by Patrick Jarenwattananon

The Jazz Process
courtesy of Addison-Wesley

Adrian Cho is currently working on a product built on IBM's Jazz team collaboration platform. No, it's not this book.

What can business and sports teams learn from jazz musicians? Adrian Cho thinks he knows:

Like software developers, jazz musicians must work in synergy to deliver unique, high-quality offerings that will attract and retain customers. They must deliver on-time and in real-time, often under continuous scrutiny. They do this by integrating strong individual contributions from passionate and committed practitioners and ensuring success with best principles.

I'm usually skeptical of any extended analogy between business teams/basketball/[thing that is not-jazz] and jazz; it always breaks down at some point, or is too vague to be useful. But if anyone would be qualified to take a stab at it, it would be Cho, a general overachiever. He works for IBM as a software developer, and he also plays bass and leads a big band in Ottawa, Canada. (Peter Hum featured him a few times at jazzblog.ca.) So he's written a book, scheduled to be published in May of this year, called The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation and Agility. He details the 14 principles of his "Jazz Process" on a Web site dedicated to this idea. It strikes me that the number one principle of the jazz process, no caps, is to achieve such mastery of the rules that you no longer think about them when you perform — but I suppose most corporate strategies aren't nearly as (observedly) laissez-faire. [Web site: The Jazz Process; Dr. Dobb's: The Jazz Process (article)]