Yes to the Mess. Frank J. Barrett

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      On the Way to Yes—Abandoning Routines

      In my high school and college years, I had a number of jazz idols, beginning with the pianist Oscar Peterson. Peterson could swing hard and play complex harmonies and lightning-fast licks—plus, he had the technique of a world-class concert pianist. I would listen to his recordings for hours, marveling at how flawless his playing was. Later, when I began to play professionally, I was stunned to learn that among some jazz musicians Peterson is not so highly regarded. As one of my friends said, “he can swing, but he’s simply too perfect.” What he meant, I came to understand, was that while Peterson had mastered the clean and perfect phrases that were his signature, often at breath-taking speed, his licks varied little if at all from number to number.

      In effect, Peterson was saying the same “yes to the mess” just about every time he sat down at the piano, relying on catch phrases that became clichés until the playing itself grew programmatic. The pure sounds were there, the pyrotechnics he was famous for, but not the struggle that goes with improvisation, the willingness to stretch into the unfamiliar. As the composer-pianist Keith Jarrett once put it, in words that apply equally to jazz and business, “the music is struggle. You have to want to struggle. And what most leaders are the victim of is the freedom not to struggle. And then that’s the end of it. Forget it!”⁹

      If jazz has an exact anti-Peterson, it might be saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Many consider Rollins the greatest living improviser. He takes risks and tries new styles, forever stretching himself beyond his own familiar limitations. Among musicians, Rollins is almost as famous for his mistakes as he is for his “successful” innovations—wild experiments that have crashed grandly in ways that would embarrass most players. Fellow sax player Ronnie Scott contrasted Peterson’s flawless prerehearsed solos with the risk taking of Rollins, who attempts to transform the harmonic and melodic materials that the tune presents:

       Oscar Peterson is a very polished, technically immaculate performer, who—I hope he wouldn’t mind me saying so—trots out these fantastic things that he has perfected, and it really is a remarkable performance. Whereas Sonny Rollins, he could go on one night and maybe it’s disappointing, and another night he’ll just take your breath away by his kind of imagination and so forth. And it would be different every night with Rollins. ¹⁰

      Rollins’s deep commitment to staying open and responsive has led him down some unusual byways. Throughout the 1950s, he was a well-known and successful jazz musician, playing and recording with such greats as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, and Art Blakey. But in 1959, Rollins mysteriously quit playing. Rumors circulated that he was sick or maybe suffering from drug addiction, but in fact he had quit because he had gotten tired of hearing himself playing the same phrases and licks in solo after solo.

      Rollins wanted to break himself of the habit of playing what he had been hearing himself play, so for three years he went to the Williamsburg Bridge near his home in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, found a place under the surface of the bridge where he could be alone, and played his saxophone. Each time he heard a phrase that sounded like one of his familiar routines, he stopped, waited a moment, then played something he hadn’t heard before. At the end of three years, he recorded an album with Jim Hall on guitar, Bob Cranshaw on bass, and Ben Riley on drums, and dedicated the album to the location he had found to reinvent himself. The title of the album is, simply, The Bridge.

      At first, The Bridge was not well received by critics, partially because the music was such a dramatic departure from Rollins’s previous style. Now it’s considered a classic recording—on most critics’ list of the ten most important jazz recordings ever made. In fact, here’s how Rollins talks about how he approaches his art:

       As soon as I hear myself playing a familiar melody I take the mouthpiece out of my mouth. I let some measures go by. Improvising means coming in with a completely clean slate from the first note … the most important thing is to get away from fixed functions. ¹¹

      Rollins’s efforts to unlearn his successful routines was an affirmative move. He was letting go of the familiar and comfortable in order to welcome new possibilities and opportunities. A quarter-century later, Intel’s Andy Grove did almost exactly the same thing.

      Grove is popularly credited with ingeniously, strategically, and deliberately leading Intel into the microprocessor industry, but as Grove himself recounted in his memoir, the real story is quite different.¹² The success of Intel was largely a matter of the top leadership team saying yes to the mess.

      Intel is known today for its microprocessors, but for much of its early life, the company’s success was built on DRAM technology (for dynamic random access memory), and by the mid-1980s, Japanese DRAM competition was severely eroding Intel’s profit, from $198 million in 1984 to less than $2 million in 1985. Looking backward, the moral would seem to have been obvious: find another field to conquer. But Intel, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, was “living forward,” and Intel’s scientists, technologists, sales force, and even its customers were so familiar with the existing processes that they could not imagine Intel not focusing on DRAM.

      Nor was a fresh solution readily presenting itself. Intel’s initial progress in microprocessors was somewhere between accidental and clandestine. An Intel manager invented the microprocessor inadvertently while developing technology for a calculator, but Intel strategists barely noticed the market potential of the discovery, even though microprocessors were proving to be very profitable. So powerful was the comfort of the company’s past experiences that it continued to overwhelm external reality until, finally, Grove had his own “unlearning” moment.

      As Grove tells the story in Only the Paranoid Survive, “I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance when I turned back to [Intel cofounder] Gordon [Moore], and I asked, ‘If we got kicked out and the Board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?’ Gordon answered without hesitation, ‘He would get us out of memories.’ I stared at him, numb, then said, ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?’”¹³ And thus was born Grove’s famous first step in attacking difficult problems: “Set aside everything you know.”

      “Welcome to the new Intel,” Grove announced in a speech not long afterward. Intel went from being a company that makes memory chips to a company that focused on microprocessors, a move that quickly became hugely profitable. But to get there, he and Moore had to let go of the routines that were the secret to past success. Only by unlearning old routines were they able to open themselves to new opportunities and see the potential coming from an unexpected direction. To develop the dynamic capability that would carry the company forward, they had to step outside of themselves, something else jazz players are constantly called to do.

      “Take a Knee”

      On April 3, 2003, during the early weeks of the Iraq War, Lt. Col. Chris Hughes led the U.S. 101st Battalion into volatile Najaf, on a crucial and sensitive mission to meet with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who was in residence at the mosque—the third holiest site for Shiite Muslims because it is the Imam Ali Mosque. That alone made the mission sensitive, but the Shiite high cleric was also crucial to establishing good relationships with the Iraqis. He had urged Muslims to remain calm and cooperate with U.S. forces, and now he was asking the U.S. Army for protection, the immediate reason for the 101st’s mission.

      Unfortunately, as the battalion neared the mosque, a rumor began to spread that the Americans intended to arrest the cleric and destroy the holy site. With that, Iraqi villagers suddenly turned on the U.S. troops. Indeed, within a split second, the situation changed dramatically. СКАЧАТЬ