Business It’s Just Rock and Roll
What has Rock ’n’ Roll got to do with starting and running a business? Everything.
Tim Harper
The Hard Lesson
Business It’s Just Rock and Roll – that’s the truth I learned the hard way, discovering that founding a company has more in common with forming a band than with an MBA case study.
I spent most of my teens and early twenties far more interested in forming bands and DJ’ing than business, although at the time I didn’t realise that they were the same thing. That only slapped me in the face like a wet lettuce years later. How could I have wasted almost 20 years without noticing?
What Rock and Roll Teaches About Business
It turns out that you can learn a lot about business by playing records and looking at how someone with an idea for a song turned it into a hit record, formed a band or engaged a song out into a 50-year career. I’ll show you how people with a little talent and a small idea made it stretch a very long way, while other highly talented artists made decisions that nose-dived their career — in some cases literally. It’ll also explain how you need more than just raw talent to avoid getting ripped off by managers, advisors, and investors.
The MBA Illusion
Sure, you can prepare for setting up a business by spending the next few years reading back issues of the Harvard Business Review or working your way through the airport business book best-seller lists of the seven habits of effective CEOs and all the others that advocate rising at 4 a.m., every morning for an ice bath and an hour’s mindfulness and some longhand journaling.
If you have the wherewithal or the time you can even pay £100,000 for an executive MBA at a top business school. While any or all of these things might allow you to carve out a career in the innovation department of some dinosaur company ignoring climate change or AI, they won’t rewrite the future, which is what every entrepreneur sets out to do.
Why You’re Still Reading
If you don’t want to do that, then stop reading, hop on LinkedIn and start applying for jobs right now. If you do, then read on and I’ll do my best to distil 40 years of a twin-track life in business and rock and roll and what I’ve learned from both. It’s not a lot and it’s not obvious, so some of the experiences and tips in this book might save you time and effort, as well as depriving a few senior partners at law firms from future bonuses, so buckle up.
Business It’s Just Rock and Roll: the Same Setlist
Both depend on rhythm, teamwork, timing and audience feedback. Founders and frontmen share the same scars. You can play every note perfectly but still lose the crowd if you forget why you’re on stage. The best gigs — and the best companies — are built on trust, tempo, and knowing when to stop for an encore.
If you’ve ever felt that startups and studios share the same pulse, you’ll find more in Born to Disrupt — and even the Harvard Business Review agrees that the best business lessons come from rock and roll. Rhythm. Rebellion. Reinvention. That’s the real playbook.
In Born to Disrupt I draw on what touring, producing and running companies have in common: the relentless need for rhythm over noise, structure over chaos, and courage over consensus. You’ll meet founders, engineers and artists who kept playing through the feedback — and others who imploded mid-set. The stories are loud, human and, above all, true.