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Executive Briefings

Published January 2008

Where Business Meets Jazz

  Lindsay Edmonds Wickman

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Born in a different time, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Miles Davis might have been known as the most successful corporate leaders in America instead of the most well-known jazz musicians. Why Because of the incredible overlap between the worlds of jazz and business. The elements that make a jazz group phenomenal are similar to those that make companies great.

Michael Gold, who has a Ph.D. in performance, brings the sounds of saxophones, trombones and basses to corporations to show them how a business should operate more like a jazz ensemble, fusing business with art.

“We’re trying to create an experience that people have which goes deep. The whole premise of using art as a tool in education for business is that if you use it in the right way, you can drive the experience to a deep enough level so that it is accessible to them [participants] in their everyday functioning,” said Gold, who is a jazz bassist but has also worked in the corporate realm.

His corporate program, Jazz Impact, involves top jazz musicians coming together to play before employees and teach them how their companies should operate more like a jazz ensemble. Gold shows businesses what makes a jazz group successful: autonomy, passion, risk, innovation and listening (APRIL). Coincidentally, these concepts are the foundation of a good business.

In jazz, leadership means nothing without the underpinnings of support. Similarly, executive leaders must empower their employees and develop a cooperative environment with an intellectual give-and-take between employees and their bosses.

“For most of the 20th century, the idea of autonomy was you win, they lose. That’s how you did it in business. Well, that doesn’t work anymore, and in jazz, it never did. The idea of autonomy in jazz is based completely in a mindset of inclusion, and that’s because, in the jazz ensemble, we are constantly transitioning back and forth between a position of leadership and a position of support. The leadership actually makes it possible, through the way they relate, to be instantly influenced by the reaction of the supporting team,” he said.  

“It’s a subtle point, and yet something that is very relevant in business. The real resource in a company is its intellectual capital. So the autonomy that we’re demonstrating in the jazz ensemble is something that top managers really strive to achieve, which is wanting people to take the initiative at all levels and to be accountable for their actions.”

Businesses need to cultivate passion in their employees. When employees believe in the integrity of their company, they feel an emotional commitment that affects their success.

“In jazz and in business, it’s the passion of emotional commitment that gets you through all the very difficult work that has to be done. It actually forms a renewable resource because, if people feel a sense of authenticity about their corporate culture, that’s going to generate passion, and when they have passion for what they do, they’re going to feel a sense of authenticity,” he said.

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