MINDY PETERSON, NCTM

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

December 29, 2020

Executives develop organizational and leadership skills through unscripted, interactive and unconventional orchestral performances. This innovative program has been utilized in over 20 countries and at hundreds of corporations and organizations, including Lockheed Martin, Harvard Business School, Pfizer, Unilever, Sony, and Google. As of 2020, the experience is also available virtually.

Guest

Joining me today from New York City is Maestro Roger Nierenberg, conductor extraordinaire and creator of The Music Paradigm. Roger has conducted and recorded with countless orchestras around the world. He enjoyed long tenures as Music Director of The Jacksonville Symphony (Florida) and the Stamford Symphony (Connecticut). In 1995, Roger began The Music Paradigm, an interactive learning experience for organizations of all types that uses unscripted orchestral performances and role-playing to teach organizational & leadership skills. Since then, Roger has taken The Music Paradigm experience to over 20 countries and hundreds of corporations and organizations, including Lockheed Martin, Harvard Business School, Pfizer, Unilever, Sony, and Google.

Notes

• Roger tells the story of why a successful and well-established conductor created The Music Paradigm learning experience.
• Roger describes The Music Paradigm experience, and why it is so successful.
• Roger has said: “Every word that I speak, every inflection in my tone of voice, every gesture is directed toward the goal of creating a feeling of community. A community simply acts faster, more intelligently, more creatively and with more joy than a group that is primarily focused on its leader.”

 Connect/Other Resources

• The Music Paradigm website
• Facebook: @themusicparadigm
• Twitter: @rogernierenberg
• PBS (2018): What orchestras can teach executives about conducting business:

• New York Times article: There’s a Lesson Here; All You Have to Do Is Listen
• Nierenberg’s book is a translation of the Music Paradigm into book form: Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening
• Roger’s TED Talk

Coda

Roger says: “During the Music Paradigm session I want everyone to see that dysfunctional leadership really does undermine the team’s ability to produce great results. So I intentionally role-model that kind of behavior and ask musicians to share their reactions. After that I ask a musician to describe what it’s like to work with a great leader.”

View the entire video (scroll to Building Audiences for Orchestras).

Closing Words

I have included the video of this segment in the show notes so you can fully appreciate the moment by seeing the visuals as well! Thank you so much to Maestro Nierenberg for sharing his time and expertise with us today, and for the ways he enhances so many of our lives with music, directly and indirectly, through his work with some of the world’s biggest corporations and organizations.

Today is December 29. Christmas 2020 is now behind us, and the beginning of a new year is just a few days away. Even though the pandemic restrictions will not dramatically for most of us when the calendar flips to 2021, most of us ARE ready to be done with the old year and welcome in the new year. If you want to take advantage of this new beginning, with the start of 2021, to make some positive changes or set new goals or start fresh in some other way, music can increase your success and make the overall process more enjoyable. In Ep. 66, Olympic trainer Daniel Stewart explains how music can increase motivation and performance. Tying in with this topic is Ep. 51, on Conscious Music and how the music we choose to listen to shapes our mental narrative. If your goals are more related to athletics or fitness, you’ll enjoy Ep. 23 on how music is a LEGAL substance that can enhance athletic performance by up 15%.

With the holidays this past week, I had a little more time and I watched the documentary Phil Collins: Face Value (it’s free for Amazon Prime members). I really enjoyed it; it brought flashbacks for me of the late 90s, which is when I did a lot of listening to Phil Collins’ “Hits” album, and took me down a whole rabbit hole of Peter Cetera and Genesis and Chicago and a bunch of other artists I was listening to at the time – a fun trip down memory lane!

Thank you so much for joining me today! Until next week, may your New Year’s celebrations be enhanced with music.

 

 

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