Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead: The Ten Most Innovative Lessons from a Long, Strange Trip Paperback – November 20, 2012

I received this as a gift. I guess working for a large company and being a fan of the Dead was the reason my kids chose this for me!I have read a lot of business books over the years. This was definitely the most fun one I have ever read! Colorful stories about a band I love were engaging, making this a page turner to me.The ten lessons are fairly unique as well, but quite reapplicable to business across the board. "Live your values," "Be kind," "Encourage Employees to Lead" sound similar to other business books, but come with a Grateful Dead spin on it. Has given me some great ideas to try and implement at my company.Deadhead? Business professional? Either one (or both!) will find something in this book! Recommend!

My wife and I met at a Grateful Dead concert and we were married at one. All of this took place many years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, both from my perspective as a Dead Head and a current Tour Manager for a nationally touring band. I bought two copies to share amongst the band members of the band for whom I work.This is well-written, very comprehensive, and an insight into America's favorite band (like it or not, it's true). I learned a lot from this, both in terms of what I experienced way back when and what I am now confronting, trying to help an extraordinary group of musicians survive in today's economy.Read this. You will come away with a smile on your face.

My wife bought me this book for Christmas around 2015. I did not get around to reading it until 2017. Who cared about the business end of the Grateful Dead? I had been in the fire service for 40 years, 25 in senior leadership positions. As I started reading the book, I started correlating the 10 principles to the activities and operations of the fire service. Dr. Barnes's work inspired me to create a class based on the 10 principles called, " What The Fire Service Could Learn From The Business Principles of The Grateful Dead." I then submitted this very unique presentation to the "Fire Department Instructors Conference", the largest Fire Service-related conference in the United States. Three months later, to my surprise and excitement, it was chosen to be presented at FDIC 2018, (It did not hurt that the dude who ran the conference, Bobby Halton, was a huge Deadhead.). While developing the content for the presentation, Dr. Barnes was gracious enough to support it. Creating and developing the presentation was one of the most exciting events of my life. We had fire hats and stickers made up to distribute at the presentation. I even had a banner created. it went well, The reviews rated it highly. I still deliver the program one to two times a year, in total it has been delivered about 20 times. At the end of every class, I always have a couple of people come up to me and say, "I attended this program as I was curious. I am not a Deadhead, but your content and delivery resonated with me, good job." This book and its principles can be translated into any industry. it gets people to think from a unique and different perspective to expand their minds to be open to new opportunities. "Once In Awhile You Get Shown The Light In The Strangest Of Places If You Look At It Right." and then, "Maybe You'll Find DirectionAround Some Corner Where It's Been Waiting To Meet You."

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BUSINESS I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD – A Book Review by George KoumantzelisI really enjoyed reading this book a lot. It’s only 223 pages long, and it reads fast. I finished it in just a few days, on October 31, 2013. If you are a Dead Head, read this book. If you are just starting a band or just joining a band, read this book. If you are about to open your own business, read this book! … Now, there are better books out there to read about The Grateful Dead, about starting or joining a band, and about opening your own business. But, I do not know of any other book that covers all three. In that sense, this is a serious pre-requisite to your career in music – if that is what you think you want to do.The Grateful Dead hold – with distinctive honors – a unique place in the pantheon of rock and roll musicians when it comes to dealing with the music business. This is no overstatement. Among business organizations in general, and rock and roll band organizations in particular, The Grateful Dead stand out as a group of people who not only walked their talk but also put their money where their mouths were. This is rare! It is rare because among musicians in general – let alone rock musicians (if you want to call The Grateful Dead “rock”) – very few of them had the foresight and the presence of mind (let alone the will and determination) to take the business-bull by the horns and maintain control over their own economic destiny as did The Grateful Dead. A lot of us already knew this about the band, but the author of this book – Barry Barnes, Ph.D. – fills in a lot of the details on how they went about doing just that: keeping control of their business dealings. Frank Zappa, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, among others have all tried to do this in one way or another over the years – but The Dead did it with class! They were aristocratic and democratic egalitarians to the core of their being – and God bless them for taking the high road on this one!My only problem with this book is that it does not go into enough detail. I was really hoping that the author would have really dug deep into the brass tacks of the actual logistics of exactly how the band split up all of the profits they made from their music. This is why I am only giving this book four stars, and not five. I was very disappointed in this respect. I kept on waiting to find out exactly how they did it – cut up the pieces of the rock and roll pie (percentage-wise) and shared the wealth – and not just “the women and the wine.” You know? … I mean, if it was not going to be revealed in this book, then where would it ever be revealed? In a way, the fact that this information is missing, or just barely addressed, makes me all the more want to write my own book about rock musicians and money. This is something that I have been wondering about for a long time.For instance, the author states that The Dead were very generous with how they split up the profits of their labor and their musical creations. He even waxes rhapsodically time and time again about how cool and how hip the band was in their working relationships with their staff, their roadies, their office help, their sound men, et al. Fantastic! No problem! Great! … But why was there no mention of what most beginning musicians and most beginning band members and most beginning small-time business operators want to know: how do we split the money that we make between us so that it is the most fair to one and all?EXAMPLE: In a most recent special edition of Rolling Stone on The Grateful Dead that was published earlier this year and sold on newsstands, somewhere in the back, in small print, I think it stated that for all of the songs that Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter wrote together, each of them – Robert and Jerry – got 45 percent of the profits, and that the other five guys each got two percent. Two percent. … Does that sound fair to you? … Also, it does not say if Robert Hunter got more of a percentage for writing both the words and the music to any particular song. It does not say if these percentages only related to profits made from the sale of records, tapes, CD’s, DVD’s, Blu-Ray’s, and digital downloads, or if it also pertained to profits made from performance-rights agency royalties from radio, TV, and internet streaming airplay from organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. It does not make it clear if these percentages apply, also, to publishing profits – profits derived from the sale of sheet music and guitar “tab” song books but, even more importantly, to when other musical artists and bands “cover” your song and do their own rendition of it on their own recordings or performances before the public, let alone licensing royalties for music played in elevators, supermarkets, and the very lucrative soundtrack residuals that are paid to musicians for songs included in major motion picture releases in theaters worldwide. You know? … So, there are still a lot of unanswered questions here!Also, there is no mention of how gigs and concert profits were divided up between the band members themselves and the rest of the crew. Did the drummers make as much money as the guitarists on every gig? Did the roadies and sound men make as much money as the band? Did the profits from the sales of T-Shirts, Stickers, Patches, and any and all other assorted doo-dads, gizmos, and gadgets with the Grateful Dead logo on them get divided differently than the profits made from playing at a concert – after the vendors and the hall got their cut? … Right? …Some people say that one reason why Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones was because he never got enough credit and payment for all of his musical contributions to the band. I mean – let’s face it – there is more to the kind of music that The Grateful Dead play than just song lyrics and chord changes during the verses and choruses of a song. These guys were like jazz musicians! This was musical composition on the fly a lot of the times. Every member of that band was an equal co-creator of this great music. Should it not be split equally and fairly and justly if that is the case – depending, of course, on the amount of creative input that each member put into a song? I know that “the industry” calls what Mick Taylor did adding “embellishment” to someone else’s “song” – that someone else being the person who wrote the lyrics and the major chord changes, like most of Bob Dylan’s songs. But, what about long, complex, melodic songs that have no lyrics? Don’t exceptional guitar solos count for something? Don’t great bass riffs (THINK: “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison!) count for something? Don’t unique and original and complimentary keyboard or percussion parts count for something? Okay, maybe “embellishing” parts of a song should not be considered to be of equal weight under all occasions but, certainly, there are times when they actually “make” the song what it is! (THINK: Mick Taylor’s great guitar solo in “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” by The Rolling Stones on the Sticky Fingers album! … We’ll overlook the fact, for now, that his great solo is derivative of an original guitar solo played by the renowned jazz guitarist, Larry Coryell, on a song called “For Mods Only” on Chico Hamilton’s 1966 record album called, “The Dealer.”) Mick Taylor should have at the very least been given co-authorship credits to this song and a percentage of the royalties – even if that percentage was not equal to what Mick and Keith received. … Right? …Maybe this will inspire me to write my own book about all of this? I’d like to call it: “Rock and Roll and Music: Cutting-Up the Rock and Roll Pie.” My only hesitation and reservation is that part of me thinks that a lot of musicians might not want to talk about this part of their lives: their finances and how they got those finances in relation to all of the other people in their lives who helped them get to where they are today. I realize that it is foolish to think that we are all equal in respect to talent and labor output. We are not. So, it is in no way “just” to pay people equally for what they do if what they do is not of equal value or which took an equal amount of time and energy exerted. Some people are more talented, write more popular songs, and work harder and longer at their craft. But at least people can be “fair” about the way that they pay their musical collaborators and crew in the sense that the pay and credit that they receive is “just” and one which reflects a true monetary compensation for the amount of time and effort and quality of the work that any one individual contributes to the mix. … Right? …Okay, enough of that! … Now you want to know why I think this book is so great. It’s great because it has a lot of juicy quotes and first-hand stories in it that came from the primary research of the author himself. The author is not just regurgitating articles and stories from other people’s books and putting them all together into his own book. This is an authentic, literary contribution to the Grateful Dead cannon. There are stories in here that you will not find anywhere else – as far as I know.Here is one of them from pages 51 and 52:Despite the Dead’s popular image as zonked-out hippies, they were deeply committed to providing a high-quality experience for their fans. As early as 1967, when the band was playing shows in San Francisco, Garcia would tell his band mates, “This isn’t an Acid Test anymore, boys and girls. They’re paying money to come and see us. We have to put on a show.” The Acid Tests had been “happenings,” where the Dead were just fellow participants, and could play as much or as little as they wanted. But now they had paying customers. Garcia “was very professional about it,” Rock Scully recalled. “Jerry was the guy who instructed the band that we were now getting into show business and the people were paying money to come and see us, so we had to be good.” During a tour in 1967, Lesh was feeling uncharacteristically uncomfortable onstage, as if the music were reaching beyond what he was capable of. At one point, he just stopped playing, bewildered. Between sets, Garcia confronted him. “He was so pissed, he just grabbed me and said, ‘You play, mother ######,’ and sort of threw me down the stairs.” They were in show business now, and show business demanded that musicians actually put on a show. … While demanding stellar showmanship of themselves, the Dead stayed committed to keeping ticket prices at a reasonable level … The Dead even took care of those who couldn’t afford tickets at all. For their fall 1971 East Coast tour, they arranged FM broadcasts to satisfy fans without tickets.”I could go on and on with more juicy stories like this one, but who wants to listen to me? Just get the book and read it for yourself. It may not be “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” but it’s a real good read. … YOWZA!George Nicholas Koumantzelis / The Aeolian Kid