Ted Gioia: evaluation

Transcript context

…What would be an example of that? Well, let me give you an example. When I was at the Boston Consulting Group, we were analyzing new product introductions. So, the idea—a new product is coming out, a new computer or something, and you have to predict how it’s going to sell over the next five, ten years. We had these mathematical formulas we used to predict the spread of an innovation, and I found that these mathematical formulas had all been developed to track diseases. These were the same formulas they used at the World Health Organization. If there’s a new flu somewhere, they use the same formulas to track the spread of a disease that we used to track the spread of an innovation. Now, fast forward. Fifteen years later, I’m working on researching the history of jazz, and I’m studying New Orleans, and it was such an unhealthy city. In fact, New Orleans was the unhealthiest city in the United States at the time when jazz was invented. And I asked myself, could there be a connection between the spread of disease and the spread of a musical innovation? Because based upon what I learned at the Boston Consulting Group, there might. Then I started looking at other situations, and I found a surprising number of situations in history where unhealthy settings and situations had created artistic revolutions. Most people date the start of the Renaissance to the year 1350 in the city of Florence. They don’t realize, 1348 was the Great Plague in Florence. What people don’t realize, the troubadour revolution spread from the South of France into the rest of Europe. It followed the exact same dissemination patterns the Black Death did. So, classic example: I am taking analytical tools that I learned at the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey, and I’m applying it to music problems. I’ve done this in many instances. A lot of my work on blues is taking aspects of things I learned back then. Was it a waste of time to get a philosophy, politics, and economics degree from Oxford?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.