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It's Friday. Let's party.
Once upon a time in 2004, the late George Harrison was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and a few friends showed up to help him posthumously celebrate:
The whole thing is a sonic marvel. Even if all you can do is bring the energy of these excruciatingly good minutes to your work today, you're done.
But I need to draw your attention to 5 minutes, 34 seconds — a moment that was drawn to my attention by Michael Palmisano:
And you can tell by his look: that was the moment ... he saved it to the very end.
Previously, Prince had gone on his masterful tear, which a guitar god is wont to do, but when that god is in the presence of another god named Tom Petty, things are even more magnificent:
It's a really heavy part ... a riff in a song without a riff ... it shows how diverse and spicy Prince can be sometimes.
Right there, you see Prince's face?
He told [Tom] with his face he had that F [note line] before he even got there.
Tom is leading the impromptu supergroup, a responsibility which had gloriously devolved into steering the waves of the ocean. And the energy of those waves belonged to Prince:
Prince knows where he is, he's waiting for it, he says 'You think I'm not gonna get that F?'
And he comes in right on it, right at the right time, completely in control of the moment.
That merry-go-round of trust — the promise that Prince would return to the main line of the song after demolishing the stage, was complete.
(Not that Tom had a choice.)
My Manager Heart Gently Weeps
We want to get to P/M-fit, and we've read some articles lately talking about how tight everything needs to be, all the way down: 'Yeah! Tighten those bolts!'
This appeals to our deep desire to control for things like quality and timing.
But paradoxically, for a team to find fit, we, as the team leaders, have to allow for the opposite of tightness in the day-to-day, week-to-week, sprint-to-sprint.
Yes, we need to be tight with whom is allowed on stage. But once they're on stage, we need to let them run. If they can't run, they're the wrong person. If they can run, but we won't let them, we aren't gaining the advantage in the margins we desperately need to break through.
If You Want To Feel Like This
After numerous pivots, Summit had our own breakthrough earlier this year, and it's not even a question that without the contributions of my teammates (Ryan and Pieter), it couldn't have happened.
We didn't find our fit because of the presence of one part (me), we found it because of the contributions and interactions between those parts, and because we gave each other permission to make each of us just a little uncomfortable, some of the time.
But then it comes around. That feature, that flourish, that unrelated idea, flows back into the main line in a way that shocks and delights us, and our market.