Great Ideas Like Great Songs
It can be entertaining when you have an old soul like Taylor (shoutout compliance!) and a gen Z soul like Holly (shoutout Vanderpump Rules!) in the same office together because you end up having some very interesting intergenerational conversations. So it went after the recent Grammys with Holly extolling the virtues of the winners while Taylor couldn’t stop harping on how music used to be so much better (though both agreed that Tracy Chapman’s performance of “Fast Car” with Luke Combs was fantastic).
To make his point, Taylor asked how many of the 2024 Record of the Year nominees besides Taylor Swift (Miley Cyrus, SZA, boygenius, Victoria Monet, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, and Jon Batiste) would still be household names in 30 years? Whereas if you went 30 years back and looked at the same list (Whitney Houston, Neil Young, Sting, Billy Joel, and Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle) it was a veritable who’s who of staying power (though it might be stretching it to say that about that last pair).
And it does seem to be the case that the farther back you go, the more established ROTY nominees seem to be at the time they received their nomination. But is this evidence that music is getting worse?
I think the answer to that is no because the historical performance of an artist is not a reliable proxy for quality of new material (even The Beatles had “Revolution 9”). Further, it’s undoubtedly the case that digital distribution and social media together have made it exponentially easier and cheaper for unestablished artists to go direct-to-consumers and create hits solely on the merits.
Indeed, this breakdown in control of what music gets produced and distributed is likely a bigger factor in the proliferation of “unqualified” ROTY nominees than relative degradation in quality of product. (Also, Occam’s razor, Taylor might just be grumpy.)
To wit, rewind 30 years and it wasn’t like Grammys were being awarded on the merits anyway. Here, for example, were the nominees for ROTY in 1993: “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton, “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus, “Beauty and the Beast” by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson (heckuva run for Peabo in the 1990s), “Constant Craving” by k.d. lang, and “Save the Best for Last” by Vanessa Williams. Sure, Eric Clapton and Celine Dion are juggernauts and those are good songs, but not even nominated was “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, arguably the best and most influential record of the past 50 years.
Yes, at the time “Achy Breaky Heart” was recognized as a superior record to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (which won not a single Grammy in any category). We can agree that’s a miss.
The point is that great songs, like great ideas, can come from anyone anywhere at any time, and just because someone had one before doesn’t mean they will necessarily have one again. Therefore, systems should be set up to recognize and capture greatness no matter its origin. Thanks to technological advances, I think that’s what we’re increasingly seeing in the music industry and if that means more artists that haven’t had or don’t go on to have decades-long careers are being nominated for awards, that’s a feature not a bug.
It’s the same in business, with breakthroughs as likely to come from the shop floor as the C-suite. So if you own or operate one, a good question to ask is are you regularly capturing and evaluating ideas from across the entire organization?
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gives the advice that the most senior person in a meeting should always speak last and in his recent interview with Lex Fridman advised that meetings go around in order of seniority. While I appreciate the intent of that approach (if one exec doesn’t assert undue early influence, there is more likely to be a debate on the merits), it (1) seems inefficient and procedural (shouldn’t the insight most likely to advance the conversation the farthest go first?); and (2) doesn’t solve for the fact that in a small room a group might coalesce around an idea based on who presented it regardless of when it was presented anyway.
Yet I also can’t top it because alternatives such as anonymous idea generation or trying everything and seeing what sticks come with similar problems.
One thing I will recommend, however, which I don’t think many organizations do, is an idea audit. This is the process of looking back at what you did over the past year, particularly with regards to new initiatives, and identifying who or where the idea for doing that came from. Once you have attribution, you can see whose ideas your organization is most frequently implementing.
My hypothesis when you do this is that the majority of ideas will come from a minority of origins. Then a question to ask is do one or a small number of people have a monopoly on good ideas at my organization or does my organization not have a good system in place for collecting and evaluating ideas from everywhere?
While it’s comforting to assume that the former is the case, if you agree that great ideas, like great songs, can come from anyone anywhere at any time, then what you’re seeing in that idea audit data is actually a reflection of the latter.
-Tim
