“When I choose guys for my band, I look at the man first and the musician second. If he’s 100% man and only 50% musician, that’s okay. We’ll turn him into 75% musician after a while. But if he isn’t 100% man, there’s nothing I could do.
I must respect what the man has to offer. A guy who can take the roof off a club isn’t necessarily the best musician. He can be a fiery type of guy who can move the audience in a hurry, but the audience doesn’t like to be overexcited all the time. They want it to be something else on occasion. Each guy in the band is good for his particular thing. Everybody is there to cooperate and push me.”
That was B.B. King, speaking in 1982, and there is a bucketload of wisdom in those two paragraphs.
The King of the Blues was not saying that technical ability is irrelevant. Technical ability certainly matters. He was not as Draconian as his contemporary, “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business”, James Brown, with his five-dollar fines to his bandmates for any technical error in their performance. A band is formed around people who can play, listen, adapt, respect the room, and understand that the point is the music, not the ego, according to King.
Hiring the right people is one of the most important jobs any leader has, which is why I remain slightly flabbergasted by how often the process is delegated to people and systems that appear to have no real-world understanding of the work, the pressure, or the team into which they are being hired. In a world of AI-assisted CVs, polished cover letters, optimized LinkedIn profiles, and grammatically flawless self-aggrandizement, the surface has never looked sparklier. The individual underneath has become even harder to see. Some HR departments, armed with keyword filters and software promising efficiency, appear to process applicants rather than understand them. Somewhere in that machine, excellent people are not merely missed. They are quietly deleted with no human interaction.
This does not only happen to people trying to get into an organization from the outside. It also happens internally when new management arrives with its own habits, loyalties, preferences, affiliations, and prejudices dressed up as innovative strategy. This is where managers, not leaders, search for people who reflect themselves, or at least people who place a higher premium on loyalty than competence. Experience may be discounted because it is inconvenient, and perhaps even a threat. Age may be treated as legacy, or as evidence of an inability to learn something new. Judgment may be mistaken for resistance.
I have led teams in Paris, London, and Copenhagen, and the best interview processes I remember were not designed simply to establish whether a candidate could recite the technical catechism. They were designed to find out whether the person could function under pressure, learn quickly, take direction and correction, bring something innovative to the potluck, and work with the rest of the team without poisoning the air. The right hire was not always the most polished one. Often it was the person with the curiosity, stamina, humor, quirkiness, and humility to grow into the role and leave a real footprint.
That is where B.B. King’s point lands. A great team does not need eleven people trying to take the roof off the club, although some of these LinkedIn posts I see, with rocket ship emojis and the like, would lead one to believe that this is the only way to punch above one’s weight.
A team needs different instruments, different temperaments, and different forms of intelligence. In investment teams, that means the person who understands the model, the person who remembers the last crisis, the person who hears the client’s real concern, the person who knows the plumbing, the person who spots the weak assumption, and the person who has the courage to ask the awkward question before the trade is done.
An algorithm is really good at a lot of things, but it won’t invite you out for a coffee to smooth ruffled feathers after a falling-out at the desk. These AI agents are programmed to be pleasers, and that does not include much of a retort beyond “you’re right to push back on that…” before taking a different tack, which may be just as twisted as the first skewed hallucination.
AI can help everyone sound more competent, and as a management tool it can work wonders. The danger is that polish becomes cheap. A leader then has the harder task of looking past the clean formatting, the tidy phrasing, and the well-behaved vocabulary to identify judgment, foibles, restraint, curiosity, and the ability to cooperate without disappearing into the furniture. Those qualities are not always the loudest. They do not always arrive with perfectly straight teeth, the correct institutional pedigree, and a pair of matched socks.
B.B. King hired the band, not the brochure. He knew that music needs skill, discipline, character, and feel. So do markets. So do teams. So does leadership.
Better Not Look Down · B.B. King Take It Home ℗ 1979 Universal Music Group Recordings, Inc.
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