- Banned
- #1
What The Beatles Can Teach Us About Business
When Richard Courtney and I set out to write Come Together: The Business Wisdom of the Beatles, it had a slightly different working title: Be Bigger Than the Beatles.
Saying something was going to be bigger than the Beatles used to be like saying something was the greatest thing since sliced bread, a little bit of commonly understood hyperbole to underline a person or things popularity or standing.
Times change. A little road testing on Facebook revealed that our fellow Beatle fans and we are, first and foremost, fans would not countenance the notion that anyone or anything could be bigger than the Beatles. In our own way, we were experiencing a faint echo of John Lennons famous difficulties after telling writer Maureen Cleave that the Beatles just might be bigger than Jesus.
Chastened, in our now much more suitably named book, Richard and I continued to ponder some of the factors that went into making the Beatles such a worldwide, multigenerational phenomenon.
We were pretty sure it wasnt just talent. Yes, the Beatles were a unique and unrepeatable perfect storm of songwriting genius, performing chops, and enormous personal charm. But talent and charm are just the beginning; by themselves, they are no guarantor or even predictor of success. As the man once said, unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
The Beatles, by contrast, according to Billboard, sold more than 450,000 albums and 2 million individual songs in just one week following the release of their catalog on iTunes [AAPL 335.06 -3.02 (-0.89%) ] in November of 2010 some 40 years after the band broke up.
Clearly, these guys have been doing something right. So, what made the Beatles the Beatles, and what can we learn from them?
News Headlines
When Richard Courtney and I set out to write Come Together: The Business Wisdom of the Beatles, it had a slightly different working title: Be Bigger Than the Beatles.
Saying something was going to be bigger than the Beatles used to be like saying something was the greatest thing since sliced bread, a little bit of commonly understood hyperbole to underline a person or things popularity or standing.
Times change. A little road testing on Facebook revealed that our fellow Beatle fans and we are, first and foremost, fans would not countenance the notion that anyone or anything could be bigger than the Beatles. In our own way, we were experiencing a faint echo of John Lennons famous difficulties after telling writer Maureen Cleave that the Beatles just might be bigger than Jesus.
Chastened, in our now much more suitably named book, Richard and I continued to ponder some of the factors that went into making the Beatles such a worldwide, multigenerational phenomenon.
We were pretty sure it wasnt just talent. Yes, the Beatles were a unique and unrepeatable perfect storm of songwriting genius, performing chops, and enormous personal charm. But talent and charm are just the beginning; by themselves, they are no guarantor or even predictor of success. As the man once said, unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
The Beatles, by contrast, according to Billboard, sold more than 450,000 albums and 2 million individual songs in just one week following the release of their catalog on iTunes [AAPL 335.06 -3.02 (-0.89%) ] in November of 2010 some 40 years after the band broke up.
Clearly, these guys have been doing something right. So, what made the Beatles the Beatles, and what can we learn from them?
News Headlines
