Swing to the left

Coltrane - captain of industry?

Outside of the obituarising and (as Philip Larkin might have it) critical whoring that constitutes much newspaper coverage of jazz, it made the national press last week when Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, revealed the spending in his department during the last year under Labour. The figures showed that £3450 was paid from public funds to Improwise, a company that offers to improve management practice by applying the “jazz model”.

According to its website, Improwise, led by “organisational management expert and jazz pianist” Alex Steele, holds workshops using a jazz quartet to show how, “over the course of a 3-minute jazz piece, you can witness the growth of a newly formed business team [and] observe the simultaneous design and manufacture of a bespoke product delivered to the customer in front of your eyes.” In language redolent of an MBA lecture it goes on to ask: “What can we learn from the jazz life cycle and apply to development and delivery of your products and services?”

Elements of jazz, such as its fondness for improvisation and its “high tolerance for uncertainty” are proposed as exemplars for organisational practice. Among those invoked as role models are Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis (examples, in their defence of the wrong note, of how to “embrace errors as new sources of learning”) and John Coltrane (one of the jazz innovators noted for “continually re-designing and re-building their products, driving future demand and markets”).

In jazz, it says, “you only do something the same way once”, but it doesn’t mention that most jazz “improvisation” amounts to a parade of practised patterns and that classical players, working from a score, interpret liberally. Nor is there any inkling that as much might be learned about improvisation from a team of gardeners presented with a empty plot. Jazz has no monopoly on creative thinking. It does, however, have an artistic mystique and left-wing cachet that makes it rather saleable to those in search of the exotic and politically correct.

Perhaps more significantly for private sector customers, the site says nothing of the fact that reliance on jazz has traditionally been a fine way to live on the breadline, go bankrupt and, latterly, live with a fat student debt - except, perhaps, for those who turn to more lucrative work such as selling the idea that business should model itself on this largely impecunious art form.