Management 101 (Taylor’s Version) – The Globe and Mail

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The world waited expectantly in February, 2024 as Taylor Swift dramatically flew on a private jet from her concert in Japan to the United States to cheer on her boyfriend Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl. The singer-songwriter is commonly photographed performing or in airports or with friends at restaurants, but here we had to create an image in our own minds: A lone jet, with her and support staff, speeding across the vast blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

It was a charming, romantic moment but also a reminder of one of the great strategic management lessons Taylor Swift, entrepreneur and billionaire businesswoman, has to offer. When as a 13-year-old she began co-writing songs with established artists, she had a firm vision: She would appeal with country music to people her own age rather than the older folks for whom songs were usually written, exploring teenage angst rather than divorce and middle-age heartbreak.

This fit with theories being developed at about the same time and published in a 2005 book by INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy. Instead of treading water in a crowded and brutish “red ocean,” coloured with the blood of an increasing number of competitors vying for the same customers, companies were told to swim gloriously in blue oceans where nobody else was competing but customers could be drawn. All those teenagers were an open blue ocean for the country songs she felt compelled to write. Nobody else was offering that option.

Kevin Evers, a Harvard Business Review editor who has documented Ms. Swift’s business strategy over the years in There’s Nothing Like This, notes it was a gamble, going after non-customers. But Marvel had done something similar in the 1960s when comic books customarily portrayed superheroes for children to worship; instead, it aimed at college students with characters who were more human and flawed.

Ms. Swift also was intent on reaching beyond the target market. For her first, eponymous album, she had strong choices for the lead single but surprised by going for a nostalgic ballad, “Tim McGraw,” about how people could be affected by country music, in this case a couple who fall in love and their favourite tune is by Mr. McGraw. Her song was in many ways a traditional one with a traditional (and very popular singer) in the title.

“This combination – between old and new – is an inherently good strategy to enhance a song’s popularity. According to computational research, the content that tends to gain the most influence – including academic papers, songs and articles – isn’t the most innovative; it’s conventional content that features one new, unusual feature,” Mr. Evers notes.

Later, Ms. Swift headed to the vast blue ocean of pop, but rather than swimming alone she was effectively steering a cruise liner filled with adoring fans. And she was following a sound approach that consultant Chris Zook has advocated for moving to an adjacent space. You want to be sure the potential profit pool is large, you can be a leader in that field and that it shares things such as the same customers, competitors, cost structure and channels of distribution as well as the brand, asset or technology that gives the core business its uniqueness.

By 2011, in her early twenties, Ms. Swift was a superstar – but a paranoid one. “I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through,” she was later to say.

Mr. Evers notes that this fear was actually helpful as Intel founder Andrew Grove has outlined: “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” For her, it meant teaming up with Swedish megaproducer Max Martin for a new sound.

Mr. Evers notes that leadership expert Herminia Ibarra argues if you want to grow and create more impact in your career, you must push against your natural inclination to preserve and protect your “authentic” self. You need to expand your sense of self to find new possibilities.

He suggests Ms. Swift was looking for what management researchers call positive shocks: Sudden breaks from successful collaborations that help you develop new ideas and force you to be more flexible and agile. “The idea is that a stable network of collaborators is a good thing, until it’s not. Eventually the stability creates cognitive and social rigidity – you stop thinking in new ways; you stop hearing new ideas from outside your network. It stifles creativity,” he warns. You need to go beyond your network to find that creativity.

Given the many “Swifties” following her every move, she was delicately also navigating what LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault has called the paradox of star brands. “Like the legacy fashion brands (‘houses’) that Mr. Arnault oversees, including Dior, Louis Vuitton and Moët, Ms. Swift and her music need to emit an aura of timelessness without getting tired. Provide a punch of newness but still be the old you. Evolve and stay relevant, but in a way that reminds us why we love you,” Mr. Evers writes.

Ms. Swift might shrug this analysis off. She did what seemed logical at the time. As she put it while accepting the Innovator Award at the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Awards: “I never a single time woke up in the morning and thought, ‘You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to go innovate some stuff.’ What I did do was try to make the right decisions for me.” But Harvard Business Review’s Mr. Evers says she is “instinctually and preternaturally good at doing the things that HBR, and business classes, and leadership coaches, and so many more, teach.”

Cannonballs

• At the end of each month, consultant Allison Dunn advises asking these three questions: What did I spend time on that didn’t move the needle? What’s one thing I can stop doing, delegate or change? What did I let go of this month – and what did it make space for?
• When a big decision is coming up, executive coach Scott Eblin says you must go around the table, look each team member in the eye and ask whether they are in agreement or, if not, learn why not.
• When testing a new idea, be wary if the response from your team is “everyone needs this.” Marketer Seth Godin insists that’s a trap. Your work is to find the right somebodies, while ignoring the imaginary everyone.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.