The Art of Leadership: Lessons from Art Blakey

Great article. I think we find time and time again that the best leaders are really “cheerleaders”. It turns out that inspiring people, personally living the values you espouse, and giving your team trust and respect is the key to success.

In my experience, people excel in environments where they are given a high level of trust, autonomy, and clear goals on the timescale of months and years.

Teams on the rack of egotistical middle managers get stretched thin until they break. There aren’t a lot of good examples of “micromanagitis” being cured. So-called leaders taking credit for their team’s work leads to their team not trusting that leadership has their growth in mind. Art Blakey’s real legacy is both the amazing players he mentored and tutored, but also the attitude that if you give people the tools they need, they’ll excel

This is a great article, but I take issue with the "character matters" section. Blakey was a notorious heroin addict and was known for introducing his young sidemen to the drug. A lot of the stories are here: https://www.organissimo.org/forum/topic/80777-whats-the-deal...

From the thread:

Jamil Nasser told me (re: Dan's interview and the junkie question); when the band went on the road, Blakey stocked up with dope ahead of time. So the typical situation was - they are in some town, middle of nowhere; everybody is strung out and desperate. So Blakey says, 'let me go out and see what I can find' - he comes back with the stuff he already had, marks it up about 10 times, says, 'well, this was all I could get but it's pretty expensive." He takes their "share" out of the gig money, they go home with nothing, he takes all the cash.