Two Beats Ahead
What Musical Minds Teach Us About Innovation
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Discover what the musical mind has to teach us about innovation in this fascinating book, featuring interviews with Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams, T Bone Burnett, Gloria Estefan, Imogen Heap, and many more.
Musicians may just hold the keys to innovation in business. They don’t think like we do, and in the creative process, they don’t act like we do. It’s no coincidence that some of the world’s most respected creators are also entrepreneurs.
In Two Beats Ahead, Panos A. Panay, senior vice president for strategy at Berklee College of Music, and R. Michael Hendrix, global design director at IDEO, interview some of the nation’s top musicians and business leaders about how they approach innovation differently. They speak with hit maker Desmond Child about the importance of demoing and with industry legend Jimmy Iovine about listening and knowing your audience. Readers will learn the secrets of collaboration from Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams, about “daring to suck” from Justin Timberlake, about the power of reinvention from Gloria Estefan, and the importance of experimentation from Imogen Heap and Radiohead. And they’ll learn the value of finding and producing talent with T Bone Burnett and Hank Shocklee, cofounder of Public Enemy.
A window into these brilliant mindsets, this book equips any entrepreneur or innovative thinker with tools they can put into practice to thrive in an evolving world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The skills that give musicians their creativity and dedication are the same skills that business people need to get ahead, argue Berklee College of Music v-p Panay and designer Hendrix in their insightful debut. They survey a bevy musicians, producers, and songwriters who have succeeded both on the charts and in the business world: Björk, for example, was inspired by her practice of listening to the world around her to start a program with a venture capital fund in which they listened to their emotions as well as data to make decisions. Electropop songwriter Imogen Heap's openness to experimentation led to her creation of the song "Hide and Seek" after all her album files were deleted, as well as to design the Mi.Mu smartgloves (which come with software that links gestures to music). Jimmy Iovine, Interscope Records founder, co-created high-end headphone company Beats by Dre thanks to his ability to "listen for gaps" in the market. While the authors give plenty of examples of how musical creativity applies to business (demo tracks in music are similar to prototypes in business, for example, while remixing songs is analogous to an innovator's willingness to change a product), the metaphor loses its luster thanks to overuse. Still, there are enough takeaways here to make it worth the price of admission.
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