Chapter 36.
Manage the
Fundamentals First

Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things and I’ll show you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things.

—Lawrence D. Bell, Founder, Bell Aircraft

The Rodney Mercado motivational methods are not only the most effective methods for teaching music, but for anything else.

Professor Mercado was a genius in 10 different fields, including mathematics, economics, sociology, anthropology, and music history.

Scott recalls: Once, I was surprised to be getting an economics lesson inside my music lesson. Mercado turned to me and said, “Well, Scott, you know, math is very, very simple. It’s all based on addition. But most people lose sight of that. So if you learn how to do one plus one equals two, everything in math flows from that. Everything.”

He was always focusing on fundamentals.

Like the time he came to assist our chamber group in preparing to perform a piece. Under his guidance, we spent the entire hour working on the first two measures of this piece. We kept going over and over them, and each time he would ask us to explore a new possibility.

“How would you like to create more sound here?” he would ask. And then he would give us ideas on how we could possibly do that. And by the end of the hour, all we had done was work on two measures of a piece that probably had 80 measures of music. Then, at the very end, he said, “Okay, now let’s play the whole thing.”

The entire performance and our entire group were transformed. We played the whole thing beautifully!

That showed me the power of fundamentals. Don’t gloss over them. Slow your people down and do things step by step, getting the basics right, getting the fundamentals in place.

We were coaching a client recently in his companywide managers’ meeting, and two people didn’t show up on time for the meeting. The CEO wanted to rush through the meeting and “talk to the people who didn’t show up” later.

But we slowed him down and had the whole group focus, slowly and fundamentally, on how to handle this tardiness and absenteeism and lack of commitment from these two managers. In the process, we had a number of breakthrough moments for other managers on the nature of commitment, and a newer, more creative policy emerged.