Boston Philharmonic Orchestra

There's a guy called Benjamin Zander.

He was one of the conductors of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.

And he had this thing that when musicians would come and they want to be part of his orchestra and they could be really skilled and amazing at what they do.

And he was like, yeah, that's really awesome.

All of those sorts of things.

Ben Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, used to have this great line about being a conductor.

And he said, it was in my 50s when I realized that the conductor doesn't make a sound.

And I think a lot of leaders haven't figured that out yet.

Let me give you another example that I think is a great example of this.

There's a guy by the name of Benjamin Zander who's the founder and conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and he's got a great TED Talk.

He's also got a fantastic book called The Art of Possibility.

But in both his TED Talk as well as his book, he talks about how for the first half of his career, he saw his musicians not as people, but as instruments.

And Sheetal manages relationships with governments, with multinationals across the continent.

And in this chat, she shares a principle from the Boston Philharmonics Conductor that, um, change the way that she thinks about hiring and letting go, and how that impacts the work and the team.

And then we have Emma Murr, who is the group chief risk officer at First Rand, who runs one of the most critical functions in one of South Africa's largest financial services group.

And Emma makes a distinction between excellence and perfection that I think a lot of leaders need to hear.

It's called The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander.

This is a very odd book in the sense that Rosamund Zander is a therapist and Benjamin Zander is a conductor for, I think, the Boston Philharmonic or something like that.

So it's quite a combination, and it just talks about all these different kind of like...

It's kind of a productivity book, but it takes it from sort of an artistic lens, but also a kind of, like, grounded therapist lens as well, and it just puts things in a way that I'd never heard of before.