Music, and how it is performed, seems to serve as an interesting analogy to business.

A solo features a single, star performer – and in the true sense of a soloist, they perform totally by themselves (although they may sing while accompanying themselves on an instrument). Truly talented soloists are entertaining and able to maintain the audiences attention. But less than stellar soloists become rather boring and repetitive after a while.

More interesting is a soloist with some back-up musicians. The soloist is still the featured performer and the focus of the performance, but with additional support musicians (piano, guitar, bass, percussion) they become much more versatile, able to pull off different styles of music, and the sound is much more full.

Obviously, groups of musicians can range from two or three to extremely large. Although duets are pleasing and interesting with their dual harmonics, they carry many of the same limitations that soloists do.  Duets obviously have more variety than a single performer but they don’t bring much breadth to the performance.

In Western-based music (remember there are many traditions of music based on different instruments, different rhythms and even differing harmonic scales – African, Oriental, Caribbean, Hawaiian, etc.) the harmonics from a trio (and even more so, a quartet) provide a richer, fuller experience. A vocal group featuring the harmony of three voices, to a traditional soprano / alto / tenor / bass arrangement, gives the listener an amazing variety of sounds and experiences – partly because they can either perform in synchronization rhythmically (that is, they move from one note to the next at the same time) or each part can move independently across the musical piece. Usually this movement is designed to be harmonious, but sometimes there is dissonance (experienced as conflict) as one musician moves from their current note, “through” a transition note, to the note which brings resolution.

In music played by a group, different roles are required. There is the leader who sets the tempo of the music and attempts to keep the group playing together through the song. This musician may or may not be the star performer who plays the dominant instrument or who is the flashy talent that brings the sparkle to the performance (and often is not).

There are obviously secondary players who enrich the overall sound and quality of the music, and many times are “role players” – they are solid in what they do, but they are not star performers. Some support musicians add tremendous value by their versatility – being able to play a number of instruments, filling in where needed.

Another factor is that some musicians’ skill set is best suited for highly structured music (e.g. classical orchestral music) where they are given the exact notes to play, and even instructed how loud to play by the conductor. While other musicians do better with less structure and they are given the ability to improvise within the global structure of the music (e.g. jazz or bluegrass).

And in many performing groups there is a manager – someone who administers the logistics of the group – setting up performances, getting contracts signed and collecting payment, arranging for transportation and lodging – and many times, managing interpersonal conflicts among team members.

More and more, there are technical support members – primarily sound technicians and lighting technicians – who help produce the show and are critical to the success of the performance. Without them, the musicians would not be seen or heard adequately.

I will not insult your intelligence by drawing specific analogies or lessons for business from the roles described. However, I would encourage you to think through your business team. Identify what role(s) you play.  Figure out who keeps the rhythm of the group and helps everyone perform together.  It may be helpful to think about those secondary players who do not receive a lot of attention or accolades, but who really make the rest of the group sound (or look) good. Who helps manage the logistics and / or goes behind the scenes and resolves developing conflicts among team members? Are there group members that don’t perform harmoniously or in rhythm with the rest of the group (they play to their own beat or they don’t want to play the same song as the rest of the group)? If so, what needs to be done? And do you have the right type of musicians, given the type of music your group plays?

Whatever the answers are for your group, I hope you enjoy the music you are playing together and that you are able to create beautiful music together!

A week ago, I had the privilege of attending a music festival with my son, Daniel.  Although the festival is several days long (and many people go and camp out, playing music all night long), we were only able to go for one long day. For those who are not familiar with it, the Walnut Valley Festival can sound like a small-scale gathering of country hicks — it is located in Winfield, KS, a small community one hour’s drive outside of Wichita, KS.  But the festival has been the home to the national acoustic guitar flat picking championships for 30 years, has between 12,000 - 15,000 attendees each year, and a variety of musical styles are represented.  Performers as diverse as Nickel Creek, Alison Krauss, John McCutcheon, the Dixie Chicks and Byron Berline have played at the festival over the years.

This year I thoroughly enjoyed the high energy rockabilly style of The Wilders , the humorous entertainment of the Italian maestro of acoustic guitar — Beppe Gambetta , John McCutcheon’s irreverant political satire and command of multiple instruments, and the driving rhymic jazz of Tommy Emmanuel.  But probably the most delightful surprise was my introduction to The Greencards, an up and coming bluegrass/jazz group who play in a style reminiscient of Nickel Creek.  They are a trio from Austrailia and Great Britain who have mastered a traditional form of American music and added their own twist to it. (Some friends of my son’s had heard them and encouraged us to go and listen to them — there are four stages going simultaneously at the festival, so you have to choose who to listen to.)

Now, why am I writing about this?  I obviously am not a music critic and the theme of this blog isn’t music.  However, I was moved deeply during the time — as I often am when I listen to music.  For me, music (and especially music with no lyrics) is healing.  In fact, I firmly believe that when I listen to purely instrumental music for a period of time, I can actually feel its impact on my brain.  I”feel” different — I calm down and relax, there feels like activity in parts of my brain that I don’t usually experience, and the “high activity” parts of my brain related to words gets to relax.

Now add live music to sitting outside, with a breeze on your skin, sometimes drizzling rain, sometimes partly sunny, sitting on a grassy hill (at one of the stages, at least), and watching a variety of people — different ages, various backgrounds, and different reasons for attending (for some, it is an annual ritual, for others it is an introduction to new types of music, and for many, it is a reason to get together with friends) — and you get an incredible multisensory experience.  And that doesn’t even include the food.

You may not especially like music.  That’s ok.  I am not trying to sell “music”.  But I hope you have other, similar experiences that provide this type of restorative feeling to you.  Biking, sailing, hiking, fishing, reading a good novel, gardening, painting, sewing or knitting, hunting, watching the stars, running, — whatever it is, I would encourage you to make some time for it.  And if you are like most of us today, you will need to plan in advance, otherwise it may not happen.  What would you like to do?  When?  Get out your calendar and write it in.  And enjoy — both looking forward to it, planning it, experiencing it, and reflecting upon it.

This week I have been asked to present to my local Chamber of Commerce on “Work / Life Balance”.  After thinking about it for a while, I chose to use the Superball as an object lesson.  Now for those of you who are young and don’t know much about the Superball, let me fill you in.

The Superball was marketed by Wham-O (who also sold Hula hoops in the early 60’s, and the Frisbee in the 70’s).  Introduced in the summer of 1965, by that Christmas they had sold 7 million balls (for 98 cents each). What was amazing about the Superball (the originals were about an inch in diameter) is that they could bounce over houses, and as they went down the street they almost seemed to pick up speed.  They were fun because with just a little effort, they could bounce all around the house (or office). 

What does the Superball have to do with balancing work and the rest of our lives?  Well, there are different sized Superballs — the regular 1″ diameter and then larger ones up to 3″ — which look really cool and like they could go incredibly high.

These large Superballs remind me of superstars in our culture — people who look like they “have it all together” — maybe some movie stars, rich athletes, and multimillionaire business owners.  The problem is — they really don’t have it all together (as the news media reminds us virtually every day).  They actually have some big chunks of their lives missing, like this. 

You see, it is a very, very rare person who is “larger than life”, who is successful in multiple areas of their life, and who is well balanced.  The reason is — we only have so much time and energy, and if you devote it almost exclusively to succeed in one area of life (business, sports, entertainment), then the other areas of your life are short-changed.  And, as a ball, you may look good (if the missing piece is hidden), but you don’t bounce “true” — you get off-course.

So I propose the following “ABC’s of Work - Life Balance”.

Apply what you already know.  Most of us know what we need to do in life.  We don’t need more information.  There is no “new groundbreaking research” that is going to solve the issue.   We just need to consistently do what we know we should.

Balance?  No one I know can “balance” a ton of bricks and a truckload of concrete.  The issue really isn’t “balance”.  The problem is that we are trying to do too much and, (surprise!) as a result, we feel overwhelmed.  The feeling isn’t perception; it is reality.  You really are trying to do too much.  Let’s look at some of things we are all trying to keep in balance:

Work (including email, voicemail, “mail” mail);  Family (Spouse, kids, parents, extended family); Daily life tasks (cooking, laundry, lawncare, car maintenance, grocery shopping, errands, paying the bills);  Finances;  Community life (civic organizations, volunteering, church, school-based activities); Maintaining our health (physical fitness, leisure and recreation, spiritual growth, social support); Friendships; Career education & training; and so forth.

So what is the answer?  Well, we first trying something called:

Cutting back?  This is where we try to survive by ceasing to do some activities in our lives.  The problem is:  what we “cut back” on is almost always those activities that maintain our long-term health — physical exercise, rest and sleep, true restorative leisure activities, spiritual reflection, vacations (weekends), and friendships.  So we wind up just shooting ourselves in the foot (I started to write “slitting our throat” which is probably more accurate, but too gruesome).  But what we really need to do is –

Create space.  This may sound the same as “cutting back” but the focus is different.  We need to take out those time and energy wasters (some are small, some are big) from our daily and weekly lives, and create space for the truly important parts of our lives.  I have been working on this for the past several months and the quality of my life has improved, from my perspective.  It’s like this.  A friend of mine recently came back from two weeks of uninterrupted vacation in the Rocky Mountains.  He proclaimed that he and his family did not watch TV, watch any movies, listen to the radio, check their email or read the newspaper for two weeks and “it was wonderful”.  He then indicated he is going to try to keep these activities to a minimum, because he realized he “really didn’t need them.”  This may sound extreme to some, but have you ever been away from the news for three to four days, come back and realize that you really didn’t miss much of importance? 

My point is this — there are a lot of mental & emotional space “eaters” that don’t really add significantly (if at all) to the quality of our lives.  And if we remove these, we can create “space” for more meaningful activities.  Possible suggestions:  don’t listen to the news while getting dressed in the morning; don’t listen to music while driving or commuting; turn off “talk radio” or your iPod; only read the paper once a week; quit checking online news multiple times a day; turn off the TV.  Even with these potentially small actions you are “freeing up” a fair amount of mental space — time and processing energy that will allow some creative thinking. 

Additionally, most of us need to learn to say “no”.   It works best if you link your “no” to a choice of something else more important to you.  “I’m sorry.  I’d like to but I don’t have the time because of my commitments to my family.  But thanks for asking!”  And really, we have to say ”no” repeatedly because they will keep asking.  Often we’ll agree to do something out of fear — fear they will get mad, fear they won’t like us, being afraid they won’t ask us again.  The problem is — if we make choices for our time and energy driven by fear (especially of what others will think of us), this leads to an out-of-control life.  So, say “no” — it will be okay, really!

The final suggestion is –

Do something.  Don’t try to change your whole life at once.  Just make a little change — one thing today, or this weekend.  Don’t be afraid to “fail” (i.e. not be consistent in your attempt to change).  Try something for a while, then try something else.

The real point is this — don’t try to be a big, oversized Superball and do everything you can to look like “everything is ok”.  You can’t do it all.  No one can (I don’t think).  Pull back — be ok with being a “regular” Superball who is balanced.  It is a lot more fun, and you really do bounce pretty high!

We all only have one life to live.  Be sure and live it in a way that brings joy to you and those around you.

I am excited.  I finally have come across an article on leadership that doesn’t expect every leader to “have the intellectual capacity to make sense of unfathomably complex issues, the imaginative powers to paint a vision of the future that generates everyone’s enthusiasm, the operational know-how to translate strategy into concrete plans, and the interpersonal skills to foster commitment to undertakings that could cost people’s jobs should they fail.”  That is, we no longer have to be (or look for) Superman/Superwoman.

In Praise of the Incomplete Leader is a refreshing look at leaders.  It is a collaborative article by Deborah Ancona, Thomas Malone, Wnada Orlikowski and Peter Senge, all of whom are professors at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  The article is in the February 2007 Harvard Business Review and I came upon it while killing some time in the library.

Although the authors propose four key characteristics of leaders, I love their perspective and balance.  “No one person could possibly stay on top of everything. But the myth of the complete leader (and the attendant fear of appearing incompetent) makes many executives try to do just that, exhausting themselves and damaging their organizations in the process.”  Thank you!

Or how about this:  “Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete — as having both strengths and weaknesses — will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.”   The groundedness of their position in reality is wonderfully refreshing.

And I love their differentiation between incomplete leaders and incompetent leaders.  “Incomplete leaders differ from incompetent leaders in that thye understand what they’re good at and what they’re not and have good judgment about how they can work with others to build on their strengths and offset their limitations.”  Which ties into what B. George, P. Sims, A. McLean and D. Mayer state in another HBR article (”Discovering Your Authentic Leadership”) — that their research found self-awareness to be one of the core qualities of good leaders.  In essence, as Ancona et al admit in the incomplete leader article: “No leader is perfect.  The best ones don’t try to be — they concentrate on honing their strengths and find others who can make up for their limitations.”

The four capabilities they propose need to be balanced in a leader are:  sensemaking (making sense of the world around us); relating (building relationships within and across organizations); visioning (creating a compelling picture of the future); and inventing (developing new ways to achieve the vision).  And, rather than being silo-driven in their approach (i.e. that each capability exists by itself), they emphasize the holistic nature of the abilities.  “Sensemaking, relating, visioning, and inventing are interdependent.  Without sensemaking, there’s no common view of reality from which to start.  Without relating, people work in isolation, or, worse, strive toward different aims.  Without visioning, there’s no shared direction.  And without inventing, a vision remains illusory.”

But what I really love is their realistic approach. “No one leader, however, will excel at all four capabilities in equal measure.  Typically, leaders are strong in one or two capabilities. . . Once leaders diagnose their own capabilities, identifying their unique set of strengths and weaknesses, they must search for others who can provide the things they’re missing.”

And I applaud their conclusion:  “It’s time to celebrate the incomplete — that is, human — leader.”   Yes! Let’s be a bit easier on our bosses (and ourselves).

Have a great Labor Day and rest of the week.