Jazz and Leadership: Not Simply Podcast

Jewel and Greg in celebration

Last Thursday, the day Jewel and I celebrated my birthday at Foxwoods Grand Pequot Tower in Connecticut, a podcast episode was released featuring us discussing the Jazz Leadership Project. The podcast, titled Not Simply and hosted with finesse by executive coach Wendy Bittner, a partner at the cutting-edge leadership development organization, Cultivating Leadership, centers on how too often we simplify complex topics, which hampers an ability to not only understand complexity, but to survive and, even better, thrive in the midst of it.

I became aware of Cultivating Leadership when taking a course on “Developmental Coaching” several years ago with the Coaches Rising organization. Jennifer Garvey Berger, a principal of Cultivating Leadership and author of several books, including Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World, was one of the instructors. She was my favorite teacher in the course, so when our friend and colleague Amiel Handelsman introduced us to the podcast’s producer, Rebecca Scott, we agreed to be guests.

We began the conversation by critiquing the limited and simplistic ways some think of jazz and detailed how we use the music as a metaphor for communication and collaboration at work and in relationships generally. Jewel and I discuss some of our recent client engagements, where we enact jazz as an embodied praxis that, in addition to being a creative expression of human connection and possibility, is representative of American democracy in sound and Black American culture, while also avoiding the trap of the Cartesian mind-body split.

Click on the button below and check out the half-hour episode. Jewel and I are quite passionate throughout, and are confident that you’ll find this dialogue enjoyable summer listening.