“It’s not possible for the Grateful Dead to have a business plan,” bassist Phil Lesh once explained, “We don’t even plan the music.”
That is precisely the point, says Barry Barnes, author of “Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead.” The Dead were brilliant improvisers, and those same skills lay at the root of their business success. “In all of their business dealings, they adopted a strategy I call strategic improvisation — blending planning and doing while staying alert, alive to fluid situations,” Barnes writes.
The band created a horizontally managed organization with shared leadership, recognizing that decentralized decision making motivated employees to produce great work and remain loyal. Barnes writes, “The band never lost that commitment to democracy, but eventually they did feel the need to understand a bit better just how they were operating.” Without a clear leader, division of responsibility was unclear.
In 1981, the band asked employee Alan Trist to create a report on band organization. The resulting 31-page document, entitled “A Balanced Objective,” addressed disharmony within the organization that was caused, in part, by “ambiguity about responsibility for essential functions.”
Trist’s report states, “Our work situation needs a balance between the structural requirements of taking care of its business and the fluid needs of its overall creative process.” That balance is something all organizations must strike, Barnes says — between the need for structure to get things done and the danger that such structure will stifle creativity.
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