Yes to the Mess. Frank J. Barrett
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. Now Hughes and the men under his command faced an angry standoff in highly uncertain territory. The soldiers were tense as an increasingly hostile crowd began to crowd in on them. “It seemed to turn like that, but it was a very deliberate turn,” Hughes said later. “If somebody shot a round in the air, there was going to be some sort of massacre.”
“Everybody smile!” he ordered his troops, as an embedded CBS News camera caught the scene. “Don’t point your weapons at them. Take a knee! Relax!” The “take a knee” order seemed to buy time, so Hughes followed up by ordering his men to withdraw, and just as suddenly, the situation pivoted once more, and goodwill was restored.
Reporter Dan Baum later interviewed Hughes for a New Yorker account of the incident.14 Where had he learned this strategy? Baum asked. How did he know that pointing his own rifle down and ordering his men to take a knee would tame the crowd? Nowhere, Hughes said in essence. He was making it up on the spot, as he went along.
At first glance, Hughes’s answer would seem to align with the popular understanding of jazz musicians as free-spirited, free-form performers. But in reality his answer goes to the deeper nature of the art form. U.S. military training manuals generally teach two standard responses to situations such as Hughes and the 101st Battalion faced: use helicopter blades to push away angry crowds or fire warning shots. The last step in the training is the final solution: shoot to kill. So when Hughes ordered his men to “get down on one knee and smile,” he was in fact improvising. But his solution was also the result of relentless learning and a disciplined imagination that, in an instant, took into account the complex tribal dynamics that all foreign troops faced in Iraq. Hughes threw out the rules, to be sure, but he didn’t throw out his deeper engagement and his deeper desire to express respect toward the Iraqis. Even under the intense pressure of the moment, he managed to stay fully engaged in the details and in the aggregate. That’s what made the difference, and that’s great jazz in a nutshell.
This book challenges the myths or belief systems we hold about leadership. It’s often assumed that without singular direction, groups turn chaotic or unruly. What we are learning, though, is that without being guided by an outside entity or prescripted plan, a system can self-organize and produce even more efficient and effective outcomes. Think how different this model is from the one we have been taught. We were told that social systems need hierarchy to function and coordinate. But when birds flock, when cities form and expand, there is no controlling singular force. Individuals act unpredictably, and yet a coherent and productive organization emerges. Just as in jazz. The message is provocative: an emergent system is smarter than the individual members. And systems grow smarter over time. The jazz mind-set is one that recognizes the emerging coherence amid constant flux.
In a system of distributed, decentralized control, what are the implications for leadership? How does someone lead “structured chaos”? What is the role of the leader in a group creation? Leaders often must act without full awareness of the consequences of their action, even without any full articulation of what the plan might be or how it