Leadership Ensemble

The second week of January at Baruch High School in Manhattan: Teenagers are noisily making their way to and from class. On the street below, a siren blares through Union Square. And in a classroom on one of the floors of the high school, musicians are sight-reading a piece of music. After several frustrating attempts, cellist Melissa Meell finally stops and shrugs her shoulders. "We're a long way from Carnegie Hall," she quips.

That kind of wisecrack would be typical of a clever 12th-grader who's struggling through her first Mozart symphony, hoping to ace her audition for all-city orchestra and get a crack at playing on the stage of that revered concert hall. But, in fact, Meell is 44, a professional musician, and a member of Orpheus -- a Grammy-nominated chamber orchestra that's widely considered one of the best of its kind on the planet. Although she and her fellow musicians are just 19 days away from their next Carnegie Hall performance, they still sound as if they're playing rubber bands.

With such an imposing deadline at hand, why is this prestigious group of musicians rehearsing in such noisy surroundings? The school, it turns out, is its home. Orpheus has been the orchestra in residence at Baruch High School for more than three years and at Zicklin School of Business, which is affiliated with New York City's university system, since September 1999. Orpheus is a conductorless orchestra, and it was for that very reason that Baruch wanted the orchestra to take up residence there -- so that students could watch Orpheus rehearse and observe firsthand how it uses collaboration and consensus building to settle its creative differences. High-school students would get a living lesson in conflict resolution. And business students, who would soon be working in a world where few people believe that a CEO has -- or should have -- all of the answers, would learn that self-governance makes a worthwhile model and that leadership is most effective when all levels of an organization have input.

Its self-governing and leadership abilities have made Orpheus more than just a group of gifted musicians. Orpheus has actually become a metaphor for structural change -- the kind of change that has bedeviled so many big companies and exasperated so many big-company CEOs. Orpheus's founder, Julian Fifer, 49, first became aware of the group's metamorphosis when a chairman of a large Japanese publishing company approached him several years ago. "He told me how much he had enjoyed our concert," Fifer recalls. "But then he confided that he didn't want his employees to discover us." Fifer was amused -- and intrigued: If old-line business leaders resisted their self-governing process, presumably there were corporate mavericks who would find it compelling. That assumption proved to be correct: During the past two years, several large companies, including Kraft Foods and Novartis AG, have hired Orpheus to demonstrate its process to their executives. This spring, the orchestra will be sharing its lessons with hospital trustees and directors in Dallas and with PR executives in New York City. Within the next year and a half, the group is scheduled to make presentations to international business leaders in Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo.

What do these executives find so compelling about Orpheus's sound and system? To them, the group is a radical, ongoing experiment to find out whether grassroots democracy and commitment to consensus can lead to transcendental performance -- or whether it will all end in organizational chaos and muddled results. So what is the key to the orchestra's continued success? A set of insights about motivation, decision making, performance, and work that are as relevant in conference rooms as they are in concert halls.

Motivation: The Sweet Sound of Satisfaction

Those who aspire to a career as a classical musician and who are studying at a top conservatory have a few obvious career paths: Clearly, the more talented you are, the more options you have. Those who win or place well in big competitions can go on to sign recording contracts and to enjoy solo careers. They can also choose to join chamber-music groups, as do many of their other colleagues. Virtually all -- no matter how successful or well-known -- teach. Some, however, are forced to do so to support themselves financially. Most orchestra musicians who want to perform full-time join symphony orchestras.

Those jobs offer relative stability and a decent income, but they are hard to come by. Even so, back in the early 1970s, when Orpheus's founding members were trickling out of music schools and into the New York freelance scene, taking such a job was not high on their list of career goals. "Many of us believed that joining a traditional orchestra would lead to a creative dead end," says Ronnie Bauch, 47, a violinist with Orpheus since 1974, "because you'd be under the thumb of its conductor for the next 30 or 40 years."