The experience that conductor Roger Nierenberg brought to life at the 2010 National HBA Leadership Conference in Philadelphia with his Music Paradigm (http://www.themusicparadigm.com/) is one that those in attendance won’t soon forget. But for those who weren’t able to attend, or those who were and want something concrete to take away from the event and back to the office with them, Nierenberg’s book, Maestro, fits the bill.
This first-person narrative is the story of a business exec who is put in charge of a squabbling team of business men and women—marketing people, manufacturing people, research and development people, sales reps—who can’t seem to put aside their differences and work together to improve the company’s bottom line. The narrator must use superior leadership skills to get the best out of this team and the best results for the company.
The opening scene of Maestro—a workday meeting where each person in the room spouts his or her own point of view at the expense of the greater good—is so powerful specifically because it is so familiar to all of us. While we never find out what sort of company our narrator works for (do they make pharmaceuticals? Beauty products? Toys?), the environment is general enough that it could be familiar to any of us, and specific enough that it is indeed familiar to each of us. As leaders of teams and members of teams, we’re all guilty of being shortsighted at times, of not seeing the forest through the trees. But how do we step back and see the bigger picture of our team’s assets, and our shared goal of improving the bottom line and ROI (return on investment) for our companies?
In Maestro, the narrator’s solution comes when he hears his daughter’s music instructor talk about the new conductor for his orchestra—how the new conductor simply has a way of making the members of the orchestra all want to work together and achieve their individual best potential in order to contribute to the whole. Intrigued, the narrator speaks to his daughter’s instructor, who speaks to the conductor, and soon finds himself sitting in the middle of the violin section of the orchestra’s next rehearsal.
With each orchestra rehearsal our narrator sits in on, and each subsequent conversation he has with the conductor, he learns more and more about the conductor’s leadership skills, and what it takes to get a group as diverse and dynamic as the members of an orchestra to creative something cohesive and beautiful. The narrator takes what he learns at these rehearsals and applies it to his business life, to his team of brilliant but stubborn workers, turning the company around. In this way, Nierenberg lays out the metaphor of a conductor and his orchestra as leader and team members for the reader, and shows how to apply the same principals to the business world of today.
What makes this format interesting is its ability to deliver the metaphor—and the resulting practical leadership advice that we all need—in a flowing narrative that keeps the reader engaged, creating more than a simple “How to be a Great Leader” type book full of lists, facts, statistics, and bulleted points. Getting the message across in the form of a story makes it more memorable and more pleasing to the reader. Some of the conductor’s quotes from the story that we can carry over into our own jobs include:
“Eventually I realized that a great performance would happen only when the motivation sprang as much from them as from me.”
“If a leader wants his people to truly own their work, then he has to be willing to let go of some control.”
“You can force compliance with your directions, you can require obedience, but you can’t mandate enthusiasm, creativity, fresh thinking, or inspiration.”
Quotes like these, peppered throughout the narrative, serve as the inspiration we all need to help our business teams function more like a professional symphony orchestra. And key words that we find the conductor using throughout the story serve as take-home words that we should remember and strive to make part of our daily professional lives: coordination, collaboration, initiative, change, and motivation.
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