A Crisis, but with Jazz
Fertilizer, scooters, ride-shares, and the fine art of surviving your own mess
It’s getting a bit hectic over here so I’m using this post as a reflection for a podcast I just listened to from Boss Class by The Economist. The episode is “Handling a Crisis” from Season 2. The big idea, borrowed from jazz, is that if a musician hits the wrong note, the rest of the band morphs the tune until nobody notices. Management consultants find this metaphor irresistible. After all, “keep improvising” bills much better than “we have no clue.” To prove the point, the hosts replay three corporate train wrecks that (mostly) stayed on the rails.
Yara
Norway’s fertilizer giant woke in February 2022 to find half its customers under shellfire in Ukraine and the other half boycotting Russian phosphate. Imagine planning Taco Tuesday and discovering the grocery store is out of tortillas, beans, and electricity. European gas prices spiked fifty-fold—yes, fifty—and “just-in-time” suddenly read “just-in-case-you-enjoy-bankruptcy.” Headquarters tossed the playbook to regional managers, who did what competent New Englanders do in a nor’easter: swap ingredients, beg neighbors for supplies, and keep the kids fed.
Lime
Calamity struck the e-bike and scooter company in in March 2020. Revenue for its e-bikes and scooters fell ninety-plus percent, which for the CFO meant “we’re about to hold meetings in a cardboard box.” New CEO Wayne Ting drew three circles on a whiteboard: durable hardware, data-driven ops, city relations. Then Marie Kondo’d every budget line that didn’t live inside those circles. Head count shrank, fresh cash came in, and the company survived long enough to claim it had always been about sustainable urban mobility instead of joy-rides for brunch.
Uber
Uber’s train wreck, by contrast, was entirely homemade. In 2017 a gush of scandals (harassment, “toe-stepping” gone feral, regulators banging down doors) turned the brand into a case study for top business schools. Enter HBS professor Frances Frei, who found brilliant engineers running a frat house. She forced managers through thirty hours of “how not to be a jerk,” let employees rewrite the values, and finally sent the company to etiquette class. Today, Uber is finally showing sustained profitability. Cue the saxophone solo.
Three takeaways:
Push decisions to the front line. Whether you’re running friends-giving or organizing a nonprofit fundraiser, the person closest to the action spots problems first, so trust their judgement.
Practice before improvising. From fire drills to spare batteries or dry runs for new dance moves, rehearsal buys you seconds and confidence when things go sideways.
Know why it matters. A mission with real teeth helps teams stomach detours, budget cuts, or PR nightmares.
All of this leaves me with more questions. Does this jazz doctrine work in fields where mistakes get people killed, like aviation or hospitals? How do leaders know whether a fumbled chord can be rescued or the band should just stop playing? How often must companies rehearse the apocalypse so the first drill doesn’t feel like the actual apocalypse? No matter how many times we face the same problems, flexing our muscle in response to them can always be challenging.