The OffBeat #51: Music-Inspired Rules to Thrive at Work

Playing by the rules, sort of

I’ve always been a rule follower. I hate cutting in line, I generally read and follow instructions for things like board games and cruise ship muster drills, I always pick up dog poop, and I at least endeavor to live by the golden rule: treating other people how I want to be treated.

But when it comes to corporate leadership, things get a little squishier. I love restaurateur Danny Meyer’s philosophy of thinking about his business as a laboratory in which he constantly asks the question: “Who ever wrote the rule?” In his memoir Setting the Table, he writes about his commitment to continually add something fresh to the existing dialogue in his industry, for example by banning smoking in his restaurants 11 years before New York City passed its smoking ban (who ever wrote the rule you can’t prioritize your team’s and guests’ health over a societal norm?), and by combining luxurious dining with a comfortable rustic setting in the iconic Gramercy Tavern (who ever wrote the rule fine dining equal fussiness?).

Rules provide structure and navigation, like bumpers on a bowling alley lane. But if too stringent, they constrain creativity and individuality.

I recently finished the legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, a meditative contemplation on living as a creative human. (His table of contents is organized into 78 “areas of thought,” which is sort of badass.)

One of the topics he covers is rules. He writes,

“Much of the artistic process involves ignoring rules, letting go of rules, undermining rules, and rooting out rules that we didn’t know we were following. There is also a place for imposing rules. For using rules as a tool to define a given project.”

When you think of rules as “setting a palette” for your project—for example, the painter Yves Klein used only the color blue, leading him to discover an entirely new shade that became known as “International Klein Blue”—they become more freeing than constricting.

There are a series of “rule”-type guidelines in the music world that I think apply nicely to the workplace if interpreted through this lens of palette-setting.

Rule of three:

Music: Have only three musical phrases playing at any one time. Nearly all popular music conforms to the rule of three. Let’s say you have a guitar riff, some interesting lyrics, and a cool bass line. If that’s all happening at once, the drums should be less prominent.

Leadership: Communicate in threes. Listing principles, concepts, objectives, what have you, in a quantity of three makes them easier to remember as human brains cling to patterns. Three JTBDs (jobs to be done) for the year, three insights extracted from a campaign analysis, three proof points of a consumer tension at the heart of creative work. (This is what led to my three principles of leadership: ACE —Accountability, Communication, Empathy.)

Rule of seven:

Music: Inspired by the marketing rule of thumb that people need to hear your message seven times before they’ll make a purchase decision, there’s a POV in music that people need to hear your song seven times before they start to care.

Leadership: Shout out to my friend Kevan Lee for this one: the seven-second rule suggests that when you’re asking for feedback or reactions, like in a team meeting, wait a full seven seconds before moving on to allow people time to process and share. It’s awkward (try it—seven seconds of silence can be agonizing), but it often produces results and it’s a powerful tool for inclusion.

50/50 rule:

Music: Trumpeter Eddie Lewis’s 50% Rule states that at least half of practice time should be spent practicing music, not exercises. Playing music requires balancing at least 50 things at once (posture, dynamics, phrasing, intonation, style), which is clearly impossible from a mental capacity standpoint—so it requires, through practice, moving as many of those things as possible into your subconscious mind. Exercises, like scales, are valuable for their distraction-less focus on drilling whatever it is you need to work on, but it’s the practice time spent on music that builds, well, musicianship.

Leadership: I have three 50/50 rules I orient by as a marketing leader:

1. <50% of your job is the work, >50% of your job is the people. If you're spending any less on the latter, it's not enough.

2. 50% of your marketing strategy should be planned, 50% should be opportunistic and reactive to culture. (Credit to Monica Austin)

3. 50% of your time and effort in developing content (including internal decks) should be on the headline, 50% on the body copy. (Per David Ogilvy)

Rubin writes in The Creative Act,

“There are no bad rules or good rules. Only rules that fit the situation and serve the art, or those that don’t. If the goal is to create the most beautiful work possible, then whatever directives are truly in service to that end are the right ones to use.”

Rules, whether in music or at work, or only as good as they improve your craft.

Have a great week,

Allison