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The Music is the Message

Alumnus and CWRU management professor Frank Barrett spreads the lessons of jazz far and wide

Photo by Roger Mastroianni Frank Barrett playing the piano at the Tinkham Veale University Center on campus.

"So," says Frank Barrett, PhD, a professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management, as he gazes at a new class of graduate students, "how many of you have a background in music?"

Not exactly the beginning you'd expect to a course on leadership and organizational change.

But it's a fundamental question for Barrett (GRS '90, organizational behavior), a journeyman jazz pianist who spent a year touring with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and now uses jazz improvisation as a model for cultivating organizations that can adapt, innovate and flourish.

He frequently leads his classes from the keyboard, demonstrating how jazz musicians navigate fluid situations and prod one another to exceed their limitations so that his audiences can do the same back at work. Sometimes, he'll even have students join him on the piano bench and coax them into improvising along with him.

Barrett first gained widespread attention for his approach in his 2012 book, Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz, which is required reading in some MBA programs. He also has published articles on jazz and leadership in scholarly journals, written pieces on the topic for major media outlets, explained his ideas in podcasts and YouTube videos and shared his insights with military brass and executives at companies ranging from Ford Motor Co. to Facebook.

In 2023, Barrett brought his approach to the Department of Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead School, where he earned his PhD and now serves as faculty director of the Master of Science in Positive Organization Development and Change (MPOD) program. He also teaches in the executive education program.

Barrett's use of music in the classroom has a firm pedagogical basis. "Music enables you to make an emotional connection—and when you have that connection, you actually remember the ideas you are studying better," said Barrett's longtime friend and colleague Richard Boyatzis, PhD, a Distinguished University Professor at Weatherhead School, who has studied the neuroscience of learning with CWRU colleagues.

But perhaps what's most intriguing about Barrett, Boyatzis said, is that while some people have "one wave in life ... one area in which they're really connecting," Barrett has "come back in another mode ... one, two, three, maybe four times. That's very, very impressive."

Arguably, Barrett has done that by applying what he calls "the jazz mindset" (see sidebar below) to his own life, which he treats as an unfolding journey of discovery.

In 2021, feeling that he had begun to fall into a rut, Barrett took a leave of absence from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he taught courses in management, organizational design and leadership to Navy and Marine officers, including admirals and generals, for more than 30 years. He moved across the country to earn a Master of Divinity degree at Harvard. (He graduated in May.) Even before completing his degree, however, he had joined the faculty at Weatherhead School.

"I was getting to the point where I wasn't surprising myself anymore," Barrett said of this series of rapid ruptures. "I thought, 'I have got to do something radically different.'"

That urge to shake things up calls to mind one of the jazz-derived principles that Barrett teaches: provocative competence, or disrupting people's routines to nudge them out of their comfort zones and spur them to new heights. Typically, Barrett encourages his students to practice provocative competence on the people around them. In this case, however, the person whom he decided to shake out of complacency was none other than himself.

"We should all practice what we teach," said Ethan Bernstein, DBA, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who regularly has Barrett visit his MBA classes. "But Frank actually does it, which is pretty special."

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Roger MastroianniFrank Barrett

Barrett's musical talent surfaced early, as did his scholarly proclivities.

By the age of 8, the Cleveland native was playing ragtime piano duets with his grandfather. But as he grew up, his principal ambition was to be a college professor. "I just always loved learning," he said.

That urge was initially channeled into English literature—he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in the subject at Notre Dame University—but the job market for English professors did not look good. So Barrett dove back into music, gigging at riverfront restaurants in Cleveland's Flats with the legendary reed player Ken Peplowski and touring with the Dorsey band under the leadership of the virtuoso trombonist Buddy Morrow. Yet still he dreamed of a career in academia.

Then, in the early 1980s, several of Barrett's friends independently mentioned the organizational behavior program at Case Western Reserve to him. Intrigued, Barrett investigated and found himself immediately drawn to the study of groups. The connection between organizational behavior and jazz, however, took longer.

Indeed, at one point Barrett's dissertation advisor, the late Weatherhead School Professor Suresh Srivastva, PhD, introduced him to Karl Weick, PhD, a pioneer of organizational behavior, as "the doctoral student who used to play jazz." Weick asked Barrett if he was writing his dissertation about jazz as an innovative organization. At the time, Barrett, who was instead studying the behavior of teams at the Cleveland Clinic, hadn't the foggiest idea what Weick was talking about. What, he wondered, could jazz improvisation possibly have to do with organizational behavior?

Only later would the light bulb go on. Jazz bands, Barrett eventually realized, are in fact teams of highly interdependent people who fruitfully collaborate despite having to make rapid, irreversible decisions with little certainty about outcomes—conditions that closely resemble those of the modern workplace, with its rapid pace of change and emphasis on teamwork and innovation. What's more, jazz musicians have developed effective systems for training themselves to do what they do. Jamming and hanging out might seem like casual pursuits, for instance; but as Barrett knew from personal experience, they are powerful ways of honing skills, generating new ideas, and transmitting professional knowledge.

By the mid-'90s, Barrett had the academic career he had wished for as a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and was fully committed to using jazz improvisation as a metaphor to understand collaborative innovation and organizational learning. And while he is not the only person who has embraced improvisation as a way of teaching management and leadership skills, his dual pedigree as a scholar and serious jazz musician gives him a unique perspective on the topic.

"I have yet to run into another human being who was as accomplished as Frank was in jazz and has a PhD in organizational behavior from one of the best programs in the country, if not the world," Bernstein said.

SPREADING THE WORD

Photo by Roger MastroianniFrank Barrett and students in his fall course, "Managing Organizational Change and
Real-World Challenges" talk during a break-out session.

Barrett often uses the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis as an example of a leader who habitually got his bandmates to see things in new ways. But Barrett tends to have that effect on people as well.

Michael Wheeler, JD, who has taught negotiation at Harvard Business School for more than 30 years, helped bring Barrett in as a visiting scholar from 2008 to 2010. Wheeler was immediately struck by the relevance of Barrett's ideas about jazz to his own work. "Great negotiators are great improvisors," said Wheeler, who drew heavily on Barrett's work in his 2013 book The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World. Wheeler states in the book: "We can't script the [negotiations] process. ... Opportunities will pop up. So will obstacles. Power ebbs and flows. ... Even our own objectives may evolve. We have to improvise and make the best of whatever unfolds."

Barrett has had a similar impact at Weatherhead School.

Amanda Comstock (MGT '24), said that often with a traditional approach to organizational change management, end goals are set and a 'final state' envisioned—and only then does a carefully structured plan of change begin.

"Frank's work is pretty radical," said Comstock, whose firm, Empowered Learning by Design, provides strategic planning and sustainability consulting to nonprofits and other organizations. "He says, 'no—you just need to start by jumping in and experimenting and let the final state emerge through the process.'"

Comstock began applying Barrett's improvisational approach while enrolled in the MPOD program, which aims to help graduates create enterprises that are economically viable, environmentally sustainable and socially responsible. She said her clients, which range from the American Library Association to a local nature center, have found the idea of embracing experimentation to be liberating. (The greatest challenge, meanwhile, seems to be the fear of the unknown, which Comstock aims to address through workshops informed in part by her classes on improvisation with Barrett.)

Now Barrett is poised to apply the lessons he has drawn from jazz to a whole new field of endeavor: the ministry.

Long interested in theology and eager to serve others, Barrett pursued a Master of Divinity degree in part because he thought becoming a hospital chaplain would be a gratifying way to spend his eventual retirement. For his final thesis project, he gave a public performance in which he explained how aspects of the jazz mindset relate to pastoral care and grief counseling, like not getting hung up on making mistakes and being willing to follow and support others without knowing where the process might ultimately lead.

"Those are muscles that pastors really need," said the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, PhD, Barrett's thesis advisor at Harvard Divinity School.

Using music to model effective strategies for pastoral care might seem like a surprising turn for someone who has spent so many years imparting his improvisational wisdom to military and business types.

But for Barrett, it's all part of preaching the gospel of jazz.

— ALEXANDER GELFAND