Does a jazz ensemble hold the answers for navigating the uncertainties in business today? – An interview with Michael Gold of Jazz Impact

Hello everyone and welcome to the Better Life Better Business podcast presented by The Speakers Group. I'm Shawn Ellis, founder of The Speakers Group, and today we're talking with Michael Gold, founder and principal of Jazz Impact. And through Jazz Impact, Michael demonstrates that good jazz and high-performance business both depend on creativity, agility, empathy, and flexibility. And I had a chance to experience his program here in Nashville a few years ago, and it's, it's really something special. If you get a chance to see him or bring him to your organization, by all means check it out. You'll love it. And what really makes it work is that Michael comes at it not only as a world-class jazz musician, but he's also held various senior management positions in the real estate and and financial industries. Michael's also lectured at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and he's been working on the development of an arts-based learning program for the Executive MBA and leadership development programs at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. You can find him online at jazz-impact.com. And Michael, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, Shawn Ellis. It's great to talk with you.

Great. Well, it's always good to talk to you too. And just starting out here for our listeners, when did you first discover this connection between jazz and business?

That's a great question. I think as a jazz musician, you're always aware of a connection. Between jazz and business because the jazz musician is the entrepreneur of the music world. You know, when classical musicians go to work, they walk into an environment, they sit down, they're handed a score, and everything that they need to do to create a successful experience a successful business product is defined. Now, that's not to say that there's anything easy or simple about classical music. It's tremendously challenging, but the jazz musician comes to work and has to create with the people he's working with in the moment, and that's what brings value to jazz is the quality of the experience that people are able to create together in the moment. And it's no less demanding than classical music, perhaps even more.

Well, that's— it makes perfect sense when you say it that way. I'd never really thought about it in those terms. Today, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about some of the key lessons building on what you just said there with that as the foundation, but let's start with the 5 5 dynamics of jazz, because you've created this great framework that really pulls out some of the key lessons that we can take from jazz into business. Would you like to share a little bit about those 5 dynamics?

Yeah, I found that over the years I was talking about, really depending on the client that I was talking to, but the general scope of the dynamics have to do with autonomy, passion, risk, innovation, and listening. And that forms an acronym, APRIL, which I like to think of as rebirth, regeneration, the spring. But the foundation for that is the fact that business now finds itself more than ever having to function in an environment that is not predictable, that it is absolutely uncertain. And these were disruptive trends 15 years ago. They are now constants, and as they are in the world of jazz. One of the things that business can really learn from jazz is that adapting to the kind of open engagement, working together without the absolute control of people knowing what to do at every moment and what the outcome absolutely is going to be, is very important. Especially with the advent of social business technology, the sort of intranets, internets, and the huge amount of information flow that's happening now, people have the tools to really mindfully improvise together in a business environment. So if we look at The idea, say, of autonomy, which in the old business paradigm might be thought of as sort of a zero-sum game, you know, your win is your competitor's loss. This is a completely different concept in the world today. Autonomy in jazz is absolutely interdependent, interactive, and it depends on being able to form agile, small, flexible groups of people that can come together in a moment, address a certain situation, be highly productive, and then move apart and carry away the knowledge that was gained in that interaction and take it into their next interaction. This is extremely important in large corporations and extremely important individuals as well.

Yeah, and I think one of the things that is so great is everything you're saying, it's so relevant to business today, but then to be able to see it come to life in a jazz ensemble, especially when you're doing a Jazz Impact program. I mean, these things we talk about, we hear about them a lot, but then to actually be able to see them, take it outside the walls of, you know, our typical office environment and see it on stage, that's what makes the the program really special. And one of the dynamics that I love, you talk about how in jazz there's constantly this transition between leading and support, how any one person is always transitioning from leading and support. And that's another thing that's just so important today in the way business is structured. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that and how that works in a jazz ensemble and how that carries over?

Yeah, the value proposition, so to speak, in JAS is that we are able to sustain a process of innovation, and innovation is extremely incremental. It, you know, most people will think of innovation in terms of a brand new product that comes out and dazzles them. But in fact, that while yes, that product is innovative, that product actually stops the process of innovation because it creates a status quo that then the people that are working together who created that product have to move beyond. So in jazz, We are constantly working to hone that innovative step-by-step agile process of creating new ideas in a very even flow. And to do that, there has to be a sense of shared leadership. So it's most obvious in the jazz idiom with the idea of a soloist, and if you think of, you know, say Miles Davis or Wynton Marsalis standing out front of the band and blowing a solo, very few people realize how deeply tied that soloist is to the rest of the people in the ensemble, and I think If you're able to really break it down, which we try to do, you find that the soloist who looks as if they're the leader is actually looking towards the supporting people in their organization, the bass, drums, and piano, to help them in their leadership role, and in fact, they could not be doing it without the interactive support of all the other people that are working with them. Now, this has been true in jazz ever since it emerged, and it's how jazz evolved so fruitfully and so rapidly over really what was a period of 30 years, and continues to evolve. In the world of software, you can find a parallel to this in the model of agile, agile development, where a group of programmers will take a very complex idea and just constantly iterate that idea over and over again.— in doing that, they keep discovering new ways of making it better. And they're not just doing it with themselves. They're putting it out to people to use so that they're constantly getting feedback on that process of iteration. And in that group of engineers, sure, there may be one person who is far more brilliant than the others. They become totally interdependent on one another and on the response from the people that are using the software as well. And there's a real parallel here between the way JAS works and the way that process works. And as I find very frequently, it's not that different from the way things go on in most organizations. It's just a matter of of how people look at the structure of hierarchy and leadership and support.

Yeah, I'm thinking back to a time when I was in a corporate, a very corporate environment and working together on projects and how one department may take the lead on a project at one time and do their part and then you take it over, hand it off to another department who's going to take the lead and build on what you had what you did in this constant interaction. That's just another application of it. But yeah, it's just, it's such a perfect picture of how business works, or at least how business works in a, how it works better, I guess we could say. To shift gears a bit, going more to the performance aspects, one of the things in music that is so very clear, obviously you've got to do a lot of rehearsing in music, even though there's so much improvisation in jazz, there's still a lot of rehearsing that has to go into it to make that possible, I know. Talk about that related to business, and you emphasize how there's a difference between performance and practice. Could you go into that a little bit?

Well, everybody has to be— in jazz, each musician has to be very accountable for their skill set. I don't think there's a difference with business. I think in business everybody has to be accountable for the particular skills that they are hired to have. What's different in jazz from say classical music is that We are expected to be able to create ideas and to build off of one another's ideas. In classical music, people have to be very good at teamwork and interpreting a given idea and playing their part in a very empathic way, but in jazz, the we have to be able to build new ideas with one another in real time. And I think there's a great parallel there with most businesses. Now, the skills that are required for that in jazz are, of course, you know, being technically facile on your instrument, understanding the elements of language, the language of music, But even more so is a capacity to listen beyond the level of what you assume or expect to hear or are used to hearing, to be able to listen for surprise, to be able to really understand what is emerging with the other people that you're working with. And Performance depends on our ability to actually be in the moment, almost as beginner's mind, to, in a sense, forget everything that we know so that we can really seize the opportunity of what is emerging in that moment. In jazz, there's a saying that says you play what you practice. And if you spend hours practicing other people's ideas, which many, many jazz musicians do, that's what you're going to be playing. And you're going to be missing— not only missing what's emerging with the other musicians, but you will not be present. For them in the way that you must for there to be this agile development of new ideas. So practicing for jazz musicians really becomes the practice of listening, of hearing new ideas, being able to respond without being tethered sort of by the gravity of your past success, which is a great parallel in business because so often in business we try to recreate what's happened in the past. You cannot do that, especially now. And given the tools of social media, social business, dynamics, we have the capacity to listen in ways that we never have before. And so this becomes a really important parallel for business. Right.

Yeah, it's so true. I mean, there's just so many practical ideas here that— practical applications that I'm sure a lot of us never even thought about that could come out of jazz, and that's what makes the program so effective. Before we go, you touched on social business. I do want to bring that up. I know you were just recently at the Social Business Summit in Berlin, and now we understand a little bit more about how the lessons, the application from jazz applies so much to social media, social networking. Is there anything you want to add to that, any key lessons that you shared there that you'd like to share with us today?

More of what I learned, yes, I was a speaker there. But I listened to some really fascinating people talk about the emergence of the social business platform and how quickly on a global scale this is beginning to transform the world network. And I'm not talking about small startups. I'm talking about BASF, IBM. There were some very big companies represented and some very eloquent speakers. And what I realized is that Social business is doing the same thing to the business world that jazz did to the world of music 100 years ago. Essentially, it is desiloing all levels of hierarchy. Jazz really did fuse the composer, the conductor, and the performer into a new a new role, which was the improviser. And that model of the jazz ensemble, that small agile group that emerged seemingly overnight with people like Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, essentially were responsible for creating a multibillion-dollar world market of rock and roll. And it may seem surprising to make that connection, but it really was the jazz ensemble that generated the model that went on to create rock and roll and world popular culture that has completely transformed our global culture. So there's a great deal of efficacy to the idea that less is more, agility and the ability to engage in open systems rather than systems of control, the capacity to read large amounts of data and integrate it in real time. Which was another fascinating aspect that I heard about there. We're being able to understand things about what our organization's profiles look like and feel like in ways that we never have before, and it's happening very quickly.— it means that we have to improvise. It means that we really have to start taking control of what we're creating in the moment, which is what jazz is all about. Right.

Yeah, this is just really, really fascinating stuff, Michael. And for those of you who are listening, if you'd like to learn more about Michael, you can find him at thespeakersgroup.com, of course, also at jazz-impact.com. .com. If you'd like to, to dive deeper into this and learn more about how you can learn from jazz and bring that into your personal and business life, check out jazz-impact.com. Michael has recently co-authored a book called Trading Fours about jazz and the learning organization, and the link for that— we've got a short link for that— it's bit.ly/jazz-impact. /jazzimpactbook altogether, and I'll put the link here on the podcast page as well. You can follow Michael on Twitter @jazzimpact. Michael, again, it's just been great, and we could talk about this all day long. I know we've just scratched the surface, but anything you want to share before we close?

Well, just that You know, if you're listening and you have a chance to go out and hear some jazz, go check it out. It's an important art form. It's the only American art form, the only truly American art form aside from baseball, but you might not consider baseball art. But baseball and jazz, those are the two American contributions to world culture.

Yeah, well said, and there's no better way to see this in action than to really see it in action, to experience it. So, Michael, well, thank you very much for being here, and thank you for listening to the Better Life, Better Business podcast. We'll see you next time.