Book

Overview

The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation and Agility is a unique publication that distills the best practices of jazz musicians and other highly effective groups into a framework for success that can benefit business and software development teams and anyone seeking to better collaborate, innovate and perform with agility. Drawing on examples from business, software development, music, military operations and sports while applying laws of sociology, psychology, physics, biology, and systems theory, the book presents a method for execution and fourteen best principles with 320 pages, 20 unique figures and over 10 pages of cited works.

Back Cover Blurb

What Can Your Team Learn From Jazz Musicians?

Experienced jazz musicians apply specific principles to collaborate, execute, and manage change in real time—delivering extraordinary innovation in the face of non-stop pressure and risk. Now, jazz musician and collaboration expert Adrian Cho shows how you can use the same principles to dramatically improve any team’s performance. Cho systematically introduces the Jazz Process and demonstrates how it can help cross-functional teams improve teamwork, innovation, and execution. You’ll learn new ways to encourage and integrate strong individual contributions from passionate and committed practitioners, and give them maximum autonomy while making sure your project’s “music” never degenerates into chaotic “noise.”

Through multiple case studies, Cho shows you how high-performance teams achieve their success.

  • Master five core principles of working in teams: use just enough rules, employ top talent, put the team first, build trust and respect, and commit with passion
  • Establish a realistic framework for effective, continuous execution
  • Collaborate more effectively with team members, consumers, customers, partners, and suppliers
  • Master the essentials of team execution: listening for change, leading on demand, acting transparently, and making every contribution count
  • Reduce the “friction” associated with collaboration—and increase the synergy
  • Use form, tempo, pulse, and groove to maintain constructive momentum
  • Learn about the importance of healthy projects and teams
  • Innovate by exchanging ideas and taking the right measured risks
  • For every practitioner, leader, and manager interested in getting better results

Reviews

“The Jazz Process will open your eyes to a different way of thinking about teams, business, and software development. It’s a huge payback for the time invested in reading it.”

Bill Wagner, C# expert and author of three books.  Read the full review.

Advance Praise

“An insider’s guide to translating the creative techniques of jazz to the business world.“

Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management
“The 14 fundamental principles found in this book are essential to any collaborative venture. Cho lays out a clear path to achieving elegant teamwork, goal-oriented project completion, and winning results.”

John Goldsby, bassist and author
“Jazz demands cooperation, enterprise, creativity, measured risk, and so much more—and so does business. Adrian’s book is an entertaining guide for importing the jazz process into the world of business.”

Jack Chambers, linguistics professor at the University of Toronto and jazz biographer, author of Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis
“This book has an important message: Effective collaborations are like jazz improvisations. Jazz succeeds because the group shares just the right kind of rules and structures; business teams also need to improvise within the right kind of structure. Cho has years of experience playing jazz and working in business teams, and in this book he applies this experience to analyze the ways that effective business teams balance structure and freedom.”

Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, associate professor of psychology and education at Washington University and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration and many other books on creativity and innovation
“In the Jazz Process, Adrian Cho weaves some unusual and interesting four-part harmony between jazz, business, sport, and information technology around an important theme… teamwork.”

Dr. Saul L. Miller, psychologist and author of Why Teams Win: 9 Keys to Success in Business, Sport, and Beyond and Performing Under Pressure: Gaining the Mental Edge in Business and Sport
“Adrian Cho’s insight into high-performance teams is drawn from his personal experiences in music, business and software engineering. Within the Eclipse community we have seen many of these ideas in action and they work. I highly recommend the Jazz Process to anyone seeking to learn how to build agile, effective teams—regardless of your field of endeavour.”

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation