I think the experience in Paris where he composed and recorded a film score for director Louis Malle (for Elevator to the Gallows,
1958) in a single night was important. There he might have realized
that simplicity was one way to create great music in a very short time.
Maybe he realized that this recipe could be improved further: get good
songs, simplify them as much as possible, get the best players in the
world, and force them to listen to the music by not telling them what
to do.
Rob Austin: The "business" version of what Carl
just said might be: get great materials, simplify the task down to its
essential elements, put your smartest people on it, and force them to
listen—to each other, to the interaction between the company and its
customers, and to the market.
Q: Kind of Blue was recorded in
two short sessions of only five and three hours, respectively, and
Davis often used only the first takes. What about short sessions and
first takes helped the musicians' creativity to flow?
Carl Størmer: As in conversation, everything in
jazz is about the interaction that takes place between the players. The
legendary recordings of jazz are the result not only of superb
individual performances, but of great listening and interactions within
a small number of improvisers as well. In order to make this work, the
players adhere to a set of shared codes—almost like language—consisting
of, among other things, key, tempo, groove, rhythm, song form,
tradition, and harmony.
Miles Davis was known to have a preference for first takes. First
takes often end up being the best takes because they have a magical
quality that only exists when musicians are approaching something
without an overly detailed plan. Working without a script or with a
very loose script forces you to listen intensely to ensure that your
own contribution is contextually relevant to what everybody else is
doing in the moment. Very often, this openness is gone after the first
take. On a second take, many musicians will try to improve their own
performance, and just by focusing on their own performance they will
lose some of their ability to listen to everyone else. As a result,
each individual performance might be more perfect on a second take, but
the enhanced individual perfection comes at a collective price often
resulting in a decrease in the interaction quality. The end result is
music less spontaneous, more stiff, less alive.
Rob Austin: This is something we've studied in
other contexts as part of a larger project on innovation. One of the
big problems in innovation is how to free yourself from preconceptions,
to get outside your expectations and normal tendencies, so that you can
create something really new, without creating more risk and problems
than benefit. Often it can be risky to push people or a process to "the
edge," so to speak—something might break. But what we've seen in
various cases is people, teams, and companies coming up with strategies
to get out to the edge, without causing a mess or without suffering
serious damage when you do make a mess. We see, for example, people
getting really clever at experiments with cheap parts, or doing the
edgy, risky things inside a computer-based simulation.
Miles Davis shows us another way. Get really good people and put
them in situations they can handle, but also circumstances that
challenge them and their preconceptions. What would happen if you put
great people on a business problem and refused to let them solve it in
a habitual way?
Carl Størmer: Miles Davis forced the musicians to
approach the music without any expectations or preconceptions, often by
giving them minimal sketches and sparse instructions. He would more
often tell them what not to play. Think about how valuable it
would be for teams of business innovators to be free of preconceptions
but as skilled at their task as Davis's musicians were.
One more thing: I think time pressure is also important. Often,
short sessions are a result of busy players, expensive studio time, and
booking schedules being made on short notice. Not so different from the
way a lot of things happen in business. This results, sometimes, in
mistakes. But in jazz, we often do something interesting in the
aftermath of mistakes: we repeat them. For instance, on the song
"Freddie Freeloader" Davis comes in one bar early at one point. The
band adjusts to this unexpected entry by the leader in such a seamless
way that very few people notice the subtle glitch. This is the power of
collective improvisation: Everybody listens to everybody else and
adjusts to what they are doing. In jazz, the short session has always
been the norm.
Q: What aspects of Davis's innovation seem
unusual compared with companies and creative enterprises you have
studied? Are there aspects of intellectual property rights that arise
from this case, given the contribution of all the musicians?
Rob Austin: Well, Miles Davis certainly had an
unusual leadership style, if you think in a managerial context. For one
thing, he often didn't say very much, and when he did speak, he
sometimes provoked people. Provocation is, of course, one way of
jolting people into doing something new. As I've mentioned, we've
definitely seen some parallels between how Davis worked and how
companies push to "the edge" in search of innovation. What is
particularly remarkable about Davis in a business context, though, is
how radically he detached from his past to make a more interesting
future. The inability of business to do that has often resulted in
infamous episodes. For example, IBM's refusal to "cannibalize" its
success in mainframe computers by pushing PCs and the Internet
eventually got it into really big trouble in the early 1990s.
Carl Størmer: On intellectual property rights, the
extent to which improvisers should receive partial ownership is an
unresolved issue in jazz. It is generally accepted that Bill Evans, the
piano player on the session (except on "Freddie Freeloader," where
Wynton Kelly plays), was the composer of both "Blue in Green" and
"Flamenco Sketches" and an important collaborator on some of the other
material. However, he never received proper credit. (Miles Davis is
listed as the composer of all the songs on the album.) It's often been
true that individual musicians don't receive royalties.
Rob Austin: Just as individual employees often don't when they invent something on behalf of a company.
I'd say there's also an issue that interacts with the inclination of
people like Davis to try new things. What seems to matter most to Davis
is pushing into new, interesting territory—creating something new. What
matters as well to a business is capturing the value that is created by
the new thing, or by its introduction. It might be hard to get people
like Davis to care as much about "value capture" as they care about
"value creation."
Q: What are you working on next?
Rob Austin: My work focuses on the role of
aesthetics in business competitiveness, and I'm continuing to play
around with the case as a literary form. I'm working on a project right
now, for example, where we are trying to translate one of my cases into
a "graphic novel."
Carl Størmer: I'll keep working on ways that jazz and improvisation inform management action and decisions. 
About the author
Martha Lagace is senior editor of HBS Working Knowledge.
