Posted by Rick Denney on April 24, 2003 at 11:06:59:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Fort Worth posted by David on April 24, 2003 at 08:43:35:
I agree with most of what you say about music, but I think your understanding of the business world isn't what I see. The differences are profound from the perspective of the recent graduate.
CEO's are not trained primarily by mentoring though they may receive it along the way. When they graduate, they get a job. It's usually an assistant administrator, writing invoices or keeping books or selling. In my experience, those who sell and do it well are the ones most likely to move up, despite that the ability to sell doesn't cross over to management terribly well.
When they prove themselves in their lowly job, they get promoted. They move to an administrative role. Eventually, they get promoted to an office manager, and then they move up to regional manager, and so on. At each level, they either have to prove themselves or they have to give the impression that they are proving themselves (which is actually harder to do, but it's why good sellers end up getting promoted).
I don't think you'll find many department heads of established companies who got their job within ten years of graduating from business school. The only young CEOs (in their 20's or early 30's, when tuba players are seeking an orchestral gig) are those who had a vision and started their own company, and most of them fail.
And in many industries, business school graduates are used only for administration, leaving management for those who understand (from having done it) the technical mission of the company. The decline of this is one of the reasons behind the problems of corporate America, in my humble opinion.
This is a gradual process. It provides a box around a new graduate that grows with that person's ability to fill it (and stay within it--most of the time). When the box gets too big and they can't fill it, their progress stops (this is the Peter Principle, which gets recounted as a joke but it's deadly serious).
Orchestral musicians don't mark their progress that way. They graduate from school and go on the audition circuit. While on the circuit, they take free-lance gigs, teach kiddies, and practice excerpts. They show up to all the auditions. At some point, they have a great day, and get selected, or they don't. If they don't get selected (which is the usual outcome), they stop going to auditions, and spend more time developing their free-lance and kiddie-teaching roles (those who go back for a doctorate and then teach in college are teaching big kiddies). Or, they discover that they prefer free-lancing and teaching to counting measures (now I'm sounding like Joe, heh, heh), and they take themselves off the circuit.
It doesn't happen that a budding orchestral musician gets out of school and takes a job as the third assistant understudy to Mr. Jacobs (to pull a name out of the air), to be promoted to second assistant understudy when Mr. Jacobs retires and the first assistant is promoted to the principal chair. The fellow who was acting as the alternate for Mr. Jacobs when he was in his later years didn't fill the seat when Mr. Jacobs retired--it went to someone else on the basis of an audition. It does sometimes happen that musicians of great stature take on favored students (apprentices) and then feed them into the local gigging scene to help them build resume, but even this is more the exception than the rule.
Now, part of the reason for this is that orchestras want to recruit from the top of the barrel, just as businesses do. When I want a new Chief Financial Officer, I look to my current corps of finance office adminstrators, but I'm more likely (unfortunately) to bribe the CFO from my competitor into coming to my company. Either that, or I'm trying to go public and I pick someone that members of the board think will impress Wall-Street analysts and investment bankers. Again, I'm specifically recruiting from a known pool, not on the basis of a dog-and-pony show during the interview. The notion of someone without the best qualifications coming from behind in an interview is more rare than is portrayed on TV.
The problem is that those lowly orchestra-alternate tuba jobs don't pay a livig wage. In the old days of artisan apprenticeships, the apprentices were paid (or at least fed and housed) by the master, until they earned their way to journeyman and could go on their own (i.e. journey to a new place) while they developed their skills to mastery such that they would be entrusted to teach. In a high-physical-skill profession like music, this model has real merit despite its antiquity. But the alternates in most orchestras are paid by the service. The resume-building gigs that aspiring orchestral pros earn either don't pay at all or they pay by the service. I have lost many opportunities to play in groups that purport to be amateur groups because of a recent graduate who needs to build resume for an orchestra gig. Orchestras don't have farm clubs. So, most tuba players and other musicians who must feed themselves take free-lance gigs and teach kiddies, and do the amateur orchestras for free.
Another part of the problem is that there is only one tuba chair in an orchestra, and so there is nothing for the third assistant to do to prove himself in most orchestras. And the principle might hold his position for 30 years--too long to provide any prospect of promotion for the assistants.
Music is an entertainment business, and there are those people who are driven to be entertainers despite that they outnumber the available positions. There are unpaid "interns" in every TV studio and movie set in the land, and those people make ends meet however they can while they dream of their big break. Such is the nature of things when the supply outstrips the demand.
While you can construct an economic model, perhaps, that describes both the business world and the music world, the experiences of the participants just aren't the same. You don't see recent business-school graduates consulting by the hour for a variety of customers and mentoring kiddies while they practice their interviewing skills. For one thing, they don't know anything yet and companies won't hire consultants who don't know anything.
To me, it argues for the notion that much of what is important in music is innate. My friends who have been successful as orchestral musicians disagree and say that any skill can be learned with enough work, but those skills are the faster, higher, and louder part, not the music part. But the person who has an innate talent often doesn't recognize it as such, while the lack of that talent is glaringly apparent to those who don't have it, or who don't have it to the same extent. Thus, we don't build orchestral musicians as a master builds a journeyman, because those who lack the innate talent usually don't find it in such training, and those who have find the training to be the stuff of life and undertake it on their own initiative at an early age. In the fuzzy middle between these extremes, there are people with considerable but not overwhelming talent who keep hoping for a good day at an audition. I admire their tenacity, but I'm glad I'm not one of them.
Rick "a businessman in addition to being an engineer" Denney