Lessons in Innovation from Bowie, Beyoncé, and More

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard. Most of us know that we can learn a great deal from people in other disciplines. So you’ll find business leaders who’ve studied social sciences, like psychology or law, applied sciences, like math and engineering, and humanities, like history or languages.

But our guest today believes that there’s a field executives and managers don’t consider closely enough. They say all the creative work that’s gone into the hit music made by artists like Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Bjork, Pharrell, Justin Timberlake, Prince, Yo-Yo Ma, Bon Jovi, or The Beatles can also be applied to our corporate endeavors. Whether it’s becoming better at experimentation, collaboration, or reinvention, we can learn a ton from these musicians.

With me today is Panos Panay, the outgoing senior vice president for global strategy and innovation at Berklee College of Music, and the incoming co-president of the Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys, and Michael Hendrix, partner and global design director at IDEO, the design and innovation consulting firm.

Together, they wrote the book Two Beats Ahead: What Musical Minds teach us about innovation. And they’re here to explain why we should all think more like musicians, even if we can’t carry a tune. Panos, Michael, thanks so much for being here.

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: Thanks, Alison.

PANOS PANAY: Thank you.

ALISON BEARD: Why have you pinpointed musicians in particular as important people to learn from versus another kind of artist or an athlete or a coach?

PANOS PANAY: Well, partially, it’s because we’ve worked with musicians all of our lives, we’ve been musicians. I’ve personally been immersed in music and the music industry since I was very young. So that’s been our experience, but we also believe that these mindsets that we describe in Two Beats Ahead are pretty unique to the music makers out there.

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: Well, one of the interesting things about musicians is the way they see the world. You asked about musicians versus athletes, for example. When you think about any sport, the rules rarely change. And when they do, it’s quite controversial. But because the rules don’t change, the team, the number of players on the field doesn’t change. You can optimize for your roles. You can optimize for your performance.

Music doesn’t work that way. Music is all about dynamism. It’s about improvisation. It’s about creativity and unlocking the potential of one another. What we are advocating for is adopting more of that mindset that focuses less on creating master plans and optimization. It focuses more on building collaboration and respect between peers, and then moving into those relationships with openness and curiosity, with expectation for new outcomes that were not planned.

ALISON BEARD: And it seems obvious, but you say the first thing that musicians do is listen. And that’s something that people in the corporate world could do a lot more of. So how do musicians listen in a way that yields new insights?

PANOS PANAY: Alison, I think we live in an era of too much broadcasting and not enough listening. What sets musicians apart is not so much just the way that they go about expressing themselves, but their ability to hear and listen and process, if you will, information in a way that nobody else does. They make space for listening. They make time for listening. They understand that music is as much the action, if you will, the note, as it is the space and the time and the openness in between the notes.

And we feel like in the business world, there is a lack of a conscious time spent on truly listening to the environment around you, be it your employees, be it your customers, or ultimately, the broader changes that are happening around us. Things are moving perhaps so fast that we don’t really make a conscious effort to slow it down and pay attention.

ALISON BEARD: And you draw some very clear parallels between what musicians do and what entrepreneurs do, in that they do consciously experiment and create demos. Talk a little bit more about how The ways in which musicians do those things, maps to what we can see working in organizations.

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: Well, demoing is very similar to prototyping, and it begins with this idea of simply sharing your intention with somebody else. When a song idea comes about, it’s raw. And actually, in the book, we have playlist at the end of each chapter, so you can hear some famous demos to get a feeling of this.

ALISON BEARD: As soon as I read that chapter, I Googled up Prince. And I watched his demo of Manic Monday, which was obviously made famous by The Bangles, but Prince wrote it.

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: Yeah. And so when you heard that demo, you heard the intention of the song. The Bangles understood what Prince was trying to communicate through that prototype or that demo. And then obviously, they made it theirs with their own character and their own voice, but it’s a clear line from A to B. And sharing early, sharing often through demoing is a practice we can all do regularly at work.

Now, what happens normally is people. People worry about criticism because of lack of perfection. They hold ideas back. They self-edit. They’re often incentivized to do that by the organization itself, because the way you show up at work, so to speak, can often have consequences on whether you’re promoted or not. But the truth is, sharing sooner often helps get to ideas faster, and it opens space for other people to collaborate with you and build upon those ideas.

PANOS PANAY: Demoing or prototyping is all about sort of a positive action. You’re daring to take a step. In the book, we mentioned a number of examples of this happening to musicians, like Ike Turner, for example, and the discovery of distorted sound, which changed the trajectory of modern music forever, which was simply, they were driving to a gig and the amplifier fell off the back of the truck, and when they plugged it in, it just sounded distorted. It’s daring to experiment or daring to commit to an action no matter the outcome that often leads to breakthroughs.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. One of my favorite lines was from an interview you did with Justin Timberlake, who said he dares to suck in the studio, but the studio is obviously a really forgiving environment where people are riffing and trying out new lyrics and new melodies and new chords. How do you create a work environment in which people feel comfortable doing that when they’re not Justin Timberlake in the studio?

PANOS PANAY: You know what’s funny, Alison? Since the book came out at Berklee, all of our executives read the book, and it’s now become common for people to say, “Look, I’m going to dare to suck, but I’m going to go ahead and say this.” I think it’s just simply a reframing of what’s the concept of a studio. I mean, if you think about it, you said it’s an easy place to experiment. Well, it’s actually quite not because it costs a lot of money even today to be in a recording studio.

So for us, it’s more about creating the conditions in the workplace or other places where it’s safe to go ahead and say something and make a mistake, or take an action and embrace imperfection as often a means to generating or creating something that maybe you weren’t intending, but it’s the very thing that you were meant to have all along. So for me, this is where the managers can play a big role. Can you create the conditions, the environment where people feel okay to dare to suck? And just sitting back and seeing what happens, what kind of crazy ideas come about.

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: I mean, this is one of the bigger lessons we learned as we were writing the book. We did a chapter on producing and in that chapter, we spoke with Jimmy Irving and we spoke with Hank Shocklee, one of the founders of Public Enemy, T Bone Burnett. They all were saying the same thing. And Panos used the phrase, creating the conditions. We all talked about that in some way, that they felt like the job of a producer, and I relate to this as a creative director, as an executive, the job of the producer is to understand the talent they’re working with, understand their strengths and then be able to come alongside them, create the opportunity for them to use those strengths and then help them grow in the places where they’re weak. And that’s very empowering for them and it’s also, I think, empowering for the producer.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I feel like an HBR speak, it might be called leading from behind.

PANOS PANAY: I was about to use that expression. In many ways, we’re used to the concept of leadership, somebody who’s leading in the front, charging ahead, issuing orders and people are following, if you will, those directions. But what we’re finding is that the best producers in the world, they’re skilled at trusting their talent, understanding the uniqueness of that talent and creating the conditions and the platforms, if you will, for the talent to express itself.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about collaboration. We talked about how Prince works with The Bangles, how musicians work with famous producers, but the stories that you tell about the behind the scenes collaboration to make albums like Beyonce’s Lemonade, for example, are really interesting because you see the music industry really being a shining example for leveraging, not just a few points of view, but dozens. So how can we begin to apply that to our work lives?

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: Yeah. Beyonce is a master collaborator. We don’t think of her often that way because one, she goes by her name, she doesn’t have a band name. What she shows us though is that in many ways, she takes this producer’s mindset in which she’s looking at the talent of many people around her and asking, how can I work with you in some way to unlock something new for each other? So a song like Hold Up had 15 songwriters, which is hard to imagine that you can have 15 songwriters for a song, but she did have a vision for, let’s say some of the parts, but she didn’t know how that was exactly going to come together, right? She’s a little bit of working with Ezra Koenig, who had taken a little bit from Karen O.

She’s a fan of MNEK, asked him to come in. She’s friends with Diplo, asked him to come in. And all of these different parts start to add up to something new and really a genre-defined song, really smart lyrics that she had pieced together. And if she had set out to say, I’m going to write a song with 15 collaborators, I think it would have been a train wreck. But what she did is she just kept organically building with these different peers whom she saw as peers to get to that final outcome.

I mean, that can be really uncomfortable, I think, in the business environment to think, I’m going to invest in putting this team together. I’m not sure what they’re going to come up with, but it comes back to belief in the team itself, belief in this collaborators itself. And Beyonce lives this, she believes in the collaboration and the power of it to result in the outcomes she’s hoping for.

ALISON BEARD: And you all have seen leaders who aren’t Beyonce and do this sort of thing, pull really great talent together and just have them tackle a problem or a challenge and come up with a new and unexpected way of solving it.

PANOS PANAY: Yeah. I feel that we often think of some leaders, even somebody like Steve jobs as sort of these, again, prototypical lone chargers who sort of issue these edicts and things happen. But even in the situation of Steve Jobs, I think one of the things that he’s probably not recognized for is his ability in his second tenure at Apple to assemble a team of amazing individuals, most of which are still there even almost a decade I think after his death, that collectively have been able to make Apple into the world’s, depending on the week, most valuable company.

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: The product model of IDEO is basically this idea of putting together supergroups, right? . It’s not just about putting random teams together and hoping things happen. Choosing the right talent is critical, and you can see this. My kids, they’re all out of high school now, but they were in project learning environments in which they would be put on random teams with other classmates and it would often be a bad experience for everybody. Someone didn’t contribute at all, the teacher’s grading them. Even though two people did the work, three people didn’t, it’s a mess. And that’s because of the randomness of the teams that you’ve put together. So when you think about collaboration at work, team-based projects are great, but we do need to be very mindful of how we choose that talent and put them together. Otherwise, it has potential to fail.

ALISON BEARD: So we’ve talked a lot about innovation, but I do think execution is also really important for our audience. And one thing that I found interesting, maybe a little counterintuitive, is your suggestion that like musicians, it’s okay for leaders to make decisions partly on feeling and intuition that we should keep this experimental process going and rapid iteration, et cetera. It’s like wherein does the rubber meet the road and you have a product that you know is going to be great, and then you just focus on making it as good as possible?

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: I mean I think we’re in a dynamic world and there are some things that are done, but most things are in some version. And there was a poet, a French poet, I don’t remember his name, but he basically came up with the idea that great art is not finished, it’s abandoned. You basically just get to the point where you can let go. And throughout all of our interviews, basically all the artists were saying the same thing. You keep working on things until you let them go.

Kanye West is an example of an artist who even after letting go, came back and changed an album again and again over the course of three months to the frustration of the music industry. But he was thinking about different versions of that record, Life of Pablo, and how he wanted the sound, changing song order, changing songs, changing arrangements. So I guess what I’m advocating for in that is done may not be the right mental model in the digital era that we need to start adopting more of an organic biological mental model for these things that are constantly evolving.

PANOS PANAY: Well even products that were once thought of as done, even that’s changing. Look at cars. You buy a Tesla today and it’s primarily software driven. The form of the car may not change, but so much of the underlying operation of the car, even its efficiency, is changing from software updates. So as the world is moving more and more to bits and bytes and away from atoms, I think you will see that nothing is really ever done. And I believe we will begin to see this manifest, especially as we’re experiencing all new computational power, more and more devices tapping into the cloud. I think that you will see a lot of this idea of things evolving and becoming, and never quite feeling done insert itself in all products that were once thought of as final.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. You also have whole chapter on remixes. So how can people in the business world do that process of looking back to pull forward into something that’s more relevant today for their customers?

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: Yeah, I mean so much of innovation is simply transferring what works from one industry into another industry, right? And that is really the remixing idea. I can take the beats from a jazz record, loop them and rap over the top and I’ll get a hip hop song. And Hank Shocklee, whom I mentioned earlier, was just a genius at doing this, recognizing the patterns. And that’s where it starts, I think, is it’s an intuition where you can find patterns across industries and start to recognize where opportunity might overlap. In our world, you could say for example, the pay at the pump gas station is an example of a transference from taking an ATM pad and putting it onto a gas pump. And there’s a lot of opportunities for us to be thinking about that transference in the market.

PANOS PANAY: And we tend to think of innovation as starting something new out of nothing. But often innovation is about seeing things that are already there and envisioning them assembled in a different way and creating something new. It’s just simply shuffling things around.

ALISON BEARD: On the flip side, you talk about the reinvention, that people like David Bowie, and Madonna, and Lady Gaga have figured out in their careers, and that’s truly abandoning the past and going onto something new. So how might I do that in my own career? How could our listeners? Or how can companies do that?

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: Well, the good news is that you as an individual and you as a company can both do the same thing. And we’ll look to David Bowie for some instruction here. Bowie, at the end of his career said, “When I look back at four decades of all these characters I’ve had, from Aladdin Sane, to Thin White Duke, to Halloween Jack, to Lazarus, I see that at the core, I’m a songwriter and I’ve written about three or four themes my entire life, things like loneliness, isolation.”

And I think that’s really instructive because when you think of Bowie, you think of someone that is constantly changing, don’t you? And both Madonna and Lady Gaga have said they took that same blueprint. But actually what’s happening is you have an example of somebody who really understands their core, understands what they’re good at, understands what they’re passionate about, and then rotates the collaborators, the cast of characters, the ideas around that core idea. So getting to your core is actually the secret to being able to change. We share some stories about companies in the book that, Fujifilm was one, Nokia, National Geographic. They’ve all had to figure out what their core is so they can evolve with the changing market.

But if you look at what each of them has done, they really did start to understand, I provide infrastructure for communication, or I have the ability to help preserve the quality of imagery, or have the ability to help communicate stories about our climate. When they can boil it down to that simplicity, they can change the activities around them fairly easily. And we have to do that as individuals too. I think especially now, a lot of us have been asking that question of ourselves anyway, because of the pandemic.

ALISON BEARD: It sounds like you’re talking about purpose.

PANOS PANAY: I was about to use the word purpose. Don’t confuse your product with your purpose or the other way around. Or as a mentor of mine, who is a founder of Avid, a guy called Bill Warner said to me, “There is invention and then there’s intention. Don’t confuse the two.”

And I feel that often as individuals, as organizations, we get too hung up on a particular identity that we forget what our purpose or our intention is. And ultimately, this is what has distinguished great artists, this is what distinguishes great companies or great individuals. They keep changing, they keep evolving, they keep shedding a skin, if you will, but they’re always somehow recognizable. No matter what, Bowie in the late 60s, or Bowie in the 2000s, right before his death, you could hear one note sung by David Bowie and you know it’s David Bowie, the same with Miles Davis, the same with Madonna, the same wit any number of artists.

ALISON BEARD: Okay, last question, if I am a manager, or even just an individual employee, what’s one thing that I can do at work tomorrow to be more like David Bowie or Beyonce?

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: I would start with the collaboration concept we talked about earlier. Think about your talented peer set and ask not what they might create together, but who might be interesting to have creating together.

PANOS PANAY: And I would say, in the next meeting that you’re in, and you’re sitting there hearing people talk and an idea pops in your head, you have two choices. There’s the editor that says, “Ah, I may sound silly. Or people may not like what I have to say.” Or the other choice is, I’ll dare to suck and I’ll just go ahead and throw my idea out there and see what happens. Choose the latter.

ALISON BEARD: I love it. I will try to do that tomorrow. Panos, Michael, thank you so much for being on the show.

PANOS PANAY: Thank you, Alison.

R. MICHAEL HENDRIX: Thank you.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Panos Panay, the outgoing Senior Vice President for Global Strategy and Innovation at Berkeley College of Music, and incoming Co-President of the Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys. And Michael Hendrix, Partner and Global Design Director at IDEO. They’re co-authors of the book Two Beats Ahead: What Musical Minds Teach Us About Innovation.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our Audio Product Manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.