The Value of Your Work Has Echoes

I work with some really smart people. On a regular basis, they create and do things that challenge and inspire me.

Because I have consumed an irresponsible amount of caffeine this morning — and because I love trying to connect music, art, and what we build…

Dave lists a number of “stakeholders” who are impacted by the value of a jazz solo. In exploring this, he extends the definition of stakeholder to include a musician in the audience who heard the solo, takes what they learn back to their practice room, and builds on it.

So, on the nights Santana is in the hotel room because he has a gig, the album impacts him, and thereby impacts everyone in his audience. Each of those people in turn impact everyone they come in contact with the next day.

When Coltrane spent days and nights locked in his studio, ignoring his wife, 4 year old daughter, and new born son, writing the music that would be recorded for A Love Supreme, the value of the work he did there alone in the room extends to stakeholders who are going to see Carlos Santana in concert all those years later.

On July 4, 1976, The Sex Pistols played a show in Manchester. The show is sometimes referred to as “the gig that changed the world.” There were a lot of people in the audience at that show. Well, actually, not a lot of people. Certainly not the number of people you’d find at a Taylor Swift show. But in that audience were people who would go on to form The Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Fall, Simply Red, and The Smiths. While punk didn’t actually begin that night in Manchester, that show is marked as one of the fixed points that gave birth to punk rock and what came after. So if you’ve ever listened to Joy Division, The Smiths, Peter Shelley, or any of the bands that evolved from those bands, you are a stakeholder of that show in Manchester.

In 1948, Franklin Quick Hershey was working as the chief of the GM Special Car Design Studio. Hershey decided to take an idea he saw in an early production model of a P-38 and include it in the design of the 1948 Cadillac. This is where the automobile tailfin came from.

In 1985, James Brown included Cadillac Ranch in his video for “Living in America”

In 2006, Pixar released Cars, which features Cadillac Ranch.

In 2008, Cage the Elephant included Cadillac Ranch in their video for “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked”

Quality extends well beyond passing QA. The work we do impacts the people who use it. Those people impact others around them. Every interaction we have with others does the same.

If you are a PM, you are not excluded from this. Every interaction you have with someone in your organization impacts value, quality, and craft.

Value can have a very long tail. Our work has echoes. Franklin Quick Hershey never heard of Speed McQueen. John Coltrane never met the 20-year-old attending the Carlos Santana show just so they could hear him sing “Smooth.” Yet, the connection and impact are still there.

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