A beautiful analogy. I've been thinking about what being a product leader means in this new word. I learned what good looks like at Facebook, where we wrote sustainable 3-year strategies and planned and worked in halves. However, in this new world, strategy doesn't seem as important anymore and fast, iterative execution is now the way to go. Maybe the pendulum will swing back to a coherent strategy in a few years when this whole AI thing settles down. We just don't know yet where it's going and where it could take us to create sustained strategies.
Great analogy. I remember eBay's leadership training ended with a conductor drawing the metaphor of conducting a symphony and running a team, but I agree with you on the inexorable move towards improvisation and agility.
Continuing the analogy, whether you're in a symphony or jazz band, the individual player must be an expert with his/her instrument. I was just speaking to a good friend of mine, and he was saying that he should hire a young gun to build out some AI agents for him. I encouraged him to download Claude Code and do it himself. A podcaster said that senior execs don't really get AI because they're not using it themselves; their direct reports are so competent that they don't need to...yet. It's kinda like the boss who had his secretary print out his emails. Don't be that guy.
What an "on point" analogy of my recent experience with a local private university. Having "jumped at an opportunity" to work with four students within their artificial intelligence department I was abruptly told "how things were going to be done"! The professor of marketing "commandeered" the project with no personal knowledge of AI herself. She really did "tighten up on that directors wand" and refused to let the four, or ME contribute at all.
Within a week, I decided to leave that program and look elsewhere of help~
This is great — I do push back a bit though on the implications you’ve raised. I’m not sure they’re realistic at scale.
1) I love a good jazz analogy (my dad’s a percussionist who spent most of his career playing in church bands, which is actually this really interesting hybrid of symphony and jazz: loose structure, but also a worship leader, a congregation, and intuition/spirit you’re letting guide you).
But I think it can gloss over something structural that I’m not sure any large org has actually solved: jazz requires eye contact. Literally. You can’t improvise with someone you can’t see. You can’t make eye contact if you’re not on the same level. And you definitely can’t make eye contact with 69 other people who are all facing the conductor!
I honestly think this is less of a culture issue and more of a very very practical one… Orgs are built on rationed access… who reports to whom, who approves what, whose taste wins. We can encourage people to blur their roles and improvise, but they can only do that with people they’re making eye contact with. And some people might avoid your eye contact 😅 and it might be because they need to make eye contact with your manager.
To do jazz at scale, we have to fundamentally redesign who has access to whom and renegotiate power accordingly… And then everyone would have to be okay with that power redistribution. I genuinely can’t think of a large org that’s pulled it off… I worked on BCG’s org productivity thought leadership for about a year back in 2022. I’d see Netflix get cited a lot but that’s more like an extremely curated orchestra that fires any musicians who isn’t keeping up (and can afford to bc they perpetually have a line of people auditioning). Spotify tried the squad model and has walked most of it back I’m pretty sure.
I DO think early stage startups are doing jazz right now! I’m just not sure a a critical enough mass of people inside of a large organization could actually work in an improvisational way, even if they all were deeply passionate about profitability and nothing else, since there are many routes to profit.
Jazz is better than Symphony when the environment changes rapidly as it does today. Large global companies are subject to geopolitical incidents that force them to frequently readjust their value chain to maintain their business or to grow.
I like your analogy. I think on a small scale this is already reality today.
But thinking of a big house, with open doors, and 50 teams are jamming individually - I get goose bumps. If they share great parts of their values/targets, this will end up in a great organisation.
The big question for me is: how to get up on speed, beeing agile, but have this big house move in desired directions. And who decides what's desired? How to guarantee the shared values and targets. It's like organising a partisan army.
Need to think about this analogy and consequently a little bit longer 🫠
There is something really special about the local jazz group that plays at the local restaurant on the weekends. If that’s what tech companies can move in to, I’m on board!! 🥳
A beautiful analogy. I've been thinking about what being a product leader means in this new word. I learned what good looks like at Facebook, where we wrote sustainable 3-year strategies and planned and worked in halves. However, in this new world, strategy doesn't seem as important anymore and fast, iterative execution is now the way to go. Maybe the pendulum will swing back to a coherent strategy in a few years when this whole AI thing settles down. We just don't know yet where it's going and where it could take us to create sustained strategies.
Great analogy. I remember eBay's leadership training ended with a conductor drawing the metaphor of conducting a symphony and running a team, but I agree with you on the inexorable move towards improvisation and agility.
Continuing the analogy, whether you're in a symphony or jazz band, the individual player must be an expert with his/her instrument. I was just speaking to a good friend of mine, and he was saying that he should hire a young gun to build out some AI agents for him. I encouraged him to download Claude Code and do it himself. A podcaster said that senior execs don't really get AI because they're not using it themselves; their direct reports are so competent that they don't need to...yet. It's kinda like the boss who had his secretary print out his emails. Don't be that guy.
What an "on point" analogy of my recent experience with a local private university. Having "jumped at an opportunity" to work with four students within their artificial intelligence department I was abruptly told "how things were going to be done"! The professor of marketing "commandeered" the project with no personal knowledge of AI herself. She really did "tighten up on that directors wand" and refused to let the four, or ME contribute at all.
Within a week, I decided to leave that program and look elsewhere of help~
https://Picture-Yourself-Remembered.com
This is great — I do push back a bit though on the implications you’ve raised. I’m not sure they’re realistic at scale.
1) I love a good jazz analogy (my dad’s a percussionist who spent most of his career playing in church bands, which is actually this really interesting hybrid of symphony and jazz: loose structure, but also a worship leader, a congregation, and intuition/spirit you’re letting guide you).
But I think it can gloss over something structural that I’m not sure any large org has actually solved: jazz requires eye contact. Literally. You can’t improvise with someone you can’t see. You can’t make eye contact if you’re not on the same level. And you definitely can’t make eye contact with 69 other people who are all facing the conductor!
I honestly think this is less of a culture issue and more of a very very practical one… Orgs are built on rationed access… who reports to whom, who approves what, whose taste wins. We can encourage people to blur their roles and improvise, but they can only do that with people they’re making eye contact with. And some people might avoid your eye contact 😅 and it might be because they need to make eye contact with your manager.
To do jazz at scale, we have to fundamentally redesign who has access to whom and renegotiate power accordingly… And then everyone would have to be okay with that power redistribution. I genuinely can’t think of a large org that’s pulled it off… I worked on BCG’s org productivity thought leadership for about a year back in 2022. I’d see Netflix get cited a lot but that’s more like an extremely curated orchestra that fires any musicians who isn’t keeping up (and can afford to bc they perpetually have a line of people auditioning). Spotify tried the squad model and has walked most of it back I’m pretty sure.
I DO think early stage startups are doing jazz right now! I’m just not sure a a critical enough mass of people inside of a large organization could actually work in an improvisational way, even if they all were deeply passionate about profitability and nothing else, since there are many routes to profit.
Jazz is better than Symphony when the environment changes rapidly as it does today. Large global companies are subject to geopolitical incidents that force them to frequently readjust their value chain to maintain their business or to grow.
Great peice Deb. Thank you.
I like your analogy. I think on a small scale this is already reality today.
But thinking of a big house, with open doors, and 50 teams are jamming individually - I get goose bumps. If they share great parts of their values/targets, this will end up in a great organisation.
The big question for me is: how to get up on speed, beeing agile, but have this big house move in desired directions. And who decides what's desired? How to guarantee the shared values and targets. It's like organising a partisan army.
Need to think about this analogy and consequently a little bit longer 🫠
There is something really special about the local jazz group that plays at the local restaurant on the weekends. If that’s what tech companies can move in to, I’m on board!! 🥳
❤️