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Leading with musicHe is the highly respected conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and she an equally respected psychotherapist and executive coach sought out by large corporates, and who constantly seeks to invent new paradigms.
But to millions around the world, Benjamin and Rosamund Zander are better known as a powerful team of motivational speakers who inspire with their message of “possibility”.
No strangers to South Africa, they recently returned here at the request of Dr Louise van Rhyn, chief executive officer of Symphonia for South Africa, a not-for-profit organisation “with a mission to strengthen the fabric of South African society”.
While here, they engaged in presentations, workshops and the launch of Symphonia’s DVD, South Africa – Alive With Possibility. The DVD is one of Dr Van Rhyn’s projects to mobilise South Africans to become actively involved in making the country one that works for all its people.
“What we came here for was to reactivate and re-energise the possibility way of thinking,” Ben told me when I caught up with him and Roz over breakfast at their Cape Town hotel.
“South Africa had started with a gigantic big ‘yes’ that resonated around the whole world.
“Before that, everybody had thought there was going to be a bloodbath.
“South Africa is in a very interesting place.
“This country is based on the idea of ‘alive with possibility’. It’s not dead on possibility, and it has not given up on possibility. It just needs to be reactivated.”
At this point, Roz comes in: “It’s going through a period when people could say, ‘Oh, this is the story, it (South Africa) went up like this, and it quit.’ But we have a different story.
“It is going through adolescence.
“Someone said to us the big problem here is about entitlement, that people think if they are entitled to something, they simply take it without going through the steps. That’s adolescence, the same as with teenagers.
“Why not love it? Because you see, it’s going through something. And if you have the story that it is adolescence, then you know each year they are growing up, especially if you love them, you love the process – and if you offer support and allow things to fail, you’ll be fine. But if you decide that this means there is a sudden break or think it was not worth it, or nothing ever happened...”
At this point, Ben interrupts: “We don’t allow those thoughts,” he says.
“So we frame it in something you can get access to and move forward on, and you can do that with anything,” Roz adds.
The conversation indeed sums up the way they work. Always a two-way conversation, a testing of concepts in a laboratory of ideas, always searching for possibility in whatever they are confronted with at any given moment.
Roz, the creative thinker, will develop the concept, invent the new paradigm; and Ben, the highly energetic performer, the showman, teacher and communicator, will take it to their audiences to share with them its significance.
Although Roz joins him on stage for the second half of their presentation, her presence is somewhat more subdued, more graceful, or tranquil.
Ben is the energetic performer, racing backward and forward across the stage, getting the audience whipped up to sing “Ode to Joy”, Beethoven’s ninth symphony – stabbing a pen at his flip chart, bounding up an aisle to interact more closely with members of the audience, attacking his piano, conducting his audience.
What comes to mind watching him with his boundless energy, his shock of white hair and his trim body dressed formally in black, is that he could be the philharmonic world’s answer to rock’s prancing, bouncing, running Mick Jagger.
Ben likens the story of their lives and their development together to the book Pilgrims’ Progress, in which the hero is saved through religion.
Coming from a world of music, he met Roz, who turned him on to her world of ideas and creative thinking.
“I was saved through Roz,” he says, to her great amusement. “This (their model for transforming lives) is like a religion without a belief system, but it has the place of religion and provides possibility, which is a way of thinking that actually provides the entire spiritual gamut that human beings require in order to be effective in the world without any dogma or faith.”
Ben uses the analogy of Roz as his teacher, and himself as “a very good student”. “Roz is a tremendous thinker and a tremendous creator, and I am a very effective proselytiser like John the Baptist,” he says.
It was not music that brought them together, but their interest in life, they say. Both having been married previously, they were introduced by mutual friends who thought they had much in common. And, indeed, they soon found they were kindred spirits, and have been together for 34 years.
Although legally still married, they have been living in separate homes for many years, yet remain devoted friends and partners, supporting everything the other does.
“We remain extremely close and passionate about each other’s commitments,” says Ben, with Roz in agreement.
Roz describes herself as a 15th generation American who “came over on the Mayflower”.
She grew up in Boston, a child enchanted by the creative side of life, playing the violin, painting and writing. She went on to earn a degree in English Literature and several degrees in Psychotherapy.
“My main job is psychotherapy. Out of that, and out of what I call constructivist therapy – that is the way of listening to people’s stories and how they construct their reality – came a lot of this work,” she says. “I am now a creative thinker, I think about how human beings develop, and I play games with myself, and that’s all part of the work we do.
“I thought of myself as a free thinker and a creative thinker, but with intellectual rigour behind it – and that is something we have in this model.”
“What I cover is a kind of clarity of thinking, together with Ben’s incredible energy and performance and the way he gets communities to work together. That combination is what I think is unusual about us.”
But what is this model she talks about?
In their presentations and in the book, The Art of Possibility – a best-seller translated into 16 languages, which they co-wrote after an offer from the Harvard Business School Press – they premise their model on a number of practices, the fundamental one of which is summed up as “it’s all invented”. Everything people believe and do is based on preconceived assumptions, a framework containing a life story that has been invented and into which people fit. They then encourage people to invent their own story, a new universe of possibility, to shift the framework – or the paradigm, as it were.
Instead of measuring life in terms of success and failure, a person should recognise his/her own participation in life as a contribution.
Ben and Roz use the analogy of a silent conductor to show how a leader does not have to stand on a podium, but can sit on any chair.
They go on to show how frameworks that bring forth possibility can be invented and sustained and how, instead of thinking in terms of “us and them”, people can engage in enthusiasm and deep regard to tell “the we story”. Much of the book and their presentations are filled in with fascinating and uplifting stories and personal anecdotes, many of these from Ben’s childhood as a Jewish boy growing up in post-war London and his later life as a musician and conductor.
Ben’s father, Dr Walter Zander, a lawyer in Berlin, brought his family to live in Britain after the Nazis rose to prominence in Germany. His passion was that each of his four children should have a good education and, indeed, each of them made their mark in their chosen fields.
“I became a musician very early and left school at 15 to become a cellist,” he says.
Several of his compositions came to the attention of Benjamin Britten, who gave him lessons.
“I then went to study under the great Spanish cellist Gaspar Cassadó in Florence in Italy and travelled all over the world with him.
“Conducting followed naturally, me wanting to paint on a broader canvas,” he says.
Ben completed his cello studies at the State Conservatoire in Cologne, Germany, where he served as an assistant to Cassadó. Returning to England, he completed his A levels and then studied Literature at the University of London.
A scholarship took him to the United States, where he lives to this day.
He got his first job as a conductor, telling a lie “which was not really a lie”. At an interview for a job in an orchestra, the lady who had interviewed Ben remarked in passing that they were looking for a conductor and asked him whether he knew of anyone. He replied that he would like the job. When she asked if he was experienced, he said: “Very experienced.”
“Which was true. I had just not ever conducted an orchestra. But I was a very experienced musician and teacher. So I got the job.”
“I became a conductor of the Boston Civic Orchestra for seven years and then I was fired.
“The entire orchestra resigned and followed me and we formed the Boston Philharmonic,” Ben relates. He has been conducting the latter for 33 years.
What followed was a life committed to conducting and teaching music, with room for nothing else – until he met Roz. She introduced him to a new world, highly intellectual and thought-challenging, involving art, nature, the environment, and much more. “Things I had never before had any idea of,” he says.
“What then emerged for us was a development of thinking about what it was to lead people. Roz was leading people in therapy and I was leading people in the orchestra.”
Thus they embarked on their journey of possibility, seeking to find new frameworks in order to turn extraordinary accomplishments into everyday experiences.
Some of the key elements of their message include encouragement to always speak possibility and avoid being enrolled by others into a downward spiral of negativity, and not recognising possibility. They hold that people should be given a possibility to live into, rather than having to live up to, an expectation.
Ben says for many years, however, he had himself missed the point and lived the life of a dictatorial conductor.
“The normal assumption that is made about leadership is that the person in charge makes things happen. Therefore he is in charge, has to be obeyed and is a dominating, fearful figure. That was the model I was brought up with.
“Then I suddenly had this kind of blinding realisation that however powerful the conductor is, he has no power other than the one he can create in the player. And that, of course, is a very powerful shift,” he says.
Ordinary things in life can be transformed if you challenge your assumptions about them, say Ben and Roz. This was aptly demonstrated in a short video recording they showed their South African audiences on their recent visit.
In it, Ben visibly transforms a youthful group of Mexican musicians during an impromptu visit. He uses his infectious energy and the extraordinary techniques by him and Roz to transform an almost listless group of child violinists into a lively orchestra, playing their music with newfound passion.
“I tried to punch through the resistance children have to expressing joy and enjoyment when they are doing something difficult, in this case playing the violin. And it worked,” says Ben.
“And then, through an extraordinary series of coincidences, that programme went from 23 children to 5 000 children and 27 orchestras in a matter of three years.”
Finally, their message for South Africa is: “We are all playing and singing together in one huge symphony of possibility. Be the music that the world wants to hear.” ▲
Stef Terblanche
