Moving Performance Blog

A tale of two concerts and two leadership styles. Over the last week I have witnessed first hand two conducting and leadership styles, that speak a simple message which is so relevant to leadership in the workplace. The first was a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, possibly the hardest piece for a conductor to…

Have you ever been in the situation where a new boss comes in who just doesn’t have a clue? I witnessed it this week in an orchestra rehearsal. The conductor was a “choral” conductor who knew seemed to know very little about conducting let alone rehearsing an orchestra. We were “rehearsing” Rossini’s Stabat Mater ahead…

In an open forum speaking event in a corporate conference exhibition hall recently, I played a group of delegates (all strangers to me and to each other) the song Beautiful by James Blunt. I asked them to reflect on how it made them feel. A youngish lady puts her hand up and says “it made…

I played golf with Tiger Woods a few weeks ago. …actually I didn’t, but I did have the opportunity one evening to play my french horn in one of the leading orchestras in the UK, alongside their horn section. This, I tell my friends, is a bit like going for a round of golf with…

I came across this video of Obama introducing a night of music from the Civil Rights movement at the White House. He speaks about the music (freedom songs) providing a “soundtrack to the movement” which “gave strength” and that the movement was “sustained by music”.  Interestingly, Dr King when looking to mobilise communities, focused on those…

Check out this quote from Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Do we give ourselves time to imagine? To dream? Do we know how to? And what…

I love this story – it almost reduced me to tears first time I read it. Whilst it is was an experiment to explore peoples’ taste, perceptions and priorities in a social context, for me there is a strong leadership parallel here. As leaders do we recognise our environment around us – do we understand,…