Perhaps you remember as well as I do the Big Hair Bands that dominated the charts during the 1980s.
These bands were known for their big hair, big concerts, big displays of pyrotechnics, big guitar solos, and big personalities. One of the bands that exemplified the image of the Big Hair Band was Van Halen. The stories of the antics that occurred off-stage were often as newsworthy as the music they performed onstage. One such story was that the band – get this – demanded that M&Ms be placed backstage for them at concerts, but that no brown M&Ms would be tolerated. No brown M&Ms? But M&M bags are full of brown M&Ms!
Can you imagine the poor crew member that had to painstakingly remove every last brown M&M from the pile? How absurd! we all exclaimed. What divas! we all thought. Rock stars, we all sighed. It must be nice to be so pampered.
And then there’s the rest of the story.
A brief article in the March 2010 edition of Fast Company magazine, written by brothers Dan and Chip Heath, illuminated the truth behind the Legend of the Brown M&M.
Van Halen’s concerts, like many bands of that era, were incredibly high tech. (Nine big rigs full of equipment for any given concert. Nine!) So, the set-up required meticulous attention to detail and a careful following of the band’s contract. Certainly the band would not have time before each show to check every light, amp, or pyrotechnic doo-hickey, so lead singer David Lee Roth had the idea to put the “no brown M&M” clause deep in the middle of the contract (“Article 126,” to be precise).
This technique allowed them to make a quick assessment of the concert preparations – when the band arrived at a venue, all they’d have to do was look and see if there were any brown M&Ms in the bowl. To them, the presence of brown M&Ms meant that the crew hired to set up the show was not reading the contract carefully, and therefore Van Halen would call for a complete line check of the stage before starting the show.
Ohhhhhhhh.
How clever is that? I thought when I read that article. What geniuses! I mused. This is brilliant – get this! I said to everyone that would listen.
Wow. What a totally different perspective, more than 20 years later. Spoiled Rock Stars? No. (Well okay maybe, but not because of this). Innovative businessmen? Absolutely. And for the rest of us, who smirked and whispered and rolled our eyes at the absurdity of their behavior? We were missing out on a great lesson on smart management and an even greater lesson on the basic truth that there is always more than meets the eye.
How often do we do that with our students? Make assumptions based on what we see, on the limited information readily available to us? How often do we paint a picture of the “truth,” when really the picture we are painting is based on our own perceptions and experiences? What a gift it is, then, to instead take the time to find out the whole story… to find out the “why” behind the “what.” The truth we discover there just might knock our socks off.
Are you taking the time to find out the rest of the story?
For breakfast I had Chipotle. Oh wait, that was lunch.
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