The Beatles Principles: Final Teamwork Lessons From The Liverpool Lads

By Andrew Sobel

The Fab Four sold over 1 billion records, tapes, and CDs, and 36 years after their breakup they remain, in many ways, the world's most popular band. Most importantly for us, they managed to create a whole that was far greater than the sum of the parts--no doubt the goal of any services firm. These are the final business lessons from the most successful pop group in history.

Parts I and II presented Beatles Principles 1 through 7:

Beatles Principle Number 1: Invest in and build face time between team members well before they are asked to pitch to a client.

Beatles Principle Number 2: Evolve your "songs" and bring the same level of ideas, new perspectives, excitement, and enthusiasm to your hundredth meeting with a client that you brought to the first.

Beatles Principle Number 3: Cultivate humility and self-effacement in your dealings with others, especially when you're on the heels of great success.

Beatles Principle Number 4: Use humor, especially self-deprecating humor, to ease tensions, show you are human, and create an emotional connection with colleagues and clients.

Beatles Principle Number 5: Help team members become brands-within-a-brand by giving them a song -- an idea or proposal -- that will help them to shine.

Beatles Principle Number 6: Carefully craft the first 60 seconds of all your communications--the opening measures of your songs--to command your audience to listen.

Beatles Principle number 7: Show your public--your clients, in every interaction, that you truly like them.

Here are principles 8, 9, and 10, as well as my conclusion:

8. Two Of Us: Sharing The Credit

When they first started out, Lennon and McCartney fancied themselves as following in the tradition of great songwriting duos, such as Rogers and Hammerstein. They agreed early on to credit all of their songs "Lennon/McCartney" and take equal percentages of the publishing royalties.

This arrangement, although it occasionally irked the two songwriting geniuses later on, had a profoundly positive impact on the actual nature of their collaboration. They freely exchanged ideas, helped each other improve their songs, and never (at least not until many years later, after they broke up) made an issue out of who actually had written what.

The opposite was also true: George Harrison was initially given a far smaller royalty share than Lennon and McCartney, and it discouraged, to some extent, his songwriting in the early days. Later, George even wrote a sarcastic song called, "Only a Northern Song," a jab at the tiny royalties he was receiving from the Northern publishing venture that owned the early Beatles songs.

Overall, however, The Beatles always presented an image of four equal partners, and certainly in the public's mind, even Ringo came across as a critical member in the group--without one of the four, The Beatles would never, ever truly be The Beatles. Years later, in 1996, the surviving Beatles were offered sums of money approaching one billion dollars to put on a reunion tour. George Harrison's response was unequivocal: "As long as John Lennon is dead there will be no Beatles reunion."

Many powerful business cultures have been shaped by insisting that credit and compensation reward team efforts. Egon Zehnder, the blue-chip executive search firm, is an excellent example of the Lennon/McCartney "equal credit" philosophy in action. Says founder Egon Zehnder, "We prefer to stick with the old-fashioned way to pay…There is no formal procedure for tracking the performance of country offices, let alone individuals."

Partners are given equal profit shares each year, adjusted only for tenure at the firm. The result is an unparalleled amount of cross-border and cross-office teamwork in the service of large, multinational clients, and a partner turnover rate of less than 2% per year.

Goldman Sachs, another example, has always emphasized team contributions in assessing the performance of its partners. A typical performance review may involve interviewing dozens of other professionals that a partner has worked with over the year, to understand how effective he or she has been as a banker and as a team player.

A recent Fortune article about Goldman entitled "Inside the Money Machine" begins, "Start with the physical surroundings…There's nothing that shouts 'Goldman Sachs' or 'money.' Inside, you're struck not by elegance…but by the shabby state of affairs…Nor will you spot a lot of flashy investment bankers."

Goldman does vary partner pay more than Egon Zehnder, but its approach--highly unusual on Wall Street--has created a legendary teamwork culture, as opposed to a star culture where the highest-paid investment bankers are publicly glorified (and then frequently leave for the next better offer).

It's a truism that teams should share credit equally among members, but in reality this rarely happens. Most businesses remain convinced--or behave as if they are convinced--that leveraged incentives and the glorification of individual stars produce the best performance, despite evidence to the contrary. The Beatles had a better approach.

Beatles Principle Number 8: Create a one-for-all, all-for-one culture by fostering a "Lennon/McCartney" equal-credit environment for teams.

9. Revolution: Having Conviction

The Beatles were not just another fluffy pop group which churned out love songs and counted the royalties. During The Beatles second tour of the United States in 1964, the foursome learned that one of the stadiums in their tour, in Florida, was segregated--there were still separate seating areas for whites and blacks. They immediately held a news conference in New York and announced that The Beatles would, unequivocally, refuse to play in segregated venues.

Historians say that The Beatles were, in fact, the first major white musicians to publicly denounce racism in the music business.

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