The Don of Leadership
One of the greatest instrumental introductions of all time can be found on Track #3 of the self-titled, debut album from the band known as Boston.
Lead guitarist and chief songwriter Tom Scholz takes mere mortal listeners like you and I on a sonic journey with an ethereal Hammond B3 organ solo known only as Foreplay. Coupled with ‘Long Time’ and clocking in at 7:47, it’s the first song Tom ever recorded on a two-track machine in his home basement. A multi-instrumentalist and MIT engineering grad, Tom worked for Polaroid. His homemade demo tapes received numerous rejections from major record labels before a tape fell into the hands of Epic Records, which signed Tom and his band in 1975. By August of the following year, the debut album was released as Tom held down his full-time job at Polaroid. Within two weeks, the lead single had been added at 392 radio stations before the album went platinum in November.
Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘Iconoclast’ as:
“A person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, or widely accepted practices.”
Originating from the Greek eikon ("image") and klastes ("breaker"), the term can also be utilized to describe rebels, renegades and nonconformists. By insisting on recording his album at home and not in a professional studio approved by corporate bigwigs at Epic Records, Tom Scholz showed the entire world how an iconoclast can disrupt standard practices in any industry. In other words he refused to play the same game as everybody else. By definition, Tom falls into the same iconoclastic category as one of North America’s leading management thinkers. For decades, this globe-trotting maverick has used biomedical science, genetics, planetary physics, history and evolutionary thinking to bust common leadership myths that still permeate organizations today.
Any leader can readily relate to a weary traveler’s journey, devasting setbacks, seizing the moment and the need to keep chasing a dream. That’s why the vision of Tom Scholz and the controversial theories of a Baltimore-based best-selling author Don Schmincke are so perfectly aligned. It’s a long road on a lonely, uncertain path but it helps to have the musical inspiration of Boston for THE DON OF LEADERSHIP on Leaders & Legends.
“When I first started recording, I was told by all of the experts in the business that the kind of music that I was doing was never going to sell. That disco was the coming thing and it was going to take over and what I was interested in was a minor sideline”
TOM SCHOLZ
p.s…. Graduating with an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is not the road typically travelled by internationally famous rock stars.
Driven on by obsessive relentless, perfectionism, Tom Scholz took seven painstaking years to complete that debut album from Boston. It was never a band project like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones. It was the work of a sonic architect who refused to play by conventional record industry rules.
Don Schmincke has followed a similar path. Not many of the so-called leadership experts out there apply evolutionary psychology, anthropology and neuroscience to reveal glaring flaws in the way CEO’s and senior management teams think about change and transformation.
In Don’s view, ancient human wiring is still running unchecked inside modern organizations. Which is why it takes a true iconoclast to point out what’s been happening for centuries. It will require three things:
1. Genuine curiosity and open-mindedness to be willing to see things differently from other people.
2. Conquering your fear of failure, the unknown and being subject to public and private ridicule. Let’s face it … going out on a limb, makes you a target.
3. Radically improve your storytelling skills to generate interest in your ideas and how to sell those ideas to opinion leaders.
WHY THIS MATTERS TO YOU:
To begin thinking more like an iconoclast yourself, it helps to study those who have come before you. There are few examples better than Albert Ruddy, the visionary invisible hand that brought The Godfather to the silver screen.
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