By Donald F. Smith, Cornell University
April 15, 2015
On February 9th of this year, I posted a story about how the classical pianist, Glenn Gould, shaped my thinking about
surgical technique. I promised to write a follow-up story about how his construal of Bach also
inspired me to think about leadership.
Gould was the premier
interpreter of J.S. Bach in the second half of the 20th century. While
his rendition of the Goldberg Variations thrust him onto the international
stage early in his career, it was his elucidation of the Bach fugue that had
always been more fascinating to me.
The fugue is a contrapuntal
form of music that is played or sung by more than one voice or instrument,
often three or four. The first voice presents a short theme (subject), and the second repeats the
theme with variation and in a different pitch; and each successive voice
likewise. The voices build upon each other, not as objects stacked vertically,
but in flowing cascades of ever-complex sounds, working in synchrony. Each
voice complements the others as the subject flows in an interwoven linear
fashion towards its conclusion. As mentioned in the previous article, what is so
impressive about watching or listening to Gould’s recordings is the unique
mastery of equal strength, independence and co-dependence of each of his ten
fingers. The manner in which each
complements the others is simply breathtaking.
While moving through the
ranks of department chair and associate dean at Cornell, I dutifully read many
of the standard leadership books. These contained worthwhile material and, though
much of it was similar book-to-book, I benefitted from the repetition of themes
presented in different contexts. However, moving from theory to practice tests
different skills, and leading and empowering teams to work together towards a
common goal was always the most difficult challenge for me. Like many leaders,
I struggled finding ways to capture the creativity and accord of strong-willed
people working in an environment with a finite set of resources.
In the quiet moments I was
able to carve out for myself, I started to reflect more and more on the Bach
fugue, to which I had been listening in one form or another for years. Why not move
beyond the leader-follower theme, I reasoned now that I was dean, and encourage the voices to work for each
other rather than in competition? Instead of having one voice carry the
dominant theme and be supported by the others, perhaps I could evaluate
department chairs on the success of the other departments, rather than the
success of “their” department? Would that not create a climate in which department
chairs and directors became more committed to the overarching priorities of the
college, especially as they leverage their allocated resources for the greater good?
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| The Front Cover of Glenn Gould. A Life and Variations Otto Friedrich (Random House, NY), 1989 (Photo by the Author) |
I held a mini-retreat for
department chairs early in my term as dean. We had changed the
college’s departmental structure, moving from eight departments of different
sizes, to five which were more evenly balanced. We also mixed up some of the
disciplines: creating a mild form of chaos that always encourages original
thinking.
Several of the chairs were
new hires, including two from outside the college, and we were in a rebuilding
stage with new academic initiatives that crossed departments, with the focal theme
of translational medicine. Several new
positions and supporting resources would be allocated to three interdepartmental
themes: cancer biology and oncology, comparative mammalian genomics and medical
genetics, and infectious pathogenic diseases. If we were going to build
successful programs that crossed departmental lines, there needed to be a
managerial structure that encouraged chairs to work for the common good, and
rewarded such behavior.
I shall always remember standing
at the white board in the summer of 2000, attempting to explain the benefit of
a contrapuntal form of governance as we implemented these new initiatives, and
explaining why I felt the department chairs should move from a primary
relationship with the dean, to a primary relationship with each other. “I shall
still evaluate you relative to the strengths of your individual departments,” I
remember saying, “but I will also judge you on what you provide as value-added
to each of the other four departments.”
If we were going to move towards
a contrapuntal (fugal) style of management, we also needed to change the form
and frequency with which we interacted with other. Consequently, I advised the
chairs to start meeting together, without me or any other member of the dean’s
office. We also reduced the length and frequency of my meetings with the group
of chairs from weekly for two hours, to biweekly for one hour. I added a
regular one-on-one monthly meeting with each of the chairs, in their respective
offices. Issues like allocation of space and common resources became topics for
the chairs’ meetings, though I never did learn the full scope of their
deliberations, or even how they developed agendas or who presided over the
meetings. I don’t recall ever seeing a set of minutes from the meetings that
continued for several years.
While I am not suggesting
that this system was superior to a more traditional top-down form of
dean-to-department chair relationship, it proved to be a viable alternative,
and it worked for me. I also believe it
promoted a sense of joint responsibility and program ownership by the chairs.
While allocation of space and shared resources is never perfect nor fully
equitable, we moved the center of gravity away from the dean’s office, and
created a system whereby chairs were better able to understand the pressures
across the college, and explore ways to resolve problems amongst themselves.
I believe the college
benefited greatly, and we made substantial progress on many fronts, including the three academic areas mentioned earlier. Most importantly, the shared understanding
between the clinical and basic sciences departments led to a stronger
commitment for developing ways to support programs in translational
medicine.
Contrapuntal management is
a form of teamwork, I suppose, but I don’t look on it that way because it is so
much more. The fugue as Bach perfected it (and Gould interpreted it), was
developed upon a single musical theme, with progression of that theme
articulated over and over again by voices with different, but equal, strengths.
Each voice is absolutely critical to the whole and each voice is equally
valued. Importantly, the voices are all
playing in a linear fashion, rather than as notes stacked one upon the other.
In its most elegant and highly-developed form, the fugue is an incredibly complex
composition which adds creative expression to its mathematical foundation. It draws
up the highest level of expertise of each voice working in concert with the
others.
In the previous article on
Glenn Gould, I told the story of the British surgeon who never proceeded to
perform a major operative procedure without first listening―with his patient―to
a recording of Gould interpreting Bach. I also recall once hearing of a physician
who would often commit time to listening to a Gould recording before starting
his day. There are many fine recordings of Glenn Gould playing a Bach fugue,
but a great place to start is with the annotated and interpretive interview
called simply, Glenn Gould An Art of the Fugue.
I recently learned that 60%
of Harvard medical students have music in their backgrounds. Though the
percentage may not be quite as high among veterinary students,
there seems to be a strong correlation between medicine and music. Though the
relationship may be built somewhat upon the organization of information and the
discipline of practice, I suspect that it represents a more complex interplay of
cognitive forces and emotional energies. What I suggest here, though, is that
the relevance of music to medicine should not stop with the practitioner, but
also engage the realm of organizational behavior.
Dr. Smith invites comments at dfs6@cornell.edu