St. Helena, CA
Listening to the Miles Davis classic "Kind of Blue" instantly evokes the man's genius. Miles' gift for quiet, sonorous "cool jazz" emerged in stark contrast to the frenzy of bebop and post-bop jazz forms in the '50s and '60s. Yet, thinking about Miles always raises interesting questions about, well, working with jerks.
Miles could be a world-class jerk, as many who knew him have said and written. In fact, his miserable, disrespectful treatment of collaborators, sidemen and audiences wrapped in an almost mystical inaccessibility was seen as part of his creative personae. But was it really necessary? And do singular creative gifts merely provide some geniuses with an excuse to act like sociopaths?
Hey, we've all worked with sociopaths, right? Often ones without any particular genius! It seems that each of us is free to decide whether we will carry the heavy baggage of a damaged boss or colleague. Maybe it's worth a short ride to conspire with the greatness of a Miles Davis? After all, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans saw in Miles something that made it all worth while. "Kind of Blue" was the astonishing result.
Music is sometimes used by thinkers as a metaphor for organizations and leadership. My thinking about the jazz metaphor was heavily influenced in the early '90s by Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch. NYU's Richard Sennett, a renowned sociologist and first-class cellist, has also written marvelously about classical and jazz metaphors as tools for understanding societies. The hierarchical and linear nature of symphonic orchestration contrasts in organizational and leadership terms with improvisational and seemingly nonlinear jazz forms. Indeed, many corporations embrace the former world while competing in the latter world.
I recently came across Mary Jo Hatch's 1999 article in Organization Studies on "exploring the empty spaces of organizing." A professor at the University of Virginia, Hatch is a wonderful scholar for among many reasons her ability to write well and present creatively. She uses Richard Rorty's 1989 model of metaphoric redescription to help us think of organizational cultures in jazz terms in order to break with old vocabularies and derive new understanding. In doing so, she reminds us just how readily the ambiguous, emotional and temporal aspects of jazz performance extend to working life in today's modern corporation.
Listening to the Miles Davis classic "Kind of Blue" instantly evokes the man's genius. Miles' gift for quiet, sonorous "cool jazz" emerged in stark contrast to the frenzy of bebop and post-bop jazz forms in the '50s and '60s. Yet, thinking about Miles always raises interesting questions about, well, working with jerks.
Miles could be a world-class jerk, as many who knew him have said and written. In fact, his miserable, disrespectful treatment of collaborators, sidemen and audiences wrapped in an almost mystical inaccessibility was seen as part of his creative personae. But was it really necessary? And do singular creative gifts merely provide some geniuses with an excuse to act like sociopaths?
Hey, we've all worked with sociopaths, right? Often ones without any particular genius! It seems that each of us is free to decide whether we will carry the heavy baggage of a damaged boss or colleague. Maybe it's worth a short ride to conspire with the greatness of a Miles Davis? After all, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans saw in Miles something that made it all worth while. "Kind of Blue" was the astonishing result.
Music is sometimes used by thinkers as a metaphor for organizations and leadership. My thinking about the jazz metaphor was heavily influenced in the early '90s by Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch. NYU's Richard Sennett, a renowned sociologist and first-class cellist, has also written marvelously about classical and jazz metaphors as tools for understanding societies. The hierarchical and linear nature of symphonic orchestration contrasts in organizational and leadership terms with improvisational and seemingly nonlinear jazz forms. Indeed, many corporations embrace the former world while competing in the latter world.
I recently came across Mary Jo Hatch's 1999 article in Organization Studies on "exploring the empty spaces of organizing." A professor at the University of Virginia, Hatch is a wonderful scholar for among many reasons her ability to write well and present creatively. She uses Richard Rorty's 1989 model of metaphoric redescription to help us think of organizational cultures in jazz terms in order to break with old vocabularies and derive new understanding. In doing so, she reminds us just how readily the ambiguous, emotional and temporal aspects of jazz performance extend to working life in today's modern corporation.