Hold A Shoot-Out

Rick Rubin is one of the most prolific producers in the music business. Boasting records by Johnny Cash, LL Cool J, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Neil Diamond, the Dixie Chicks, and the Beastie Boys, just to name a few, he’s also one of the most diverse. Rolling Stone calls him “the most successful producer of any genre.” He’s almost impossible to pin down.

What you can pin down, though, is his process.

During production, he hosts what he calls “shoot outs,” where he will gather “as many as five different mastering engineers mastering the same album and then we ‘A/B’ them.” As he explained to the LA Times, he will “hire several engineers to do the final mix on a recording and listen to the results without knowing which engineer did which track.”

Why?

“If you know the greatest mixer in the world mixed one track and the guy who is making coffee on the project mixed that one, you’re liable, psychologically, to think the famous engineer’s mix is bound to be the best… But if you don’t know who did what, the playing field is clear and even, and you are really picking based on what sounds good. And very often we’re surprised. Very often.” (Rick Rubin: In the Studio)

If you’re thinking, that’s all well and good for music production, you’d be missing the point. It’s how great software gets developed, too. Steve Jobs employed a similar approach when developing the iPhone, commissioning two teams to explore alternative production models in parallel (it’s hard to imagine the iPhone with a trackwheel in hindsight, but we forget how revolutionary that feature was on the iPod):

"P1 was the codename for the phone being developed using an iPod track wheel, and P2 was the new alternative using a multi-touch screen... After six months of work on the trackwheel P1 and the multi-touch P2 phone options, Jobs called his inner circle into his conference room to make a decision. Fadell had been trying hard to develop the trackwheel model, but he admitted that they had not cracked the problem of figuring out a simple way to dial calls. The multi-touch approach was riskier, because they were unsure whether they could execute the engineering, but it was also more exciting and promising” (from Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs).

This is actually how many technological advances have crept forward behind closed doors. Even at Xerox’s acclaimed PARC studio, mission critical projects were undertaken by multiple teams in parallel, and “for more than a year (after major milestones had been reached)… it was impossible to say which system would eventually prevail” (from Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age).

My observation of many innovation efforts is that they’re much too efficient, trying to nail down which one team is going to tackle a given problem, so that everyone else can work on something else. And they’re much too civilized — after all, multiple teams undertaking multiple paths in parallel means someone might “lose.”

I like Rick Rubin’s style. When exploring new possibilities, hold a shoot out.

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