If a typical traditional music session, supported by pints of Guinness, a fog of cigarette smoke and a voluble pub crowd, sounds more like a recipe for hungover employees calling in sick than a model for creative management, think again, says composer Micheal O Suilleabhain.
Prof O Suilleabhain, chair of music at the University of Limerick, has added the model of the Irish music session to the growing set of ideas emerging around music and management.
The trend, which veers more towards the playful and inspirational rather than the concrete on a scale of competing management theories, is seeing more conductors, players and composers appearing at business schools and conferences with a variety of messages and metaphors around individuality, creativity and teamwork.
In an early appearance of the music-management connection, Peter Drucker suggested in The New Realities, published a decade ago, that managing an information-based organisation would be more like conducting a symphony orchestra than running a business on traditional lines.
One person regularly invited to play with that analogy since is Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. Mr Zander told 300 UK-based Microsoft employees last year that leadership of the future would be about what he called "radiating possibilities" rather than the downward spiral caused by competitive thinking. Mr Zander suggested that instead of relying on outdated military and sporting metaphors, leaders needed to be thinking in terms of creating a symphony in which everyone sounded together. His delivery - a combination of relating his own life-changing experiences, interspersed with piano-playing and encouraging audience participation - ended with the Microsoft employees standing to sing - in German - The Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Another American conductor, Robert Nierenberg, music director of the Stamford Symphony Orchestra, delivered this year's annual BBC2 Money Programme Lecture, an edited version of a management awareness seminar given to around 30 companies, including the BBC.
Mr Nierenberg used the last movement of Brahms's First Symphony to bring managers, musicians and conductor together to consider issues of organisation, performance and leadership.
Included among the relevant elements of the orchestral model for business leaders were the extent of organisation, teamwork and the degree of communication flowing during the playing. When Mr Nierenberg asked the orchestra to play without a conductor, it took just three measures to find a consensus.
Musicians may make and execute decisions 100 times a minute. Various exercises between conductor and orchestra showed that what works is whole-hearted commitment to the performance, not leadership by diktat or performers playing for themselves rather than the unit.
Prof O Suilleabhain's playful exploration of the Irish traditional music session metaphor shares similarities with the jazz jamming model developed by former Harvard professor, author, movie producer and jazz pianist John Kao.
In the Irish music session, creativity, individuality and intuition combine and are expressed inside a free-flowing, almost invisible structure to produce something - music, or, if you like, the product, that is more than the sum of its parts.
Prof O Suilleabhain contrasts the more structured, hierarchical approach of the classical orchestra with the informal ethic of traditional Irish music, which mirrors the informality of Irish culture. But while a successful traditional music session depends a good deal upon individuality and improvisation, these still obviously take place within a system. Inside the system's rules, musicians are free to play, elaborate and diverge. Different players take the lead at different times. Players respond to each other dynamically, swapping lead and background roles. What looks anarchic and directionless can lead, as anyone who has been to a particularly good session knows well, to something sublime.
Although an egalitarian spirit pervades sessions, a leader generally emerges. Prof O Suilleabhain likens this to the idea of primus inter pares, or "first among equals". It is a negotiable position and, as the music develops and changes, so may the leader.
The parallels for business are not hard to spot. "People are attracted to join organisations where individual autonomy is balanced with a strong focus on performance. This is particularly applicable to knowledge workers in the high technology sector," says Patrick Flood, professor of organisational behaviour at the IMI and at UL.
"In a session the group works together in a very close way. There is a tacit knowledge of when to let someone off to do their own thing, when to switch over and let someone else take the lead. Liberation and individuality is balanced within the session through an almost unconscious system of control which operates between the musicians," says Prof Flood, who was among the audience at Prof O Suilleabhain's talk on music and management at the IMI's annual conference in April.
"The metaphor of self-organising which is presented in the traditional music session is consistent with trends in the wider business environment, including de-layering, or reducing levels of hierarchy. Many businesses are attempting to increase empowerment through the use of self-managing teams, with little interference or supervision," said Prof Flood.
"Research shows that Irish knowledge workers are very group oriented, while they also express a strong desire for room to express individuality on the job," he added.
Prof O Suilleabhain prefers to let business people draw their own lessons from the session model he first proposed "quite humorously". "I think I'd be overstepping a line if I were to start drawing specific conclusions," he said. "But I think the Irish session metaphor has something to say to the Irish style of life, and the Irish style of doing business. There is an informality that works."
The question is, can you get a culture going within a management system, where you can encourage individuality and yet keep communality, he added. He quotes studies of Danish hearing-aid company Oticon, whose productivity shot up after it threw out most of the props of a regular business in an effort to spur creativity and new ideas.
Mobile desks replaced the normal office structure, paper was almost eliminated and the elevator was replaced with a spiral staircase to facilitate more face-to-face communication.
At UL's Irish World Music Centre, Prof O Suilleabhain is not going quite that far but he is planning to break with "traditional hierarchies within the education system and with notions about a two-tiered contribution to the community" by introducing communal meetings for administrative and academic staff in the next academic year.
Oticon's unorthodox approach is also cited by John Kao, who elaborated a theory of jazz music for managers in Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity published in 1996. Creativity, says Mr Kao, is like jazz - fuelled by contradictions, between discipline and freedom, convention and experiment, old and new, familiar and strange, expert and naive, power and desire - a host of paradoxes Mr Kao says managers should make no attempt to resolve.
Lest this send a chill through the hearts of stressed-out managers, Mr Kao is clear that all this must happen - somehow - within a disciplined structure. "Without discipline, freedom degenerates into chaos," he says.
He suggests that companies start with an audit of their performance - and their industry's performance - on innovation. Who are your most creative people and how do you reward them? How do you get the best people in the business? How to get them jamming creatively for you?
Among the conclusions - by constructing the kind of office where they playfully interact, and by fostering the Zen concept of "beginner's mind".
Those solutions, and indeed the whole music in management metaphor, may strike some business people as more than a little thin when it comes to specifics. A permanent culture of innovation, improvisation and innovation might be destabilising, threatening or plain tiring in the average workplace.
Creative geniuses with drug habits and chaotic inner lives, like Charlie "Yardbird" Parker or Miles Davis, might be less than inspiringly encountered in the office on a Monday morning.
Traditional sessions do not always soar into the sublime - the music can degenerate and peter out in a haze of empty pints and exhaustion. The fiddler and the piper might grow to hate each other and decide never to play together again.
But fans argue that the central message - to aim for more creativity and more innovation within an organisation - is sound.
If that idea is not new, the music metaphor may be a more appealing way of delivering it. Having the creativity message amplified by a portion of Brahms or a Micheal O Suilleabhain piano composition is likely to be more fun and uplifting than listening to another dry lecture. "It's a stimulus to the imagination and a challenge to old ways of thinking. That can be very motivating," says Patrick Flood.
