Welcome to my blog about cases and the case method, the people who create and use cases, and the ways in which the case method is changing to reflect diverse cultures and technologies.

6 January 2012

Entrepreneurship? It ain't worth a thing if it ain't got that swing

Regular readers will know that I love jazz and have drawn comparisons between it and case writing/teaching as two great American art forms constantly reinvigorated by adoption and adaptation in the rest of the world.
Seems that business academics and practitioners can learn some wider lessons from jazz and how it's organised and led.  Research into entrepreneurial leadership at Warwick University says that entrepreneurs and leaders of entrepreneurial teams can learn a lot from how the jazz greats lead their ensembles.  Entrepreneurial Teams: Insights from Jazz by Deniz Ucbasaran, Mike Humphreys and Andy Lockett (any relation to the sax player Mornington Lockett?) won an award for best paper at the 2011 ISBE conference.
Now the story is running in the jazz press
A jazz setting would make for a great case study, maybe in the style of Raymond Chandler:

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed entrepreneur ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. (adapted from the opening paragraph of The Big Sleep)



    Now that's an opening.

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