Infernal Comms: the Write the Talk blog

A business lesson from modern classical music

At the weekend Alex Ross penned an article asking why most modern classical music is disliked. There's a lesson for business in this debate.

Ross points out that film, art, theatre, pop and writing all have their lauded avant garde exponents and yet the mainstream resistance to their equivalents in music remains. There's a problem here though. If the modern novel was based on Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, not many people would be reading new fiction. It's not that music audiences are clinging to the past, it's that many modern composers can't resonate with a broader audience.

Blaming that audience is missing the point.

There is snobbery in this, as there is in almost all art. Everyone's fighting for the cultural high ground, and sophistication can be attractive in that lofty, rarified environment. But sophistication for its own sake is a minority sport. It's really important for prompting change and new thinking but the skill, the art if you like, is in the combination with the familiar to make something exciting. Make the leap to something new too great and people won't bother. Most of us have more pressing things to deal with.

Modern art, punk, and the most successful strands of modern theatre and film certainly broke with tradition, but they did it in a way that made the form more accessible. The most common criticism of recent art and the initial punk explosion was that anyone could do that. And? Change needs participation, not just ideas.

It seems to me that modern classical music has become a battle between two schools: broadly, music needs tunes vs tunes are yesterday's music. Setting up conflict is not a recipe for success: it encourages entrenched views, the taking of sides. Embracing what's gone before and finding common ground for the future is the way to get people involved.

Culture change in business is very much the same. Making an enemy of the past and those who identify with it is problematic. Creating something new that is still recognisable to everyone is where the future lies. Surprise people, yes, but don't maroon them.

So, new ideas must be encouraged, and groundbreaking creativity shows us what is possible. But without followers, leadership is a lonely and rather redundant activity. And only a poor leader would point the finger of blame at the crowds left behind.

Find the real voices in your organisation

The way your business uses language is too important to be left up to the people in the top jobs.

Climbing the human pyramid of power doesn't depend on being able to excite and astonish in words; in fact the opposite is often true. Many conform to perform and encourage their people to do the same.

A business that writes like it thinks is a business that understands relationships. Without relationships a business is dead.

So if you don't have the bottle or the skills to write it like it is, find the people in your organisation who can. Track down the individuals with the authentic voices, who can talk the dialect of your business rather than the management Esperanto that no-one would dare use in public.

Get them to help convey news and ideas in ways that people will understand, appreciate and remember. You just might find that it catches on and everyone feels able to write like a human being. Pretending to be something you're not is an energy-sapping way to live a life after all.

All you need to do is support the pioneers, then sit back and take the credit.

It's restructure time, but no cuts

I admit this isn't the most regularly updated blog. Other projects take priority, I get a life, I even fall out of love with the idea of blogging.

But I keep coming back to it. Why? Because I really believe in this fight we're waging, the fight against consultancy-speak, banality, and the impersonal. So it's time for another push, and this time perhaps a bit more structure.

I've been doing some training recently, and I'm going to share some of that with you. It's about being persuasive and making the impact you want to have on your readers. So over the next few weeks there'll be a series of posts that will add up to a guide for any writing that you do. It'll be great to hear what you think.

If there's anything else you want to hear about, leave a comment and I'll see what I can do. As we're being told so often at the moment, we're all in this together. And I'm going to do my bit.