John Perry Barlow
What a long, strange trip it’s been…
—Grateful Dead, “Truckin’ ”
No shit.
The real marvel is that the Grateful Dead made this declaration back in 1969. Considering all that went down during the four very weird decades since then, it becomes obvious that we1 didn’t begin to know the meaning of “long” or “strange” at that point. (We did, however, have a pretty firm grasp of the meaning of “trip”…)
I have been intimately involved with the assembly of phenomena generally referred to as the Grateful Dead since my dewy youth forty-four years ago, during which time my sense of irony has been honed and burnished to a high sheen by the operation of something called enantiodromia, the process by which everything is continually becoming its opposite. According to Heraclitus, this is the fundamental operating principle of the universe, and, whether that’s true or not, it has certainly been visibly in evidence around the Grateful Dead, about whom the opposite of any accurate statement one might make was also generally true—or at least became so eventually.
Consider, for example, that I’m now writing a foreword to a book proposing that this anarchic, antimaterialistic, profligate, reckless, besotted, impractical, idealistic, spontaneity-obsessed, dynamically careless, and acid-addled mob added up to a sharp business organization. This doesn’t surprise me as it would someone of a more linear view. It’s ironic, sure, but what isn’t?
When I first heard of this project, I thought that what was being proposed was a book about the larger dimensions of our having pioneered, however accidentally, one of the most important innovations of the information economy: viral marketing. There is much to be said on this subject, and there is much that I have said and written about over the last twenty years.
But, no, further discussion clarified for me that this was to be a book about how the Grateful Dead had successfully created or harnessed a broad range of strategic practices in management and business that might be emulated by other commercial organizations. This struck me as a somewhat less credible proposition.
Yes, a huge amount of money was generated—though it was mostly spent as quickly as it was made. (I remember one strange morning in 1980 when Jerry Garcia appeared on Good Morning America. They cut to a live shot of a particularly funky Deadhead waiting at dawn in the ticket line outside Radio City Music Hall. They asked him what he did and he said something like “I do whatever I need to so that I can make enough money to tour with the band.” Cut back to the studio, where perky Joan Lunden asked Garcia what he thought about someone who spent all his money following the Grateful Dead around. Garcia, who wasn’t much enjoying being up at that hour, growled, “What do you think we do?”)
This was essentially true at the time. Though still some years away from the mega-success that hit in 1987, torrents of money were already passing through our vicinity. I used to say that the Grateful Dead lived a hand-to-mouth existence, “but it’s a big hand and a big mouth,” I would add. To the extent that most would say thrift plays an important role in sound business management, we managed to get by without it. Moreover, it always seemed to me that the sometimes dizzying success of the Grateful Dead had much to do with a number of happy accidents that were the business equivalent of staggering into the river and coming out with a pocketful of fish.
I don’t mean to diminish the quality of our core product. The music of the Grateful Dead was, on a good night, as marvelous as any sound that has ever delighted the human ear (though it was also true that on a bad night, it was, as a well-known musician once muttered to me during a particularly incomprehensible passage through “space,” like “the Special Olympics of rock ’n’ roll”).
In Wyoming we like to say that even a turkey can fly in a strong enough wind, and, however ungainly its commercial aerodynamics, it must be admitted that a mighty wind has blown around the Grateful Dead and its survivors for almost half a century. Whether that wind arose from the music or the whimsies of Fate or some crazy genius hidden in our anarchic decision-making processes, we certainly displayed a knack for sustaining it once it began to howl.
But aside from acknowledging that the music was sometimes transcendent and recognizing the critical role that the inadvertent invention of viral marketing had played in spreading that awareness, I never gave much thought to the other “secrets of our success.”
Now comes this book, and I’m moved to reconsider. Even after taking into consideration that Mr. Barnes is a freely confessed Deadhead and thus in a condition that may blunt his critical capacities in our regard, he makes herein some assertions about the emergent wisdom of our mad methods that seem true to me. Viewed from his side of the proscenium and thereby abstracted from the sausage factory of their creation, he is able to see what we could not: that our commercial “policies,” though improvised adaptations to a set of unprecedented conditions, actually do reflect some principles that might be generalized for wider corporate use, especially by those legacy companies that are struggling to find footing in an information economy.
First, of course, was the accidental brilliance of letting the audience tape the concerts. It wasn’t our initial response and certainly wasn’t something that Warner Bros., our record company at the time, supported. But Deadheads are a sweet and hapless lot. Nobody felt right about the baleful glances they cast our way as they and their cassette recorders were being given the bum’s rush. Besides, if they actually were stealing something, nobody was quite sure what it was. Finally, Garcia pointed out that we weren’t in it for the money, which was an easy thing to say at that point since we were hardly making any. Without precisely encouraging taping, it was decided to leave the tapers alone, unless they became irritating to other members of the audience. Which, being a meticulous lot, they eventually did. At that point, sometime in the seventies, it was decided to concentrate them in a little ghetto near the soundboard. As far as I can recall, this was the only time that taping was ever officially sanctioned.
But by that point, the tapers had already created something that Warner Bros. could not: a successful way to market Grateful Dead music. They spread the contagion not simply by word-of-mouth but by “hear-of-ear,” endowing us eventually with a following so devoted that we could, for a time, fill any stadium in America. This was largely through the expediency of hauling the audience around with us, but the fact remained: we could. The fans knew, based on hearing the tapes, that every concert would be different. If they didn’t hear them all, they’d be missing out. It wasn’t about buying a thing. It was about being part of a flow. It wasn’t an economy of nouns. It was an economy of verbs.
There were several benefits—not well understood at the time—that descended from this happy accident of leniency, all of which Mr. Barnes recognizes and expounds upon here.
The most important of these was that music is a product of an information economy and that an information economy is fundamentally different from a physical economy. In the latter, as Adam Smith pointed out two centuries ago, there is a set of rules based on the hard-coupled relationship between scarcity and value in the physical world. Thus, if your product is physical, it makes sense to regulate toward scarcity, as the folks at De Beers harnessed successfully by cornering most of those regions of the planet that produce diamonds. (Diamonds are actually quite common, but De Beers was able to make them scarce and thus more valuable.) The same rules apply to everything from real estate to pork bellies.
I believe that these rules do not apply to expression, where there appears to be an equally strong relationship between familiarity and value instead. I might have the world’s largest diamond in my pocket and its enormous worth will remain the same whether or not anyone knows it’s there. But the world’s greatest song has no value to anyone but me as long as it remains in my head. Indeed, if I sing it to a few friends, they may love it, but it still has limited value. Only when a lot of people have heard and enjoyed it does it start to accumulate value, and even then not so much for itself but for me as its source. In this, music is more like a service, something that is continuously provided, rather than an object of commerce. The more people who become aware of the quality of that service, the more that can be economically derived from providing real-time access to its provision. Thus, every time we “gave away” a show to the tapers, we increased the value of the music that hadn’t been played yet.
I wrote a piece about this for Wired magazine in 1994 called “The Economy of Ideas,” which has been expounded on many times since, and which foreshadowed a variety of subsequent events, including Napster, the decline of the traditional record industry, and creation of what is known as Web 2.0.
The term Web 2.0 generally refers to the idea that the audience is the product—a principle that is fundamental to the success of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and a host of others, and which the Grateful Dead began to take unwitting advantage of back in the seventies. At one point, I took an inner-city friend to a Dead concert, which he seemed to enjoy. I asked him if he would come back again and he replied, “Nah, I don’t think so. Seems to me that what you guys are selling here is a sense of community, and I already have one.” Which was true. Most of our fans were white suburban kids who’d grown up on television and in a culture too commercially massive to provide them with a sense of belonging. Heading out on tour with eighteen dollars in change, a Microbus with three working cylinders, and a sense of magical possibility inspired our fans to form the kind of necessary interdependency that shared adversity generally provides. They became a community. They liked it. Their stories of adventure and peril became a very effective recruiting tool. A lot of what we were selling them was themselves.
In addition to community, we were selling another product that is fundamental to an information economy. We were selling an authentic and unique experience. Of course, there is a paradox in this, since there is a huge but poorly recognized difference between information and experience, and the old media that have tried to enter the information economy fail to recognize that the information itself is not as valuable as the relationships and experiences that form around it. Furthermore, the more bombarded we are with information, particularly broadcast information, the more we long for the real stuff of life. In a sense then, the information that was the Dead’s taped or recorded music became an advertisement and convening beacon for the ineffable experience of being there in surreal time, of being in a place where it seemed, on some nights, that God Itself would show up.
And yes, there was a religious aspect to it. That cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that this was a fundamental element of both our commercial success and our longevity. As many saints and charlatans have learned over the years, if you want to make a lot of money, start a religion. Of course, we were not really interested in doing either of these things and when it became obvious that we were and had, we had profoundly mixed feelings about the money and a genuine horror about the religion. (Fortunately, Bob Hunter and I recognized that the most toxic aspect of religion is dogma and, while we couldn’t do much about stopping twenty thousand people who were taking LSD together from experiencing the Holy Who Knows, there was a lot we could do to keep It from seeming to make dogmatic pronouncements, since these would likely be found in the lyrics, and generally his. So we avoided preaching.)
But even without dogma or our willing participation, the mysterious cult of the Dead formed all manner of myths, rituals, and divination practices. For example, the audience became obsessively focused on the set lists, much in the same way that certain baseball fans memorize the welter of multi-decimal statistics associated with the game. Ask Deadheads what songs were played on any given night and in what order, and a disturbingly large percentage of them can tell you accurately. This was more than ordinary consumer product awareness. It became a way of finding the implicit order that grounds a chaotic world.
We didn’t create the first cult product. Indeed, Mr. Barnes’s former employer, John Deere, had generated an equally fixated zeal in its customers clear back in the nineteenth century and even did so by somewhat similar means: its drive to manufacture products that embedded in them the ideals of its culture resulted in a long tradition of eccentric but highly effective designs… and a following who regarded other farm equipment as, well, impure. (I was a cattle rancher for twenty years and this was certainly how I came to feel about the green machines.)
And I hardly need to mention Apple Computer in this regard. Steve Jobs has become a cult figure to a degree that makes Jerry Garcia look like a good start. Of course, unlike Garcia, Jobs hasn’t resisted being cast in this role and has even injected an element of moral sanctimony into the “Cult of Mac” that would have been anathema to us.
While we were unwilling to impose our own moral views on anyone, the fact remained that the culture of the Grateful Dead actually did embody a lot of the giddy, open-hearted sixties values, at which it’s now so fashionable to poke fun. As an organizational whole, we went on standing for them even after the darker forces of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll had taken some of the gleam from our eyes. While many would claim that it’s wildly impractical to run a business on the principle that “what goes around comes around,” I would say that we pretty much did that for forty years, and if you add it all up, we came out way ahead.
The faith we extended to our fans was consistently rewarded. For example, when it became obvious that we were going to allow taping, we did ask the audience not to make any commercial use of the tapes. And even though there were certain concerts of which a good tape was as valuable as a one-of-a-kind baseball card, I never saw anyone selling tapes. The Deadheads had a hot barter economy in such things, but it was scrupulously self-regulatory. Indeed, it seems that just about every time we showed faith in our “market,” it was rewarded.
Consider the way we ran our philanthropic arm, the Rex Foundation. When we established it in 1983, the original board—the band members, the songwriters, and folks like Bill Walton, Bill Graham, and Mountain Girl Garcia—shared with its “executive director,” Danny Rifkin, a horror of the organizational nest-feathering that is the nearly universal disease of the nonprofit world. So we set out to make a foundation that was designed along much leaner than normal lines. Our records fit in a box in the trunk of Rifkin’s car.
Although there were some years in which we generated—with especially dedicated concert runs—and gave away over a million dollars, we didn’t accept grant proposals. Instead, each board member would identify worthy little machete-and-loincloth nonprofits—ranging from needle exchanges to composers of “difficult” music—who were too busy doing good to spend a lot of time asking for money. At board meetings we’d agree to surprise these unsuspecting saints with donations of anywhere from five thousand to twenty-five thousand bucks and we didn’t require that they report on what they did with the money. As an organizational system, this sounds wholly irresponsible. Yet it worked amazingly well. Years after Rex started giving away money in this reckless fashion, we checked back on the original recipients and found that most of them, barely functional when we encountered them, had gone on to do great and lasting work.
Even though I continue to believe that I have never been around a philanthropic foundation that operated with anything like the efficiency and effectiveness of Rex, it never occurred to me to suggest that anyone else try it. It simply required too much faith in everybody—from the fans, who happily paid for tickets to Rex shows (rather than relying on “miracles” to somehow get them in) to the board members whose whims were trusted to identify deserving recipients, to the recipients themselves, who were never asked to prove in detail what they’d done with the money.
But we are at a particularly cynical moment in the history of American business. The trust we’ve traditionally had in our engines of commerce has taken a severe beating over the last decade. The benign organizational principles that reigned for a long golden time after the Second World War have become more predatory. Perhaps it’s time to give trust a chance.
Also, because of the Internet, we are moving into an economic epoch the fundamental laws of which are still being promulgated. Maybe it actually is becoming practical to create an environment of common purpose with one’s customers, employees, and stakeholders. Not just to talk about it, as every company does, but to do it. Our existing regulatory methods, to the extent they haven’t been gutted, no longer seem effective against unrestrained greed. Perhaps in the absence of effective laws, we have no choice but to return to shared ethical principles and an enlightened sense of the common good to guide us into the future.
As I’ve said, there was a lot about the Grateful Dead in its entire context that felt more than a little like a religion. It certainly felt like a community with a common set of generally unspoken beliefs to guide its decisions. On a good day, it felt like being on a mission from God. Whatever uneasiness one might rightfully feel about turning a business into a holy mission, you can’t deny that when it works, it works. And besides, it feels good.
There was a lot that worked for the Grateful Dead. Indeed, upon examination, it becomes obvious that Mr. Barnes is on to more here than I first suspected. After reading this book, I’m forced to admit that a lot of the characteristics Barnes identifies as being central to our business style are accurately identified and may actually be useful now to different organizations as they confront the puzzling present and the even more confounding future.
He notes, for example, that we had a practice of “strategic improvisation,” which is to say that we made our business as we made our music, with a lot of what might be called “just-in-time planning.” Back in the days when history moved at a slower, more predictable pace, most business schools would have said this was just sloppy and foolish. But these are very chaotic times. Everyone is in a state of what Toffler called “future shock.” As much as twenty years ago, forward-looking business thinkers, such as Tom Peters, were extolling the virtues of “ready, fire, aim” policies as a means of dancing with the weird commercial music of those frothy times. Now almost everyone has to be ready at a moment’s notice for startling new developments.
Also, we had a creative process in which the audience played a fundamental role. We used to say that we didn’t write Grateful Dead songs, we grew them, and we did so in a field of dense interaction with the audience. The Grateful Dead was certainly one of very few successful bands who practiced and worked up new material before a live audience. And the result was that the fans had a justified sense of ownership and participation in the material. They were us in some essential way. We were all in it together and they knew that. This is precisely the sort of quality that one must optimize for in Web 2.0 economics.
The fans were also pioneers in the use of social networks. When I first got online back in 1985, it was because I wanted to study the culture of the Deadheads, who had beaten me there by a couple of years and had set up lively communities on USENET and a legendary computer bulletin board called The WELL (short for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link). By the 1990s many of the social forms that characterize Facebook and Twitter had already been in seasoned use by Deadheads.
Our emphasis on decision by consensus that had to include just about everybody seemed like a very clumsy tool at the time but, in the process, we were doing a lot of the early work in designing the “flat” organizations that have become far more common in recent years and include major successes such as Apple.
Hell, I guess Barnes is right about a lot of business advantages we developed without expecting them to provide much leverage. They worked. We actually did do well by doing good. We stayed right at the edge of technological possibility, mostly because we enjoyed the challenge and thought it was fun to try crazy new things. We created the most fiercely, one might even say helplessly, loyal customers any business ever had. We learned how to learn as a culture.
Yep. Strange indeed it is to say, but one actually can learn a lot about business from the Grateful Dead.