I have not created anything alone since I was 14…
Craig is the reason a lot of this work exists. He is a serious musician, and I am the guy who at best, plays bass in his church band. When we work, what makes it work is not that we are equals at everything. It is that one of us goes second on purpose.
That is a strange sentence to write in a culture that talks about partner as a meeting of equals. Equals is the brochure. In the actual room, on the actual Tuesday, somebody defers first… somebody decides their job right now is to make the other person’s idea better instead of competing with it. Get that order right and the partnership compounds. Get it wrong, or leave it unspoken, and 2 talented people quietly take turns interrupting each other for a year.
The partner question in our framework is: whose support do you need to succeed? Today’s version is sharper… in which rooms have you decided, on purpose, to be the support?
…and neither had the producer in the Valley…
The producer on Jagged Little Pill was a veteran with a long resume. Across from him, in 1994, was a 19-year-old with 2 Canadian dance-pop records nobody outside Canada had heard. Glen Ballard had every credential in that room, and by every account of those sessions, he made 1 decision that shaped the whole album: he let her go first. Within 30 minutes of meeting they were already writing. A song a day poured out across those months, her lyric and voice out front, his craft holding the structure underneath… and her first takes kept, not fixed. The veteran went second, daily, on purpose, and the result was 1 of the biggest albums ever made.
…which is how the gentlest song got on the jaggedest album
“Head Over Feet,” which the 2 of them wrote together, is the song on that record about someone who was a friend before he was anything else… the person who showed up with patience and devotion and no agenda, and won by not pushing. It is the least jagged thing on a very jagged album, and it did quiet, patient work on the charts to match: released as the fifth single in July 1996, it spent 8 weeks at Number 1 in Canada and became the album’s only top-10 single in the United Kingdom. The loudest album of the decade, and its most durable single is the gentle 1 about partnership.
There is a reason that song could only exist on that album: it was written inside the exact partnership it describes.
Who goes second on your team?
Here is what I watch senior leaders get wrong. Your Mind will tell you that going second costs you authority. Watch what it actually costs. Then watch what it buys. Ballard’s credentials did not shrink because a teenager’s first takes led the album… his name is on 1 of the defining records of the 1990s precisely because he made room. The leaders I coach who master this get the same trade: the meeting where you speak last is the meeting where you finally hear what your team actually thinks, and the peer you deliberately support this quarter is the partner who eases your Mind next quarter, when you are the one who needs the room.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: pick 1 meeting this week where you speak last. Not summarizing last. Speaking last. We can practice that – Schedule time with me here.
You are the one who went Head Over Feet … for somebody else’s idea.
