How to Innovate like a Beatle

My favorite documentary of 2022 was The Beatles: Get Back, which follows The Beatles’ month-long process to create the Let it Be album. What I thought was simply a Beatles documentary turned out to be something much more meaningful for someone who works in innovation.

Get Back is an eight-hour masterclass in innovation.

The Beatles were a famously innovative band, but what struck me about their innovation in Get Back was far more elemental. It came down to three words: Simple, Strange and Shared.

Innovation through Simplification

The songwriting process seen in Get Back was often an act of reduction. The first draft of Don’t Let Me Down had Lennon’s line “Nobody ever loved me like she does” accompanied by McCartney and Harrison in a Drifters-style doo-wop backing vocal. The final version loses the doo-wop entirely, allowing Lennon’s words of yearning to stand starkly alone. It is an act of reduction that makes the song far more powerful.

When asked about the design of the first iPod, Steve Jobs had this to say: “When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”

Innovation through Strangeness

The word “corny” shows up a lot in Get Back. The Beatles used the word pejoratively, applying it to music they felt lacked originality. By decreeing something corny, they would push each other to try something unexpected. As McCartney is belting out his earnest early version of “I’ve Got A Feeling,” Lennon starts riffing a subversive new melody to these words: “Everybody had a hard year, everybody had a good time.” McCartney starts laughing and playing along. It was totally odd, unexpected, and exhilarating. Ultimately Lennon’s riff was added to the song and made it far better.

Sarah Stein Greenberg of Stanford’s d.school puts it this way: “Creative work requires you to become more open to things you find strange or unusual. Without strangeness, you are left only with sameness.”

Innovation through Sharing

What surprised me most about Get Back was how much the Beatles actually enjoyed each other’s company. With so much Beatles lore centering on the acrimony of their final years, the documentary shows generous glimpses of the band laughing, joking and just hanging out. (Not exclusively - there are also tense moments).

Still, a spirit of sharing and collaboration permeates many of the best moments, including the one noted above. When John starts adding irreverent lyrics to Paul’s early version of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” Paul might have taken offense. Instead, he laughs. Emboldened by Paul’s reaction, John continues messing around, and together they create a shared work that is one of the most memorable songs on the album.

In Collective Genius, Dr. Linda Hill and her co-authors present findings from decades of research into leaders of innovation. Their primary finding? Consistent innovation requires shared invention. “Look beneath the surface of almost anything produced by an organization that is new, useful, and even moderately complex, and you'll almost certainly discover it came from multiple hands, not the genius of some solitary inventor.”

Dieter Rams, the world-renowned industrial designer has a simple axiom in his work: “Less, but better.” To me, the innovative genius of The Beatles has similar contours: Simpler, Stranger, and Shared. Watching Get Back helped me reflect on my own company’s innovation: How can we simplify to make our work better? How do we push for the unexpected and exhilarating??How do we innovative collectively? And lest we forget: How do we keep from being corny?

Leave it to The Beatles to inspire once more.