I spent a weekend last month seeing Dead & Company at the Sphere in Las Vegas. The shows were amazing, and because I’m a full-on nonprofit nerd, I couldn’t help but think of the relevance to civic leadership.
The Grateful Dead, led by the iconic guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia, emerged out of the Bay Area music scene in 1965 and lasted until 1995, the year of Garcia’s death. Integrating jazz and bluegrass approaches into rock and roll, the band invented a genre of music— folk-rock improvisation — and created a culture: the famed Deadheads.
When Garcia died, everyone thought that was it for the Dead. We fans were grateful for the memories.
Then, 20 years later, a different version rose from the grave, with pop-music star John Mayer in the unexpected role of lead guitarist and Bob Weir from the original band anchoring the endeavor.
Every summer for 10 years, Dead & Company has played sold-out tours at major venues across the nation. I’m not sure there’s ever been anything quite like it: a legendary band that naturally ended its run when its leader and most iconic member died, emerging again two decades later under new leadership and fully embraced by both longtime and new fans.
This new iteration of the Dead feels as excellent as the original, but in a different way. The shows still last four hours and are full of long jams, but they have added in whole new elements, demonstrated by breathtaking video storytelling.
So why is any of this relevant to nonprofit leaders? Because every organization must figure out how to connect its current work to its original vision, to both adapt to the times and remain true to its core.
Nonprofits have had a notoriously difficult time over the last decade or so integrating and aligning new staff with an organization’s approach and mission. A friend who runs an educational-empowerment nonprofit for youths of color in Chicago told me that his younger staff members want the organization to take stands on social-justice issues. He wants them to focus on how to be better tutors. It’s not that he disagrees with the first; it’s just that the nonprofit’s mission and strategy are about the second.
Ryan Grim’s much-discussed piece two years ago for the Intercept, “The Elephant in the Zoom,” was a particularly vivid account of this tension. Today, the problem is most apparent in the challenges facing nonprofits that take a stand on the Israel-Hamas war.
Following the Dead
I think the longevity and adaptability of the Dead offer a model for how to meet the challenge of maintaining an organization’s essence while allowing for different approaches to implementing programs. Here are three principles nonprofit leaders can draw from the band’s example:
Be crystal clear about your organization’s genre. The Dead was a folk-rock band with long jams. It didn’t play loud heavy metal or quiet chamber music. Similarly, direct-service nonprofits that seek to serve everyone regardless of identity or ideology are a different genre than an advocacy organization that uses confrontational protest to call out oppressors. Every nonprofit leader should forcefully communicate what genre their organization belongs to and what work fits that genre.
Encourage staff to master the nonprofit’s songbook. Bands have songbooks, and organizations have programs and services. Just as members of a band should seek to play their songs at the highest level, so should nonprofit staff aim to learn the skills at the heart of the organization’s work. Ideally, a nonprofit not only sets virtuosity as a goal, but it also has internal training programs that help staff achieve that level of excellence.
Commit to playing with other virtuosos. Each member of the Dead was a remarkable musician and could have easily led his own band — indeed, many of them had side projects doing just that. What made the Dead special was that the members were virtuosos playing together, each of them with a bone-deep understanding of what constituted a Dead song.
That’s ideally what a nonprofit organization should be, at least at the senior level — a group of virtuosos playing together. When playing with other virtuosos who are all committed to the genre and know the songbook cold, each member can bring their special flavor to a song, while still playing as a collective.
These principles are particularly relevant when bringing new staff onto a senior team. How do you welcome their talents so the organization changes for the better while remaining true to its core mission?
The Grateful Dead had a mostly consistent crew from 1965 to 1995, but the keyboard player did change a few times, and for several years they added a female singer. If you listen to concerts from those different eras, as Deadheads are wont to do, you can tell the difference between the bluesier lines played by the Dead’s first keyboard player, Pigpen, versus Bruce Hornsby’s jazzier approach in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I have some experience with this at my own nonprofit. Of the 20 most senior people at Interfaith America, a dozen or so have been at the organization for at least seven years. They model and demonstrate daily what our culture and standard of excellence look like, how we treat colleagues, and how we engage with external partners.
We want new people, including those hired at the senior levels, to bring their distinctiveness to the team, the same way that John Mayer plays Dead songs with a bluesier flavor than Jerry Garcia. But we make sure they first understand the genre in which Interfaith America operates. All program staff, for example, are required to go through an intensive “core content” seminar in which they read the literature of civic pluralism, including authors such as Robert Putnam, Danielle Allen, and John Inazu.
They come away from this training with a clear grasp of who we are: a pluralism organization that facilitates respect for diverse identities, relationships between communities, and cooperation on projects for the common good. We are not an organization that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed.
We make it clear to everyone who joins our nonprofit that they need to commit to being a virtuoso at playing our songbook — and at being comfortable playing with other virtuosos.
All Dead songs have chord changes and lyrics, but they also have a spirit. You can feel the spirit at their shows, and you can feel it when witnessing the work of an organization that is fully in tune with its mission and audience. Not surprisingly, the Dead’s own words best describe the essence of effective civic and artistic enterprises: “Without love in the dream, it will never come true.”
