BARRY BARNES: The ‘Long Strange Trip’ Comes to the Boardroom: 10 Innovative Business
Lessons of The Grateful Dead

Presented in affiliation with the Dolan School of Business.

The Grateful Dead, America’s greatest road band between 1965-1995, provide a surprising and paradoxical source of important business and organizational lessons for the 21st century. Driven by a passion for understanding change in organizations as well as his love for music, Dr. Barry Barnes, a university management professor and consultant to multiple Fortune 500 companies, researched the Grateful Dead’s business practices for more than 20 years. He published “Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead: The 10 Most Innovative Lessons From A Long Strange Trip.”

In his illustrated talk, Barnes explains why he was drawn to Grateful Dead as a successful business model given his own background as one who had worked in corporate America for 20 years. Interviewing dedicated ‘Deadheads’ at their concerts and through interviews with those who worked for the band, we gain an inside peek at the magic and mystery that created the indestructible legacy spanning the birth of Psychedelia in the 1960s through this summer’s concerts selling out stadiums from coast to coast.

Barnes walks us through the Dead’s 10 lessons relevant to all organizations today when decisions makers are confounded by “tried and true” methods that are no longer reliable in today’s turbulent, fast changing times. These lessons apply and resonate in today’s marketplace with examples from business failures and successes. His pioneering research on the Dead brought him international media attention including articles in The Atlantic, Business Week, the New York Times, the Financial Times (German edition), and the Sunday Times of London Magazine as well as being interviewed for the CBS Evening News, the Fox Business Channel and more than 30 radio programs across the US. “The misfits of yesteryear,” notes The Boston Globe review of Barnes’ book “ may be today’s role models…they were visionaries when it came to social networking and they believed in ‘insourcing’ all called by Barnes as “strategic improvisation” – so let’s jam on!

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