“Hey Bob – have you looked at these $10 bills? I think they’re counterfeit.”
At the time, my day job was teaching school in the projects in West Philadelphia. I usually stayed late one afternoon each week to teach guitar lessons to any of the kids who were interested. I was teaching them to play the tunes they were listening to. One day I was recruited by a band of adults in the community who’d just lost their guitar player. So, four nights a week I was part of a seven-piece band playing from 9:00 pm – 2:00 am in some pretty scary bars around Philadelphia. The owner of one of those places liked to take $10 bills out of the register and replace them with phony $10s. We had to figure out how to deal with that – three different times – while we waited for him to get busted. He was so lame that it only took three months before he was arrested.
You may be wondering, “Is that a true story?” Yes. You may also be wondering, “How does this connect to entrepreneurship? And how did it lead to The Blues-Print for Innovation?”
It’s a four-part story:
- How I learned to be a terrible guitar player – and how I got better
- How I learned to be a terrible entrepreneur – and how I got better
- How the lessons I learned in each world helped me improve in both worlds
- How that led to The Blues-Print for Innovation
The Guitar Playing Part
Although I always loved listening to recordings of hot guitar playing, I was a college freshman before I realized that music wasn’t just something that came out of speakers: my roommates all owned guitars. Watching their amateur jam sessions caused me to say something that has gotten me into trouble repeatedly over the years:
“I ought to be able to do that.”
By my sophomore year, I was the lead guitarist of what was surely the worst band on campus. I played with a great deal of passion and almost no skill. I didn’t know how to read music and I had no instructors. As a self-taught musician, I developed and practiced a lot of bad habits. I got better at being terrible.
Over the next ten years I added a lot of skills, yet I fell for that naïve advice to “just express yourself” and “ bring your true and authentic self to the performance.” That sounds fine, but club owners are not a forgiving bunch. They’d say, “You may think you’re expressing yourself. I think you just ran off all my customers. You’re fired.”
The obvious lesson: you have to strategically deploy your creativity to create something that pleases your audience, and makes money for others in the process. Hmmm…
Finally, I went all-in and became a full-time musician. I joined a 9-piece band and played seven nights a week for a year. I was the guy on stage that talked to the audience for five hours a night, seven nights a week. I got a LOT better at reading the audience. My fellow musicians were skilled and trained, and thanks to them, my guitar playing chops improved.
At the end of that year, I declared, “I’m never going to stop playing, but this is a terrible way to make a living. I’m going to MIT for business school.” I kept both of those promises.
After I graduated, I played weekends in a couple of excellent bands, but my playing was always missing something. It took me a while to realize that my solos were flashy but shallow – more “Look at me” than supportive of the music.
Things turned around when I joined a seven-piece blues band on the South Side of Chicago. Those guys were The Real Deal. One night, they told me, “Bob – your solos would be twice as good if you played half as much.” I was crushed – for about two hours – then I realized that they were right. I grew up a little that night.
Through the years, I’ve dealt with lots of sketchy experiences: players with substance abuse issues, lying club owners, audiences that would bring guns into the room while we were playing, and even playing strip clubs with dubious financial practices. Through it all, I LOVED the music and loved collaborating with great players and singers. It has sustained me through many of life’s difficulties beyond the stage. It also taught me that every now and then, you can create magic out of thin air – if you have the right attitude, the right collaborators, the right skill set, and the right connection with your audience. It’s a lot like entrepreneurship.
The Entrepreneurship Part
When I first started down this road, I thought “entrepreneur” was a French word that meant “unemployed.” Although I am an entrepreneur, there are still days when I think its synonyms include “mentally ill,” “deranged,” and even “doomed.” In those days, there were no mentorship programs and no courses that tried to teach this stuff. Once again, I was self-taught. Once again, I played with lots of passion and no skills. Once again, I was oblivious of my audience – and once again they fired me.
Through a couple failed start-ups my love for the field kept me going, and over time I got better at it. I melded my own experiences with what I’ve learned from mentoring more than 100 companies through MIT’s Venture Mentoring Services, Building Global Innovators and other programs that work with high-growth entrepreneurs. I often lecture at MIT in a course called The Nuts and Bolts of New Ventures, and many of those lectures are available online for free. I also wrote a book called The Start-Up Starter Kit: How to not fail in the crucial first two years, which distilled what a lot of us have learned about success and failure in this world.
The Part Where I Learned Something
After I accumulated lots of battle scars from playing for many years and from starting four companies, I began to see the parallels everywhere:
- Brilliant players are often commercial failures because they can’t appeal to an audience. Ditto for brilliant inventors who lead failed businesses.
- Innovative bands have great interpersonal communications – often unspoken – and that facilitates great improvisation. Ditto for your innovation team.
- In both worlds, you’re more likely to take risks if you trust your colleagues not to shut down if your explorations don’t work the first time
- Bad collaborators will screw up a band’s ability to improvise – and a team’s ability to innovate – every time. This stuff is hard enough even when everyone is pulling together cohesively.
- Fabulous classical musicians – and skilled long-term corporate executives – are often completely lost when asked to improvise/innovate. They’re just different skill sets.
How It All Led to “The Blues-Print for Innovation”
“Bob, this stuff is so important and so helpful. It’s completely changed my whole approach to building my company. You’ve GOT to talk about it from a stage somewhere.” I’ve heard variations on that theme over and over. I took that advice: I’ve given lots of talks on lots of topics for lots of audiences. Three of the things I’ve learned are:
- The talks that didn’t go so well were the ones where I tried to pack too much content into my allotted time slot.
- The best content in the world doesn’t do you any good if you can’t remember it.
- Most people can’t remember more than three things from a talk.
Since I’m serious about wanting to deliver value in my talk, this left me with a challenge:
How do I deliver three immediately useful lessons and make them memorable?
In the spirit of all good marketers, I checked out the competition: I watched a lot of videos of other presenters talking about innovation. Nobody is drawing the parallels I draw between “innovation” and “playing the blues.” And NOBODY is taking a smokin’ electric guitar on stage and actually playing the blues. When I’ve done that, the audiences have told me that the talk was extraordinary and that they’d remember it for the rest of their lives.
Okay, that’s probably a little hyperbolic. But when they got back to the office and the boss asked them what they learned from their expensive conference, at least they were able to recite and discuss the three pillars of innovation.
All kidding aside, the entrepreneurs I’ve worked with will tell you that despite my cheerful demeanor, I’m as serious as a heart attack about helping them succeed. The Blues-Print for Innovation continues that ethic.