Marching Band: A Blueprint for Organizational Excellence 16 May 2023

A marching band is composed of individuals with unique skills, but success comes from each understanding their role and working as a united team. Every member makes their contribution, whether they are in the low brass section, the horns and reeds, the drumline, color guard, the twirlers, or the principle piccolo.

Marching band exemplifies discipline, teamwork, and creativity through its practice. One does not just listen to a marching band. You experience the band as a moving mass of shape and color shifting between cacophony to harmony, exploding sound while retaining rhythmic familiarity. It is chaos made coherent from a particular point of view, much like the flurry of actions that occur with an organization. In many ways, the performers’ collective efforts to strive for the highest embody the principles of organizational excellence.

Marching band demands precision through meticulous attention to detail. Every step, note, and movement must be executed precisely and in sync. Visual cues, verbal commands, and a shared musical language enable complex maneuvers with precision. Attention to detail promotes efficiency and professionalism. Likewise, open communication and collaboration are vital in organizations, enhancing teamwork, problem-solving, and innovation.

However, marching band requires such a dizzying array of concerted actions that it exhibits a robust anti-fragility in its execution. Even if there are errors, the internal rhythm and self-correcting nature of a determined group of musicians is apparent.

My college marching band director was Dr. Chris Knighten, Director of Bands and Professor of Music for the University of Arkansas. When I was in the Razorback Marching Band around 2010, we would have about 350 students create a new mass production - The Best in Sight and Sound - each week for 60,000 raging football fans. Dr. Knighten provided many forms of wisdom, like his memorable catchphrase, “The train has left the station,” when describing the sense of urgency needed to be ready for rehearsal. But one saying of his that still gives me pause was his observational admonishment:

“Even if each of you make only one mistake, that is 350 errors in a performance.”

Truth be told, there were many performances where I made more than one mistake and others did as well. Often this would translate into a working show that few could see or hear any sign of errors because of the total effect of the experience of the show. Yet even though the show was passable to an audience, even to Dr. Knighten, each performer would know they could do better.

Of course, one could only wish to perform among a large group for what could be twenty minutes or more of continous multimodal entertainment in front of tens of thousands of onlookers with only one mistake, even moreso a whole shift of work. It is an impossible ask.

But there is also safety in attempting such a statistically improbable event among other high caliber performers. Even if you did make a mistake, everyone else was so focused on their own contribution and were able to adjust that it did not matter in the grand scheme of the show, giving you room to breathe (hopefully not during a solo!).

Marching band cultivates organizational and individual excellence through its durable structure. Remove any one person from the band, and the members of the band would fill the gaps and adapt their spacing, voicing, and configuration. Yet ask any one member to play their part or perform their routine, and 9 times out of 10 you would witness a artistic powerhouse with personal flair.

Because of the ethos of the members of the group to do their best, to “leave it on the field” as it were, the performers in a marching band demonstrate a remarkable ability for self-assembly for a group of autonomous individuals with their own strengths, weaknesses, schedules and desires. Friendly rivalries emerge within a section among players vying for chair positions which prescribed the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic lines. Yet these emotions sublimate during the performance as each part was necessary to blend the chords into sonorous passages of tension and release.

Marching band members are accustomed to dedicating themselves to practice their craft, rain or shine, and embrace a strong work ethic. They also tend to stick together. In many universities, strong kinships form among bandmates during early week before the academic year even begins. This discipline cultivates perseverance and a shared commitment to musical excellence. Organizations that reward dedication to the craft see these traits in high performance individuals and teams.

Viewed in this light, marching band offers insights into organizational excellence. Nearly every person who is or once was a member of a marching band share these qualities to some degree. From clear vision and goals to individual accountability, precision, adaptability, effective communication, and discipline, these principles apply to any organization. Embracing these qualities fosters a culture of excellence, innovation, and collaboration, propelling organizations toward extraordinary achievements.

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