Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

A few months ago, I mentioned the Washington Post story where they got Joshua Bell to busk in the Metro. It prompted a blog post about the importance of context, but it also made me realize I miss having music in my life. I actually started listening to the audio of the performance for a few days before I realized I could just buy a few CDs. So I bought a Joshua Bell CD and a Leila Josefowicz CD, but neither of those were quite what I wanted.

I really liked the unaccompanied purity of the pieces Bell performed in the Metro. So I ordered a CD I’d thought about getting for a while, the Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suites performed by Yo-Yo Ma. I had fond memories of these pieces from hearing somebody perform them at the Cafe on Sunday at Burning Man in 2000 - they seemed appropriately peaceful and reflective after the chaos of the Burn. And I was pleased to find that Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of them was as satisfying I had hoped.

I later was at HousingWorks and happened to see the Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould and bought it since I’d always wanted a copy. And it’s great - I’m listening to it right now. All of the different variations of a simple theme show off Bach’s playful mastery. Okay, I’m also getting the urge to watch Silence of the Lambs as Hannibal Lecter listened to this as well, but that’s a separate issue.

Now that I had works of unaccompanied cello and piano by Bach, I needed to find the equivalent for the violin, my former instrument. I remembered the Bell article mentioning that he had played the Chaconne from the Partita in D Minor, so I looked that up on Amazon and discovered that Bach wrote three unaccompanied sonatas and partitas for violin. After reading various reviews, I settled on the Sonatas and Partitas as performed by Nathan Milstein (although I was tempted by the Heifetz and Perlman performances).

I’m not quite sure why Bach appeals to me so much. I love his work in all of its forms. The St. Matthew’s Passion is one of my favorite choral works, as is the Mass in B Minor. The Bach Double Concerto for violin was the piece I most wanted to learn when I was a kid. But I really like these unaccompanied works. They are almost like a magic trick - there’s nothing up his sleeve, no orchestra to fill in the gaps, and yet this wonderful music keeps pouring out of these seemingly simple setups.

Bach wrote the rules on counterpoint. Literally. In my harmony and counterpoint class in college, our teacher told us that student composers in the centuries after Bach were given his cantatas and motets with notes or chords missing and had to figure out what Bach did, because Bach had constructed his pieces so that there was only one possible solution.

And yet despite working within these rules, Bach always found ways to be inventive and surprising. When sight-reading Bach, I always had to pay attention because the line would be going one way and then take a completely unexpected turn. But after singing it a few times, I would understand the underlying rightness of what he did. If he had continued in the original direction, it would have been boring and saccharine, as evidenced by the chorales in his cantatas that were intended as the Sunday hymns for the masses to sing.

These unaccompanied works are a great example of embracing constraints. One instrument. No accompaniment. Strict rules of counterpoint. No dissonance. No funky rhythms or time signatures. And yet Bach created these wonderfully complex works that continue to resonate for centuries. I’ve been listening to them almost every morning, and I still haven’t gotten to the point where I know what’s coming next, a point which I can reach within a couple listenings of most pop songs. No matter how strict the rules are, there’s room for innovation and creativity and surprising direction.

This evening I went to go see So Percussion perform Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. Long-time readers will remember that I’m a complete nut for Reich’s work, so I was looking forward to seeing it again, especially since the other So Percussion concert I’d been to was enjoyable. Alas, I was incredibly disappointed.

My expectations were clearly too high going in. I’d only seen 18 performed by Steve Reich’s ensemble, a group that has been performing the piece for 30 years, and has it polished to an incredible level of perfection. Their total mastery of the piece and comfort with its rhythms allowed them to move beyond the performance into this whole other space of art and meaning.

Given my recent posts, it’s probably not surprising that my thoughts during the performance tied this back into management. It’s another illustration that no matter how great the plan is, the team must execute for the plan to work. In this case, I know this is a great piece, and I love the ways in which the chords build on themselves and the interplay between the different instruments. And when it’s performed as intended, it’s a spiritual experience for me. But when the same piece is performed short of perfection, it falls apart into a disjointed set of bangings. Execution matters. Experience matters. Deliberate practice matters.

So why did the performance not work for me? A few things I noticed:

• The tempo was set just a bit fast, and they seemed to do each element the minimum number of times, so everything felt rushed rather than deliberate.
• The performers were excited, which is normally a good thing, but they overplayed their excitement to the point of hamminess.
• The sound mixing was off, so that the singers were sometimes inaudible and sometimes overmiked, making it hard for them to stay in tune with each other.
• The violinist was out of tune - there was one exposed string section, where her A-string was painfully flat, and she kept on playing it and I kept on cringing.
• The coordination wasn’t as tight, which isn’t surprising since the performers had come together for this one set of performances, but there was some noticeable awkwardness compared to the Reich ensemble.

Nothing major. No one thing that leaped out at me and ruined the performance. It was a combination of little things that didn’t quite fit.

This relates to one of the points I made in my last post, where I stated that a team can be greater than the sum of its parts. And when everything locks into place, the results are amazing. The musical analogy I came up with is the overtone series. When a chord is perfectly in tune, you can actually hear the higher order harmonics audibly. If any element of the chord is just slightly out of tune, the chord will still sound okay, but you lose the spine-tingling harmonics. Listening to a chorus like the Tallis Scholars is great because they nail their chords and all of the overtones just pop out of the texture. There are more notes being heard than are actually being sung.

Something similar happens in a well-functioning team. When everybody is pulling together and perfectly aligned, extra output just appears from the synergistic effects of the team. One plus one plus one somehow equals four. But here’s the downside - like the overtone series, if anything is even slightly out of alignment, you lose all of that bonus.

It’s interesting to me as a student of management because it demonstrates that getting 90% of the way there means nothing. It’s only when all aspects of an organization are aligned 100% does it really take off. This reminds me of Built to Last, where the authors point out that the successful companies have built the core values of the company into every aspect of the company. Doing 90% doesn’t cut it because it raises the expectations and then doesn’t fulfill them. To take a made-up example, a company could put all the elements of an employee empowerment program in place, but if one manager micromanages their employees, it may be even more demotivating than if the company had done nothing.

I think that’s what happened at the performance tonight. It was a solid performance, and most of the audience enjoyed it. But having seen two perfect performances, where I’d seen the synergistic effect of the performers and the piece feeding on each other, this was far short of that experience. And because it was almost good enough, it was almost more frustrating than if it had been just terrible. I wanted to like it. I almost liked it. But I ended up being disappointed.

The take home lesson is contained in the post title. Notice the discordant elements in your company. If something doesn’t align with the company goals, remove it. It might seem minor, but it could be preventing synergistic organization overtones from forming. It’s like Peopleware’s description of how to build a team - first avoid all the ways in which you can prevent a team from forming, avoiding teamicide. It’s also similar to the Broken Windows theory, where fixing the little things makes it easier to fix the big things because all elements of the system are then in alignment.

Of course, the first step to figuring out which elements are discordant is figuring out what the goals are. Until you know where you want to go, you can’t align everything else. But if you know what you want to accomplish, and you remove all the obstacles, even seemingly minor ones, then great things can happen. You’ll hear those overtones pop into existence and the company will achieve greater things than you thought possible.