What business leaders can learn from Van Halen and brown M & Ms

The Devil really is in the details. 

Legendary rock band Van Halen notoriously gained a reputation as obnoxious, self indulgent celebrities, due to a bizarre stipulation buried among the dozens in the complicated 53 page technical rider for their shows. It demanded M & M candies be made available in their backstage area, but with all the brown ones removed. Which means that someone was given the thankless task of painstakingly digging through piles of M & Ms and removing every last brown one for no apparent reason. Note - at the time, M & Ms had two different shades of brown, dark and tan (later replaced by blue).

The contract stipulated that if any brown M&M’s were found backstage, the band was legally entitled to cancel the entire concert at the full expense of the promoter. So because of a single candy, a promoter stood to lose millions.

Van Halen was happy to cultivate their reputation as spoiled superstars, but years later in an interview, lead singer David Lee Roth revealed the real reason behind the oddly specific demand, and it had nothing to do with an aversion to brown candies. The real story is a valuable lesson for business.

The brown M & Ms were essentially canaries in the mine. If any brown M&M’s were found in the backstage candy bowl, it was an immediate red flag that more critical technical stipulations related to lighting, sound, wiring, staging, security, etc. may have also not been read and complied with by an inattentive promoter. The results of that could literally be fatal.

Van Halen had the biggest production of their day, and they also toured in many smaller markets that bigger names usually avoided. Most arenas in that era, including many of the larger ones which were built decades before, were never built to accommodate a rock band of that scope, so without specific guidelines, fuses could blow, old floors could buckle and collapse, beams could break, and the lives of the band, their crew and fans could be at serious risk.

David Lee Roth explained:

'...We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through...

...there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

"If I came backstage, having been one of the architects of this lighting and staging design, and I saw brown M&Ms on the catering table, then I guarantee the promoter had not read the contract rider, and we would have to do a serious line check" of the entire stage setup, Roth said. 

Roth outlines a show experience they had, which reinforced the extreme caution they adopted.

"...The folks in Pueblo, Colorado, at the university, took the contract rather kinda casual. They had one of these new rubberized bouncy basketball floorings in their arena. They hadn’t read the contract, and weren’t sure, really, about the weight of this production; this thing weighed like the business end of a 747.

I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean “What is this before me?” … you know, with the skull in one hand … and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.

The stage sank through their floor. They didn’t bother to look at the weight requirements or anything, and this sank through their new flooring and did eighty thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the arena floor. The whole thing had to be replaced..."

We all can learn an invaluable lesson from this. When executing a complex project with many moving parts and myriad people, departments and organizations involved, the fine details matter. If someone can't get the small details right, they are unlikely to be sufficiently diligent about the larger ones. Because in fact, the large issues are essentially comprised of an interconnected collection of smaller ones. Van Halen through a simple seemingly odd request hidden in their rider, had developed an easy-to-monitor and reliable indicator. No brown M&Ms indicated the promoter was as meticulous with the small details as the large ones, so there was more confidence that the show would run smoothly. But if they failed the M & M test, the band performed a line by line inspection looking for other missed requirements. Similarly, in your business, having reliable and easy-to-monitor indicators is the key to success.

It's not necessary to deliberately plant innocuous tests to signal potential problems as Van Halen did (though many organizations do this), but it is very important to have the right indicators in order to ameliorate risk. Repeated spelling errors and mistakes in budgets, or contract drafts can erode confidence in attention to detail. The same is true with resumes and RFP submissions. An organization including a visible minority staff member on a DE & I team, obviously only as window dressing because there is no diversity on their own senior team, is a red flag of deeper organizational issues. Are the photos of people on an organization's website consistent with their stated brand, vision or their recently trotted out statement on inclusion? Observe how a leader interacts with the catering or janitorial staff, or corresponds with those in a subordinate role.  Are women in the organization's meetings regularly subjected to 'mansplaining' and 'manterrupting' without any repercussions from management? Is there a casual attitude toward following the organization's brand identity guidelines? Is there inconsistency between email signatures from staff at the same organization? Organizations regularly suffer reputational damage due to the abhorrent behaviour of employees, because they neglected to proactively scan the individual's digital footprint, which would have revealed a history of inappropriate posts or comments. There are many indicators which should be triggers to dig deeper and look for larger and more systemic issues. Pay attention.

Sweat the small stuff. It mitigates the big stuff.

#leadership #keyindicators