What I Write and Speak About |

I just re-did my main ?What I write and speak about? page on my website, and just for fun I thought i would repost it here.

This page presumes that you are a meeting planner or a similar ?impresario? looking to book a speaker for your event. Hopefully, this will give you some idea if I am right for your group.

The never-ending question: ?So Justin, what do you write and speak about?? Well, like many speakers, I talk about a unique adventure. However, my grand adventure was not about climbing Mt. Everest or playing in the NFL. Actually, statistically speaking, my biggest adventure was much harder to do: I played in a major symphony orchestra.
And I share what was, and continues to be, been a remarkable journey of artistic discovery.

My main ?topics? (everything is custom-tailored to each audience/event) come in four ?levels:

Real Men Don?t Rehearse
Henry Ford Vs. Henry Mancini
Principles of Applied Stupidity and

Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid

Here we go:

Level One: Real Men Don?t Rehearse

This is how the whole ?author/speaker? career came about: Whenever I was at a cocktail party, if people found out I played in the Boston Pops, that would trump all other avenues of conversation. ?What is that really like?? they always asked. We know everything there is to know about pop musicans, but orchestras remain mysterious and exotic. And so I would share the many wacky stories of what it was really like to live and work in that truly remarkable world.

A sample below, strictly for fun, the classic tale of the night I got the Boston Pops bass section drunk by mistake:

Level Two: Henry Ford Vs. Henry Mancini

Orchestral conductors are often used as metaphors for the leader of an organization, but this usage always makes me wince. Very few people outside the culture ever get to see how the process really works. In fact, the one question I am always asked is, ?Just what exactly does the conductor actually do??

The problem with answering this question is, most people lack the cultural vocabulary for me to even begin to answer them. The vast majority of people in the USA live in a culture created by Henry Ford. Our lives revolve around the factory. Granted, we don?t have that many actual factories any more, but much of our workplace and institional culture is still based on that mechanical model. Orchestral playing transcends that mechanical realm.

A big part of the industrial revolution was the systematic ?cultural genocide? of all the many different foreign cultures coming to america. The only European culture that escaped was that of major orchestras. So for me, at age 19, to go from a farm in the Midwest to that world, was a culture shock in the extreme.

In the talk below, I discuss just one major difference between major orchestra culture and factory culture, i.e., what I call the ?trust vs. obedience? management models (see more on this blog post, on mastery vs. obedience):

Level Three: Principles of Applied Stupidity

Once I more or less recovered from the shock of playing in a major orchestra, I started to wonder why some conductors were so much better than others, why some conductors would get such fabulous results with little or no apparent effort, and even more vexing, why some folks with apparent talent and training never seemed to ?make the leap.?

This reveals yet another cultural divide: Again, in terms of broad cultural history, a great deal of our educational establishment was designed to serve the needs of factory-like work environments. Sad to say, such training involves the systematic suppression of creativity and instilling a fear of ?being different.? So I decided to write a book that would help people ?unlearn? this obsolete training. Since I am encouraging people to do things that, in the context of the old model, were always labeled as ?stupid,? I call it, what else, ?Principles of Applied Stupidity?:

Level Four:

Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid

Speaking of rare adventures, before coming to Boston I had yet another major culture shock experience (this seems to happen to me a lot): At age 15, I was transferred from my local ?poor kid? public school to the posh college prep rich-kid private school.

It took me along time, but I finally got around to writing a book about these first-hand experiences of the cultural differences between poor kids and rich kids. A brief intro video below:

So that is a brief intro to what I do as an author, speaker, and consultant. I offer a decidedly different perspective on management, learned in a VERY different culture, where individual ?buy-in? and the highest level of emotional commitment by every person on the team was just another day at work.

Oh and by the way, I spent many years producing propaganda videos, I managed the Bose Philharmonic, and my musical plays for family orchestral concerts are done all over the world. My whole professional life has been about entertaining people and managing emotional energy. And yes, I really am in the Guinness Book of World Records, for playing the Bicentennial concert with Arthur Fiedler in 1976.

The industrial era took away our ability to work holistically and artistically. The digital age has brought that back. No matter what you ?do,? the future value in your work is going to be derived from your artistic perception. I would love to help you out with what I know of the subject.

So that?s the overview. If you are the kind of person who likes pushing the envelope and doing something different, here I am. Let?s talk. Call me at 781-330-8143, or email justinlocke1@gmail.com. No hard sell, and I look forward to chatting with you.

PS: a worthwhile six minutes, how to free yourself from the fear of failure:

(Watch more videos, listen to an interview on CBS radio about my latest book, ?Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid?, or read my Bio.)

?An abundance of charisma . . . ? ? The Boston Globe

?Justin Locke . . . borders on genius I think.? ? Mary Richardson, WCVB-TV, Boston

??Real Men Don?t Rehearse? paints a lively picture of what goes on behind the scenes at a major symphony orchestra. Anybody who thinks that all classical musicians are stuffy and lack a sense of humor will be set straight by this rambunctious book.?
?Peter Schickele (?curator? of ?PDQ Bach?)

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