Book review: 'Mess' finds business, jazz link

• Musician-author Barrett sees similarities in leadership styles in businesses, jazz
• Barrett recommends abandoning top-down management style
• Duke Ellington's 'provocative competence' method especially effective

On the surface, it would not appear that jazz improvisation and business leadership have much in common.

But, in his new book Yes To The Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz, Frank J. Barrett makes an engaging and convincing case that the leadership style that it takes to make great jazz can also make business more innovative and successful.

Barrett, an accomplished jazz pianist who used to play with the Tommy Dorsey Band, is a professor of management and global policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

He says that experience helped him understand that "jazz bands actually are organizations designed for innovation, and the design elements from jazz can be applied to other organizations seeking to innovate."

He explains that jazz musicians are unlike classical orchestras that follow a conductor and play complex, pre-arranged musical scores. Instead, jazz artists take their cues from each other, work from very simple music charts, and spontaneously improvise new music on the spot.

But even though the jazz creative process is unpredictable, Barrett says it has an underlying structure and leadership style that makes it work.

Yes to the Mess is not a call to get rid of routines and structures, Barrett says. "The problem comes when companies over-rely on structured responses, especially in situations where a different kind of thinking is needed."

Relaxing control, letting go of old habits and encouraging experimentation are some of the organizational behaviors based on the jazz mindset that Barrett believes can make a positive difference when applied to business.

Barrett recommends abandoning the traditional top-down management style and emulating jazz band leaders who set the basic form for songs, then let band members creatively fill in the details.

Business leaders would be smart to mimic this approach, setting up the basic structure of an organization, then letting employees figure out the best way to get the job done. He encourages the development of a corporate culture where leaders and followers interchange roles and actively support one another's ideas.

Barrett weaves colorful stories and quotes from jazz greats such as Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins and Bill Evans into the narrative. Their insights illustrate why minimal structure, experimentation, collaboration and strategic improvisation are so important in the jazz creative process.

Legendary bandleader Duke Ellington employed what Barrett calls "provocative competence," a management technique that encourages employees to think for themselves and not rely on old habits.

When a band member noticed that a chart Ellington had given him only had eight bars of music, he asked what else they were supposed to play. "You'll know," replied Ellington, and they did, spontaneously creating an entire song from that simple idea.

The technique also worked for Giant Manufacturing, the world's largest bicycle maker, back in 2008. Tony Lo, CEO of the Taiwan-based company, realized executives were missing out on a huge sales opportunity by ignoring the women's market.

Lo gave one of his top executives, Bonnie Tu, six months without any restrictions to create the first Giant all-women's bike shop in downtown Taipei. His hands-off approach paid off big-time; Giant all-women's stores are now a huge success.

Other examples:

-- Toyota gives employees autonomy to find their own solutions to problems on the assembly line.

-- Apple's office buildings are designed to encourage chance meetings, random interactions and exchanges of ideas.

-- IBM encourages online "Innovation Jams" involving thousands of employees in hundreds of countries, a practice that has spawned new businesses under the IBM umbrella.

You don't have to understand or even like jazz to appreciate Barrett's insight into how the improvisational jazz mindset can help business thrive in a tough market and meet the challenges posed by global competition.

But, if you are a jazz fan, you'll really enjoy getting an insider's view of how the music you love is created. There's a lot to learn, and Barrett is a great teacher. What executives can learn is that discord is not always detrimental. By saying Yes to the Mess they can learn to harness disharmony for the good of the company.

Destro is a jazz singer and freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.