Governance sounds like the driest word in the world. It conjures up grey suits, audit committees, risk registers, and forms in triplicate, the sort of thing that feels about as rock and roll as a tax return. But strip the jargon away and it’s nothing more, and nothing less, than the mixing desk of your business. It doesn’t write the songs, it doesn’t strut around the stage, it doesn’t sell a single ticket, but it makes sure the right things are heard at the right time, and without it the whole show descends into mush.
Because without a board that knows how to work the desk, the bass drowns out the vocals, the drums vanish under the guitars, and the frontman can’t hear a damn thing in his monitor. A good board, like a good engineer, keeps competing inputs in balance so the audience gets music instead of chaos, and you walk off stage looking like you always meant it to sound that way.
But nobody ever thanks the sound engineer when things go right. Nobody buys a ticket for the governance. But they notice when it goes wrong, and they never forgive you for it. Guns N’ Roses learned that the hard way. It just took one dodgy monitor mix leading an impatient Axl Rose to storm off mid-gig, and suddenly the headlines aren’t about the band’s glory but about a riot in St. Louis, smashed seats, blood on the floor, and a reputation that took years to claw back. That’s bad governance: when the people supposed to keep the balance disappear for a smoke and leave the faders where they fell.
And if that’s bad, then Altamont is what happens when governance doesn’t exist at all. The Rolling Stones thought they could run a free festival on good vibes, a borrowed stage, and the Hell’s Angels as security. No plan, no structure, no one at the mixing desk. The result was a total fucking nightmare: stabbings in the crowd, chaos on stage, and a decade’s cultural dream dying in the dirt. It’s the same in business when a founder convinces themselves they can do without governance altogether, no board, no process, just instinct and charisma. For a while it feels wild and pure, but eventually the knives come out, lawsuits land, regulators circle, and the dream curdles into a cautionary tale.
Now let’s flip it. Think about The Clash in their prime. Their rehearsals were legendary not because they were harmonious but because they were constant arguments. Egos clashed, tempers flared, but they fought it out in private so the live shows came out razor sharp, political fury wrapped in precision. That’s good governance, forcing the conflict to happen early, so when the lights hit, the set roars without missing a beat.
Founders hate hearing this, because what they really want to do is crank everything to eleven, every project urgent, every market expansion a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, every product the next big thing, and if you challenge them they’ll tell you you’re stifling their genius. But that’s not a mix, that’s just noise, and noise without balance isn’t art, it’s the squeal of feedback that clears the room. Governance doesn’t exist to kill your creativity, it exists to make sure the audience doesn’t walk out and demand a refund.
Think of it like the difference between a bootleg gig in a squatted warehouse with a generator coughing in the corner and a stadium show that still feels raw but doesn’t blow the power halfway through. The bootleg has its place, but if you’re serious about scaling, you need someone on the desk, hands on the sliders, making sure the lights stay on, the PA doesn’t fry, and the show actually gets to the last encore without someone kicking a hole in the stage monitors. That’s governance when it’s working, invisible, unglamorous, but absolutely essential.
Copyright © 2025 Tim Harper. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from Born to Disrupt: Entrepreneurship, Rock and Roll, and Surviving the Shitshow.
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