Recently, I read a wonderful post by fellow leadership blogger Gwyn Teatro where she wrote about what Jazz can teach leaders about the value of improvisation in their organizations. Being a big fan of this musical genre (one of my daughters’ drawings found on my site is of the blue cat mascot from our city’s famous Jazz festival), her piece really resonated with me and it also got me thinking about some of the other lessons that Jazz offers to the field of leadership.

Granted, for some Jazz can sound like a mass of contradictions, especially in those sections where the various musicians play their own variations/motifs. And yet, if we focus less on the separate elements and instead listen to the piece as a whole, there’s a definite connectedness that can be heard despite these individual expressions.

I think this is where the Jazz analogy plays well in terms of today’s business world. For the last few decades, we’ve been used to the classical orchestra model of leadership – with a single conductor at the helm directing all the players to create and repeat the same message over and over. However, what many businesses are beginning to discover now is that it’s no longer feasible or desirable to maintain such rigidity of structure; that what’s needed instead is a greater fluidity and movement where the message can change and ebb and flow.

With this in mind, here are three lessons Jazz offers on how to keep your leadership in step with today’s ever-changing world: Click here to continue reading »”3 Steps To Help Get Your Leadership Groove On”

If Paris is “the city of lights”, then without question Montreal is the city of festivals.  And the one festival that best demonstrates this has to be Montreal’s world renowned jazz festival, the “Festival International de Jazz de Montreal”.  Of course, this year’s event was certainly bigger than previous ones as the festival was celebrating its 30th anniversary of bringing this musical genre out onto the streets of Montreal and into the various clubs and theatres throughout the city.  But the festival’s organizers were not the only ones celebrating a major milestone with this year’s edition of the jazz festival.  In fact, this year’s festival also marked my 20th consecutive year of attending this amazing celebration of the world of jazz.  And just as the jazz festival itself has evolved over the years, so too has my own personal experiences being an attendee of this event.

Walking around this year’s festival grounds, I couldn’t help but reminisce about how I first started attending this event as Click here to continue reading »”Jazz and Montreal – Celebrating a Major Milestone”