For many years now, I’ve been trying to explain (both to myself and other people) some of the phenomena I observed while I played in the Boston Pops. One big question: why was Arthur Fiedler so famous? Another big question: why were some conductors, who had all the requisite talent, skill, training, and connections, total failures at that level?
It wasn’t until I wrote my most recent book (“Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid”) that the explanation dawned on me in its fundamental form. It has to do with a management model based on trust versus a management model based on obedience to higher authority.
Just to give you an historical example: in World War II, the reason the Allies prevailed on D-Day was because the Allied armies ran on a trust management model. The Germans had had years to prepare, they had superior tanks and artillery weapons, their soldiers were highly experienced and battle hardened, while the Allied soldiers were totally green. But what the German soldiers lacked was a trust management model. The German commanders were not trusted by Hitler, and so they had to wait for permission to do anything. Thus, rare opportunities to possibly crush the Allied invasion came and went without being exploited.
The Allied soldiers, on the other hand, were free to act. The paratroopers who landed the night before were scattered all over, and so they had to improvise new strategies on the spot. They did not call and ask for permission to do this. This is what a trust management model gives you. It accesses the creativity of everyone in the organization, not just the person in charge.
Another D-Day example (did I ever tell you that I’m a World War II history nut?): when the Allies got bogged down in the hedgerow country (resulting from VERY poor planning from above), various lower level people figured out a way to allow tanks to knock down the hedgerows. No one asked permission from above to start welding these plow-like structures on the fronts of their tanks. They just did it. And the P-51 Mustang was a 2nd-rate airplane until a British Test Pilot pushed to have the Merlin engine put into it, thus creating one of the greatest combat aircraft ever, and having a gargantuan impact on the course of the war. Again, if the Allies had been in a top-down “obedience management” model, this would never have happened.
Closer to home, you may have noticed Bill Belichick, in coaching the Patriots, talking about “situational football.” In using that phrase, he is saying to his players, “don’t just blindly follow a system or a play call. Use your head and adjust to the moment.” This is the trust management model, and the Patriots are in the playoffs every year. When you see the confused players on opposing teams looking at the sidelines saying “what do I do now, coach?” you see the obedience model, that always looks so good on paper, falling apart.
A small handful of very famous conductors understood the concept of a trust management model. Bernard Haitink is famous in the culture for ending rehearsals early. You would think that having less rehearsal would equal less quality, but because he trusts the players more than any other conductor, they love him and respect him, and they bring “the good stuff” when concert time rolls around.
Conversely, there are hundreds of conductors who are steeped in the concept of the obedience management model. The hard-core “trust culture” of a major orchestra is always highly resistant to anyone trying to get bossy on them, and so conductors who are stuck in that mode inevitably get rejected, and they end up conducting a school orchestra someplace, where they can narcissistically indulge in an obedience management model, and grouse about how they are not appreciated.
One of the biggest discoveries I made in writing the “rich kid” book was in realizing that life is very much about opposite polarities. The glass is never half-full or half-empty, it’s either completely full or completely empty. And this was so true of the many conductors I played for. They either embraced the trust model and got top performance, or they embraced the obedience model and got a drab performance. There is no middle.
© Justin Locke
