The always-impressive Dion Hinchcliffe sums it all up perfectly in his post, “CoIT: How an accidental future is becoming reality“.  Hinchcliffe repurposes Computerworld’s Scott Finnie’s use of ‘CoIT’ as referring to the ‘consumerization of IT’ to a new term, ‘Cooperative IT.”  I’d like to humbly suggest yet another interpretation of CoIT as a shorthand for “Converged IT” – referring to a world where much of the work of the IT organization has converged with the business as a deeply embedded capability.

A Vision for CoIT

Hinchcliffe suggests some aspects for the vision of CoIT as embodying:

• Decentralized (or at least distributed) governance
• IT support that scales up to the new app/device proliferation
• Business led IT solutions with an enabling infrastructure

I think these are appropriate, though many details and realities to be yet worked through.  And, I believe, while the IT leaders who are most proactive in leading this shift will make some mistakes, they will also be the first to figure out the new realities and will ultimately make less mistakes and learn more quickly than their ‘ostrich’ counterparts who either believe this will all blow over, or that they can figure it out down the road.

What do you think?  Do you agree with Hinchcliffe’s vision?  What are you doing to exploit the emerging ‘converged’ reality of CoIT?

Digital Art: ‘Convergance’ by Wilby  courtesy of Iasos.

Many years ago, when I was a partner with Ernst & Young, John Cross, the CIO of BP (a very highly regarded company at that time) approached me wanting to benchmark the way E&Y managed its engagements.  My first reaction was incredulity.  I knew we were good at engagement management – after all, it was what we did for a living!  But it was not immediately clear why this would be of interest to BP.  John explained,

You respond to RFP’s and prospect requests virtually overnight.  You assemble a consulting team with the right mix of competencies in a day or so, and you get them on the ground at the client site, with their own consulting workbenches and tools, ready to be productive in about 48 hours.  You do all this while developing new people, managing engagement economics, running a robust quality assurance process, and keeping up with emerging technologies.  If my IT organization could do those things half as well as E&Y does them, we’d be in great shape!”

What You Can Learn From Consulting Businesses

Now I got it, and realized why John had been so successful at BP, leading the transformation of IT first at BP Exploration, and then globally across BP’s business units.  What we found through the benchmarking exercise (BP was part of a 3-year longitudinal study of global IT transformations that I was leading at the time) was that one of the trickier and more subtle aspects of the E&Y ‘magic’ was the deeply ingrained Matrix Management approach.  Individual contributors reported to both their discipline leader, and the leader of the project to which they were assigned.  Both bosses were part of regular performance reviews, with the project leader’s input carrying significant weight.  Over the course of a year, you might work on a half-dozen or more project, and work in a couple of disciplines, so you were getting performance feedback from 8 or more people.

Other Factors for Matrix Management Success

If you need the flexibility and agility that Matrix Management can bring, and the characteristics of a good consulting organization that I described above, there are several ‘conditions for success’ I’d like to point out:

1. Clarity of Roles and Responsibilities, and “Organizational Clarity” as Patrick Lencioni refers to it in his great book, Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive.
2. A clear distinction between ‘role’ and ‘job’ – people may have one job, but fill many roles depending upon their competencies and the need at hand.
3. A robust Performance Management System – where performance feedback is taken very seriously, performed consistently, and has a direct impact on rewards, recognition, career path and promotions.  Both the individual performer and managers must take Performance Management seriously.
4. An organizational environment where ‘power and success’ are not denoted by one’s number of direct reports, but by one’s contributions to the success of the organization.
5. Strong Project Managers.  A ‘project’ is the ultimate temporal unit of management – if the project management process is broken, or project managers not fully competent, Matrix Management will suffer and confusion will rein.

I am indebted (as ever!) to my colleague Roy Youngman for his contributions to this post.

Image courtesy of Life in a Matrix

Three Ways to Abuse Process Discipline

1. Forgetting that the heart and soul of process thinking is Process Improvement.
2. Process becomes a substitute for thinking, rather than an aid to it.
3. Not everything lends itself to detailed work processes.

Let’s examine these.

Come Back Deming – All Is Forgiven!

When the likes of Deming and Juran began spreading the gospel of Process Thinking, they weren’t talking about creating a process and freezing it in concrete!  The ‘Deming Cycle‘ – Plan, Do, Check, Out – was all about continuous (and sometimes, discontinuous, as in process re-engineering) process improvement.  And yet many IT organizations somehow leave this aspect behind as they institutionalize worksteps, activities, deliverables and milestones.  People are encouraged (forced”) to follow the project management methodology or systems development life cycle, and punished for violations.  For a while, things improve – some process is generally better than no process!

But then people begin to realize that the process seems to get in the way – inhibits agility.  Intelligent choices are held victim to the process, and bureaucracy reigns.  To get past this sticking point, people need to understand, believe in and be passionate about process improvement.  Be it incremental, stepwise improvement or breakthrough re-engineering, the missing ingredient of continuous improvement is essential to getting the intelligence back into the work and non-value-adding activities out of the work – especially if these inhibit speed, agility or quality.  The trick is to throw out the ‘bathwater’ of blind rigor without throwing out the ‘baby’ of process management discipline.

Three Ways to ‘Standardize’ for Repeatability and Predictability

Many years ago, my esteemed colleague Roy Youngman was co-authoring a book with me (Development Effectiveness: Strategies for IS Organizational Transition) and pointed me to this great work by Henry Mintzberg.  If a goal is to make work consistent, repeatable, predictable and of high quality, there are three ‘degrees of freedom‘ that can be tackled – the tasks, the deliverables, or the people.  The degree to which you ‘standardize’ within this mix is a function of the nature and complexity of the work you are trying to achieve.

For highly complex work (think brain surgery) the emphasis is on the people, which is why surgeons go through years of training, board certification, residencies, and so forth.  It’s no use handing them a detailed process to follow and expecting an untrained person to achieve a quality result.

For work such as bridge building, the emphasis will be on the deliverables – various types of blueprint, work breakdown structures and so on.

For routine, sequential work, the emphasis will be on defining the tasks to be followed and the sequence in which to follow them.  Ideally, the work can be so ‘routinized’ that it can be automated.  (Think data center operations and the shift over the years to ‘lights out’ data centers.)

The graphic below tries to capture this concept.  Detailed processes are great at helping manage work that is routine and sequential in nature (which is one of the reasons why ITIL has gained so much traction in the last few years.)  For work that is inherently collaborative, and may require more visual enablement, standardizing on deliverables may be more apparent (think discovery and solution delivery).  For work that is more complex and exploratory, think training and performance support.

Some Process Management Questions To Ponder

• Are your IT processes holding you back – or setting you free?
• Are they an aid to thinking, or a substitute for it?
• Is it time to move past the blind discipline of mindless processes to a more context-sensitive and effective approach?
• How often to your processes improve, and where is the impetus and insight for those improvements coming from?
• How are process improvements recognized and rewarded?
• Is it clear who owns ‘improvement’ for any given process?
• Is it clear who owns the ‘services’ that are delivered by given processes?

Answers on a postcard, please!

IT Business Edge has just published a short slideshow on “Four Common Mistakes in IT Portfolio Management“, re-purposing a post of mine from January 2008.  I think they did a great job simplifying and bringing to life some of the key points in the original post.  Enjoy!

For IT Leaders, the Cloud Changes Everything!

For me, the big question is, what does the migration to Cloud Computing mean for today’s IT organization?  What structural changes are necessary to successfully leverage Cloud Computing capabilities?  How quickly should you be moving IT services to the Cloud?  How does the Cloud impact the IT Service Portfolio and the capabilities needed to deliver those services?  What are the implications for IT competencies?  How does business-IT governance change in a Cloud Computing world?

I think these are important questions whose answers are not yet totally clear.  As I reflect back on the shift from mainframe to client-server computing, many IT organizations were less than stellar at anticipating needed changes.  As a result, they experienced more bumps and potholes in that journey than was necessary.  For example, for all that had been learned about back-up and recovery in a mainframe world, the onset of client-server computing created gaping holes in the IT organization’s ability to cope with data protection and loss at the Personal Computer level.  The same was true for the evolution from client-server to the web – many of the controls put in place for client-server computing were ineffective (and some even counter-productive) as more work moved to the Internet.

Which Aspects of Cloud Computing Could Bite Your IT Organization?

In the next few posts I will explore some of IT organizational implications of Cloud Computing.  Aspects we will examine will include:

• Mobility implications – both for the business user and the IT professional charged with enabling that user.
• The distinctions between Infrastructure as a Service, Applications as a Service, Platform as a Service, Development as a Service and Business Process Services and how these impact IT organizations.
• The distinctions between Public, Private and Community Clouds and their implications for IT.
• Accounting implications, including funding and budgeting.
• Implications for Business-IT Governance.
• Security and Privacy.
• Implications for the work teams and flow of work involved in requirements analysis to solutioning.
• Impact on Enterprise Architecture.
• Implications for IT Services and Service Management.

Please weigh in – let us know your experiences, issues and concerns about the shift to the Cloud.  Do you agree with my assessment that this shift is inevitable?  How fast do you see it happening?  What does it mean for you personally, and for your career?

Wonderful, but Imperfect?

My wife’s iMac started playing up a few months back.  Symptoms were thin purple lines appearing on the screen as if rows of pixels were dropping out.  Sometimes, the screen distorted, as if the image was melting or being torn.  The more serious problem was the machine crashing!  This was quite distressing as the occasional MS Windows “blue screen of death” was one of the (many) reasons I’d moved my wife to the Mac, then me to that platform.  The crashing took the form of the little spinning color wheel icon appearing and staying on – forever!  The only way out was to hold in the power button, forcing the machine to quit.  The good news here is that a reboot on a Mac is dramatically faster than on Windows.  (My Windows point of reference is Windows XP.)  The crashing was especially frequent when I was using her machine to do processor intensive things such as video editing.  (Fortunately, I now do that on my 27 inch iMac – which has – touch wood – been totally fault free!)

So, How Smart Are the Geniuses at the Genius Bar?

First, the good news.  The whole process of making an appointment – whether with the Genius Bar, Personal Shopping Assistant, or One-on-One is excellent!  In fact, I still find everything about the Apple Retail Store experience to be mostly superb!  Anyway, I took the iMac along to the store and met with our Genius at the appointed time.  He did a quick check, and concluded they would need to take the machine out back and run some diagnostics.  I filled in some paperwork, and left the store.   A couple of hours later, he called and said they could not replicate either of the problems I’d described and the diagnostics revealed no problems.  He suggested they reinstall the Mac OS (I was on the latest release) and that I could recover all my files and applications using the Time Machine back up.

I was fine with this – I’ve been using an external hard disk with Time Machine since it became available.  My only concern was that when I tested Time Machine recovery before I took the machine to the Apple Store, the Mac crashed!  So I had never proven I could recover.  I did, however, make a copy of my wife’s critical digital assets – mainly a 7,000 photo iPhoto library, a nearly 2,000 song iTunes library, and our Quicken data.  So, I figured we were relatively safe.

I picked up the machine later the same day – no charge to me, which was great.  I got the machine home, turned it on and immediately had the lines of purple pixels, and within minutes, the dreaded spinning color wheel icon.  I soldiered on and tried Time Machine to restore my wife’s applications and data, and – miracle of miracles – that worked superbly!

The Wonders of the Web

Some days later, frustrated that my trip to the genius bar had not resolved anything, I did some online research – yes, I know.  I should have done that in the first place!  I quickly found several Mac forums that indicated that both my symptoms with this iMac were very common on the older machines.  So, Apple disappointment numbers 1 and 2!  There clearly was a real issue with these machines:

1. Why didn’t the ‘Genius’ know that, or have access to a knowledge base (e.g., the Mac forums I quickly found)?

2. Why doesn’t Apple acknowledge these well known problems and provide fixes beyond the warranty period? (I’m assuming that if I’d hit these problems during the initial warranty, or if I’d taken the extended warranty, it would have been fixed at no additional cost to me.)

On more scanning through the Mac forums, I came across a potential fix for the problems I was experiencing. This involved resetting the parameter random access memory (PRAM) and nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM), with a link to instructions for this on the Support section at Apple’s website .  This was trivially simple to do – essentially shutting down the computer and restarting it while holding down 4 keys – Command, Option, P and R.  (Actually, pressing these keys together requires some dexterity!)  Anyway, this simple fix seems to have totally eliminated the two problems we were experiencing on my wife’s iMac!

So, Apple disappointment numbers 3 and 4!

3. Why didn’t the ‘Genius’ try this at the store?  (I assume he didn’t as the computer came back with exactly the same problems it had when I took it in!)

4. Why didn’t Apple suggest I try this when I made my Genius appointment, given that I explained why I needed the appointment in the first place!

Again, I’m still a big Apple fan.  Perhaps, one lesson from this is that when you create an exceptional customer experience, expectations rise, and your customers want every interaction with them and your products to be exceptional.  Regrettably, they are not.  I guess the good news is, there’s still room for Apple to become even better at what it does!

I was taken by this video for a couple of reasons:

1. For what it says about the science behind motivation – both for routine, repetitive types of work, and for more cognitive types of work.
2. For the animation technique and how it enriches the (beautifully) spoken messages.

Learn, be enlightened and enjoy!

Graphic courtesy of SDisbury.com

So Much Known – So Little Followed!

There is a substantial body of research and theory about organizational change management (OCM) dating back to the mid-50′s or even earlier.  Most OCM findings seem to resonate with people who are facing, or who have faced organizational change.  And yet, nearly all of the findings and recommendations from the body of OCM knowledge seem to be woefully lacking when it comes to increasing the success of change management initiatives.  If this were not the case, why do so many change initiatives fail to meet their objectives?

For IT professionals, even the terminology can be confusing!  I had a long, and I thought, enlightening conversation with a CIO some years back about the challenges and importance of managing change.  About an hour into the conversation, it became apparent that he was talking about technical change management – configuration management, release control, testing, and all that good stuff, while I was talking about the so-called ‘soft’ stuff (which is so hard!) of organizational change management!

How Have You Dealt With Change?

Ultimately, to effect change such as that involved in the introduction of a new work process or new tool, or increasing collaboration across silos, or improving team effectiveness, individuals must leave behind habits and behaviors ingrained over many years and adopt new ones.  Think about changes you have tried to make in your personal life – how many have truly succeeded?  Be it weight loss, increased exercise, learning a new skill, or any other change, chances are you’ve had way more more failures than successes.

A couple of years ago, after 60 years of reasonably successful brushing of my teeth (I still have most of them!), my dental hygienist suggested a slight change to my brushing regimen.  This did not require new skills, or new equipment, or any difficult physical movement.  It just required changing a habit of literally, a lifetime.  How long would it take to institutionalize this change – to make the new way of brushing my new habit?

For me, it took concentrated effort for about 6 months for the new brushing regimen to become habit – leading to my “Six Month Rule” for behavior change.  And during that period, I slipped a few times.  I did not suddenly decide to go back to my lifetime’s brushing habit, or decide to give up on the new approach suggested by the dental hygienist – no, I just lost focus in the early am when I got up, or the late pm when I went to bed, and – voila – I was back in the old routine!  It took conscious effort, as well as all sorts of reminders to help me stick with the change long enough for it to become institutionalized!  (For those facing a tooth brushing change, try a piece of string or rubber band around the handle of your toothbrush as a gentle reminder!)

The Six Month Rule – And Why Changes Fail

With business attention spans getting ever shorter, how can an organizational change that will take at least six months to shift behaviors be expected to stick?  No wonder the “this too shall pass’ response to dictated change is so common – by the time the changes may be starting to take hold, top management has moved on to the next big challenge or opportunity!

And my “Six Month Rule” applies to changed behavior demanded of someone who believes in that change.  Supposing for a moment, that my teeth brushing routine change was not something I believed in?  Or that it required I learn a new skill?  Or, as with an adjustment to a golf swing, it actually degraded my golfing abilities while I adjust to the new swing?  (Visions of me walking around with gobs of food all over my teeth, apologizing and explaining, “Sorry about the filthy teeth.  I’m learning a new way to brush – it should all be cleared up by Christmas!”)  It’s no wonder that the response to so many corporate change programs is, “This too shall pass!”

Most of what we do during a day’s work is based on deeply ingrained habit.  It’s not necessarily the ‘best’ way, or even the ‘right’ way – but it’s the way that is familiar too us and, most importantly, predictable.  And it is these deeply ingrained behaviors that are so hard to change and that often derail organizational change initiatives.

Lessons Learned, Questions to Ponder

We can all learn lessons about organizational change management – whether we are leading them or simply participating – by looking into ourselves and identifying what we need to be doing differently, and how are we going to accomplish that.  Achieving change at the personal level is crucial for most corporate change programs.  While it is easy to depersonalize change at work as “something that’s going on around me”, the reality is that if we don’t change ourselves at some deep, personal level, the desired change will not take hold.

So, first ask yourself, “Do I want this change to succeed?  What might be in it for me?  What if it fails – how might I be impacted?  Then, assuming you decide the change is positive, ask yourself, “What do I need to be doing differently?  What will that look like and feel like?  How will I go about making the personal changes happen?  How will I recognize success or failure, and what consequences will I hold over myself?”

The massive mixing console in Abbey Road's Studio 3

I came ‘out of the closet’ with my post the other day about my somewhat hidden Dr. Jekyll existence alongside my more public Mr. Hyde life as a management consultant, research and author.  While my Mr. Hyde is known for helping companies through IT and shared service transformations and for my blogerly musings on the changing face of IT organizations, my Dr. Jekyll is a wanna be rock star!

A Tale of Two Paths

The latter is actually the path I thought I was on since I bought my first guitar around age 10.  It is also the path I deliberately veered away from at age 18 when I left my London home for Manchester, to get an Electrical Engineering degree and pursue a career in computers.  It was the right career path for me – I have no regrets.  But I am glad that late in my career, I can shed my suit and tie every now and again, mingle with real rock stars, and work with them in the same studios they record in and on the same stages they play.  I’ve also been able to apply my consulting and business skills to help David Fishof, the founder and producer of Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camps expand the business and open it up to more mere mortals like me.

I just returned from one of my yearly rock ‘n’ roll ‘sabbaticals’ – this one back in the UK, where I spent a week recording in Abbey Road studios, with members of Pink Floyd, Yes, Cream, Badfinger, and many other rock notables.  The week was capped off by a performance at the Cavern in Liverpool – an old underground warehouse made famous by the Beatles – but in reality, now moved about 12 feet and turned by 90 degrees from its original location – a fascinating story in its own right.

In my previous post on this, I shared 3 lessons – things I’d learned from my rock ‘n’ roll experiences that I believe apply more broadly to the corporate setting – about team building, leadership and organizational change.  Today I’ll expand on this theme with some more take-aways from my Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp experiences.

Three More Lessons from Rock Music

1. Songwriting is a great tool for collaboration.  Several of the Rock camps I’ve attended have featured an opportunity to write and record your own song.  Typically, one or more of the campers or the counselor have already written songs, and come brimming with ideas.  So although I’ve participated in song writing in the past, it’s been in a relatively minor way.  At this last camp, our counselor, Joey Molland, from the band Badfinger insisted on a collaborative effort.  At first it was like pulling teeth!  “Who’s got some ideas they’d like to share?” asked Joey.  Silence was the deafening response!  After much probing and uncomfortable silences, I mentioned the Gulf oil disaster as something that had been on my mind for a while.  “Great!  What does that bring to mind?” asked Joey in his inimitable Liverpool accent – sounding and even looking like Sir Paul McCartney.  “Well, there’s oil in the water, smoke in the air…” I replied.   And so it went.  From these humble beginnings, all the band members chimed in, with Joey suggesting structure and form, all of us writing pieces and working with Carol, our singer, to get melodies that matched her style and suited the lyrics.  Two days later, after a 6 hour session in Abbey Road’s Studio 2 (home to the Pink Floyd recording sessions) we had a recorded original that we are all proud of!  (I plan on making a video with scenes from the Gulf oil disaster set to this original song, “Promises, Promises” and putting it up on YouTube.  Who knows, maybe a viral hit in the making???)  The key, though, was as a band, we needed to become a high performing team.  And the songwriting experience helped us bond as a team.  I believe that writing a song together, or any similar creative exercise can be a great (and fun!) way to build high performing teams.
2. I’ve had the opportunity to work with about two dozen highly ranked professional musicians since I became involved with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp as both a Management Consultant and a camper.  They have all been fabulous musicians, but they don’t all make fabulous counselors.  A camp counselor has to be a leader in every sense of the term – inspiring, directing, coaching, managing, and so on.  So, what are the characteristics that separate the great musician/leaders from the great musicians?  First, the best leaders are multi-instrumentalists – they know enough about each band member’s role to be able to advise and coach them.  I’m always amazed that these people, even if they are known as world class guitarists, drummers or whatever, they can play many instruments.  As I think about IT leaders, I know it has become acceptable for CIOs to be brought in from the business with no technical background.  This is ok, and sometimes works out fine, but, by and large, I believe that a CIO who has not come up through the IT ranks is at a disadvantage.  (Of course, many CIOs that have some up through the IT ranks are still lousy CIOs!)  In addition to having the domain knowledge of the people they are leading, the best leaders are ones that can check their egos at the door, be great listeners, and have empathy for their colleagues – whether they are band members, recording engineers or roadies.  I’ve met some stellar musicians that fail at one or more of these skills – they are still stellar musicians – but just not effective leaders.  And so it goes for IT and business leaders.
3. Over the years, I’ve gravitated to hobbies that require almost total immersion.  Let me explain.  I find management consulting grueling!  It is intense, challenging, and you face a constant barrage of questions to which you are supposed to know the answers.  On top of that, at least in my consulting career, I’ve had to travel extensively – typically climbing on 4 planes per week!  So, when I need a break I find that lazing on a beach doesn’t quite do it – I have to be immersed in something that takes me completely away from my day job.  For me, scuba diving, motorcycling, and playing music share the qualities that they are immersive – they require total concentration.  And that, ironically, is the kind of experience I need to relax and refresh.  I’m skeptical of all the IT executives I’ve worked with who never really separate from their work.  Even while they’re on vacation I’m seeing emails from them, and getting calls from them.  Lesson learned – find something that will take you completely and totally out of your day job – even if only for a few hours.

Me with Joey Molland from the band Badfinger at the Cavern, Liverpool

I’m pretty sure nobody noticed the fact that I was ‘off the air’ for about a month.  And I’m certain that nobody cared!  But I did feel guilty, and missed the satisfaction I get from blogging and from engagement with those that leave thoughtful comments or challenge my thinking.

By way of explanation, I took advantage of being between consulting engagements to take some personal time to indulge my alter ego.  While my ‘Dr. Jekyll’ is a relatively staid and introverted management consultant/educator, I have a ‘Mr. Hyde’ who loves nothing more than to strap on a guitar, plug into a gigantic amplifier and loudspeakers (known as a ‘full stack’ in the music business) and make musical mayhem!

I discovered an outlet for my alter ego in 2005 when I was looking for some sort of sabbatical and saw a piece about Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp on a Fine Living Channel broadcast on a Delta flight.  I signed up for the camp and literally found my life changed!  Over 2 or 3 posts in coming weeks, I’ll share some of my lessons learned that I think can be applied to the world of IT management.

Five Days that Changed My World!

That 5-day rock camp in Hollywood, Ca in 2005 had me playing with rock stars including Roger Daltrey (The Who), Jon Anderson (Yes), Dickey Betts (The Allman Brothers), Elliot Easton (The Cars) and many more.  I was teamed up with 5 other campers (who have since become good friends) and we were assigned a ‘counselor’.  This was Kelly Keagy, drummer, singer and songwriter from the band Night Ranger.  Kelly was the creative and singing force behind the rock classic anthem, “Sister Christian” and many other hits.

Our band went to hell and back during the course of a long week, rehearsing from morning till night, jamming with other campers and counselors, and learning about songwriting and the music business in ‘Master Classes’ led by the counselors.  We also learned some fabulous lessons in performance from Kelly.  For example, if a band looks like it’s having fun, so will the audience.  If a band looks nervous and uncomfortable, so will the audience be!

The week culminated in a live performance and ‘Battle of the Bands’ at Sunset Strip’s House of Blues.  The experience was truly incredible – made all the more special as our band won the Battle of the Bands, thanks to Kelly’s remarkable coaching skills.  Also, the whole camp had been filmed by The Learning Channel for a 2-hour documentary shown later that year – to the surprise of many consulting clients who happened to see the TV show, its promos, or its re-runs.  The camp was featured on Good Morning America the morning following the House of Blues performance, much to the amusement of several observant business colleagues who saw the GMA segment but had simply been told I was ‘on vacation.’ (I was rather secretive of my alter ego back then!)

Dr. Jekyll, Meet Mr. Hyde

It’s always amazing to me how apparently unconnected things can suddenly intersect and create new opportunities!  Throughout the several weeks it took to ‘come down’ from the high of the 2005 Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp, I’d been reflecting on how much I’d learned at the camp and what a fantastic incubator for team building it had proven to be.  I also realized  how much more refreshed I felt and more effective I was in my ‘day job.’ As a bonus, I found myself with several ideas about how to build on the camp concept and increase the opportunities for people to experience this amazing event.  I approached David Fishof, the camp’s founder, producer and chief executive and he agreed to meet with me in New York.

David’s immediate reaction at the meeting was that some of my ideas were probably unworkable, but that others had merit.  To cut a long story short, I began working with David and helping create a business plan to expand the camp – geographically (initially it was held twice per year – once in Los Angeles and once in New York) and in terms of concept (e.g., duration, focus).  I found myself meeting with Hollywood producers in Bel Air mansions, and all sorts of interesting characters from the entertainment industry.

The resulting camp expansion has been successful – primarily due to David’s genius as a music producer and promoter – with a TV reality series in the works, regional camps, corporate camps (think about bringing one to your corporate training/motivational event!) and a UK based camp that features one week of recording at the hallowed Abbey Road Studios in London (where the Beatles and Pink Floyd recorded their masterpieces) capped by performances at a Soho, London club and finally at The Cavern in Liverpool.

It was the recent UK camp that was the focus of my latest sabbatical.  And what a time it was!  (More on that, perhaps, in a subsequent post!)

Lessons in Learning, Team Building and Organizational Change

So, what have I learned from my Rock Camp experiences?  (I have now participated in multiple Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camps, playing in Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles, and even in an experimental one-day camp where we opened for Journey and Def Leppard at a stadium show in Columbus, OH, and my latest saga recording at Abbey Road).

1. Change and opportunity are all about taking risks – being prepared to make a fool of yourself, and damn the consequences!  For many of us, most of the time, fear of failure is a huge inhibitor to success.  Sometimes, it manifests itself strangely as fear of success!  In that first camp in 2005, I found myself in a band with 3 guitarists but no bass player.  I reluctantly volunteered to take bass duties on one song, having never played a bass guitar.  (For the uninitiated, the bass typically has fewer strings, but a much longer neck, meaning the fret positions your hands have learned over years of playing no longer work!  Less obvious, but a huge unexpected insight to me was that the bass should really be approached as a percussion instrument, with more in common with the drums than the melodies of the song.)  Much to my horror, we were to open our stage show at The House of Blues with an old Animals song, “We Gotta Get Outta This Place!” which starts with a bass riff – so screwing that up would be, to say the least, horribly noticeable!  As a result of taking this risk, I’ve come to love bass guitar, have played with bands, outside of the camps, in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Austin, and am engaged in a couple of musical projects.  I’ve learned that bass players generally have an easier time getting gigs, and I’ve learned to listen to music differently than I did before trying my hand at bass.  Best of all, I learned to be less intimidated by risk taking.
2. The old ‘forming, storming, norming and performing’ homily of team building is not only true – each step is essential.  If you think you’ve managed to bypass the storming stage, you are wrong.  You simply are not yet a bonded team, and if you think you are ready for performing, you will find yourself storming during a performance – not a pretty sight!  I had one camp experience where we all seemed to gel.  The band members had common musical tastes, similar skill levels, and seemed to genuinely hit it off.  I foolishly thought we’d finessed the storming stage.  Wrong!  During our first stage performance, our singer got a panic attack, and stormed off the stage and out of the club!  We weren’t quite as bonded and comfortable with each other as I’d believed.   Lesson learned – you have to go through the four stages.  If you have not had disputes and differences of opinion in your team (or band or whatever), you just have not yet uncovered them, or are too polite to confront them.  Hidden just below the surface, these dysfunctionalities lie waiting to trip you up – at the worst possible moment!
3. Learning is exhausting – and exhilarating!  The most learning (at least, for me) takes place when I can immerse myself in the learning experience.  Regrettably, in today’s hectic, multitasking world, it’s hard to carve out the time for learning.  I know there will be periods of forward progress when anything seems possible, and horribly dark periods, when it all seems like a lost cause and a waste of everybody’s time.  But with real commitment and focus, great things are possible, even from mere mortals with very limited musical talent such as me!  A couple of years ago I was in a camp band with Teddy “Zigzag” Andreadis, who had toured with Guns ‘n Roses (among other major bands.)  Furthermore, Slash the exceptional guitarist from Guns ‘n Roses was going to be joining us in the studio.  We decided to learn Paradise City, a choice agreed to before I realized how fast some of the bass lines were – seemingly beyond my humble abilities.  Within a few hours, I had the part nailed – even Slash complimented me on the bass part.  Some months later, our band from that camp decided to play a reunion gig in New York at Arlene’s Grocery.  “No problem!” I thought.  Then, to my horror, I found I could not play the part!  I went back to some of the video from that camp to prove to myself that it had not been a dream – that I really had learned and played the part!  Knowing that gave me the confidence to try again – and have a very successful and rewarding performance in New York.  Lesson learned?  Learning takes tremendous energy and focus – and the courage to get through all sorts of setbacks.  Don’t agree to learn a new skill unless you are prepared to immerse yourself.  And to commit the time to do it properly!