Leadership Lessons from David Lee Roth

Great read from Fast Company recently. For years, the quintessential eighties spandex-wearing rock gods, Van Halen, lived up to the billing - as notorious off stage as on. One example of excess for years as been a famous clause in the concert contracts which demanded a bowl of M&Ms available backstage… with all the brown ones removed.

Years later, former lead singer David Lee Roth revealed the true secret behind the “M&Ms Clause”...

Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted—Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read “like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.” A typical “article” in the contract might say, “There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.”

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

What was long held as a ridiculous rock star demand was actually an ingenious way to handle operational logistics.

As Dan & Chip Heath ask in their “Business Advice from Van Halen” article… “What if we could rig up a system where problems would announce themselves before they arrived? ... Where’s the brown M&M in your business?”

Read the full article on Fast Company’s website…

Posted 04.19.2010

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