Business Insight Zone

Before you laugh at the thought of the rockstar-cum-activist as a business counselor, ponder for a moment just how successfully U2 has kept up with the times — and kept themselves in the money — for the past 30 years.

I’m thinking of this because of a quote from a story headlined “New U2 album delayed till 2009″:

“We’ve hit a rich songwriting vein and we don’t want to stop,” Bono says on the band’s website. “It gets a bit dark down here but looks like we’ve found diamonds not coal. I thought a while back we might have the album wrapped by now, but why come up above ground now if there’s more priceless stuff to be found?”

Part of this may be the precious diction of the artiste, but hidden inside it is some genuine wisdom: If you’re going to try to create something that resonates, whether it’s an album or a new telecom router or a new Web browser, you can try to do a competent job that improves incrementally on what came before, or you can try to reshape the landscape.

In general, I’m a big fan of the competent-messy-NOW philosophy, since it seems to work so much better for most situations. You get an early version out the door without being too precious about it, and then you iterate it better, again and again. (If it sounds like I’m channelling Paul Graham and the 37signals folks, I am.)

Go Big

But sometimes, if you have the means and the motivation, it’s better to shoot the moon. U2 already has more money than they would ever spend; the challenge for them now is to stay fresh and relevant and creative in middle age. And who knows but what the extra time in the studio will let them come out with a Joshua Tree-caliber masterpiece?

The article linked above ends with a bit of snark about the band fouling up thir label’s fall release schedule. But if the album sells as well as How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, I’m guessing that Universal can live with booking the revenue in 2009 rather than 2008.

The same item on the band’s Web site from which the quote above is drawn ends with this tidbit from The Rose-Bespectacled One:

“We know we have to emerge soon but we also know that people don’t want another U2 album unless it is our best ever album. It has to be our most innovative, our most challenging . . . or what’s the point ?”

When you’ve reached the rarefied heights that U2 has, that’s precisely the way you keep on making history.

Question for further contemplation:

What can YOU do to “Go Big”?

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(Photo by The_Admiralty.)

Category: Entertainment