, in order to make good decisions, and you need to involve all the people in the system if you want both a robust decision and a decision people will support. Robert Dugger made that same claim yesterday in a panel discussion called the "Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget Forum on Consequences of Federal Intervention in U.S. Markets" as presented on C-SPAN.

How does Ralph Windle figure into this? He and his Creative Value Network are focused on creating dialog among those in the sciences and the arts to foster innovation and creativity. Check it out, and join in the dialog; perhaps together you and the others can be part of making the world a bit (or maybe even a lot) better.

Music, leadership, and effective presentations

I've written about music before, I've written about Benjamin Zander and his presentation style before, and I've written about leadership before.

Now you can see all three topics together in Not aloof and detached, but deeply, deeply human, courtesy of TED and Andrew Taylor's The Artful Manager. It takes about 20 minutes, but stay with it; there are good messages all the way to the end.

Contribution

Yesterday I wrote about the power of narrative, as inspired by Andrew Taylor's posting. In searching for a link for my article, I discovered a powerful message about contribution in the last half of Presentation Zen's Two Questions: Why does it matter? What's your contribution?, the part I had skipped before. It builds on the three questions meme I wrote about previously, but it uses art to do it in a powerful fashion.

Watch the Benjamin Zander video from start to finish. Yes, it's just over six minutes long. Yes, some of it is probably promoting the speaker. Listen to it anyway; the message is important. If, after listening to it, you're not sure of its application to business, check out the "Fields of Interest" part of Hewlett-Packard's 1966 corporate objectives (scroll to the bottom).

Einstein on growth and Taylor on making sense

I've written about growth and about classical music. Both came together today in Andrew Taylor's The need for narrative.

At first, I thought the Einstein quotation was a great riff on growth, and I only used the first part of the title of this piece. Then I reread Andrew's note and thought again.

Narrative (story-telling) is important in getting your message across. Art obviously plays a big role in effective narrative, from poetry to graphic arts to music (why do you think many commercials showing elegant products feature classical music?). (I read something about that last point recently, but I can't find its source. If anyone knows who blogged about it in the last few weeks, please let me know, and I'll credit the idea.) Art has a way of unleashing emotions and feelings we struggle to express in mere words.

But there's another side, too; we've all read of people who have told great stories unsupported by fact, reason, or, in some cases, ethics. Perhaps we ourselves have been mislead by such stories in the past.

That's why I think it's important to blend stories and reason grounded in data, not necessarily at the same time but certainly in the same deliberation, which may be spread out in time. I suspect we all have our own biases towards one or the other, even as those biases may shift from time to time. That's why I like the PGP approach advocated by Edward Tufte, even as I realize the risk of formulaic approaches to remove all the life from the artful (and perhaps the rational) side.

Use your art to make the rational come alive, and use your reasoning to guide your art in ethical directions and for ethical purposes!

Greg Sandow's Symphony

Some of you probably read the recent series Making musical sense by email, which was a conversation between Greg Sandow and me as we worked to make more sense of the future of classical music. If you didn't know Greg Sandow before, you might wonder what a contemporary "classical" composer writes. You might be afraid that it's harsh, esoteric, dissonant music, and you might think it's, well, unenjoyable.

Well, I can't tell you what you'll find enjoyable, but I can offer you the chance to hear his new symphony for free. As he notes, "A symphony has come to mean a major, deeply serious piece, and this one isn't all that serious. It's a symphony in the 18th century meaning of the word, which means that it's meant as entertainment." It's only 13 minutes long in 4 movements; if you're pressed for time, you can listen to one movement now, another later tonight, and so forth.

And I do hope you enjoy it! I am.

Recharging your humanity by making music

While I normally write about business, organizational, and societal issues, I have written of the benefits of the arts in recharging my (and perhaps your) humanity, for it's hard to separate the individual from the organizations in which we operate.

Today Jason Heath pointed to Visual Acoustics, "a concept for interactive expression," as they write. See if it helps you recharge. It—or something similar—may be just what you need to reinvigorate your creativity, to remove a mental block that keeps you from making progress, or to restore a feeling of being human that you've neglected in your hectic day.

What helps you recharge? What helps you be effective and human?

Music lessons (for organizations)

Years ago, I was the director of the World-Famous, Award-Winning Will Rice Chorus*, one of several** very good a cappella choruses at Rice University. We were perhaps a rather unusual group; you could hardly convince this all-male chorus to sing anything that wasn't composed in the 17th or 18th centuries, although we did manage to enjoy at least one somewhat dissonant Credo by Harald Genzmer.

After singing in the chorus for three years, I became director for two. As usual, we prepared seriously for concerts and especially for our annual Rondelet contest, rehearsing every Wednesday night at 10 p.m. all throughout the year. As concerts and contests approached, our rehearsals lengthened, and we'd add extra days each week.

The night of my first competition as director arrived. We had three pieces totalling 10 minutes of music. Most of the performance went quite well, but one (Johann Sebastian Bach's Sicut Locutus Est from his Magnificat in D, BWV 243, as I recall) went horribly wrong. As an a cappella group, we had no instrumental accompaniment to guide our intonation, and, at one point, part of the chorus wandered miserably off-pitch. Being new to conducting choruses in contests, I wasn't sure what to do, so I kept on keeping on. The chorus (there were perhaps 60 or more of us) did a great job of looking professional, but you could see the terror in some singers' eyes. We might be facing a musical train wreck.

Then one section (the basses, I think), which had had a few measures of rest, came back in strongly and on pitch. Succeeding entrances by other sections followed suit, and we finished strong—strong enough to win the competition. As one judge said, being able to recover was at least as impressive as not having stumbled at all would have been (that said, I would still rather we had done it as well as we did in rehearsals).

What's the lesson for business and organizations? Don't stumble, if you can help it, but, if you stumble, you can recover. In most situations, you aren't alone, even if you're the CEO (or director) of the organization. While you sometimes may find that people in the organization fail to execute your plans as you hope, you may also find that people in your organization jump in when your plans have holes and who carry you through the rough spots. In other words, we're all human, and we can all help each other if we have the right conditions.

What was key to getting into a position where we could recover? First, we worked hard preparing so that people knew their roles (parts) well. We paid attention to our rehearsal results and learned from our successes and our failures. Everyone in the organization knew they could tell any of the rest of us, including me as director, things we could do to make the music (the results) better. If something went awry in one area, others could help out because of their abilities and confidence.

Second, there was a desire to do well (to win) that was forged in healthy competition, those hours of preparation, a love of the work (music) we were doing, camaraderie, and a refusal to give up.

Third, there were pauses (rests in the music) to let the various groups take in the big picture and re-orient themselves (in this case, to the proper pitch) so that they could start the recovery.

Fourth, there was trust and refusing to intervene inappropriately (to micro-manage). The doofus in the front waving his hands (that would have been me, the director) didn't jump in too quickly to "fix" things. He happened to trust the guys in the choir to fix the intonation (or perhaps he was too paralyzed by the fear that we'd collapse, but it worked anyway), and he kept focused on keeping the timing and expression together, giving the guys in the chorus the opportunity to fix the intonation.

Finally, there was, no doubt, a bit of good luck.

If you lead an organization, what lessons can you draw from this story?

In most cases, we are fortunate to have others around us to help us over the rough spots, whether we're the CEO of a corporation or the director of a musical ensemble, if we make it possible for them to help. There is at least one category of person who wields incredible individual power—think of the power of a pipe organ under the control of one person's ten fingers and two feet. Friend and colleague Drew McManus of Adaptistration has reposted a classic holiday train wreck, where the power of the organist is all-too-painfully—and all-too-humorously—evident. Listen, groan, and chuckle.

* We earned the "award-winning" label for winning most (I think) of the annual Rondelet choral competitions, but why "world-famous"? One of the professors associated with our college sent us a postcard wishing us good luck from his European sabbatical, so it's clear our fame spanned the globe!

** The Jones College Chorus was traditionally our strongest competitor, with the Brown College Chorus often very close behind.