Singer Idina Menzel knows how to live with mistakes

Tony-award winning actress Idina Menzel performed her megahit "Let It Go" as part of the New York Times Square celebration on New Year's Eve. And she was not perfect, resulting in the expected tide of Twitter snark (a brief taste can be found here). But even if her performance wasn't flawless, Menzel's response was perfect:

There are about 
3 million notes in a two-and-a-half-hour musical; being a perfectionist, it took me a long time 
to realize that if I'm hitting 75 percent of them, 
I'm succeeding. Performing isn't only about
 the acrobatics and the high notes: It's staying in the moment, connecting with the audience 
in an authentic way, and making yourself 
real to them through the music. I am more than the notes I hit, and that's how I try to approach my life. You can't get it all right all the time, but 
you can try your best. If you've done that, all 
that's left is to accept your shortcomings and have 
the courage to try to overcome them.

As Brene Brown states, you invite criticism simply by "stepping into the arena." Social media amplifies (and dumbs down) criticism - snark is so easy. To accept criticism with grace (even if it doesn't deserve it), forgive yourself, and work on improving is the mark of a true professional. And as Garr Reynolds points out in his discussion of this situation in Presentation Zen, Menzel asserts rightly that authenticity and connection trump perfection.

By committing her high-profile mistake, and most importantly by her handling of it, Idina Menzel has taught something important and useful to all of us.

U2 rejection letter from 1979

Ben Greenman of the New Yorker shared a cool rejection letter that U2 received in 1979:

It's from the Robert Stigwood Organisation, who may have been best known as the Bee Gees' label. Somehow Paul Hewson (now better known as Bono) and the boys overcame that setback.

Failure Forum: Learning from Redline Entertainment, Best Buy's Media experiment

This first appeared on Matt Hunt's blog. Reposted by permission.

In the early 2000s Best Buy launched their first entertainment media label Redline Entertainment.  The goal was to help grow the organization vertically into the entertainment industry.

As an entertainment label Best Buy would sign artists to create new material, produce the content, and provided distribution of the final products into retail outlets – Best Buy stores and others.  This was a new area for Best Buy but it was tangent to their core business of selling electronics, appliances, and media.  Coming off of a successful national expansion Best Buy had strong momentum and it was hungry for opportunities to continue to grow their business.

Jennifer “JJ” Schaidler had unknowingly altered her career when she took the lead role in building out Redline Entertainment.  As with many innovation projects the team had a good plan in place but without all of the pieces together it would be almost impossible to test individual hypothesis.  Redline’s success didn’t hinge on just one element but on a series of organizational errors that JJ documented for the company in what came to be known as the Redline Whitepaper.

What makes JJ’s story unique is that she not only was willing to own her mistakes but she was willing to document them and share them with others inside the organization.  Many executives would cower from this idea as career suicide but not JJ.  During my tenure at Best Buy, JJ’s Redline Whitepaper had provided an example of what good innovation work should look like: build your hypothesis, test your hypothesis, and share the results of your tests – good or bad.  This is JJ’s story.

1. So Redline Entertainment was going to be Best Buy’s entertainment media label.  How did that idea come about?

Our Senior Vice President of Entertainment, Gary Arnold, had the idea of growing our business by creating our own label and developing our own content.  This was right around the time that Best Buy had purchased Musicland (including Sam Goody) and Future Shop in Canada.  The idea had come from two concepts:  1) that the combined entities offered a huge distribution channel and 2) the artists were becoming increasingly frustrated with their labels and their binding contracts.  The plan was that Best Buy could go straight to the artists and offer distribution but allow them to own their masters.

At that same time, Best Buy was defining the ecosystems that they wanted to grow and expand into diverse businesses –even non-retail businesses.  Entertainment was one of those ecosystems.  Starting a label seemed like an adjacent idea where we could bring the leverage of the enterprise with all of the storefront assets.  We had been developing direct relationships with the artists and had connections within the manager community.

A critical piece to the puzzle was that Redline also had a distribution relationship with RED distribution (no affiliation).  RED was the independent arm of SONY distribution and they were in theory able to get Redline products into Target, Wal-Mart and all the rest of the music retailers.  That foot print would allow us to offer the same distribution as a major label.  The advantage would come from additional marketing and advertising from the Best Buy entities.

Ultimately the competitive nature of the other retailers was the undoing of Redline.  They knew that the products from Redline came from Best Buy and they didn’t want to support a competitor.

2. When you committed to the project did you consider what would happen if you failed?  What kind of odds were you giving yourself for success?

I actually thought there was a likelihood of failure but it didn’t concern me.  My perspective was that the company was growing so fast that it would find a place for me.  In retrospect, I should have been more concerned.  Only after I had taken this new role was it clear to me that going back to my old role as Vice President of Advertising wasn’t an option.

3. Where there ever expectations set by the company for what would happen if things didn’t work out?

No.  Truthfully we had never done these types of innovation projects before so it wasn’t discussed.

4. How long did the project last?  What was the ratio of the time spent planning vs. executing?

Around two years.  The planning phase was really getting the business plan approved and that took 3-6 months.  Execution or “signing” of artists and projects were started before the plan had full approval.

5. Was there ever a clear indication that they project wasn’t going to succeed?

Yes, there were several factors that popped up where we knew that we had problems: 1) our inability to get significant radio air play for our artists – radio was still a driving force behind sales, 2) the resistance/refusal from Target / Wal-Mart to buy Redline products, and 3) the lack of incoming revenue while signing on new projects.  If we were starting our own external company we would expect there to be a lag while building the portfolio of business but within a corporation there quickly needed to be something that was showing a positive return.

6. What was the most difficult task in shutting the business down?

For me the most difficult task was letting go of our people.  The truth was that they didn’t do anything wrong.  It wasn’t their fault.  Many people did find other roles at Best Buy so we were pretty successful at transitioning but for those that didn’t make the transition it was painful.

7. After you had shutdown Redline you did something that had never been done before at Best Buy, you wrote a formal whitepaper on what had been learned through the project.  Can you explain why and how that happened?

In a budget presentation with the President, he commented that “I’d be happy to lose $7m dollars on Redline if we really learned something from it.”  In addition, he was always referencing the Clay Christensen book – Innovator’s Dilemma.  I read the book and believed that Best Buy was exactly in that classic problem.  So I wrote the white paper as a way of illustrating to the company that we would need to change how we do innovation if we wanted to succeed.  At that same time Best Buy had hired the consulting firm Strategos to help build out an innovation process.  I participated in that work and witnessed many of the same problems repeating themselves.  When Best Buy hired Kal Patel, he read the white paper and encouraged others who were trying to innovate read it.  It ended up taking on a life of its own.  That was good because in one sense – it was a $7m white paper.  Too bad I didn’t get any royalty payments on it!

8. Have you used the lessons from Redline’s failure in your work since then?

I still get emails from time-to-time from people asking me to send it to them.  The frequent comments are that not much has changed since it was written in 2002.  The bottom-line is that innovation inside of large organizations is very difficult.  It takes people that are willing to take risks and willing to fail.  When a company is growing and has the funds to support innovation it makes it less risky.  Public corporations that need to report quarterly profits are also extremely tough.  When the numbers aren’t looking good, new ideas that just haven’t had enough time to turn a profit are the easiest to cut.  In our estimation Redline needed five years.  It only had two.  There was no appetite to wait that long.

Following her role with Redline JJ went on to lead many other strategic initiatives at Best Buy, including the initial launch of the Best Buy & Carphone Warehouse joint venture – Best Buy Mobile.  She continues to take risks in order to drive innovation in her work and in her career by continually defining new opportunities.  JJ is currently General Manager for Brightstar – the world’s largest specialized wireless distributor and mobile service company.

Musician Dev Hynes: "The best can be something you didn't think you could even do."

From Melena Ryzik's interview of producer/songwriter Dev Hynes in the NY Times:

Are you in a position to turn people down, as a producer?

Yeah, but I kind of hate doing it, because my whole thing is: I want to try everything in the world. So there’s not many people that I want to ever turn down, because I think: “Cool, yeah. So we make a bad song. That’s like the worst thing that can happen.” Which, in the scheme of bad things in the world, is not that bad. That’s why I make a lot of music and do a lot of different things. No one’s dying from bad collaborations. But the best that can happen is something that you didn’t think you could even do.

Songwriter Jason Isbell "follows his mistakes" to develop a personal style

From an article in CountryWeekly.com:

Combining his personal experiences with fictional ideas to make a more compelling story is something Jason has honed over years of trial and error. “I try to follow my mistakes. I think that’s really the only way to develop a personal style,” he suggests. “If you start out imitating people, the ways you mess that up are usually the things that become your own signatures. I try to follow that.” 

Fun Friday: Elvis Costello's "Brilliant Mistake"

There's a brief interview at the start, then the song begins at 1:10. Did you catch the snippet of Dylan at the beginning? Tell us in the comments.

Calculation error gives Moog synthesizer its signature sound

Bill Hemsath, one of the engineers of the original Minimoog synthesizer, on why it had such a distinctive sound.

Our instrument had punch to it because we inadvertently overdrove the filter like crazy. Jim Scott did the filter and voltage controlled amplifiers. He made a calculation error, and he overdrove the filters by 10, 12, 15 dB, something like that. And nobody knew that until a month or two after we started in production. And everyone said, "Leave it alone!"

Hat tip New York Times.

Wyoming musical tour showcases entrepreneurial drive and creativity

Entrepreneurism is fed by constraints. Obstacles create situations that must be overcome, leading to success, or not, in which case failure results. And that's OK.

I've been reading the book "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value," by Daniel Isenberg, and one of the many quotes I've underlined is this: "A degree of adversity strengthens the entrepreneur and weeds out those without the required pluck."

And pluck is precisely the adjective I'd use to characterize the players in the WYOmericana Caravan, a musical tour featuring roots music acts that traveled through some of the loneliest, least inhabited territory in the USA. The tour was featured in a New York Times article.

Some excerpts from the piece that highlight the group's entrepreneurial pluck:

The caravan’s grass-roots style of self-promotion reflects a growing trend. “I’m seeing more and more artists who don’t have an agent or publicist but are finding creative ways to tour,” said Valerie Denn, a booking agent in Austin, Tex. As examples, she cites Dave Barnes, master of the “barnjo” (a hard-body electric banjo), whose coming itinerary takes him through Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan, and the Denver-based singer-songwriter Megan Burtt, who will be appearing at clubs in Colorado, California and Texas.

“Bands are pooling their resources, coming up with unusual packaging ideas,” Ms. Denn said. “They’re using social media to raise money, find free places to stay on the road or do house concerts between tour dates so they can pick up a little cash and sell some CDs. Crowdsourcing is the new norm among independent bands.”...

The caravan was inspired by the 2011 Railroad Revival Tour, in which members of Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, and Old Crow Medicine Show traveled across the Southwest. “We wanted to replicate some of the camaraderie and spirit of that tour,” said [WYOmerica co-organizer Aaron] Davis, 35, “particularly the all-band jam sessions they did at the end of their shows. They just tore it up.”

Both that tour and the caravan featured musicians who claim fealty to the mash-up genre known as Americana, but the similarities largely end there. Mumford et al traveled across the balmy Southwest amid the comforts of the pristinely restored Silver Solarium train car, while the Wyoming bands piled into two vans and Mr. Shogren’s Toyota 4Runner, braving spring hailstorms, snow-clogged mountain passes and squalls that threatened to blow their vehicles into oncoming traffic. Just outside Missoula, Mont., after a long, winding, steep descent through Hellgate Canyon, Mr. Crossland discovered that he had blown a brake line when he pumped his pedal at the bottom of the gorge. “I think God wanted me to play Missoula,” he said.

And while Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros could choose among sleeper cars, Mr. Crossland curled up each night in his van, which is tricked out with a writing desk, coffee maker, wardrobe, banjo and guitar racks, and caches of food (mostly canned peaches). Hoping for warm weather, the others had planned to camp, but unusually frigid late-spring weather forced them indoors most nights.

By economizing, collaborating and focusing on a neglected part of the country, WYOmericana sounds like what it is: a scrappy, innovative startup. And it demonstrates how a beleaguered music industry might have a future after all.

Eagles' Don Henley: "Success can be just as frightening as failure"

From the great documentary "History of the Eagles," from the mouth of introspective drummer/vocalist Don Henley:

Success can be just as frightening and disconcerting as failure.


Related post: "Eagles Reunion Concert Set Right By a Mistake"

Eagles reunion concert set right by a mistake

We watched the fascinating Showtime documentary "History of the Eagles" on Sunday night. I was never a big fan of their music, but for someone born in the 1960s, songs like "Take It To The Limit" and "Life In The Fast Lane" are an inescapable part of life, like the smog in LA.

And, of course, the band's story is as crazy and extreme as their music is mellow and polished. That fact alone makes the documentary great cinema. [The footage of Glenn Frey and Don Felder going at each other verbally during the band's final 1980 concert is shocking and priceless.]

Part 2 of the film takes up the band after they reunited for a concert tour in 1994. The first concert was a huge affair, to be broadcast on MTV. As the band takes the stage, the members, in voiceover, talk about how nervous and tight they were, it being 14 years since they played in front of an audience. And then, a few songs into the set, lead singer Don Henley forgets the words to one of their new songs.

And, rather than disintegrate, the band laughs at themselves [disclaimer: the following transcribed from memory and there will be errors].

"I can't believe you forgot the second verse," says Glenn Frey, smiling. "I thought you would forget the third verse."

"I know the third verse," Henley says, also with a smile on his face.

"Well, this is for television, so we get to do it until we get it right," Frey says.

And, from that point, the band relaxed and was comfortable playing together. For as professional and tightly-wound band as the Eagles, a mistake enabled them to forget their anxieties and enjoy the moment.

Great music is "perfected imperfection"

Adam Gopnik wrote recently in the New Yorker ("Music To Your Ears" - subscription required) about the challenge of recording music in "3D" - sound reproduction as if we were hearing music made right where we stood. Of course, this being a New Yorker article, the piece digressed into a discussion of music, science, and human perception/sensemaking. Two scientists fulfill the hero roles: Edgar Choueiri of Princeton University, who researches how we experience music and how to simulate the microscopic sensory disconnects that occur when we hear music performed live; and Daniel Levitin of McGill University, who studies how our brains experience expressiveness and style in music.

One paragraph stopped me in my tracks:

There was one truth, though, that connected the McGill music men's work to Choueiri's: the vital role of the not-too-perfect in our pleasures. The two expressive dimensions whose force in music Levitin had measured and made mechanical were defections from precision. Vibrato is a way of not quite landing directly on the note; rubato is not quite keeping perfectly to the beat. Expressiveness is error. Just as, at a subliminal level, Choueiri could make music come alive in space by introducing tiny errors into the amplitude and timing of the XTC wave, Levitin could show that what really moves us in music is the vital sign of a human hand, in all its unsteady and broken grace. (Too much imperfection and it sounds like a madman playing; too little, and it sounds like a robot.) Ella singing Gershwin matters because Ella knows when to make the words warble, and Ellis Larkins knows when to make the keyboard sigh. The art is the perfected imperfection.

I recently had an experience that underlined this point. While deciding what music to put on the system in my office, I chose an album that I very much liked a few years ago, "Leaves in the River" by the musician Sea Wolf. For some reason it sounded a bit sterile, muted, not quite as I remembered it. Then I realized I had another Sea Wolf item in my collection, a live podcast from that same time. I listened to that, and it sounded richer, more organic. More enjoyable.

The Sea Wolf podcast was recorded live, so it was imperfect, less constructed, "looser" both in tempo and intonation. Many of the terms we use to describe music, Gopnik points out, such as rubato and vibrato, are actually descriptions of tiny imperfections. Musicians also experience technical limitations the inability to sound a pitch perfectly, or a certain way of strategically leaving out notes in a difficult passage. All these, added together, become something we call "voice." Voice is what makes one person's playing instantly recognizable; the mistakes make all the difference.

[Thanks to Cynthia Kurtz for pointing out the article.]

Bonus: here's a "perfectly imperfect" newer live song from Sea Wolf:

Tiny Tim takes a do-over

This story came to mind recently because I've been spending more time visiting my parents, who are now both in their mid-late 80's. I'm feeling that my time with them is growing short, and every visit prompts reflections, often on the drive back home, of times past.

My dad once got tickets to a concert, which was a very unusual occurrence. This was in the '70's, before there were casinos in our area, but it was a casino-type show featuring Tiny Tim - a ukulele player who sang in a quavering falsetto. It is very hard to describe his kind of performance, and almost harder to explain his popularity in the 1960s and 1970s.

I was a teenager, and already at the stage where I didn't want to do anything with my parents, least of all see Tiny Tim in concert. But I went, reluctantly (I did most things reluctantly those days).

The show started. There was something wrong with the PA system. The sound was broken up, and dropped out for stretches at a time. The monitors must have worked OK, because Tim kept going for three or four songs before someone got word to him that the sound was messed up. He stopped. I was slunk down in my seat - it was excruciating.

They fixed the sound in a few minutes, and he kicked off again. But wait... he restarted from the first song. Teenage me was mortified. He was heaping embarrassment on top of failure. What a disaster! Those four songs took forever, and the remainder of the concert crawled by.

I took stock as I left; that was likely to be the worst show I would ever see in my life. Bad music, bad sound - and a do-over!

My parents had a different view. "What a performer!" they said. "How brave of him to keep going, and even to redo the songs we hadn't heard." I thought they were insane.

Now, as I look back, I have a lot more respect for Tiny Tim, and for my parents' assessment of the concert. It would have been easy for him to storm off in a huff when the sound failed - he wasn't the sound guy, after all. Or he could have run through the rest of his set quickly and gotten out of there; no one would have blamed him for that. But, instead, he thought of his audience. He thought of my parents. They had paid good money for those tickets; they deserved the best show he could give. And they deserved the entire show. So he took a risk and restarted.

It takes a lot of courage to be a performer, and that same courage is useful in many areas of life - when trying something new, when making a break with the past, when standing up for your beliefs. When faced with those situations, perhaps I'll wonder, "What Would Tiny Tim Do?"

[As I wrote earlier, it's hard to describe a Tiny Tim performance. Fortunately, we have YouTube]

When something goes wrong, the mistake is "not reacting to the opportunity"

Vibraphonist Stefon Harris, in a TED Talk, discusses how jazz music deals with mistakes. (See video below.) Unexpected events, Harris says, are opportunities - they only become mistakes if we don't react to them. This is a very interesting way of summarizing many of the ideas on this site.

Says Harris, "A mistake, from the perspective of a jazz musician...we don't really see it as a mistake. The only mistake is that I'm not able to perceive what someone else did. Every mistake is an opportunity in jazz." He demonstrates by playing in a certain key and asking the keyboardist to play a note not in that key.

After the wrong note, the band keeps at the same theme, and the note stands out like an unanswered call. "Hello, I'm here, please acknowledge." Nothing. Harris says the mistake was not the note, but that "we didn't react to it. It was an opportunity that was missed."

Then they play again, and the band shifts after the gnarly note comes in. Harris moves the key of the song, the drummer changes tempo. That wrong note sounds right all of a sudden. It sounds like, well, jazz.

A related riff appeared in the Times, which profiled Mr. Boyd E. Dunlop an 85-year-old jazz pianist from Buffalo who was rediscovered in the nursing home he lived in ("An Aging Pianist Finds A New Audience"). Mr. Dunlop's opportunity was to coax some music out of a broken-down old piano:

For years, the donated piano sat upright and unused in a corner of the nursing home’s cafeteria. Now and then someone would wheel or wobble over to pound out broken notes on the broken keys, but those out-of-tune interludes were rare. Day after surrendering day, the flawed piano remained mercifully silent.

Then came a new resident, a musician in his 80s with a touch of forgetfulness named Boyd Lee Dunlop, and he could play a little. Actually, he could play a lot, his bony fingers dancing the mad dance of improvised jazz in a way that evoked a long life’s all....

Mr. Dunlop arrived at the brown-brick nursing home nearly four years ago, a strong-willed but slightly bent half-note. He had 50 cents in his pocket, too much sugar in his blood, and a need to be around others. He liked to sit in the lobby and greet people, especially the women.

After a while, Mr. Dunlop let it be known that he was a musician. This did not distinguish him in a place where someone might claim to be a retired concert violinist or President Obama’s mother, and, in the first case at least, be telling the truth. Also, music here usually meant something to be endured — the weekly sing-along, say, with a resident armed with his own electric keyboard.

The broken cafeteria piano was a tease that Mr. Dunlop could not resist. He played when no one else was around, between meals, early and late. He learned how to dodge the piano’s flaws, how to elongate the good notes and suffocate the bad....

In the spring of 2010, a freelance photographer named Brendan Bannon arrived to discuss an art project with nursing home administrators — and Mr. Dunlop greeted him at the door. Mr. Bannon is balding, so Mr. Dunlop assumed for some reason that he was a doctor. “Hey doc!” he shouted. “Take my temperature.”

A bond quickly developed, and before long Mr. Dunlop invited his new friend to hear him play what he referred to as “that thing they call a piano.” Mr. Bannon, who knows his Mingus from his Monk, could not believe the distinctive, vital music emanating from a tapped-out piano missing a few keys.

“He was a beautiful player,” Mr. Bannon says. “He was making it work even though it was out of tune.”

When all you have is a broken piano, if you want to play, you make it work. We can create mistakes by kicking something off and then not paying attention to how the world reacts around the idea - customers, co-workers, etc. Or, like Harris, and Mr. Dunlop, we can sense and respond - put something out there, then listen, then adjust.

Remember, there are no wrong notes in jazz. So how do we react when life throws things at us that upend our best-laid plans?

Mistake Bank top 10: "My Mistakes" by Eleanor Friedberger

Here's our new theme song, from Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces:



You can download the song here.

NOMO Concert - a plan where everything went wrong

(click on comic to enlarge)

See the original on Bitstrips here.

Fran Ten of West Indian Girl - not using the "setup we know works" on a radio performance

This story is from Fran Ten, who is the bassist for the LA band West Indian Girl. Fran shared a story about a radio appearance, involving a suggestion his West Indian Girl bandmate, Rob James, had about using a new instrument.

There was one time, we had a radio gig, and Rob thought that someone should play a harmonium, you know, that Indian instrument? On his acoustic set. And it sounded like shit. Right? It sounded horrible.

I said, “You know, Rob, that was a mistake. We are never bringing a harmonium again to an acoustic radio show. You’re just going with your guitar, or this setup we know that works.”

But we tried it. At least we tried it. Business-wise, you have to keep making mistakes. Isn’t that how you grow?