• Discover how you can orchestrate collaboration, leadership, and innovation through hands-on music making to leverage individual and team strengths.
• Using simple percussion instruments, you’ll form a cohesive orchestra with your colleagues from around the world and experience a dynamic ensemble building process that furthers team development, social intelligence, and collective creativity.
• Be introduced to a leadership model that encompasses three ways of leading: Orchestrating, Composing, and Improvising, and using music, explore what effect each mode has on the system in the room.

This will be a musical learning laboratory with strong relevance to leadership development and navigating organizational change.

Learning objectives:

• Apply effective ways to frame and debrief experiential activities to maximize engagement and transfer of learning.

• Consider a model for leadership and collaboration that can be used cross-culturally to build trust, connection, cohesion and community.

About the Presenter: 

Gary Muszynski:  Gary is a recognized world leader on the application of music and the performing arts to the fields of leadership, collaboration, organizational development and creativity.  Besides a client list that includes many Fortune 500 companies, he has taught at the Center for Creative Leadership, the Stanford School of Business, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. As the Chief Engagement Officer at One World Music, a global training and development firm, Gary is committed to helping leaders and their teams navigate though conflict and complexity by leveraging the power of collective intelligence. Gary makes his home in Oakland, California.

The ASTD conference schedule information for all sessions is available here

This February, Gary joins Richard La Rue to co-lead an engaging experiential session to help business leaders and consultants discover how they can orchestrate collaboration, leadership, and creativity through hands-on music making to leverage individual and team strengths.

For more information, click to download a flier in PDF format, or click here to register

Excellence vs. Perfection: The Leadership Conundrum

I was complaining to a friend about my perfectionist tendencies when she asked: “Could you have accomplished everything you’ve done in your life if you weren’t striving for perfection?”  Her question got me thinking about the relationship between perfection and excellence, and inspired me to ask a question of my own:  When, as leaders, we strive for perfection, do we promote excellence?  Or do we compromise it?

Cross-cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien says the difference between perfection and excellence is “the willingness to be caught learning.”

And I think she’s onto something here.  Perfectionism doesn’t offer much room for experimentation, learning, and embracing the unknown — endeavors essential to innovation, which is a key ingredient in excellence, both personal and professional.

The founders of HP, who achieved many of their breakthroughs from a garage in Silicon Valley, pioneered the 80/20 rule.  They would get a product on the market at 80-percent effective, then refine it the remaining 20 percent in response to the marketplace.  That approach works better in some industries than others.  For instance, you probably wouldn’t want to drive a vehicle that is just 80-percent tested and then deemed safe. But 80/20 seems to be the rule with new software releases (buggy things, aren’t they?) — and if software companies waited for perfection, it’s likely that very few products would ever ship.

We’ve all heard the saying that the great is the enemy of the good (or the perhaps the good enough).  I’ve experienced this truism through writing. If my inner critic gets the better of me — a sign of perfectionism taking hold — I’m unable to produce a single word. However, if I relax and let my sense of adventure guide me, I am much more apt to produce something compelling, even if it is not great at first.

The same is true in music.  Successful improvisation takes both creative and critical faculties. Putting both into action at once is a little like applying brakes and accelerator simultaneously; you get nowhere.  To make music, to write, indeed, to produce anything and to lead others, we must balance and harmonize the creative and free-ranging with and the critical and constraining.

When I’m leading a group of skeptical novice musicians to produce a great orchestral sound, I find that if I press too hard for perfect precision, it’s often at the cost of the group’s sense of spirit and autonomy.  At best, I get a technically proficient but lifeless performance — the result of short-sighted leadership.  But when I lead with a balance of head and heart, precision and improvisation, the group is more likely to deliver a performance that is memorable and moving. To get a sense of what I mean, check out this 6-minute video of my creating a cohesive percussion orchestra with 100 IT leaders.

It occurs to me that effective personal and organizational leadership isn’t so much about insisting on perfection as it is about knowing when 80-percent means ready-for-testing and when it means back-to-the-drawing-board.  We must learn to recognize when perfectionism truly improves a product or process, and when it traps us in inertia and mediocrity.  If we always wait for 100 percent to come from us, we fail to recognize that, sometimes, that final 20 percent only happens when we, as leaders, are willing to risk failure.  “Failure”, if you will, is often a necessary step toward excellence.

Now, tell us what you think:

• Can you produce something world-class without perfectionism?
• At what point does the quest for perfection become counter-productive?  How do you recognize this point in your work?  In your leadership of others?
• What must change in the workplace for people to be freed up enough to get it wrong, experiment, and become more innovative?
• How can companies consciously create cultures that allow for this kind of exploration and provide the freedom to be “caught learning”?

One World Music has responded by expanding our offerings to include a short program — Working in Concert — that lets you bring several of the benefits of music-based, experiential learning to your organization.

Even if you only have one or two hours of meeting time, you can use Working in Concert to:

• reward performance
• encourage achievement
• build morale
• integrate cultures
• cultivate teamwork
• celebrate a milestone or
• provide a foundation for deeper learning.

We look forward to helping you plan an event that matches your needs — and fits your organization’s busy schedule.

Program: Working in Concert

Time required: 1 to 2 hours

Group sizes: 30 – 5,000+

OWM facilitators required: 1 – 10

Program Description: Working in Concert provides a fast-paced, interactive learning experience using musical tubes, One World Music’s infamous rock-passing game, breakout group musical compositions (time permitting), and opening and closing performances.  Other activities and problem-solving initiatives can be added depending on the time allotted and the group’s learning needs.

The program addresses many of the same issues and themes brought to life in our longer programs — collaboration, managing change, improving communication — but in a shorter timeframe.  It is infinitely scalable, and can be designed to deliver a variety of outcomes, from celebrating or building rapport to a more robust learning experience with deeper musical engagement, group and sub-group dialogue, and application to relevant workplace issues.

LEARN MORE:  Click here to learn more about Working In Concert and see a 4-minute video of the program.

REQUEST A PROPOSAL:  If you have a meeting coming up this year, One World Music can help you engage and align your team while advancing your business messages.  Tell us a little about your needs by requesting a proposal, and we will suggest program details and pricing options.

EXPLORE NEW IDEAS: To discover One World Music’s perspective on the challenges today’s organizations face, see the latest article by Gary Muszynski.

One World Music – a few of our talented facilitators and performers

In critical times, music has the power to inspire and unite us.  It can lift us above issues that make us competitors and teach us to collaborate.  It can make us aware that we are capable of so much more together than we are alone.  And it can immerse us in something that is often lacking in troubled economic times:  Fun!

At One World Music, we think there should be room for fun, at work as in the rest of our lives, as a balm against a troubled economy.  We have begun this blog to share One World Music news and our experiences spreading the message that music is a great tool for learning and a source of joy, in business as in life.

Transformation at McKesson and New OWM Video

What happens when you give 100 highly-skeptical IT leaders percussion instruments and ask them to make music?  You may think the answer is cacophony — and you would be wrong.  To see and hear the amazing results, visit the new and improved One World Music Web site and check out our new six-minute video.  Go to the OWM Home page and click View Video.

Here’s what a recent client had to say about the value of engaging our Synergy Through Samba program for his management team.

“We were able to see parallels between the way we work, the way we plan, the way we manage, the way we lead, and most importantly, how we need to work together.”

Randy Pratt
Chief Information Officer, McKesson Corporation

And participants described what we do in this way:

• Engaging, insightful, fun and relevant
• A multi-dimensional exploration of trust
• Awesome and innovative learning experience
• Wonderful, fun and energetic
• Out of the box thinking
• Original, mid-stretching and engaging
• Fun. powerful and energizing
• Fun, different, collaborative
• Exciting and inspirational

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore co-founded Aurora, Ohio-based Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings. They are authors of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999). This best-selling book demonstrates how companies — across myriad industries — are finding their goods and services commoditized while customers increasingly desire experiences — memorable events that engage customers in an inherently personal way.

Gary Muszynski asks:

You write in your book, The Experience Economy, that experiences and transformations are distinct economic offerings above and beyond commodities, goods and services. Do you view this progression as evolutionary and if so, toward what end? And what is driving or pulling the shift?

PINE: We do see this progression as a “natural” one, insofar as markets are free and businesses within those markets seek to create value for those who buy their offerings. Consider the changing nature of commerce over time: commodities are extracted and made available to manufacture goods; goods are then used to deliver services; services provide a platform to stage experiences; and finally, experiences become the means to guide transformations. This progression can be seen in industry after industry as well as in country after country around the world.

GILMORE: Automation is a significant driver — on the supply side — in enabling these shifts from one genre of output to another. On the demand side, consumers and B2B buyers increasingly desire experiences and transformations. While these genres of output are less tangible in form than commodities, goods, and services, they nevertheless offer more tangible value because experiences and transformations are inherently personal. They more directly appeal to individual needs and wants.

So that’s why you also emphasize customization in The Experience Economy?

PINE: Indeed. Customization to and for individual customers is another way to understand the progression: customize a good and you automatically turn it into a service; customize a service and you automatically turn it into an experience; customize an experience and you automatically turn it into a transformation. It is the antidote, if you will, to the rampant commoditization seen in goods and services today.

GILMORE: But let’s be clear in all this that we’re not economic determinists. The shift from one genre of output to another only occurs as human beings use their God-given talents to create new offerings that meet specific human needs. Frankly, since The Experience Economy was published six years ago, too many businesses have merely taken to making their marketing more experiential in order to sell more of their existing goods and services. That’s fine. But at some point businesses need to apply themselves to conceiving, devising, and offering experiences as wholly new output and a new source of direct revenue.

How much then do such paid-for experiences currently comprise the economy today? How about transformations?

GILMORE: Despite my admonition for more experiential output, an abundance of new economic experiences has already emerged. We’ve gone from the dotcom frenzy of untold freebie businesses to seeing more and more enterprises selling time online, from Everquest to Match.com. Retailers are finding ways to charge for events. For example, consider the cooking classes offered at Central Market grocery stores or Viking Culinary Arts stores. New forms of tourism and adventure are ever emerging. Go google terms like “medical tourism” and “ESL tourism’. Long-established experiences like lodging, treated in the past as merely services by too many hoteliers, have finally come to be designed “almost universally — as venues for creating engaging experiences. Some established experiences, funded solely through advertising, now face competition from for-fee alternatives. Witness Sirius and XM satellite radio.

PINE: Make no mistake about it; a vibrant Experience Economy is emerging. And as more experiences arrive on the scene, people will look to gain more meaning and purpose from the experiences they consume. This in turn will lead to the rise of more transformation offerings. Look at it this way: the four largest industries in the world — in terms of impact if not GDP — are the experience industries of entertainment and tourism on the one hand, and the transformation industries of education and healthcare on the other.

Is this mostly an American phenomenon or does The Experience Economy also describe what is going on in the global economy with non-U.S. businesses? Is there a uniquely American element to the Experience Economy?

PINE: The United States certainly leads the way, but all developed countries are shifting into the Experience Economy, and virtually all undeveloped countries have a thriving tourism sector.

GILMORE: The small nation of New Zealand has become a big source of new experiences, not just bungee-jumping but zorbing and canyoning.

PINE: The Kiwis even have a Minister of Lord of the Rings to promote film tourism around the movie trilogy that continues to this day!

GILMORE: Look, there’s a reason The Experience Economy has been translated into twelve languages. Businesses and nations around the globe recognize that goods and services are no longer enough to maintain prosperity.

How can this way of thinking (about experiences and transformations) help business leaders alter the way they do business today? And why is this critically important?

PINE: Recognizing experiences and transformations opens up possibilities for creating new lines of business. One is no longer limited to selling just goods and services. But to take advantage of the opportunity, business leaders do need to direct efforts in new ways. Creative energies need to be devoted to the research and development of new experiences, not just goods and services. Responsibility for experience innovation should not just be handed to the Chief Marketing Officer, which only results in experiential marketing. Firms should think about instituting a Chief Experience Officer, or CXO, position. Then experiences may emerge in the way we envision.

So what are you hoping that people take away from The Experience Economy?

GILMORE: We hope we’ve made the case that experiences represent a fundamental shift in the very fabric of advanced economies. And we hope many will feel compelled to participate in the shift by founding new enterprises that create the next generation of economic prosperity.

You two are working on a new book. Could you please tell us a bit about it? When it will be available?

GILMORE: The book we’re working on focuses on the subject of authenticity. In a world filled with staged experiences, we think people will increasingly desire “real” offerings. Authenticity, therefore, is emerging as a new consumer sensibility, a new purchase criterion. Think of it this way. The rise of the Industrial Economy led to the emergence of cost, or affordability, as the dominant purchase criteria among consumers. Could one afford this or that? With the Service Economy, quality, or performance, became the primary consideration. Does this or that work well? And now, with the Experience Economy, people want real, or authentic, offerings — which we define as conforming to one’s self-image. Is it me?

PINE: We’ve been working on the book for years, and we’re just about done with a rewrite of the original manuscript. We wish the book were done, but it’s more important to us that the new book proves to be enduring, like The Experience Economy has proven to be. Look for it to appear sometime in 2006.

Let us know whom you’d like to have interviewed and what themes or questions you’d like to see covered.

In One World Music’s transformational learning experiences, the emphasis is on new ways of thinking and creating a resonant environment that promotes positive change. David Rock’s research confirms that OWM’s educational approach is in tune with the latest findings on the frontiers of Neuroscience.

David Rock is a leadership coach, teacher, and public speaker advising corporations around the world. He is the CEO of Results Coaching Systems, a leading global consulting and coaching organization, and the co-founder of the coaching programs at New York University (SCPS). Rock’s Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work were developed over ten years, through designing and delivering workshops to more than 5,000 professionals across the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand.

Gary MUSZYNSKI asks …

What are some of the primary ideas that come out of this new Neuroscience research that have important implications for leadership, coaching, and change in general?

ROCK: The puzzle is: Why is it so difficult to help others and facilitate change? The pieces came from a number of disconnected areas: one person studying attention and how that changes the brain, another person studying insights, general mapping of the brain, how neurons connect, how we grow…many different components. The pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place.

“In a nutshell, the brain is built to make connections itself. All of our brains are so different and complex, that changes cannot be predicted or forced from the outside. The connections really have to happen inside one’s self.”

The moment of having a connection or solving a problem is an energizing moment. The burst of adrenaline and positive neurotransmitters help us push past what usually stops us from changing. There are strong forces that resist change like homeostasis, fear, focus and effort. The moment of having a connection and seeing something new our selves is an opposite force that helps drive change.

Most people, when they try to help others, do not facilitate self-directed insight. They, in a sense, get in the way of it.

“The most effective way of coaching and what is at the heart of leadership is really helping people reconfigure… the ways their brain is structured in a long-term way.
The word for that is neuroplasticity.”

MUSZYNSKI: What do you see as the main resistances to that way of working in organizations these days?

ROCK: Organizations are often slow in picking up new ideas. Many are still going through ‘The Quality Movement’ or Leadership and Management ideas that are decades old. One company told me they gather their people for a Change Initiative every ten years for one day!

‘The Expert Model’ is still alive in many organizations. That model is that the Boss has the answers, tells people what to do, and the people follow. They use incentive and punishment to guide behavior. That is straight out of Science from one hundred years ago. It does work to some degree, as with animals and small children, or on a mass scale. In one-on-one relationships, it is a blunt instrument that stops working very quickly.

“Leadership is the art of facilitating self-directed neuroplasticity.”

MUSZYNSKI: Recently we did a program based on Jim Collin’s work on Level 5 Leadership. The main paradox is balancing humility and will. In terms of openness and learning, humility and curiosity are really important aspects.

ROCK: Definitely. Humility and curiosity means that you are allowing your mind to open up to new ideas and different ways of thinking. Most people in the workplace are going through so much change under pressure and are so busy that large-scale change to as threatening to their internal operating system. This makes it difficult for people to think openly.

MUSZYNSKI: It seems like the challenge is knowing how to intervene in the right way, depending on who is in front of you.

ROCK: That’s true. Everyone needs different things in different moments. In my book, I am saying, “Make no assumptions at all. Keep checking in with the person that you are leading about what they need.” Some people may just need a deadline and a threat to get them motivated. They do not need a long conversation.

What we need to do is check in and ask how to best support them as a leader. Ask them how we are going to get from A to B. Also ask if they know where A is, and where B is. Or, “Do you know that you are expected to be at B? How can I help you get there?”

“In that process, those questions facilitate that person coming up with the answers. They facilitate insights and new connections. That’s a way of being a quiet leader instead of just telling people what to do.”

MUSZYNSKI: So, it is a process of engaging people in their own learning…creating the environment for them to create their own connections?

ROCK: Yes. It may sound brutally obvious, but it is amazing how rare it is. It is difficult for leaders to do this because they get a buzz from making the connections themselves. The brain is a connection machine. They hear a person’s problem and try to work it out. It is a human automatic response to helping people.

MUSZYNSKI: It seems like it would save time.

ROCK: Yes, it does seem like it…but it doesn’t. You end up getting into a cycle of debate, which wastes an enormous amount of time.

MUSZYNSKI: I want to ask you about creating a positive mental map with someone around a future change. It could be a personal goal, getting in shape, changing how they work with their team or anything. I worked with an organization that is adopting the principles of being a High Reliability Organization (HRO). These are companies in mission critical industries, such as oil refineries, transportation, etc. These are high-risk environments where safety is of paramount concern. These companies need to anticipate what could go wrong, what breakdowns could occur, and then to plan around that.

After studying Appreciative Inquiry, it seems counter to the idea of putting the positive map first. There is a part of me that resonates with looking for problems and figuring out with people how we are going to handle them when they come up. I am not sure that it is such a bad way to go. Does that oppose the research that you are doing?

ROCK: On the surface it does, but there are a number of connections between the two ideas. The first is that what you are thinking about when you are scanning for problems is the external or linear world. You are observing systems. That is very different to focusing on yourself and thinking about all the things that you are doing wrong. The internal system, your brain, is complex and chaotic, and attention has an impact on that system.

People really pay attention to potential problems and dangers. Our neurons light up and literally get energized when there is some kind of expectation of fear or even ambiguity. Fear does get people to pay attention.

Most change initiatives and management models have urgency at their core. You have to make the lack of change a problem. To get people to pay attention, you tell them all the things that are going to go wrong if they don’t change.

MUSZYNSKI: That would be contrary to some of Seligman’s thinking (Positive Psychology) or the Appreciative Inquiry approaches. It is interesting to wade through these different ways of thinking. I have studied with someone around the importance of language and images in creating a new map of the future. In a sense, we use language and image in a Social Constructionist way to create new worlds of possibility. He was saying that if we don’t know where the breakdowns are in a system, then we don’t know how to create value. When he interviews clients in terms of a needs assessment, he looks for what is not working and where their pain or discomfort is.

ROCK: The very language you used then was interesting. To describe his underpinning assessments, you said he believes that the best way to create value was to notice where there are disconnects or issues. In fact, that is where our difference in thinking is.

“I am saying we could help the client to notice where the issues are themselves. Then we help them work through those issues the way that their brain wants to work. That is much more efficient and effective.”

MUSZYNSKI: And, without a specific agenda.

ROCK: Right, just be curious and unattached to any style, approach, or model. It is assuming that the client or person that you are coaching has the best machinery for resolving this issue. That machinery might need fuel, some help starting up, or pointing in the right direction, but is ultimately the best machinery.

There is too much emphasis on trying to do something that goes against nature. The nature of the brain is to create connections.

MUSZYNSKI: Thank you for your time, your brilliance, and all the work you have done in this field.

Let us know whom you’d like to have interviewed and what themes or questions you’d like to see covered.