Five Business Lessons from Stereophonic 

Caveat: If you’re looking for the theatre critic’s take on this piece, here’s the New York Times review. But if you’re looking for the business lessons anyone could take away from this show, you’ve come to the right place. (Oh also, I probably have some spoilers in here, so if you haven’t seen the show and care about that kind of thing, maybe don’t read this.)

Last night I saw Stereophonic on Broadway, which, as you can plainly see on their website is the most Tony-nominated play of all time. The story follows a 5-person rock band and a 2-person audio engineering crew through a years-long studio session to record a hit album. The set design takes place in a 1970s-era sound studio, with the engineers at the helm of an old-school sound mixing board right in center stage. (This, obviously, is a very big deal in my house. As I’m married to a sound engineer.) 

These juicy details give the audience an up close and personal look at the art of creation. Anyone who’s ever brought a new idea to life with a group of people would appreciate this show for its honest and real snapshot into team dynamics. Here are some themes that stood out for me: 

From the anxious egos to the bandmates on a bender, the Stereophonic band runs the full gamut of what emotions any group brings to the table (though hopefully with a little less drugs and alcohol than your work environment). As an audience member, it’s an utter delight to feel invited into the intimacy of the group dynamics that unfold on stage. It’s also a reminder that even a 7-person group carries an avalanche of emotional baggage.

In the show, there’s a concept of “not forcing it” or “not rushing anything” when it comes to unlocking the band’s ideal version of the album. It’s hard to disagree: If you feel forced to move too quickly, things get tense, and when things get tense, your blinders go up and it’s harder to relax and act from a place of grounded energy. I’ve noticed that the most high-functioning startup teams I know are ones that are hyper-aware of establishing a methodical, yet empathetic pace of work. This doesn’t mean there’s no urgency; the best leaders know how to coax the best performing energy from everyone on their team at a pace that feels reasonable to them. 

The Lesson for Leaders: Set your team’s tempo at a reasonable pace that works for them. If you booked a studio for three months and the album creation process happens to take over a year, don’t worry about the financial implications or how you might be impacting the lives of everyone around you. The best thing you can do is support people where they are at. And if they want to wander into work half-baked and bloodshot from a bender the night before, offer them a bag of cocaine and a swig of liquor to buck them up to get them right back at it. 

Sometimes you just need to move quickly on a new thing. In the show, after a long night of slow progress on a song, a moment of epiphany strikes just as someone steps out for the day. The band leader compels the audio engineer to chase down his colleague in the parking lot to come back in and try just one more thing. This moment is one of the most rewarding for the audience because it’s the first time you see the band truly enter the “flow state” of uninterrupted, collaborative creation. As the leader, it’s about having the conviction to voice the unspoken and act on a sudden stroke of insight, saying, “Hey, let’s try this again – just in a whole different way,” even when everyone is tired and energy is low.

The Lesson for Leaders: Screw what I said before. Don’t worry about going slow and trusting the process. Pounce on every creative idea. Do it now. Don’t stress about keeping people up until 4am regularly in order to try it your way. Don’t worry about bringing your own versions of work to the table if you feel others aren’t working fast enough. They may hate you at the moment, but they’ll love the end result. And let’s be real: No one can argue with perfection.

You hear all the time about how obsessive attention to details often falls hand-in-hand with leaders who build great art, and the set of Stereophonic is a master class in attention to detail. While poking around on stage after the show with a friend kind enough to invite us on set, I took pictures of all the little props that brought us all home – the corked bottle of Veuve Clicquot, the half-empty pack of cigarettes on the piano, the Playboy magazine on the rug. From the vantage point of the audience, it felt as though the evidence of the messy creation process was everywhere. This believability made the story so much more real.

I’ve noticed that an obsession with minute details is a common trait among great artists. For instance, while in New Zealand last year, we learned about film director Peter Jackson's dissatisfaction with the shade of green on a tree during the filming of The Hobbit. His commitment to perfection led him to pay interns to paint each leaf a slightly brighter shade of green before the next day's shoot.

The Lesson for Leaders: Remember this: YOU ARE A GOD. It is your job to obsess over every single beautiful and wonderful detail that you need to bring your art to life. That’s the only way. If you fail to do this one thing you have been put on this earth to do, you might as well shrivel into a corner and die now. So go ahead and do whatever it takes to achieve the holy grail of perfection. Burn out your interns. Manipulate people with stories of their past until you get them to perform how you want. Threaten with force if need be. (They’ll thank you later.)

My favorite quote from the show comes in the second act, when two band members argue about how their creation process has changed over time. As an audience member, you notice things like how in the second act, you don’t really see the full band all together in the studio anymore – we see a lot more snippets of individuals workshopping little elements, taking 20 and 30 takes of the same guitar riff just until they get it the exact right way. 

There’s yelling, there’s high anxiety, there are tears, there are endless late nights, rifts and fights. The audio engineers gently remind them that they are quite literally running out of tape. But the work is never over, and they keep pushing to get one last go, at every single moment of each track in the album. They quite literally can’t stop. The singular obsession of perfection has taken hold and it is destroying them. At some point in the midst of this argument between two band members, one of them injects and shouts:

I can’t add anything to give that line any more poignance. So I won’t.

The Lesson for Leaders: … okay, um hi. Maybe forget everything I said. Pull back on the obsession stuff just a hair. You knew I was joking right? I mean, come on. You’re not curing cancer here. These are just people trying to do their best to make something magical. What’s creation without joy? Maybe next time you just throw out all of the playbooks and scripts and pre-planned ideas and just let it all loose. Back to square one. Back to basics. Scrap it all, just get back to those cozy corners and easy art. Maybe just toss out all of this advice and get back to the only true thing we know to be true at all, the one and only thing that will be the make it or break it factor for whatever it is that you dare to bring into this world…

They've got your back. And the final say on how the end result turns out.

As they say in the show, the job of an engineer is plain and simple:

Show up.

Pay attention.

Tell the truth.

Deal with the consequences.