The Reward in Risk

No matter how much I witness and understand the impact that Drum Cafe has on people’s lives, I’ll never lose touch with the fact that what we do might seem risky to an outsider looking in. I know it’s easier to offer a round of golf to a top sales team than to offer them a round of drumming.  But so often shaking up business as usual comes with some great rewards.

To punctuate this point, I just reconnected with a client who spoke with me so openly about the risk she took by bringing Drum Cafe to her company. Rebecca Brown had only been at QWBS, a division of Qualcomm, for less than two years. A new president had just come on board and together they were planning their first all-hands kick-off event.  The president wanted to start with something “a bit out of the box and really impactful”.  Rebecca had seen Drum Cafe in action and had a strong belief that we’d be a perfect fit for the 500+ attendees.  But the moment she mentioned the idea, the room went silent. Drumming??

Sometimes, what we resist most in life ends up having the most meaning for us.  The idea of bring drumming to the QWBS kick-off was hardly met with an embrace. The president wanted to ‘tone it down’ and ‘break it out’ and ‘make it shorter’. She nearly wanted us to go away before we got there. Her other big concern was if drumming started off the event, how was she to follow it with her keynote? Wouldn’t she fall flat? Rebecca heard these concerns and saw the risk in pushing forward. Her job was at stake and as much as she believed that her gut was right, she had trouble sleeping during the intense period of this decision. Of course now, she remembers all of this with a big smile on her face because she knows how things really turned out in the end.

After the president said “either we do it right or we don’t do it all”, Drum Cafe got the green light to proceed. Rebecca told me how on the morning of the event, she stood in the back of the room terrified that no one would participate, let alone transform in the way she knew they could.  But within five minutes, all her fears fell away.  From the stage, when I felt the participants go from hesitation to happiness in what seemed an instant, I caught a glimpse of Rebecca, knowing that she felt it too.

Rebecca said that seeing the president herself dance on stage wasn’t the best moment— though it was a huge relief and reward. But it was hearing her keynote address afterwards. “By virtue of the experience the president had just been through that hour – she was on fire!”

I know the participants had an incredible experience that day, and in large part due to the conviction and courage of Rebecca. It’s never easy to introduce new ideas. There’s risk in the unknown. But isn’t that the starting point for all of life’s discovery?

In Rhythm and Joy,

Natalie Spiro...

Stress Relief from the Inside Out

I just had a flash-forward. I saw myself rocking in a chair on a porch somewhere. That’s so not my life right now. Musing on the topic of stress and work, I guess retirement is the only place to envision a stress-free life. So if work equals stress, then managing stress is all part of managing work.

Inspiring Confidence In Our Youth

At Drum Cafe, we talk about how the first rhythms of life are established in the womb— with the mother’s heartbeat. I always think about this when we work with kids in our youth team building programs. It’s almost like they’re still close enough to that experience to still hear the heartbeats echoing in their head.

But life really does pull us away from that the second we’re born. It’s stressful for so many kids to acclimate to new faces, new classes, new teams. Parents and teachers provide nurturing, but sometimes the stress of just being a kid prevails. That’s where drumming comes in so strong. Kids don’t name stress as stress. They just have ants-in-their-pants and extra, distracting energy. But when they get busy drumming the smiles erupt. There’s lightness about them and anything seems possible.

I’ll never forget a girl at the JT Brackenridge Elementary School. She said she felt more confident after our drumming program. Confidence, I thought— that’s the secret sauce behind both academic and social achievement. If you feel confident, your approach to anything is just better. You stand a little taller, write a little faster— your hunger is fed somehow by your own nourishing attitude towards life.

I know for a fact that confidence also yields benevolence. When a student is more sure of herself, she’s more likely to bring another along in the spirit of kindness and teamwork. It’s infectious too. Once kids know they can drum together and make rhythms that they can’t make alone, something shifts. There’s a new awareness that interconnectedness is a big part of a happy childhood.

When I grew up in South Africa, drumming was in the belly of my culture.  I love bringing that reservoir of power across the globe to kids. I think for some of them, experiencing the Drum Cafe is just the beginning of a deeper relationship with rhythm, music and movement. Lucky them. Lucky us.

In Joy and Rhythm,
Natalie Spiro
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Polycom Take-Away Can’t Be Beat!

I was honored to facilitate yet another event into the fantastic on Feb 1st and 3rd, at the Sheraton Harbor Island, San Diego. A special client of mine since 2008, unified communications portfolio giant, Polycom , matched its marketplace renewal by enlisting the acumen and energy of our unique team. A renewed force of customer-driven sales and marketers under veteran strategist, EVP Andy Miller, along with strategic alliance partners Microsoft, Cisco and Siemens, and others, gathered to make a beautiful noise from four Theaters of the world: North America, APAC, EMEA and CALA.

Toward the end of our first program for Polycom, after reminding the sea of nearly 850 participants that the cool drums weren’t part of the company’s give-away, a man approached me, cowered in humility, hands in pockets. He’d been in attendance a couple of years before, when a significant number of conference-goers mistook our drums for swag. He was again wowed by his experience with us.

He described in colorful detail how, back in 2008, so inspired, he excitedly grabbed a djembe, cut out the doors, ran up to his room, and immediately packed it to go home with him. He pulled out a picture of his two-year old, “my little angel,” he called her. I was enthralled. “I couldn’t wait to get home and teach her what you taught me during the program—how you put your hands on the drum, how you rumbled. Like me, she was amazed by it, absolutely loves the music!”

Nevermind he’d taken one of my drums, hearing that made me want to give him another! He went on to tell me how the djembe has become a means he and his wife use to teach his little one discipline. “We give it to her when she’s well-behaved, and take it away when she’s not.”

The drum means so much to me. It’s the perfect tool to bring people together in unison, from their hearts, purely expressing, connecting with joy. I love that first-rate companies like Polycom understand—or even just want to experience time and again, what Drum Cafe has to offer their corporations. And, with the magical drum, this man’s little girl, at age two, learned to take responsibility for her actions. Apparently Daddy had, too.

He didn’t come up to entertain me or excite me with story of the passion he’d brought home to his family; he needed to get into integrity about taking something that—he later found out—didn’t belong to him. In good faith, Polycom had long ago paid Drum Cafe for the missing drums, apologizing for the mistake. So, I wouldn’t accept his money or the amends he felt he needed to make. What an example of partnering for end-to-end communications! Because of Polycom, Drum Cafe, and an inspired introspective man profoundly affected by the power of this instrument, integrity lives.

Plus, there’s a spunky Little Angel out there that just might grow up to be a drummer. Full, full circle.

Living in integrity,

Natalie Spiro
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Joy

It’s not often we think of joy in the same moment with think of ‘job’. With just one letter difference, you’d think there’d be an easy connection.  Maybe there is one but we just miss it as we hurry to the next meeting. Maybe joy is sitting there at our desks right alongside ‘drive’ and ‘focus’. Perhaps it’s time we give joy a place on the whiteboard that lists all the critical ingredients that lead to success at our jobs.

I love my work with Drum Cafe because of the joy I get and the joy I deliver. Over the years, I’ve become curious about joy as a commodity or as something that I can almost quantify in terms of its direct impact on the people who experience one of our programs. Do they go back to work more joyful and thus more productive? I picked up Dennis Bakke’s book Joy at Work and read this:

"In my experience, most people don’t believe that fun and work can coexist. In large organizations, so few executives have experienced a joyful workplace that they have no idea how to create one. The result: Most employees grasp for high pay and benefits, fewer hours on the job, the mindless comfort of routine, less responsibility, early retirement, and job security. All are hollow substitutes for a rewarding, stimulating workplace."

Dennis goes on to say what I had hoped: joy in the workplace leads to more loyalty and greater productivity. The trick is to manifest joy and sustain it so that everyone benefits. Let’s say one base note of a drum symbolizes a moment of joy. If you stay in the ryhythm of that base note and then add new notes, new tones – you soon have a sustained rhthym that resonates and moves forward. That one note of joy has grown into something so alive— a percussive ensemble if you will— that in conjures up new possibilities.

It’s no accident that Drum Cafe‘s programs are designed to start with the base notes and then grow in complexity.  That’s the way most strong foundations begin. So when it comes to injecting joy into the lifeblood of your company, starting one strong beat at a time— literally— is a great way to begin.

You probably have jumped for joy at some point in your life— hopefully recently.  It’s great to think about that same ebulient burst happening in conjunction with work. Why not? It’s where you bring 100% of yourself everyday.  Joy certainly belongs in the mix— because everyone benefits when it’s around.

In joy and rythym,

Natalie Spiro
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Drum Cafe Performs for A-list Aussies

There was no “barbie”. No “shrimp”. And definitely no confusion that this event was one fit for cream-of-the-crop celebrities and other high profile individuals. A team of 5 Drum Cafe master drummers were honored to be the ‘Musical MCs’, per se, at Australia Week’s Black Tie Dinner in LA on Jan 16th. This gala event commemorates individuals for significant contributions in their industries and for excellence in promoting Australia in the United States. The vision for how Drum Cafe would participate in this amazingly orchestrated night came from Cheryl Cecchetto, Founder and President of Sequoia Productions .

Imagine a very chique and buzzing cocktail reception—including the likes of Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman, John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, and Cameron Diaz. This is where we entered to ‘drum’ the guests toward a room with a grand stage and lavishly set tables—all of them following our beat with their feet and hearts. The night was nothing short of outstanding! From an amazing fashion show highlighting some of the hottest creative talent out of Australia, to a troop of waiters elaborately laying a dessert buffet on the stage. Our Drum Cafe team drummed in interludes throughout the night, infusing our infectious beat into every person and corner of the room. We also had the honor of leading the presenters on stage to award Greg Norman, Simon Baker, and Toni Collete.

This is one of our “pure performance ” events that we completely customized to meet the grand vision that Cheryl had. In essence, we were the thread that wove the entire event together from beginning to end—linking the night’s proceedings and reinforcing the high energy in the room.

I would love to be involved each year, for many reasons—working with inspirational people, contributing to the unity of two incredible nations, living a drummers dream. Of course, there is the slightly less serious reason that the Aussies can REALLY party…and that’s an understatement!

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