'If you love something, give it away.' Itay Talgam's inspirational TEDTalk on how to lead like the great conductors
Sometimes TED talks are so inspiring, so warm and so human that it’s difficult to say anything about them than you simply must watch it.
This is one of those. Itay Talgam’s TEDGlobal 2009 talk on ‘leading like the great conductors’ is not just funny and informative, it’s noble.
Talgam is a distinguished conductor himself and as he analyses the leadership styles of some of the great conductors in the world, he brings alive a hidden language of human interaction and reveals what types of leadership enable something beautiful to emerge.
His insight explores how authority is not enough to make people your partners, but that there is something else - something special and subtle - that can create the process and conditions for other people’s stories to be heard at the same time.
His observation that the reason you go to a live performance is to experience a community of stories: the story of the orchestra as a professional body, the musicians as individuals, the audience members as individuals and as a crowd, the unseen people who built the concert hall and made the instruments and *all* of them heard at the same time, will make you look at collaboration in a new way.
There’s a tip too, that’s probably applicable to all areas of life: “Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.”