HOW PAUL MCCARTNEY MANAGES HIS EMPLOYEE CULTURE

HOW PAUL MCCARTNEY MANAGES HIS EMPLOYEE CULTURE

Sgt. Pepper’s is having its 50th anniversary this year, with a super deluxe reissue version released today. Although Lennon was responsible for the two best songs, the album was McCartney’s concept and he wrote or co-wrote nine of the thirteen tracks. He’s the only surviving serious spokesperson for this seminal work and there’s going to be a lot of press about Paul.

There’s not going to be a lot press about what it’s like to work for Paul. He never talks about that and neither do members of his employee culture.

Except.

As part of my book, Under the Hood, which is about how an employee culture really works and how to gain its maximum commitment, I wanted to answer how you influence and inspire an employee culture that already has to be expert at its job or the job couldn’t even get done. Amongst intimate book interviews with the director of the Super Bowl film crew, ex-Muppet master and film director Frank Oz, and the CEO of CNN about the major stress of his reporters trying to capture a story in the middle of a war zone, I spent a lot of time with guitarist Brian Ray. Brian has been a member of Paul McCartney’s band for fifteen years, which is five years longer than Paul’s first band was even around.

Included here is an excerpt from that Under the Hood interview. But first, let’s summarize what Paul McCartney would say to you about how to lead your own employee culture to greatness:

  • You will never create passion in others unless you start with it yourself. If your only passion is to make money, the cost of that money will always prove more expensive and difficult than it needs to be: your customer isn’t infatuated with your revenue concerns. Your passion has to start with loving the craft of what you do and what it does for others.
  • If you hire the best and expect the best, you had better be the best yourself. Be the constant, restless, forward motion example of the standard that you expect your culture to follow.
  • Management controls performance in an employee culture because it impacts skill; it’s a matter of monitoring, analyzing, and directing. If you want to improve the skill of your culture, you should definitely manage it. Leadership won’t control anything. Leadership, which is a matter of modeling, inspiring, and reinforcing, creates performance in an employee culture because it impacts willingness.

The relative quality of performance from your employee culture probably has little to do with its skill. Those in the culture already know how to do their jobs—you hired them because they had that basic capability, and once they get an orientation to your products and procedures, they’re skilled. From that point on, the quality and quantity of your employee culture’s performance depends on its willingness to use that skill to the utmost, regardless of whether you’re hovering over it like a supervisory gargoyle.

If you’re trying to get more skill from already skilled people, you’re pushing a dead button. This makes leadership more important than management: How can you control what you haven’t first created?

  • Put as little as possible between you and your customer, no matter whether or not your work is directly customer facing. The magic moment where company and customer unite is the essence and soul of your business; don’t ever let your culture think anything else is a substitute. It’s that connection, that impact, that makes the work profound.

And now, from Under the Hood:

A ROCK AND ROLL ICON TAKES THE STAGE

Tennessee, 7:55 p.m. on a steamy, sticky Southern night. It is the darkened main stage at Bonaroo, one of the largest music festivals in America. Over 100,000 people shift, stretch, and paw the ground expectantly in front of them. They have come to experience the music of a generation, of every generation most of them can recall.

Behind the stage is another crowd, this one numbering about 150. For most of them, work done, it is time for a last mental review of their careful preparations throughout the day. For some of them, it is time to take positions for the night that is about to begin. This is the employee culture—road crew and band—that works for Paul McCartney.

Only the best are hired to work with Paul, and it’s a dream job. Well, there is this one nightmarish possibility: If something goes wrong in front of those 100,000 people, every one of them will recognize it. Instantly. They know every note and every word of every song as well as the people playing them do.

“Anything can happen,” Paul’s longtime rhythm and bass guitarist Brian Ray tells me. “Paul likes to rock. We are not playing to Pro Tools, pre-taped material, or time references. We’re not tethered to anything but each other up there. We’re on natural monitors, speakers and boxes on the ground just like the old days.

“We are sharing a live musical experience like real musicians have always done, and it requires you to have visual and audio connection with each other,” he explains. “It is an immediate, vital music experience for Paul’s band. And it’s not just us; we carry a regular road crew of about one hundred people, but we add fifty or sixty new crew members for each show—there are construction, security, lighting, video, riggers, sound engineers, guitar technicians, just so many elements. Our crew can make or break the course of a show at any minute within it.”

I’m Down

“Once the show starts, our guitars are handed to us by human beings who are on the side of the stage tuning them, and there are a lot of strings, switches, and batteries that could go bad and change the show,” Brian continues. “It’s very real.”

“How real is very real?” I ask.

“Well, on this tour we played Glasgow,” he says. “I’ve been starting the show alone on a twelve-string, just me on stage before the band kicks in and Paul comes out. A battery had fallen out of the guitar being delivered to me, which nobody realized. I’m on the stage in front of 40,000 people, it’s the first song, and there’s absolutely no sound. We’re trying to figure out what could have gone wrong, trying this and that.

Paul’s just standing there looking at me, and I’m whispering to my guitar tech, ‘Get me an electric guitar now ¬¬– I need to start the show!”

“But that was one of sixty times we’ve performed that first song, and the only time something went wrong.”

Listen to What the Man Says

“How do we all experience Paul? He is a great leader and a great boss. He wants the best out of people and he really gets it. Not because he’s a tyrant in any way, because he certainly isn’t, but because he stays on it. He throws down every time we play. He’s going to step on the gas and reach deep every night, because he loves music and because he came from the clubs. That’s still who he is.”

“How much is he in control of the concert experience?” I ask. “Everyone is aware that Paul is aware of every aspect of the show,” Brian insists. “He’s still driven, still that guy who’s the best in Liverpool. He still wants to do mind-blowing work. He wants to impress. He still loves seeing the lighters in the air. He doesn’t see his music as a museum piece; he wants it to be a living, breathing, vital thing. In concert, he just goes out there and performs like a human being who loves music, not like an idol who loves fame.

“And that example inspires all of us to do the same,” he explains. “Everybody wants to be part of this . . . every single department backstage and onstage is making the eyeball shine on top of the pyramid. That thing at the top is Paul. We are there to help him put over his vision every night.”

Good Day Sunshine

McCartney is renowned for being financially generous to his band and crew, but Brian doesn’t want to talk about that; he wants to talk about this: “Paul is maybe the least cynical man on the planet. And the ones who share that worldview are the ones that stay with us the longest. It’s a trickle-down thing. By his essence, I think Paul attracts people who carry that same sort of ethos of quality and of service to an audience and to music. That spirit. Everybody in the crew and everybody in the band pushes forward with that same sort of love of humanity and hope for a future.”

He pauses and then says quietly, “He has made me a better musician, and he has made me a better human being.”

I should leave it there, but I can’t. Paul McCartney is Brian’s boss. Brian’s job is to play Beatles songs to huge, cheering audiences. “Let’s get tactical.” I suggest. “How does one ace a job interview with Paul McCartney?”

“Sure, okay, let me explain,” he says. “In 2002, Paul had hired a producer, David Kahne, who has also produced a basketful of number one records in his great career. He’s the guy who had the vision to put together Paul’s band. They had chosen the drummer, Abe Laboriel Jr., who is a buddy of mine, and he gave David my number. I didn’t even have a cell phone, but I happened to be at home on Monday when the call came through to audition with Paul.

“I first met Paul the night before the audition, and it was as simple as, ‘I want to make a toast to my friends here with me tonight at this dinner. I want to welcome my older friends, and I want to welcome our new friends, David Kahne and Brian Ray.’ And the next day I played my first gig with him, although it was only one song.”

“Well, that couldn’t have been too hard,” I say. “What was the gig?”

“The Super Bowl.”

He adds, “The day after the show I was ready to say good-bye, and thank you, and it was a privilege, and I’ll never forget it. Paul said, ‘Welcome aboard. Stick with Abe and Rusty. They’ll show you the ropes. I’ll see you at rehearsal for the tour in five weeks.’ And that was that.”

“Well, that helps,” I mutter.

“Great, man!” Brian says.


Stan Slap wrote the New York Times and Wall St. Journal bestselling books about business culture. He is also the CEO of SLAP, the international consulting company specializing in achieving maximum commitment from manager, employee and customer cultures – the three groups that are deciding the success of your business while you read this sentence.

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Back on the Smack Tour – Stan Slap talks Music

Back on the Smack Tour – Stan Slap talks Music

I’m so sick of musicians and their wretched excesses. Wretched healthy excesses, I mean. The more any great artist improves their personal condition, the more their professional work tumbles in bland decline. It never fails: They get their crap together and their music goes into the toilet.

Who could deny that their emotional vulnerability, inappropriate rage, distorted perspective, egomaniacal point of view and chronic inability to manage even the simplest aspects of their lives in any rational manner... has produced some great music

Eric Clapton was on fire when he was on heroin. Bob Dylan’s greatest writing occurred when he was neurotic and reclusive. Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Bon Scott, Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia never got it together and their music will live forever even if they clearly won’t. Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Billie Holiday were either wrecks or recovering wrecks throughout their careers and their music stayed real and deep. It’s as capable of divinely transporting us at Starbucks today as when it was originally recorded in a painful, besotted haze.

Jimmy Page got off hard drugs and recorded an album of old Led Zeppelin songs with The Black Crowes. You call that a benefit of drug-free thinking?

We love our favorite musicians and we don’t want to see them hurt themselves by no longer hurting themselves. The Who lost nut job drummer Keith Moon and who cares about anything they’ve done since? Tom Waits stopped living in lonely bachelor squalor at the Tropicana Motel with only a bottle of beer and jar of mustard in the refrigerator. He got married, moved to Sonoma, and these days his music is revered by critics—but in those days it was revered by a bunch of people who actually listened to it and bought it. At the height of their fame, Jabbaesque Blues Traveler harp player John Popper lost 200 pounds and the band has never sold more than 200 copies of any album since. The Stones are kept alive not by their music or marketing but by Keith Richards’ ongoing shtick of snorting his father’s ashes or getting his entire blood supply transfused. I like to listen to Oasis and I don’t want to hear that the Gallagher brothers are getting along at last.

It’s better to burn out than to fade away, said Neil Young -- a guy who should spend more time listening when he says things like that. Maybe if Rod Stewart had accidentally strangled himself in some humiliating attempt at sexual asphyxia back when he was in The Faces we would still be listening to him. Or at least we wouldn’t have to.

Of course, we celebrate when someone triumphs over their personal demons and demonstrates the awareness, determination and individual integrity that become life-affirming examples of the best that human beings are capable of. But not these human beings. It’s not fair, it’s not right and it’s not a very good financial return for all we’ve invested in them. Who supported their bad habits in the first place by buying their records and concert tickets when we never knew what we were going to get? It was us. They owe us.

What is the future of our music if all our favorite musicians begin living organically, raising children and getting all American Idol and corporate on us?

Thank God for Hip Hop, is all I’ve got to say.

R.I.P. Amy Winehouse

 

Bury My Heart at Conference Room B – The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Commited Managers

Bury My Heart at Conference Room B – The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Commited Managers

This is not a management book. This is a book for managers.

Ever have the feeling that no matter how rewarding your job is that there's an entirely different level of success and fulfillment available to you? Lingering in the mist, just out of reach…
There is, and Stan Slap is going to help you get it.

You hold in your hands the book that entirely redraws the potential of being a manager. It will show you how to gain the one competency most critical to achieving business impact, but it won't stop there. This book will put a whole new level of meaning into your job description.

You Will Never Really Work for Your Company Until Your Company Really Works for You.

Bury My Heart at Conference Room B is about igniting the massive power of any manager's emotional commitment to his or her company-worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. Sometimes companies get this from their managers in the early garage days or in times of tremendous gain, but it's almost unheard of to get it on a sustained, self-reinforced basis.

Of course your company is only going to get it if you're willing to give it. Slap proves that emotional commitment comes from the ability to live your deepest personal values at work and then provides a remarkable process that allows you to use your own values to achieve tremendous success.

This is not soft stuff; it is the stuff of hard-core results.

Bury My Heart at Conference Room B is the highest-rated management development solution at a number of the world's highest-rated companies—companies that don't include "patience" on their list of corporate values. It has been exhaustively researched and bench tested with tens of thousands of real managers in more than seventy countries. You'll hear directly from managers about how this legendary method has transformed their careers and their lives.

As Big as It Gets Stan Slap is doing nothing less than making the business case for a manager's humanity-for every manager and the companies that depend on them. Bury My Heart at Conference Room B gives managers the urgency to change their world and the energy to do it. It will stir the soul, race the heart, and throb the foot used for acceleration.

Buckle Up. We're Going Off-Road. Slap is smart, provocative, wickedly funny and heartfelt. He fearlessly takes on some of the most cherished myths of management for the illogic they are and celebrates the experience of being a manager in all of its potential and potential weirdness. And he talks to managers like they really talk to themselves.

"This book is game changing in a way I have never seen in a business book. I learned about myself and gained new insights into the work I've been doing for thirty years. It is a spectacular read."
– John Riccitiello, CEO, Electronic Arts

1. New York Times bestseller
2. Wall St. Journal bestseller
3. USA Today bestseller
4. 800-CEO-READ best in category
5. Inc. Best of 2010 list
6. Fast Company Best of 2010 list
7. Miami Herald Top 10 business books list
8. Soundview Executive Summaries Top 30 best list
9. Booklist: starred review
10. Publisher’s Weekly: “must read”

 

 

VIDEO: How to Change Company Culture and Innovate by Steve Faktor & Stan Slap

On Steve Faktor's latest podcast (subscribe here), guest Stan Slap confirmed his findings. (slap is a corporate culture guru and fellow speaker at the BusinessNext conference.)  According to slap, “Most companies misperceive intellectual engagement for emotional engagement. It’s the emotional engagement that’s critical.” And when it comes to achieving change, slap agrees, “If you want the culture to buy it, you have to know how to sell it to them.”

View the Forbes article: The 9 Corporate Personality Types And How to Inspire Them to Innovate

IdeaFaktory Website: Episode 3: Slap out of it! How to Change Company Culture and Innovate