Five Lessons From Managing The Rolling Stones

Five Lessons From Managing The Rolling Stones: Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones’ founder, was kicked out of the band in 1969 and drowned a month later. One of the things that undid him, says Oldham, was his inability to “be happy in [the] moment of work.” Even if a business is only making chairs, he says, its workers must find intrinsic value in their product (Oldham describes this attitude characteristically: “If somebody doesn’t like it, f--- it; you’ll make another one”). Jones, for all his contributions, did not have this attitude toward the music. If he had made a chair, Oldham speculates, he would have found no joy in the chair itself; his work would become meaningful to Jones only if people “coddled him and applauded him and said what a wonderful chair it was.”