IELTS READING
Tuning up your leadership skills
Does jazz music offer lessons for today’s leaders?
A. Ever since management expert Peter Drucker compared the job of Chief Executive Officer to that of an orchestra conductor, the business world has been exploring comparisons and inspirations from the world of music.
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Now Warwick Business School Professors Deniz Ucbasaran and Andy Lockett are hitting all the right notes with their study of famous jazz musicians, Leading Entrepreneurial Teams: Insights From Jazz, providing some essential insights for entrepreneurial team leaders.
Ucbasaran and Lockett (together with Durham Business School Professor Michael Humphries) chose jazz for a number of reasons. For a start, jazz bands are synonymous with creativity, improvisation and innovation, all essential ingredients
for entrepreneurship. Jazz groups and their members often operate in uncertain
and dynamic environments, characterised by rapid change. Yet through collective endeavour many jazz bands find their own structure and harmony and become profitable enterprises – both creatively and commercially.
B. The authors decided to focus on three of the best known names in jazz – Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Art Blakey. American composer Duke Ellington was a pioneering jazz orchestra leader from the 1920s through to the 1970s. Trumpet player Miles Davis was instrumental in the development of a number of new jazz styles, including bebop and jazz fusion. Jazz drummer Arthur ‘Art’ Blakey became famous as the leader of his band the Jazz Messengers.
The research focused on the way that these jazz greats created and ran their musical enterprises. In particular, Ucbasaran and Lockett focused on three specific areas of leadership activity: team formation, team coordination and team turnover.
There were strong similarities in the processes the band leaders used to assemble their diverse teams of talent. In particular, they looked for musicians with a different sound or way of playing, one that was unique to that band member and would improve the overall sound of the band. That feature was as much bound up with the personality of the individual musician as it was to do with their technical proficiency.