"Sometimes you have to reinvent yourself for who you really are." Queen Latifah in Rolling Stone, or Big Blue's Lou Gerstner in Business Week? "You have to be the first to beat yourself." Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, or Intel's Andy Grove?
Today's high tech business leaders are hit makers, and like their counterparts in music and sports, they're also doctors of spin, adopting the guise of comeback kid, corporate rebel, or philosopher-king as befits the moment. And if you've been hoping this Brand of Me cycle would wash out, don't count on it, as the parallels between showbiz and big business have migrated rapidly from CNNfn ("the MTV of the '90s") to celebrity self-help books. Management guru and pianist John Kao has proposed suits take note of jazz impresarios like Dave Brubeck. The Harvard Business School Press has tapped Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander for a book on leadership. And no less a figure than Peter Drucker has entertained the notion of the executive with a baton. "What we are increasingly talking about today are diversified groups that have to write the score while they perform," says Drucker. "Sounds beautiful, yet nobody has really found a way to do it."
John Kao thinks he has. The Harvard and Stanford B-school instructor recently founded The Idea Factory, a San Francisco outfit that holds seminars drawn heavily from the "riffs," or exercises, in his book Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity. While the primer recommends the jam session as a model for strategic planning, Kao has a new metaphor for org-chart climbers: the film producer.
"Admittedly, there are millions of different kinds of producers," Kao says. "But the bottom line is that the producer makes it happen and is able to convene the right mix of resources and talent, often without having any direct control over those resources. From a show business point of view, it's akin to creating a dramatic situation in which the right kinds of things take place."
Asked if candidates for a top spot at a high tech firm would help their cause by referring to themselves as producers, Silicon Valley headhunter Ann Peckenpaugh shakes her head. "They would be seen as someone who had a pretty strong directive from elsewhere, someone not used to being in charge." In the Valley, she said, it's all about the player-coach: "You know, someone who is both the leader – has been there before – but is also suited up and on the field." She cites as examples John Chambers of Cisco Systems and Dave Peterschmidt of Inktomi.
Leaving aside that Hollywood may be the worst-managed business on the planet, Doblin Group president Larry Keeley feels that both the jazz and producer metaphors are "missing something." The Doblin Group is the world's leading strategic design firm (sound bite: "What MacKenzie is to finance, Doblin is to innovation"). Like Kao, Keeley thinks manager is due for retirement. "Ditch manager for leader," he says. "Leader is a much bigger thought." Keeley understands both of Kao's metaphors as a way to come up with something new, but observes that "jazz is mostly about a conversation, where I play something complementary to what you just said. Maybe you bring talented individuals together, but seldom do you get an emergent form." Hollywood, meanwhile, "is governed by the pitch. The genetic code of the pitch is what it's close to and what the twist is. Hardly the recipe for something unprecedented."
"What's missing," Keeley muses, "is the person who's wildly opportunistic, the person who takes a call from someone and is asked the impossible and only after they've already said ‘yes' do they figure out how they're going to do it. Or the person who has an ear, who listens to all the þunkies and crackpots and hears something in what they're saying and then aims their resources at it." So what does he propose? "I guess," he grins, "the CEO as idiot savant."
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