THE BUSINESS OF BLUEGRASS BANDS!

What a well tuned bluegrass band could teach businesses about collaboration is astounding. This week I read an exposé posted a few years ago; but, isn't that the wonder of the Internet? Things, good or bad, are there forever and easily obtainable.

In his piece titled, What Bluegrass Musicians Can Teach Business About Collaboration, Carl Alviani contrasts three pickers in a live impromptu bluegrass jam with the world's major corporations.

He says on one hand a band playing together is completely unremarkable – just a typical bluegrass jam between experienced musicians. But on the other hand, it’s an extraordinary lesson in the kind of effective creative collaboration that has eluded modern business for decades.

Consider what’s going on here. These are three experts with very different creative skills, yet they’re communicating on the fly with total precision. They build on one another’s ideas and pursue a variety of approaches to a theme while trading off leadership and support roles. It’s exactly the sort of interaction large organizations spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to enable in their project teams, often without success. But even more remarkable is that these players have never performed together--or even met--until just now. What they’ve got that most companies don’t is a strong, clearly articulated shared culture, exemplified by a set of universal melodies called standards, some with roots going back centuries. Knowing these tunes is the cost of entry to a jam session, and while it might seem constrictive to build an entire musical genre around just a couple hundred songs, standards allow for incredible flexibility. *

The other extraordinary aspect of this thinking is when one considers that so many of our bluegrass bands fail because they are not good at business and often make poor business decisions.

From hiring new band members, based solely upon one's ability to play an instrument without consideration of any other aspects, qualities or attributes, to operating on shoe-string budgets without any structured goals, business plans or formal leadership, many of today's musical groups exist solely by grace and not by design.

Seldom do I run into a band that is structured like a business with a boss and subordinate workers. Even when one individual appears to take the lead, in most cases, there is never a formal or written job description for him or any of the other band members. Most bands, even with a lead or “front man,” often attempt to run the band's business like a democracy where every vote counts. If you had a band of 13 where it would be impossible to end up with a tie vote, a democratic process may work sometimes. But usually it's all or nothing. Those voting against something are never quite satisfied with the outcome and damaged relationships begin to develop. Usually, in a band of four to six members, there is not really enough population to have equal input into every business maneuver. Sooner or later you're going to split the band right down the middle.

When it comes down to decisions of, “do we wear the white shirts or red today?” a voting process may be all that is necessary, but when it comes to the question of “what image do we want our band to present to the public?”, four different minds can easily have four different and even opposing ideas. So where does the decision come from? Usually no decision is made in order to keep the relationship among the members intact. In business, no decision can often equal a bad decision.

Wouldn't it be a completion of the circle if bluegrass bands could tap into this insightful and instinctive knowledge – knowledge they already have and knowledge that major corporations struggle constantly to obtain – to actually run their bluegrass band businesses like they run the progressions of each song?

*Read Carl Alviani's full article here!