The Setlist Is a Strategy Document.

Case Study: The Rolling Stones’ 1972 Tour

The Stones’ 1972 American run — the infamous STP, “Stones Touring Party” — has gone down in legend not just for the music but for the sheer hurricane around it. This was the Stones at their absolute peak and at their absolute messiest. Exile on Main Street had just landed, a swampy, drug-soaked masterpiece recorded in a French villa under siege by heroin, tax exile, and paranoia. Critics didn’t know what to make of it but fans sensed the chaos and loved it.

And then they took it on the road. The entourage wasn’t just a crew, it was a rolling circus. Dealers, groupies, celebrity hangers-on, film crews, photographers, reporters like Robert Greenfield who tried to document it and ended up half-participant, half-hostage. There were parties that never ended, private planes filled with coke and Dom Pérignon, and hotel rooms that looked like crime scenes by morning. The U.S. government was gunning for them, cops were waiting for excuses to crack skulls, and the Vietnam war hung in the air like tear gas. Keith Richards was riding the line between genius and collapse, playing through a heroin haze so thick that by all logic he shouldn’t have been able to stand, let alone peel off riffs that defined a generation.

And yet every single night, the show worked. Why? Because the setlist was nailed to the floor. They knew exactly how to open: “Brown Sugar” to set the tone, hit the crowd with “Bitch” and “Rocks Off” to keep momentum, then cool it down with “Love in Vain” before detonating the second half with “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and finally, the political Molotov cocktail of “Street Fighting Man.” The arc never wavered. It was military discipline disguised as chaos, a backbone strong enough to carry the circus.

Greenfield wrote that backstage felt like a travelling apocalypse, but out front the audience never saw the wobble. That’s the magic. Planning doesn’t kill spontaneity — it protects it. The Stones could swagger, improvise, and look untouchable because the skeleton of the show was bulletproof. The setlist was the anchor in the storm.

Startups that make it through their own chaos pull the same trick. Netflix didn’t stumble into streaming; they plotted the pivot while still running the DVD business, kept their audience with the old familiar while slowly seeding the future, and timed the switch before Blockbuster even realised the game had changed. If they’d “winged it,” they’d have drowned in the trough with everyone else. Instead, like the Stones, they showed that discipline in the backroom is what lets you look wild, dangerous, and inevitable in the spotlight.

Want the full context? Start with the first chapter, read the other extracts — including Governance as a Mixing Desk and The Cult of the Cockroach — or explore my work on boards & governance.

Copyright © 2025 Tim Harper. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from Born to Disrupt: Entrepreneurship, Rock and Roll, and Surviving the Shitshow.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations in reviews or critical articles.