Leadership development through jazz.

A facilitated program in which a leadership team works on communication, listening and adaptive leadership by playing music together, led by professional musicians who also teach. It runs in three modules — a talk on how great bandleaders led, a live demonstration in which a band is built in front of the room, and a fully participatory drum session — and it is experiential rather than instructional: the group does something difficult together and then examines what happened. No musical experience is needed.

Two to two and a half hours for the full arc. The three modules are self-standing, so a single module can run on its own in 45 to 90 minutes — which is how it most often fits inside an existing leadership-development program or offsite, and that is frequently where it works best: it gives a cohort a shared experience the rest of the program can refer back to. It can also recur. Nike ran six dates with us over the course of a year, and WestRock has run multiple sessions in Atlanta.

The room. We bring the full band, all the equipment and the drums, and every instrument a participant touches is provided. A space the group can stand and move in is better than a boardroom, but we have worked in both.

No, and most have none. The exercises are designed for people who have not played an instrument since school. A room of trained musicians would fall back on technique, which is the opposite of what the program is for.

Most run between fifteen and forty — an executive team, a leadership cohort or a department — and we have worked with groups from six to 250. For a larger population we usually recommend more than one session rather than one very large one. For Five Below we ran two back to back, one for the executive team and one for the sales organization, and scaled the ensemble to a full big band for the room.

A jazz ensemble coordinates in real time, almost entirely without words, with leadership passing between members several times a minute and no opportunity to pause and discuss. Those are the same conditions a senior team operates under in practice, and jazz musicians have spent a century developing explicit habits for handling them. The program makes those habits visible and then practices them.

At your offices, at a jazz club in New York, or at your offsite venue. We are based in New York and we travel: sessions have run in London for Thomson Reuters, twice in Lagos for GE, six times in Oregon for Nike, in Atlanta for WestRock, and for Notion in New York, San Francisco and at a company convention in Maui. Outside New York we hire the musicians locally — the program is the same wherever it runs, and what changes is the ensemble.

Every engagement is quoted individually, and not as a way of avoiding the question. The number genuinely moves with the size of the group, where in the world we are delivering, how many modules you run, and whether we are working with you directly or alongside a leadership-development partner. A range wide enough to be honest would be too wide to be useful. Tell us the group, the location and roughly when, and we will come back with a real figure within two business days.

Entirely different product. A band performs and the audience listens. Here the group is the ensemble, a facilitator runs a structured sequence of exercises, and roughly half the time is spent in discussion of what the group just did and what it means for how they work. We do both — but they are booked differently, staffed differently and priced differently.