One advantage of approaching middle age is having the opportunity to celebrate so many anniversaries. (We can parse the term "middle age" on another occasion.)
Thirty-years ago this week, I changed the course of Connecticut politics… well, ok, maybe I added a footnote to it… by announcing my candidacy for Governor of Connecticut. I learned a couple of important business lessons from this adventure, one of which may surprise you.
I had the good fortune to be interviewed last month by author Trevor Gay ("Simplicity is the Key," "The Nine Fruits of Leadership") at his terrific site that HR World has chosen as one of the "top one-hundred management & leadership blogs." Here's an edited version of that interview.
TG: I know you have had a fascinating and interesting career. I would love to hear a quick summary of some of the stuff you have done.
JOL: After several years of college—and six years of studying Ancient Greek—I abruptly left academia (and a promising future teaching dead languages) to play rock & roll full-time.
My campus rock band in New Haven had been picking up some prestige bookings in New York—opening for acts like the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Sly & the Family Stone, and Joni Mitchell—and we were invited to play the Berkeley Folk Festival that summer. So the band and I didn't need much convincing to take the leap.
A long-lost Beatles interview was just discovered from a Scottish tv taping session in April 1964. This was initially touted as the earliest surviving Beatles interview—which of course it is not—but it may be the earliest surviving interview in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney discuss their songwriting partnership.
The brief snippet I heard on the radio yesterday was a fresh reminder of a critical lesson in team collaboration we can learn from Lennon and McCartney: it works to share the credit.
John and Paul agreed from the beginning that no matter how much or how little each contributed to a finished song, it was credited equally. (Even if a song was written only by Lennon or only by McCartney it was credited as a 'Lennon-McCartney' composition and the royalties from the song were shared fifty-fifty.)