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CHAPTER ONE

All That Jazz

Mastering the Art of Unlearning

Businesses have plans for everything: sales (in one-, three-, and five-year projections), mergers, acquisitions, R&D, doomsdays and glory days, and just about every eventuality in between. Indeed, the only plan that’s missing, it often seems, is the one for things as they actually happen.

Let’s take BP as an example. The British-based petroleum giant definitely had a plan for what to do if a wellhead blew in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, it had two of them: a 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf generally and a 52-page plan specific to the Deepwater Horizon site. But as became painfully evident in the weeks after the fatal April 20, 2010, explosion at the Deepwater rig, both plans were riddled with problems.

The regional response plan, for example, contained instructions on how to keep walruses from being affected by an oil spill—important to walruses, but a species unknown to such temperate waters. Among the go-to people the plan suggested calling was Miami sea-turtle expert Peter Lutz, but Lutz had changed location two decades earlier and was no longer reachable in any event—he had died in 2004.

Deepwater oil reached the Mississippi River delta in nine days, although BP’s computer modeling had given it a one-in-five chance of getting there within a month, patchwork solutions serially failed, and BP’s carefully cultivated image as a global petro “green giant” lay shredded on the Gulf seabed.

Rather than consulting the company’s disaster playbook, then-CEO Tony Hayward and his fellow top executives might have done better heeding the advice of former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. “Everyone,” Tyson once said, “has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This book is about building a mind-set for our complex, fast-moving world in which even the best-laid plans are likely, figuratively, and sometimes literally to get punched in the mouth.

The management guru Peter Drucker imagined the twenty-first-century business leader as an orchestra conductor who, following a prescripted score, coaxes great performances out of an orchestra not necessarily composed of great musicians. Adequate talent would do so long as the musicians produced at their peak after “rehearsing the same passage in the symphony again and again until the first clarinet plays it the way the conductor hears it.”¹

My admiration for Drucker is almost boundless, but I believe his conductor metaphor fails to account for the enormous ambiguity and turbulence in the current environment. I’m drawn instead to the model developed by Karl Weick in his influential paper, “Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis.”² As Weick argues, organizations consist of a group of diverse specialists who, under great duress, make fast, irreversible decisions, are highly interdependent, are dedicated to creation and novelty, and act with little certainty where it’s all going to end up.

Surely that’s the situation BP executives found themselves in after the Deepwater Horizon explosion: great duress with virtually no certainty where it would all come out in the end and, critically, accompanied by little comfort with or training for the enormous ambiguity that engulfed them. The stumbling, fumbling results speak for themselves, but just as surely, the heads of many different enterprises looked at the daily media circus swirling around BP and thought, there but for grace and blind luck go I.

This is the way things are today. Big goofs end up on YouTube, but even modest mistakes can go viral in hours and take months to overcome. Products and services are almost instantly replicable; competition is ferocious and likely to emerge from any point on the compass; and thus price points, margins, and market share evaporate overnight.

What are the models for surviving and prospering in such a climate? In medicine, not the relatively controlled and sterile environment of the operating room, but the sometimes frantic triage of a field hospital, where wounds and diseases are constantly novel, conditions are always at least slightly chaotic, and the outcome is wildly unpredictable. In football, not the near-infinite permutations and combinations on basic formations—the offensive guru Al Saunders can throw 700-plus different plays at an NFL defense—but the madcap, scrambling genius of a quarterback like Michael Vick, who prospers best when the protection breaks down, his receivers are all covered, and it’s every man for himself. And in entertainment, not the prescripted and approved yuks of situation comedy but the often desperate lurches of stand-up comics at the local improv, where a really bad outing might actually bring on Mike Tyson’s punch in the mouth.

Admittedly, my sense of comic timing is strained at best, and my gridiron days were never particularly pretty. As for surgery, I’m semicompetent at splinter removal, nothing more. But there is one improv field that I know about deep in my bones, and I happen to think it’s the best model of all for business in the twenty-first century: that great American original art form known as jazz.

I come with a bias—I’m a jazz pianist. I have traveled the world with the Tommy Dorsey Band and led my own trios and quartets. I’m also a management professor, and it’s safe to say I’ve learned as much about leadership and organizational behavior—and what it takes to excel as a performer—from my riffing at the piano as I have from my academic experience.

My piano training began, inauspiciously, with formal lessons at age eight. Try as I might to play, say, the B-flat minor scale with correct fingering—thumb crossing under, elbow tucked in tightly—I would repeatedly flub it. Eventually, the teacher told my mother to stop throwing good money after bad, and the lessons ended. But when I wasn’t practicing rigid scales and chord productions, I found I could perform complicated duets with my grandfather, Arthur E. Hagan. He was a ragtime piano player and as a teenager had played the piano for silent movies in Cleveland theaters. For a fumbling, restless eight-year-old boy, my grandfather was a perfect teacher—kind, patient, and humorous. In fact, I taped some of those childhood sessions, and when I now listen to that schoolboy, syncopated version of “Bye Bye Blues,” I hear a fairly advanced sense of time and rhythm, not to mention facility with the keys.

What was so different in my two styles of “practice”? Well, I learned boogie-woogie piano not by reading sheet music and practicing rote, but by mimicking my grandfather—the way he sat, his unusual footwork on the pedals, the runs and licks he played. Even when I couldn’t hit the exact notes, I echoed his rhythms and gestures, and when I’d imitate his playing, even when I hit “clunker” notes, he would simply delight in my efforts. There was no such thing as a mistake. Unbeknownst to my young self, that mimicry was setting down the hardwiring that would later allow me to become a more than competent jazz musician.

My training in management was nowhere near so much fun as learning to play the piano—especially when I was mastering “Maple Leaf Rag” at my grandfather’s elbow—but it contained many of the same elements: both formal education and imitation of mentors and wise old hands who were as sympathetic about my vocational clunker notes as my grandfather had been about my earlier piano ones.

Still, it took an “aha” moment early in my teaching career to show me just how interrelated the two pursuits are, or should be. Truth told, I wasn’t much of a professor when I first started out. I knew exactly what lessons and insights I wanted my students to get. I devised tests and exams that reinforced my “truths,” and I spared little effort in letting students know when they were getting it wrong.

Then one day a student interrupted me with a question that had nothing to do with the teaching plan, and out of exasperation—he was disrupting my plan after all—I said (and in memory, almost shouted), “Why are you asking that?” He answered honestly, “Because I’m curious.” That stopped me in my tracks long enough to say to myself, “We want students to be curious. That’s good. Maybe I should see where this leads.” So I surrendered and let go of my plan. We started in on the question the student had raised, and thirty minutes later, I realized we had covered the original topic in a deeper, more creative way than I ever could have imagined. What’s more, I saw how often I had been more loyal to my teaching plan than I was to the students and how, as a result, I had been blocking the learning process.

Before long, I was searching for moments when my students’ grasp of a problem departed from mine, and pursuing their questions, not just my own. With that, my entire experience changed. Simply put, I began to love teaching the day I found out that I was also learning—perhaps more than the students. Students and teachers, I discovered, can be collaborative witnesses and catalysts. Together, we can bring new, unanticipated elements into the conversation, riffs that deepen our mutual experience and knowledge. These aren’t teachable opportunities that can be planned for in advance. Rather, they are moments of learning that just happen along the way if—and “if” is the key word—we let them. And that for me was the real “aha” point of connection, because this is exactly what happens in jazz. The great moments are always the ones that happen along the way, if we let them.

In the years since, as I’ve honed the skills of my teaching profession and musical avocation, I have found more and more parallels between the dynamics in organizations, the tasks of leadership, and the improvisational nature of jazz. Moreover, I have come to see the powerful ways that jazz can help us in all our pursuits to be better leaders and innovators. The old models of organizations as command-and-control systems are outdated. We need a model of a group of diverse specialists living in a chaotic, turbulent environment; making fast, irreversible decisions; highly interdependent on one another to interpret imperfect and incomplete information; dedicated to innovation and the creation of novelty. This is what the great jazz players do: They learn by leaping in and taking action before they have a well-conceived plan. Once they’ve honed their skills, they know how to fabricate and invent novel responses without a scripted plan and no guarantee of outcomes. They discover the future as it unfolds. And they also discover their own identity—who they really are. Instead of dwelling on past mistakes, they take calculated risks and hope for the best, negotiating with each other as they proceed.

Except for a few scholars like Weick who have explored the improvisational mind-set in academic journals, no one has drawn on this model to explain how the principles of jazz can help anyone make the kinds of judgments and decisions required to perform at the top level in today’s increasingly unpredictable organizations. That’s what I do here. I urge readers to do as jazz players do: embrace the complexity of their lives, take informed risks, and finally, to borrow a phrase I use with my jazz-playing colleagues, “say yes to the mess.”

The Improv Paradox

The popular misconception is that jazz players are untutored geniuses who play their instruments as if they are picking notes out of thin air. But studies of jazz have shown that the art is very complex—the result of a relentless pursuit of learning and disciplined imagination. It’s that relentless pursuit and disciplined imagination, not simple genius, that allow jazz players to improvise—from the Latin improvisus, meaning “not seen ahead of time”—and it’s the improvisation that has become the defining hallmark of the art form.

How do jazz players learn to improvise? The same way I learned from my grandfather, the same way babies first learn to speak: by hearing patterns, watching gestures, and repeating and imitating. Jazz players build a vocabulary of phrases and patterns by imitating, repeating, and memorizing the solos and phrases of the masters until they become part of their repertoire of “licks.”

There’s irony here, of course. The goal of improvisation is to be mindful and creative, making up ideas on the spot that respond to what’s happening in the moment, but the road to mindful adapting leads through copying and imitating because, as every jazz player learns, there are times when your only choice is to fall back on the patterns you learned through mindless habit.

Trumpeter Tommy Turrentine explains:

The old guys used to call those things crips. That’s from crippled … In other words when you are playing a solo and your mind is crippled and you can’t think of anything different to play, you go back into one of your old bags and play one of your crips. You better have something to play when you can’t think of nothing new or you’ll feel funny laying out there all the time. ³

After years of practicing and absorbing patterns, musicians recognize what phrases fit within different forms and the various options available within the constraints of specific chords and songs. They study other players’ thought processes and learn to export materials from different contexts and vantage points, combining, extending, and varying the material, adding and changing notes, varying accents, subtly shifting the contour of a memorized phrase. Jazz critic Mark Gridley writes that Bill Evans was a master at this sort of highly cerebral improv:

Evans crafted his improvisations with exacting deliberation. Often he would take a phrase or just a kernel of its character, then develop and extend its rhythms, its melodic ideas, and accompanying harmonies. Within the same solo he would often return to it, transforming it each time. During Bill Evans’s improvisations, an unheard, continuous self-editing was going on. He spared the listener his false starts and discarded ideas. ⁴

As with jazz soloists, so it is with organizational leaders. The competent ones hit the right notes, but the great ones are distinguished by how far ahead they are imagining and how they strategize possibilities, shape the contour of ideas, adapt and adjust in the midst of action, and resolve organizational tension. Both also face the same fundamental paradox: too much reliance on learned patterns (habitual or automatic thinking) tends to limit the risk taking necessary for creative growth, just as too much regulation and control restrict the interplay of ideas. In order for musicians and leaders in organizations to “strike a groove,” they must suspend some degree of control and surrender to the flow.

Saxophonist Steve Lacy was talking about jazz when he described the inherent excitement and danger that come with improvisation, but he could just as easily have been describing the entrepreneurial rush that comes with venturing into new businesses and territories:

There is a freshness, a certain quality which can only be obtained by improvisation … It is something to do with the “edge,” always being on the brink of the unknown and being prepared for the leap. And when you go out there you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means but it is a leap into the unknown. ⁵

Being on the “brink of the unknown,” on the “edge,” and leaping in—this is an experience common to all those who take the risk to innovate. The experience is at once exhilarating and terrifying.

In a 2007 interview, the late Steve Jobs discussed the risk involved in innovation in words that would resonate with jazz musicians. Discussing his then-current challenge at Apple, he said: “There’s a lot of things that are risky right now. If you could see to the other side and say ‘yes this could be huge’—but there’s a period of risk, no one’s ever done it before.” It’s interesting that Jobs has articulated the same dilemma jazz improvisers face. You look out over what might happen and know that there’s risk involved. But at some moment, you have to say yes, and Jobs adds his inimitable enthusiasm—“this could be huge.” The interviewer then asked him if he had an example of a product that involves some kind of risk that might lead to huge benefits, but for which he has no guarantee. Jobs was careful not to disclose what he had in mind because he was experiencing that risky “yes” at that very moment. Instead, he replied that he had an example but “cannot say” right now.

In fact, we now know that Jobs was referring to the development of the iPad, but back then there was no guarantee the iPad would succeed—no way of knowing if it would be a “huge” commercial success or a flop as the Apple Newton had been. Jobs was doing what jazz musicians do all the time, living and acting in the unknown and loving every minute of it. As he told the interviewer, “when you feel like that, that’s a great thing. That’s what keeps you coming to work in the morning and it tells you there’s something exciting around the next corner.”⁶

In that same spirit, jazz historian Ted Gioia asks readers to imagine what it would be like for icons of other art forms to work under the same conditions that jazz musicians do:

Imagine T.S. Eliot giving nightly poetry readings at which, rather than reciting set pieces, he was expected to create impromptu poems—different ones each night, sometimes recited at a fast clip; imagine giving Hitchcock or Fellini a handheld motion picture camera and asking them to film something, anything—at that very moment, without the benefits of script, crew, editing, or scoring; imagine Matisse or Dali giving nightly exhibitions of their skills—exhibitions at which paying audiences would watch them fill up canvas after canvas with paint, often with only two or three minutes devoted to each “masterpiece.” ⁷

Or imagine, for that matter, the CEO of a global petroleum giant having to react on the fly to a fatal explosion and burgeoning environmental disaster with virtually no useful script to follow, no sure solution to the blown-out wellhead, and no idea when or where the damage might stop. Tony Hayward might well have benefited from a few nights at the improv.

Weick has a favorite anecdote to drive home this idea of improvisation as an exhilarating (and sometimes terrifying) combination of exploration, constant experimentation, and tinkering with the unknown and often unknowable. A group of Hungarian soldiers were hiking in the Alps and got lost. After wandering aimlessly for days, some had given up hope of being found, while others had resigned themselves to dying. Until, that is, one of the soldiers found a map in his pocket. He used the map to help his fellow soldiers get their bearings and feel comfortable that they were headed in a hopeful direction. Indeed, the group finally did return safely. Only then did they realize that the map that saved their lives was of the Pyrenees Mountains, not the Alps.

To Weick, the story demonstrates that you should not fall in love with strategic plans, that when you are lost and face a radically unfamiliar situation, “any old map will do”—that is, any plan will work because it will turn you into a learner by helping you take action and venture forth into the unknown mindfully. You take a few steps and then new pathways emerge as you discover what to do next. Having a map helped turn the soldiers into learners precisely because they were able to experiment; with each tentative path, they compared their progress to the map, and this comparison heightened their awareness. They became more mindful. They could see more features of the landscape that might have gone unnoticed. The Pyrenees map tracked a different range, but it served to orient the soldiers and gave them a temporary sense of confidence that there was enough structure within the chaos and a loose belief that if they started down the path, they would eventually find their way out of their dilemma. Taking action turned them into learners. In short: Act first “as if” this will work; pay attention to what shows up; venture forth; make sense later.

The English Romantic age poet John Keats was getting at much the same idea when he praised Shakespeare for his “negative capability”—the ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Keats’s fellow Romantic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote about what he called the “willing suspension of disbelief” that allows readers to fully enter into a fantastical tale. Both concepts partake of the fundamental nature of improvisation: sometimes leadership means letting go of the dream of certainty, leaping in, acting first, and reflecting later on the impact of the action.

I was once asked to play at a club in Cleveland with a jazz quartet that included members I had never before met, including a singer I had never accompanied. They called a hard bebop tune, and within a few measures, it was clear that the singer didn’t really know the song very well and became disoriented. What to do? Players looked confused, and a few dropped out and looked around at each other. The drummer and the bass player kept going, but clearly they were about to stop. I was terrified and, for a few moments, frozen. So I just began to play a few notes, restating the melody in the original key. The sax player and bass player heard what I was up to and jumped in. The singer picked up the melody and started following it, making up new words. Within a few seconds, we were grooving again.

That’s Keats’s negative capability in action, but it’s a good lesson for leaders, too, especially when the wheels are starting to come off and it’s impossible to get enough information for a fully coherent plan. Do what jazz players do. Do what Shakespeare did. Act, and pay attention to what unfolds as you go.

For decades, the assumption has been that management is the art of planning, organizing, deciding, and controlling. But planning of necessity becomes unreliable when the environment grows unpredictable and unstable; organizing looks quite different viewed from the perspective of open-source innovation; deciding is not so much a rational, deductive conclusion as it is a product of ongoing relational exchanges; and controlling seems impossible in a world of networks. What we need to add to our list of managerial skills is improvisation—the art of adjusting, flexibly adapting, learning through trial-and-error initiatives, inventing ad hoc responses, and discovering as you go.

One popular story often associated with leadership holds that leaders master the skills and tools associated with strategy (such as financial and market analysis), much as people learn to play music by mastering scales, arpeggios, and other exercises. Business schools reinforce this model and sometimes treat learning as if knowledge were an object transferred between brains—what Paulo Freire called the “banking concept” of education. In this view, knowledge is a currency first deposited inside the head, then aggregated and detached in separate clusters that can be transferred, accumulated, and consumed.

In today’s dynamic world, though, quickly unlearning old habits, routines, and strategies can often be as important as learning them in the first place. GE offers a case in point. Until the financial crisis that began in 2007, GE was convinced that its financial arm, GE Capital, was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Not only was GE Capital hugely profitable in itself, it required almost no new capital investment, such as factories, to sustain itself. Then came the crash, and the golden eggs turned rotten overnight. Suddenly, GE’s credit rating was being downgraded from triple-A, and the company had to cut its dividend for the first time since the Great Depression, even with Warren Buffett riding to the rescue with a $3 billion investment.

Today, GE is stressing what it used to do so well in the past—making things, from light bulbs to jet engines, not just loans. But CEO and Chairman Jeffrey Immelt is also helping the company’s next generation of leaders unlearn old ways by having them study and spend time with organizations as diverse as Google and the United States Military Academy at West Point—Google for its “constant entrepreneurship,” as Immelt told the New York Times, and West Point for its “adaptability” and “resiliency” in highly dynamic and shifting circumstances.⁸

Sometimes it’s in the context of breakdowns, even crises, that learning comes most alive. When there’s a breakdown, managers have to do what jazz players yearn to do—abandon routines and respond in the moment. Faced with crisis, leaders often respond from their gut, sometimes discovering skills they never knew they had and solutions they had never previously imagined.

On the Way to Yes—Abandoning Routines

In my high school and college years, I had a number of jazz idols, beginning with the pianist Oscar Peterson. Peterson could swing hard and play complex harmonies and lightning-fast licks—plus, he had the technique of a world-class concert pianist. I would listen to his recordings for hours, marveling at how flawless his playing was. Later, when I began to play professionally, I was stunned to learn that among some jazz musicians Peterson is not so highly regarded. As one of my friends said, “he can swing, but he’s simply too perfect.” What he meant, I came to understand, was that while Peterson had mastered the clean and perfect phrases that were his signature, often at breath-taking speed, his licks varied little if at all from number to number.

In effect, Peterson was saying the same “yes to the mess” just about every time he sat down at the piano, relying on catch phrases that became clichés until the playing itself grew programmatic. The pure sounds were there, the pyrotechnics he was famous for, but not the struggle that goes with improvisation, the willingness to stretch into the unfamiliar. As the composer-pianist Keith Jarrett once put it, in words that apply equally to jazz and business, “the music is struggle. You have to want to struggle. And what most leaders are the victim of is the freedom not to struggle. And then that’s the end of it. Forget it!”⁹

If jazz has an exact anti-Peterson, it might be saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Many consider Rollins the greatest living improviser. He takes risks and tries new styles, forever stretching himself beyond his own familiar limitations. Among musicians, Rollins is almost as famous for his mistakes as he is for his “successful” innovations—wild experiments that have crashed grandly in ways that would embarrass most players. Fellow sax player Ronnie Scott contrasted Peterson’s flawless prerehearsed solos with the risk taking of Rollins, who attempts to transform the harmonic and melodic materials that the tune presents:

Oscar Peterson is a very polished, technically immaculate performer, who—I hope he wouldn’t mind me saying so—trots out these fantastic things that he has perfected, and it really is a remarkable performance. Whereas Sonny Rollins, he could go on one night and maybe it’s disappointing, and another night he’ll just take your breath away by his kind of imagination and so forth. And it would be different every night with Rollins. ¹⁰

Rollins’s deep commitment to staying open and responsive has led him down some unusual byways. Throughout the 1950s, he was a well-known and successful jazz musician, playing and recording with such greats as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, and Art Blakey. But in 1959, Rollins mysteriously quit playing. Rumors circulated that he was sick or maybe suffering from drug addiction, but in fact he had quit because he had gotten tired of hearing himself playing the same phrases and licks in solo after solo.

Rollins wanted to break himself of the habit of playing what he had been hearing himself play, so for three years he went to the Williamsburg Bridge near his home in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, found a place under the surface of the bridge where he could be alone, and played his saxophone. Each time he heard a phrase that sounded like one of his familiar routines, he stopped, waited a moment, then played something he hadn’t heard before. At the end of three years, he recorded an album with Jim Hall on guitar, Bob Cranshaw on bass, and Ben Riley on drums, and dedicated the album to the location he had found to reinvent himself. The title of the album is, simply, The Bridge.

At first, The Bridge was not well received by critics, partially because the music was such a dramatic departure from Rollins’s previous style. Now it’s considered a classic recording—on most critics’ list of the ten most important jazz recordings ever made. In fact, here’s how Rollins talks about how he approaches his art:

As soon as I hear myself playing a familiar melody I take the mouthpiece out of my mouth. I let some measures go by. Improvising means coming in with a completely clean slate from the first note … the most important thing is to get away from fixed functions. ¹¹

Rollins’s efforts to unlearn his successful routines was an affirmative move. He was letting go of the familiar and comfortable in order to welcome new possibilities and opportunities. A quarter-century later, Intel’s Andy Grove did almost exactly the same thing.

Grove is popularly credited with ingeniously, strategically, and deliberately leading Intel into the microprocessor industry, but as Grove himself recounted in his memoir, the real story is quite different.¹² The success of Intel was largely a matter of the top leadership team saying yes to the mess.

Intel is known today for its microprocessors, but for much of its early life, the company’s success was built on DRAM technology (for dynamic random access memory), and by the mid-1980s, Japanese DRAM competition was severely eroding Intel’s profit, from $198 million in 1984 to less than $2 million in 1985. Looking backward, the moral would seem to have been obvious: find another field to conquer. But Intel, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, was “living forward,” and Intel’s scientists, technologists, sales force, and even its customers were so familiar with the existing processes that they could not imagine Intel not focusing on DRAM.

Nor was a fresh solution readily presenting itself. Intel’s initial progress in microprocessors was somewhere between accidental and clandestine. An Intel manager invented the microprocessor inadvertently while developing technology for a calculator, but Intel strategists barely noticed the market potential of the discovery, even though microprocessors were proving to be very profitable. So powerful was the comfort of the company’s past experiences that it continued to overwhelm external reality until, finally, Grove had his own “unlearning” moment.

As Grove tells the story in Only the Paranoid Survive, “I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance when I turned back to [Intel cofounder] Gordon [Moore], and I asked, ‘If we got kicked out and the Board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?’ Gordon answered without hesitation, ‘He would get us out of memories.’ I stared at him, numb, then said, ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?’”¹³ And thus was born Grove’s famous first step in attacking difficult problems: “Set aside everything you know.”

“Welcome to the new Intel,” Grove announced in a speech not long afterward. Intel went from being a company that makes memory chips to a company that focused on microprocessors, a move that quickly became hugely profitable. But to get there, he and Moore had to let go of the routines that were the secret to past success. Only by unlearning old routines were they able to open themselves to new opportunities and see the potential coming from an unexpected direction. To develop the dynamic capability that would carry the company forward, they had to step outside of themselves, something else jazz players are constantly called to do.

“Take a Knee”

On April 3, 2003, during the early weeks of the Iraq War, Lt. Col. Chris Hughes led the U.S. 101st Battalion into volatile Najaf, on a crucial and sensitive mission to meet with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who was in residence at the mosque—the third holiest site for Shiite Muslims because it is the Imam Ali Mosque. That alone made the mission sensitive, but the Shiite high cleric was also crucial to establishing good relationships with the Iraqis. He had urged Muslims to remain calm and cooperate with U.S. forces, and now he was asking the U.S. Army for protection, the immediate reason for the 101st’s mission.

Unfortunately, as the battalion neared the mosque, a rumor began to spread that the Americans intended to arrest the cleric and destroy the holy site. With that, Iraqi villagers suddenly turned on the U.S. troops. Indeed, within a split second, the situation changed dramatically. Now Hughes and the men under his command faced an angry standoff in highly uncertain territory. The soldiers were tense as an increasingly hostile crowd began to crowd in on them. “It seemed to turn like that, but it was a very deliberate turn,” Hughes said later. “If somebody shot a round in the air, there was going to be some sort of massacre.”

“Everybody smile!” he ordered his troops, as an embedded CBS News camera caught the scene. “Don’t point your weapons at them. Take a knee! Relax!” The “take a knee” order seemed to buy time, so Hughes followed up by ordering his men to withdraw, and just as suddenly, the situation pivoted once more, and goodwill was restored.

Reporter Dan Baum later interviewed Hughes for a New Yorker account of the incident.¹⁴ Where had he learned this strategy? Baum asked. How did he know that pointing his own rifle down and ordering his men to take a knee would tame the crowd? Nowhere, Hughes said in essence. He was making it up on the spot, as he went along.

At first glance, Hughes’s answer would seem to align with the popular understanding of jazz musicians as free-spirited, free-form performers. But in reality his answer goes to the deeper nature of the art form. U.S. military training manuals generally teach two standard responses to situations such as Hughes and the 101st Battalion faced: use helicopter blades to push away angry crowds or fire warning shots. The last step in the training is the final solution: shoot to kill. So when Hughes ordered his men to “get down on one knee and smile,” he was in fact improvising. But his solution was also the result of relentless learning and a disciplined imagination that, in an instant, took into account the complex tribal dynamics that all foreign troops faced in Iraq. Hughes threw out the rules, to be sure, but he didn’t throw out his deeper engagement and his deeper desire to express respect toward the Iraqis. Even under the intense pressure of the moment, he managed to stay fully engaged in the details and in the aggregate. That’s what made the difference, and that’s great jazz in a nutshell.

This book challenges the myths or belief systems we hold about leadership. It’s often assumed that without singular direction, groups turn chaotic or unruly. What we are learning, though, is that without being guided by an outside entity or prescripted plan, a system can self-organize and produce even more efficient and effective outcomes. Think how different this model is from the one we have been taught. We were told that social systems need hierarchy to function and coordinate. But when birds flock, when cities form and expand, there is no controlling singular force. Individuals act unpredictably, and yet a coherent and productive organization emerges. Just as in jazz. The message is provocative: an emergent system is smarter than the individual members. And systems grow smarter over time. The jazz mind-set is one that recognizes the emerging coherence amid constant flux.

In a system of distributed, decentralized control, what are the implications for leadership? How does someone lead “structured chaos”? What is the role of the leader in a group creation? Leaders often must act without full awareness of the consequences of their action, even without any full articulation of what the plan might be or how it is likely to change in progress. That’s organizational life in the twenty-first century. Frequently, only after action is initiated are actual goals and preferences discovered, and it’s only in hindsight that we understand what motivated our judgments and actions. Jazz is all about repeating a theme. In this book, I am laying out the principles of jazz performance to help executives, managers, and leaders, in whatever context, elevate performance by showing them how to break the mold and move beyond the expected.