Podcast Transcript
The following is a special presentation of Tony Kurre Radio with Dr. Alex Heublein and Dr. Josh Klapow. This is a Adapt or Perish.
Josh Klapow:
Hey, welcome back to another episode of Adapt or Perish. This is Dr. Josh Klapow with Dr. Alex Heublein, and we are talking today about grace under pressure.
This is Alex’s topic. I love this because the byline is the lessons we can learn from the sustained ability of Rush. And Alex, when I read this idea that you gave me, and I will tell you this truthfully, I was like, “I don’t know what Rush is.” Like I thought Rush was some sort of coding thing, some sort of a-
Alex Heublein:
A movie.
Josh Klapow:
No, like a web abstraction.
Alex Heublein:
Oh yeah, right.
Josh Klapow:
You know, I was like, “Oh crap, I don’t know what Rush is.” And then I was sort like, oh wait, he’s talking about Rush, like Rush, the Rush. No, this is so cool. Tell me about this. Like tell me about how you got this idea, because I just, I absolutely love this.
Alex Heublein:
Well yeah you know, it’s funny because you know, I spent a lot of my childhood and my entire adult life listening to Rush. They’re one of my very favorite bands for a lot of reasons. And it dawned on me as I was thinking about sort of radio show topics and just thinking about business in general, I spent a ton of time in graduate business school. I got a master’s and a doctorate and learned all the theory and so on and so forth. But what I found was really the practical lessons that I’ve learned in my life, a lot of them came from observing and learning from very extraordinary people.
Josh Klapow:
Yes.
Alex Heublein:
And when you look at sort of these topics, we’ve been covering, innovation, adaptability, how do you take your company to the next level, it occurred to me that there’s a great parallel between what Rush as a band did over their 40 plus year history and the lessons that I’ve learned and then that I’ve hopefully been able to apply to the business world. And I think the parallels on it are just amazing.
Josh Klapow:
Well, so it’s interesting. I mean obviously Rush was one of your favorite bands. I remember my first Rush concert, and I remember something so specific and that was, I’d been to other concerts, I’d seen Van Halen, I’d seen AC/DC, but Rush … and it was moving pictures, I remember when the concert opened, there were the visuals, there were more visuals than … you know everything else was pyrotechnics. There were the visuals, and then I also remember three guys kind of … particularly Geddy Lee like running around stage, doing so much. Right? And you heard this unbelievable music come out and then you had to keep reminding yourself that there were only three people there.
And I guess what’s interesting, and I know we’re talking about adaptability, but it was almost like scalability, right? Here’s guys producing as much as you might see, dare I say it like an Earth, Wine and Fire consent where you got 27 people up on stage.
So talk a little bit about that. What do you mean about their adaptability, and just how does that relate to the business world? And by the way, listen, I agree with you, the taking of the classes in graduate school, you absolutely don’t get the sense of how all this stuff works, whether it’s business, psychology, whatever, until you actually are watching other people do it. So I agree with you there, but what do you mean by their adaptability and connect that to the business world?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah, well, they were an amazingly adaptable band. And I think you have to be if you’re going to have a 40 plus year career-
Josh Klapow:
Sure.
Alex Heublein:
In the industry. You know you’ve got to adapt your music, you’ve got to adapt your styles, you’ve got to adapt to the changing tastes of your audience and your listeners. I mean when you do it across four decades, it’s pretty amazing. And coincidentally you know, the company that I work for Adaptigent, we’ve been in business for almost 40 years. So I thought about that and I thought, wow, that’s another interesting parallel.
And we, as a company have adapted and changed and pivoted over the years to remain relevant and to really push the envelope of innovation and whatnot.
But you know, there’s a few lessons I learned, right? One of the first lessons that I learned in looking at sort of the entire body of work that these guys did and their history was that … and I think a lot of companies struggle with this, is you’ve to know who you are, and you’ve got to stay true to yourself.
As much as you’re going to adapt, as much as you’re going to do different things, you’ve really got to know who you are, and you’ve got to know who you are as a band, you’ve got to know who you are as a company. You’ve got to know who you are as a person and what’s really driving you. What are the core principles that are driving you forward? Whether it’s your career, whether it’s your business, whether you’re in a rock band. And you know, I wanted to be in a rock band too, but I can neither sing nor dance nor play a musical instrument. So I gave up on that.
Josh Klapow:
I’m with you. Go ahead.
Alex Heublein:
I would have loved it, I think that’s every eight year old boy’s dream-
Josh Klapow:
That’s right.
Alex Heublein:
Or 10 year old boy’s dream, right?
Josh Klapow:
That’s right.
Alex Heublein:
But I think you have to do that, and you know, it was really interesting because if you go look at what happened with these guys, you know back in the early ’70s, they had a fairly popular couple of albums and then they came out with the album Caress of Steel, and they really loved it, right?
Josh Klapow:
Right.
Alex Heublein:
They thought this thing was amazing, and the record company was like, “Oh man, this is terrible.” And it didn’t meet with particularly fond appreciation from their fan base.
And so they really started to decline, and so the record company came back to them, they said, “All right, we’re going to let you guys do one more record, but we don’t want any of these 12 minute tracks that you guys are known for. We want stuff tahts very easy to play on the radio. Stuff that’s in bite size sound nuggets, and so on and so forth.”
And they nodded and say okay. And then they came out with 2112, which was another one of these really long format albums that you really couldn’t play on the radio. And their record company was really upset, but their fans loved it, right?
And so these guys kind of stayed true to who they were. Their attitude was, look, we’re going to go make the best music we possibly can. We’re not going to worry too much about what’s going to happen or how it’s going to be received. And I think that that persistence and that idea that they knew who they were, and they knew what they wanted to accomplish, and they had their identity and they were willing to stick to their guns and stay true to the core principles they had as a band.
You know, that’s pretty amazing because when the world’s changing, you know one of the things you have to do in a company is that you’ve got to have some guiding principles that aren’t going to change. You know, you’ve got to have those things that your company stands for. And regardless of the circumstance you’re going to run into those are the principles that are going to help guide your decisions along in the future.
And they’re called guiding principles for a reason. They guide you when you don’t know what the answer is, when you have to make a decision and you’re not sure of what the answer is, you can kind of go back to those guiding principles, which are really what you stand for and your identity as a company, you can go back to those things and say, “All right, you know what? I don’t know what to do here, but do these multiple options, which one of these aligns best with the core principles that I have.?”
And I think that’s true as a company, as a band. And just as individuals, we all have to have those things that we believe in and that we stick to. And you know in most cases, sticking to those guns is a great idea.
Josh Klapow:
Well, let me push back on you though because I was with you until one part. And this is where you got to help me here because I’m seeing music separate from sort of business and industry. So you talk about Rush, you know the record label’s like, “Okay, y’all, you can’t do this.” And the fans didn’t like some of it, right, in the early stage. And so I’m liking that too. Okay. The market’s not buying your product right now.
If I’m a company though, I don’t say, “Well, I don’t, I don’t care, I’m going to be true to what we produce.” I mean, you’d have to make the pivot or you wouldn’t stay in business. Right? What’s the difference between sort of sticking like Rush did … Rush stuck to what they believed, they kept going, and I guess they had enough staying power. They were able to hang in until they found something that their fans liked, but if you’re a company frankly, you could perish if you were doing that. Right? No?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah, no, you’re totally good, right? And I think that there’s always that balance you have to strike between kind of sticking to your guns and going out there and doing things that are innovative in the world. And you know, like I look at Apple, right? Apple was a great example of a company that really stuck to its guns and produced some amazing products, incredible innovations throughout the years because they had a visionary leader and they believed that they could create entirely new markets, right?
Like when the iPhone came out, I mean most of the people out there just panned this thing, right? They were like, there’s no way I’m going to type stuff out on a screen, I need my Blackberry keyboard –
Josh Klapow:
Sorry, I was one of those people by the way, just …
Alex Heublein:
Yeah, I was too at first, right? And so you know, they had the belief though that this was the future and they made a future based on that. And then a few years later when they came out with the iPad you know, there were a bunch of people out there saying, “Well, this is just a giant iPhone. Who needs a giant iPhone?” Right? But you know –
Josh Klapow:
Hang on, I was one of those people too even though my kids, this is just a big thing, it’s somewhere between a computer and a phone, what do I need the pad for? Okay, keep going.
Alex Heublein:
Yeah, no, but again, it got panned in the media. Everybody thought it was a terrible idea. And you know, I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of iPads they’ve sold … I mean they created entirely new industries and entirely new markets, right, because they stuck to their guns.
And so I think there’s something to be said for that, right? But there’s also something to be said, as you said, for pivoting, right? And wisdom is knowing when to stick to your guns and when to pivot, right? And if you at Rush, I mean they pivoted over the years a number of times. If you go talk to the kind of old die-hard Rush fans, and you talk to them about what they did in the ’80s with all the synthesizers and all of the triggers and things that they used, all this high-tech stuff, you know a lot of those guys lament that period. They’re like, “Ah man, all this synthesizer crap, I just want the drums and the guitar and the bass.”
But you saw Rush pivot, right? They pivoted with the times. And they very early adopters of technology. And I think one of the reasons they were early adopters of technology is going back to what you said before, it was just three guys. Right?
Josh Klapow:
Right.
Alex Heublein:
And there’s things you want to do musically and creatively that you say to yourself, “Wow. I’m not sure we can pull that off with just three guys on stage. So we have to employ some technology to really help us deliver the experience that we think our fan base wants.” So yeah, you’re totally right, man. You got to know when to stick to your guns, and you got to know when to pivot. And that’s one of the hardest things in the world to do in corporate America is know when to do what. And I think that’s where a lot of wisdom comes from.
Josh Klapow:
So how do you do this though, I was thinking about it, obviously Rush is three guys, there’s a record label. And I mean I guess you could think about the record label maybe as like a VC backing, maybe, if I’m trying to make the parallel.
Alex Heublein:
Yeah, I think you could.
Josh Klapow:
Okay. And I don’t know how many other people sort of associated with Rush, right, in Rush, the company. How do you that because I see this all the time, how do you do that if you’re a company of 10 people or 20 people, or 5,000 people, and somebody at the top called, maybe it’s lead guitarist, is just like, “No, this is the way it’s got to be.” How do you do that as a company and make that adaptation, or is this what breaks up companies like breaks up bands?
Alex Heublein:
Well, it certainly can break up small companies. But I think the thing to really take away from this is when you’re looking at … what a lot of companies do honestly, is they sort of stifle innovation.
Josh Klapow:
Yes.
Alex Heublein:
And you know the lead guitarist is saying, “No, no, no.” And lead guitarist to saying, “No, no, no, no, it needs to be this way.” And the senior management’s like, “No, that’s not where we’re going.”
And you know, a fair bit time, the leaders are right, that isn’t the way we want to be going. But if you don’t foster that mentality and that culture of people being willing to bring new ideas to the table, and driving a company in a new direction, guess what’ll happen, right? You’ll go in the same direction you’re going. And as we’ve seen over the years, every company has to pivot, right? And it’s particularly true today. I mean the world keeps changing faster and faster. You’ve got to know when to stick to your guns. You’ve got to know when to pivot, but you’ve also got to listen to your people. You’ve got to listen to those creative minds that you have in your company, and you’ve got to build a culture that fosters that kind of almost dissent.
The last thing you want in a company today is a bunch of people just following orders. You know? Just going off and doing their job. I mean maybe there’s industries where that works well. I mean I think it probably works well for the military, and it probably works well if you’re in mining world or some commodity kind of business. But if you’re in high tech, if you’re in industries that are changing quickly, you’ve got to set up some structures to listen to those people and take what they’re saying very seriously because that’s where a lot of innovation comes from.
Josh Klapow:
Yeah. I agree with you. Absolutely agree with you, but I know, and you’ve seen this, that’s what you’re supposed to do. Right? I mean that’s what you’re supposed to do, but how many companies do we see where beyond the military, where that’s said in words, but the argument is, “But we’re doing fine. You know what? Our numbers look good. Our numbers look good enough. We’re still hitting our KPIs. Our projections are still good. Why should we change now?” Because we talked about this in earlier shows, it’s one thing to say, okay, our technology is not working, or we’re having problems because of our technology. What do you do if the company or the CEO and the management’s like, “We don’t need to do that. We’re making bucks, we’re making bank.”
How do you do that so that you adapt, if you will, early enough? And then you don’t sort of rest on your revenue cycle and your beliefs?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah. I mean it’s a classic conundrum, right? The most dangerous time for a company, and there a lot of executives that’ll agree with this, right? The most dangerous time for a company is not when you’re doing poorly, it’s not when bad things are happening, it’s actually when really good things are happening, right?
Because what happens is everybody says that, right? “Yeah, we’re doing great, man. We don’t need to change anything. We don’t need to go innovate. We don’t need to do anything different.” And you know, that’s the most dangerous sentiment because what that breeds is complacency, right? It breeds come place and see. And you know, I’m sure the guys in Rush could have just said, “Yeah okay man, we’ll go off,” and their record label … I read an interview with one of them and they said their record label wanted them to be more like Bad Company.
And look you know, I like Bad Company as much as the next guy, but they’re not Rush, right? I mean they’re not renowned the way those guys are, right? And so they could have very easily just said, “Yeah, okay you know, we’ll write some three and a half minute songs for radio airplay,” and who knows how that would’ve turned out, right?
But when you get complacent, when you just keep doing the same stuff over and over and, “Oh yeah look, we’re making money. It’s all great.” That’s the most dangerous time you can possibly have as a company because you know what, if you’re not innovating and are not almost competing with yourself, guess what? Somebody else will be. So there’s this classic idea that if you don’t go disrupt your own business, somebody else is going to disrupt your business. And it’s particularly true in high-tech industries and industries that change very rapidly, you always have to be trying to push that envelope because I guarantee you there’s a small company out there somewhere in this world that’s trying to disrupt your business. And a lot of times when they get ahead of you, there’s no catching up, right? There’s absolutely no catching up with those guys once they get a firm foothold.
So yeah, I think it’s tricky, right? You’ve got to be able to go out there and innovate. You’ve got to go listen to those people. But at the same time you can’t get complacent. You can’t have that attitude of, “Well, we’re just going to kind of rest on our laurels here. Everything’s fine, we’re all fat, dumb and happy.” That’s the most dangerous time in the world for a company.
Josh Klapow:
Well, I mean maybe it’d be accurate or more accurate to say that you’ve got to evolve because you know, we use the word in the show adapt or perish, and I was just thinking again, let’s go back to Rush or any musical entity. And they always … you know they talk about creativity, they’re trying new things, they’re experimenting. They may not have that in a recording that goes out yet, but they’re playing around with things.
And I guess I’m thinking, in a company, even if you’re resting on your laurels, okay, here’s our bread and butter, here’s what’s bringing in our money, but we’ve got to have some sort of innovation group, or some sort of innovation division that we actually listen to that maybe helps push our envelope. Again, with Rush, if the three guys get along great, and they’re on the same page, it works really good.
You think about every band that ever broke up, or the lead singer went their own way, I was thinking about the bank Chicago, Peter Cetera, right? Dennis DeYoung, STYX. The lead singers kind of were going in this other direction and it disrupted, but it disrupted to the point where people went off and formed their own businesses.
I mean, is there times where that’s what you do? Is that spinning out another company? Because I’ve seen that too?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah. No, that’s one great strategy a lot companies do because they feel like, “Hey, this stead-state mentality where we’ve got these cash cows, they’re bringing in lots of money, let’s go spin this new idea off into a separate company so it doesn’t get smothered by the bureaucracy and the processes and the procedures and everything else that are inherent in scaling out a bigger company.” Right?
So I think that’s very important to look at all those different options. And some companies do, they spin out divisions where they maintain a majority interest in the company, but they kind of let them go off and do their own thing. And you’re right, you see that happen with bands all the time. Sometimes it works out great. Sometimes it works out horribly and you know I think you’ve got to make good decisions there though to be able to make sure that you’re still evolving, you’re still adapting to the marketplace, and that is one strategy that people use for it.
Josh Klapow:
All right, so how did Adaptigent … you know, you talk about you’ve been around for 40 years, I mean I know that there are other companies that have been around for a long time, but you all are not a gigantic company, you’re not a gigantic corporation. How did you make it 40 years? What is it that you did to adapt?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah. Well, I mean I think, I think a big part of it is really listening to your customers. One of the best ways to adapt … you know you’ve got products today, but you’re working with a customer and they say, “You know, I really wish we could solve this other problem.” So I think listening to customers and being sort of customer driven is a really good way of doing that, right? To adapt. Because now you’re seeing, you’re not just sitting around theorizing about, well, what product should we build next? Or, what’s the next big thing or whatever, you’re listening to your customers. But on the flip side to that, there’s the old saying, the Henry Ford saying that if I’d asked people what they want, they would’ve said a faster horse. Right?
Josh Klapow:
Right.
Alex Heublein:
And so knowing that though, being able to work out, you know do people really want a faster horse or do they want something completely different? That I think is one of the most very difficult decisions you have to make in any type of company when you’re looking at innovation and you’re looking at … there’s times where you want to be very customer driven and listen to your customers, and then there’s times if you really want to make breakthroughs, your customers probably aren’t going to come up with those breakthroughs. Right? The truly disruptive innovations that are out there, right? I mean nobody was asking for the iPhone, you know nobody was clamoring for that. I keep going back to that, but it’s a really good example. Nobody was clamoring for this thing. Everybody liked their blackberries. I had one, everybody had one. You know that wasn’t something that if you went out and did a bunch of market research on it, you would’ve found there was this huge customer demand for.
So a tricky bit of it is figuring out what are customers really asking for both now and in the future. And I think that can drive a lot of innovation for companies. It certainly has for Adaptigent. But at the same time, you’ve got to be able to look at things and say, “Wait a minute, we’ve got a potentially very disruptive thing here we can go out and do in the marketplace that maybe the marketplace isn’t asking for yet.” But the reason they’re not asking for it is they don’t know what’s possible. And that’s a lot of times people don’t know what’s possible. Consumers or other companies, or what have you, they’re in the box thinking, right? And I think where great innovations come from, the truly disruptive ones are when people step outside that box and say, “Yeah, I know that there’s not a real market demand for this yet, but we have a really strong reason to believe that there will be a market going forward for it. And we can actually create that market.”
Josh Klapow:
Can you do that in a safe way? Because again, what I see in corporations, even small ones is what you said, look, this is bringing in us a ton of money. Maybe our resources are somewhat limited. There’s things that we can dink around with, but you know … it’s Rush deciding I guess to sound like Bad Company even though the record label didn’t want them to. How do you do that in a way that companies can feel comfortable with? Because I hear all the time about disruption, but by definition, disruption is not always a good comfortable thing. And I think it keeps a lot of companies from doing it because they feel like they got to do it in a giant way.
Alex Heublein:
Yeah. Well, I mean disruption’s never a comfortable thing. I’ve never, I’ve never gone through a truly disruptive scenario, or brought a disruptive product to market where there wasn’t a lot of uncertainty around it, where it was just, “Oh yeah, here we go, we’re going to launch this thing.” I mean we’re launching a fairly new disruptive product early next year. And you know, we think it’s got an amazing ability to help our customers out. And I think in many ways it will be kind of disruptive in the industry, but we had to go out a little bit on a limb of faith and say, “This is why we think this is going to be disruptive,” but you never know, right? You never know until you get that product out into the market, you can do all the market research you want and say, you know, would you buy this sort of thing?
And we did all that stuff and they were all good results. But at the end of the day, you still don’t know for certain. And a lot of times you got to go take some risks. But you know, there’s the old saying, no risk, no reward, right? You don’t get paid to just kind of sit around and do your thing. Where you really make money in the business world is when you actually go out and take some risks, and some of them are going to work out great, and some of them are going to fail. But that element of risk taking is another thing that I learned watching Rush throughout the years, right? These guys were not afraid to take risks. Like in the ’80s they alienated a fair bit of their fan base with this you know, new wave kind of synthesizer, more popish kind of music. They alienated a fair number of their fans. I think most of them came back around. But that was a risk for them. That was a big risk.
Or you know, you take a guy … I was reading this interview with Sting recently, when he left The Police, I mean The Police when he left, The Police were the biggest band on the planet, right? They had a number, Every Breath You Take, and all that stuff. These guys were raking in money. They were at the height of their game, and Sting said, “You know what? I’m going to go forge off on my own here.”
I read an interview with him recently, he said, “Yeah, it was a big risk. I didn’t know what was going to happen, right? I didn’t know where this was going to go.” Decades later he’s … I don’t know what that guy’s worth now, but it’s got to be hundreds of millions of dollars, right? It worked out well for him, right? But it doesn’t always work out well. And you’ve got accept that, right?
When you’re going out and taking risks, you know they need to be controlled risks, they need to be things that aren’t going to put your company out of business hopefully, but you’ve got to be able to weigh the pros and the cons of those risks and be willing to take some risks if you’re really going to grow and adapt going forward.
Josh Klapow:
All right. So I got a last question for you. I’ve heard Rush, I heard Bad Company, I heard The Police … and I didn’t say those were your favorite bands, but so if Rush is number one, who’s number two? For in terms of the most important band in your learning evolution as an individual, as a professional, if Rush was number one, is there anybody that’s number two?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah, no, I mean, I’d have to kind of throw The Police in there as well, right? Because it was a different story. Rush stuck around for 40 years, three guys playing together, did some really amazing things, created some amazing music. And then you look at The Police. I mean they lasted five albums, and then you know, Sting went off and did his own thing.
But the things that they sort of had in common for me were some things that I think are important in the business world, right? One of those is to make sure that you understand the importance of having A-players in your key positions. If you go off and look at Neil Peart and Alex Lifeson, and Geddy Lee and Sting and Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, these guys were all amazing musicians in their own right, right? They were virtuosos at their instruments. You know, you’ve got guys like Neil Peart playing the drums and Stewart Copeland. I mean these guys are some of the best drummers that have ever lived. Same thing with guys like Geddy Lee, or Alex Lifeson.
So I think you know, one thing I learned there from both of those bands was this idea of making sure that you understand the importance of really putting A-players in the key positions within your company or your band, or what have you. And you’ve got to keep doing that, right? You’ve got to keep growing. And I think the other thing that I found out from those bands is the importance of building an amazing fan base, particularly Rush, right? I mean Rush fans in general are some of the most loyal and-
Josh Klapow:
That’s true.
Alex Heublein:
Right? I mean they’re crazy. They’re just die-hard fans. And there’s very few bands out there that have really been able to generate a fan base like that, where it became part of someone’s identity, right? It wasn’t just, “Oh, they make good music,” but I think for a lot of Rush fans in particular, it became sort of part of their identity, and part of growing up, and part of their evolution as a person, right?
So being able to really go out, and whether it’s a fan base or a customer base or whatever, but having great fans, having great customers and figuring out how to do that and to support those folks, that to me is one of the other big lessons I learned by looking at bands and trying to understand how they succeeded.
Josh Klapow:
All right. So we’re going to have to pick this up in another show because I … this whole idea of the difference between adaptability and innovation, right? It’s a subtle play, but I feel like we need to do another show that really focuses more on innovation versus adaptability because I think a lot of people are like, “Okay great, I’m going to adapt, adapt, adapt, but how do I create disruption?”
So just keep that in mind because I think I’m going to be throwing those things to you at our next show.
Hey, I wanted to thank everybody for joining us today for Adapt or Perish. Stay tuned to Tony Kurre Radio for the next episode of Adapt or Perish.