What a treat! Our guest this week in “Leadership in the Creative and Cultural Industries” was Jim Ed Norman: musician, arranger, producer, former president of Warner Records Nashville and, after coming out of retirement three years ago, CEO of Curb Records Group. Jim Ed is quick to point out that his CEO position is Chief Excitement Officer. It was fitting that after the students read a chapter on improvisation in leadership in Denhardt and Denhardt’s The Dance of Leadership, that Jim Ed identified one of the most important creative leadership skills as “be quiet and listen.” Any jazz musician knows that listening is key to improvisation. Listening – especially the kind of empathic listening that is foundational to design thinking – has been a through-line in the course. The key to being effective as a listener is, according to Jim Ed, to understand how to arrange what you’ve heard. Although the in-class conversation was casual and unrehearsed, a few key phrases jumped out that sound, only in retrospect, like leadership axioms. I suggest heeding them:

• Learn humility
• Allow people to fail gracefully
• Retain your inner child
• It’s fair to be skeptical, but don’t become cynical
• Get comfortable with being wrong
• Maintain camaraderie
• Respond to the world as it really is not the way you want it to be.

(photo by Keith Nealy, public domain)