6

 

Bruce Springsteen

Embody Values Consistently, Clarify Expectations, Create Cultures of Innovation

Bruce Springsteen has always appeared at ease on stage. Indeed, he commands it. But on March, 15, 1999, he stood somewhat hesitantly, shifting from one leg to the other, at his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, facing a black-tie audience and a standing ovation. He’d spoken at inductions for Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, and others—“artists whose music was a critical part of my life,” he said—and now it was his turn.¹ After failing to get the audience to sit by repeating “thank you” again and again, he cleared his throat a few times. That did the trick.

“You were scaring me a bit there,” he told U2’s Bono, who had introduced The Boss. “I wasn’t that good.” Then he offered a warning to the audience: “The records took two years, the shows three hours, so the speech may take a little while!”

The evening gave Springsteen a chance to credit the artists whose music had fed his creative mind, and to thank the people who had helped him along the way, starting with his mother, Adele, who sat beaming in the audience. She had once taken out a loan to buy her son a guitar for Christmas.² “As importantly,” Springsteen noted, “she gave me a sense of work as something that was joyous, and that committed you to your world. This is yours tonight,” he said, holding up the Hall of Fame statuette and looking at her. “Take it home as a small return on the investment you made in your son,” he finished with a chuckle.

Of his father—who had died earlier that year but lived on as a brooding figure in the musician’s early songs and as a source for much of his artistic output ever since—Springsteen was ambivalent. “What would I conceivably have written about without him? … If everything had gone great between us, it would have been a disaster, you know? I would have written just happy songs.”

“I tried to do that in the early nineties, and it didn’t work,” he added, to laughs.

Springsteen thanked “the mighty men and women of the E Street Band,” mentioning each of them, and poked fun at himself when it came to E Street’s lone woman. “It went like this: ‘OK, fellas, there’s gonna be a woman in the band. We need someone to sing all the high parts. How complicated can it get?’” Pause. The audience, of course, knew she had become his wife and the mother of his three children. “Well, ten of the best years of my life. Evan, Jessie, Sam—three children genealogically linked to the E Street Band—tells the rest of the story.”³

At sixty-three, Springsteen is no longer the scraggly, wide-eyed Bruuuuuuuuuuce (as his audiences call him) who first drew a cult following with his shows around New Jersey’s shore in the early 1970s. He’s a more tailored and tweaked version of his earlier self; he runs on a treadmill and lifts weights with a trainer to fit into the dark skinny jeans he wears on stage and to deliver the emotionally intense and physically exhausting performances his fans have come to expect.⁴

David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker, recently described Springsteen’s performance style as “as close as a white man of Social Security age can get to James Brown circa 1962 without risking a herniated disk. Concerts last in excess of three hours, without a break, and he is constantly dancing, screaming, imploring, mugging, kicking, wind-milling, crowd-surfing, climbing a drum riser, jumping on an amp.”⁵ Writer Rob Kirkpatrick reported in 2007 that Springsteen described his concerts as “part circus, part political rally, part spiritual meeting, and part dance party.”⁶

After four decades in the business—and a musical repertoire that has continued to evolve, drawing on blues and Motown, country and punk, folk and rap—Springsteen can still dominate the charts. His 2012 album, Wrecking Ball, went straight to number 1, even if it didn’t linger there. The related worldwide tour pulled in $200 million in 2012, making it the year’s second-highest-grossing tour, after Madonna’s.⁷ Over the course of his career, Springsteen has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and more than 120 million worldwide. He has earned, among other honors, twenty Grammy awards, two Golden Globes, and an Oscar.

You might attribute Springsteen’s success to sheer musical talent: he sings; he writes songs; he plays great guitar, decent piano, and a mean harmonica. Springsteen has been lauded as our “rock laureate” for his innate ability to capture a sentiment in song—from the lonely nights of adolescent longing to the emotional scars of working-class unemployment to the grief of the nation after 9/11. Or perhaps his success is owed to his ability over the years to churn out new material, with his lyrics always speaking to the political or social issues of the day. Or to his penchant for scheduling tours around new albums and fresh artistic ideas rather than Rolling Stones–like recaps of greatest hits.

These explanations, though, miss one often-unnoticed source of Springsteen’s success: his strength as a leader. He is, after all, the front man, the band leader, The Boss. It was a nickname he earned in his early performing days, as the one who collected money and distributed it to his bandmates. He didn’t particularly like the nickname—why would an artist so aligned with the plight of the working man?—but it stuck.⁸ Springsteen is a man whose passion and perfectionism transformed a ragtag group of talented Jersey Shore musicians into a world-famous band. Springsteen’s obsession with artistic excellence drove him and his collaborators to be the best they could be and to deliver—really deliver—to their fans.

It’s worth noting that the E Street Band members are salaried musicians. “This is not the Beatles,” drummer Max Weinberg told David Remnick.⁹ That doesn’t just mean that the band rehearses, plays, and tours when Springsteen says it does. It means that Springsteen can compel the band to spend three months recording a single song. Or take three years to work on one album. Or spend three days testing locations to get just the right sound of Weinberg playing the snare drum. The extremely high standards of performance Springsteen expects can exhaust those around him. For Darkness on the Edge of Town, the band recorded some seventy songs and spent hours and hours of heavy labor in the studio before Springsteen was satisfied.¹⁰

With maturity, however, these standards have relaxed, even as his impact and audience continue to expand internationally. “If you don’t figure out how to do it a different way, you don’t have a life,” he said recently. “I have learned the skill of putting that away and moving on to other things that demand your time and attention if you want them in your life.” Although it might seem paradoxical, he says he’s become even more productive now that he has learned how to put “ boundaries on how you work, when you work, how long you work.”¹¹

Springsteen is a moral figure, having built a global community centered on a core set of values. As he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, he has tried to promote ideals of “economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all of our citizens.”¹² Through his songs and public positions, he has helped raise awareness of problems such as AIDS, gun violence, racism, the plight of illegal immigrants, hunger, and economic inequality. He has helped raise money for food banks and hurricane relief. (In 2012, he took part in the 12-12-12 benefit concert and live album, which brought in more than $50 million after Hurricane Sandy devastated the coasts of New Jersey and New York.)

Bob Dylan was the voice of the 1960s counterculture, Bono has kept global poverty and AIDS in the public eye, and Paul McCartney promotes animal rights and warns of land mines. But few have done as much as Springsteen, for more than four decades, to implore his listeners to help others. His powerful voice was evident on a crisp January day in 2009, when he stood with Pete Seeger at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial and, backed by a red-robed gospel choir, sang Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” at the inaugural celebration for President Barack Obama.

Backstreets: Greetings from Freehold

Springsteen was born September 23, 1949, in Freehold, New Jersey, a blue-collar town half an hour inland from the Atlantic Ocean. Most of Freehold’s residents worked in nearby factories. His mother, whom Springsteen has described as Superwoman, worked as a legal secretary.¹³ His father did a stint working as a prison guard and another driving a bus. If Springsteen was inspired by his mother, he was shaped by his father’s difficulties in finding work. The elder Springsteen suffered from bipolar disorder, although he didn’t always take the drugs prescribed for him, and he was known for terrible rages, often directed at Bruce. Life for the young Springsteen and his two younger sisters was hard. “My parents’ struggles, it’s the subject of my life,” Springsteen told Remnick. “It’s the thing that eats at me and always will. Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into language and purpose.”¹⁴ His early albums are filled with stories of sons battling fathers, and the promise of escape his father saw in the open road.

If life wasn’t easy at home, school offered no refuge. Whether at the St. Rose of Lima Catholic School that the young Bruce attended through eighth grade or at Freehold Regional, the integrated public high school that he later demanded his parents transfer him to, Springsteen felt socially alienated.¹⁵ He was, he says, invisible—an outcast. “I wasn’t even the class clown. I had nowhere near that much notoriety,” he said in a 2005 VH1 interview.¹⁶ It was music that gave him voice and direction—his identity. He remembered the night of September 9, 1956, when he and his mother watched Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show. He turned to her and said, “I wanna be “just … like … that.”¹⁷ Springsteen later expanded on that moment, recently telling an audience of young musicians that he realized “that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination and you could create a transformative self.”¹⁸ A week after that Ed Sullivan show, Springsteen wrapped his fingers around a rented guitar, but they were too small to make music.

Seven years after his Elvis moment, Springsteen bought his first guitar—an $18 pawnshop find—and taught himself to play. Until then, he said in Dave Marsh’s biography, Two Hearts, he “didn’t have any way of getting [his] feelings out.”¹⁹ His mother then helped him upgrade to a $60 Kent electric guitar and a small amplifier. “It was an enormous investment, an enormous show of faith,” he recalled. “I don’t think I’d ever seen sixty dollars in one place at one time in anyone’s hand.”²⁰ Once a week, according to biographer Eric Alterman, she ventured around the corner to pay the finance company.²¹

Springsteen estimates that, as a teenager, he practiced six to eight hours every night. As he said in a 1975 Time magazine cover story, he began to write his own original material because, unable to tune his guitar properly, he couldn’t accurately reproduce songs he heard on the radio.²² He joined a string of bands and played local gigs.

When Springsteen’s parents decided to move to California in search of a better life, the nineteen-year-old stayed in New Jersey, briefly attending Ocean County Community College and then gravitating to Asbury Park, a magical relic of a formerly grand seaside town, with a vibrant music scene. Most of the bands playing in Asbury Park at the time fell into one of two categories: surf music and retro rock. Springsteen didn’t fit neatly into either slot. He wanted to forge a unique sound and experimented while playing in a series of bands, beginning with The Castilles. As he told Marsh, “You can’t conform to the formula of always giving the audience what it wants, or you’re killing yourself and you’re killing the audience … Someone has to take the initiative and say, ‘Let’s step out of the mold. Let’s try this.’”²³

The “New Dylan”

By 1972, Springsteen was writing all of his own material rather than performing covers. One night, on the hood of a parked car, he signed a contract with a scrappy manager named Mike Appel. Appel then scored his client an audition with Columbia Records’ John Hammond, who had signed Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and others. Hammond initially marketed Springsteen as the latest “new Dylan.”

Although Springsteen admired Dylan, he didn’t want to make a solo folk album. Springsteen drew heavily on the Animals, the Beatles, doo-wop, and folk. Years later, at the South by Southwest keynote in 2012, he said that he soaked up “the beautifully, socially conscious sounds of Curtis Mayfield.” From the Motown greats of the Sixties, he told the crowd of aspiring musicians at the Austin conference, he learned the craft: “How to write. How to arrange. What mattered and what didn’t … How to lead a band. How to front a band.”²⁴ He found his teachers on the radio and at the record store. His musical style didn’t fit neatly into any established genre, but it resonated with his audiences.

Against Hammond’s wishes, the 1970s-era Springsteen invited some of his old buddies from the Jersey Shore into the studio with him. Their first two albums, though praised by a few critics and radio DJs, didn’t take off. But Springsteen’s hyperenergetic live shows continued to earn him fans. In May 1974, Jon Landau, a struggling music producer moonlighting as a music critic for a Boston alternative weekly, saw one such show. Springsteen was opening for Bonnie Raitt at a small venue in Harvard Square. “Last Thursday,” Landau famously wrote, “I saw rock and roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll’s future.”²⁵

Springsteen now had a cult following, but he needed a hit. Another commercial bust of an album would kill his contract with Columbia, if not his career. Springsteen tracked down Landau. The pressures from the record label, the band, and the fans were enormous. Springsteen, though, remained focused on the final product, and not the number of hours it took to create an album. (An average day involved fifteen hours in the studio, and there were some twenty-four-hour stints.) Springsteen had a vision of a single album that would include all his musical influences and creative ideas. He wanted to produce a flawless work of greatness that would “explode in people’s homes and minds and change people’s lives.”²⁶ He agonized over details others considered trivial. After nine laborious months in the studio, Springsteen managed to complete only one song, “Born to Run.”²⁷ To appease the label and the fans, according to Alterman, Appel slipped copies of the single to select radio DJs. The song, which critic Greil Marcus described as “the finest compression of the rock & roll thrill since the opening riffs of ‘Layla,’” was a hit.²⁸

It would take another six months to finish the album. “When it’s ready, it’ll be there,” Springsteen kept saying. “I can’t be pressured. I’ll give ’em my best and it’ll work out for the best in the end.” He set a high standard. As Landau said to biographer Marsh, “The biggest thing I learned from him was the ability to concentrate on the big picture. He’d say, ‘The release date is just one day. The record is forever.’”²⁹

Still Searching for His Groove

The Born to Run album, released in August 1975, transformed Springsteen’s career and his life. Its content was more mature than earlier albums, leaving behind, as Alterman puts it, Springsteen’s “adolescent definitions of love and freedom.”³⁰ The many months in the studio showed: the music was more refined, and the dense arrangements were reminiscent of the “wall of sound” production style developed by Phil Spector. The album shot to number 3 on the charts, and the tour kicked off with rave reviews. Yet Springsteen and the band still weren’t making much money. This was in part because Springsteen preferred the intimacy of small theatres. But as he dug into why, when his career seemed to be taking off, the money didn’t seem to be coming in, he found out just how lopsided his contract with Appel was. He had signed away the rights to his songs, and Appel was making more money than his rising star. Springsteen sued. Appel countersued, keeping Springsteen out of the studio.

The stalemate continued for two years, during which Springsteen insisted that he would walk away from the music business rather than give in. During this period he still wrote songs, and, to earn money, toured almost nonstop. He also began reading. Landau gave him books by John Steinbeck and Flannery O’Connor and suggested movies to watch. As David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker, “Springsteen started to think in larger terms than cars and highways; he began to look at his own story, his family’s story, in terms of class and American archetypes.”³¹ His music became less about personal liberation and more about the pain of socioeconomic changes, deindustrialization, and the scourge of unemployment.

In 1977, Appel and Springsteen reached a settlement, with the musician essentially buying back control and the rights to his music. It was a lesson learned the hard way: although Springsteen has collaborated with many musicians and producers over the years, from critic-turned-manager Jon Landau to Pete Seeger to his longtime friend and E Street band member Steve Van Zandt, he would never again give up creative control of his music.

Two platinum albums later, Springsteen was a bona fide star. But somehow, the fame felt empty, and depression hovered. He started seeing a psychotherapist, who helped him explore the roots of his unhappiness. Why did none of his romantic relationships last? Had he “inherited his father’s depressive self-isolation”? Why was he obsessed with his childhood home, which he would drive by three or four nights a week? Springsteen grappled with his offstage life, trying to grasp the past and figure out a future in which he wouldn’t feel so alone.³²

By the end of his next tour with the E Street Band—marking the release of the blockbuster Born in the USA album—Springsteen was married, after a whirlwind romance, to actress Julianne Phillips. He was rich and famous. The album had shot straight to number 1 and ultimately produced seven hit singles and went platinum.

Chrysler offered several million dollars for the right to use the title track, “Born in the USA,” in a car commercial.³³ The Boss declined. Next, Ronald Reagan tried to co-opt the same song during his 1984 reelection campaign. Springsteen, angered by the president trying to turn a song protesting the government’s treatment of Vietnam vets into an unambivalent affirmation of America’s future, protested the inappropriate use of his words and music.

On the personal side, Springsteen and Phillips moved into a $14 million house in Beverly Hills. But their marriage was filled with daily struggles and dashed expectations. He and Phillips divorced quietly in 1988.

Then he broke up the E Street Band.

Putting the Guitar Down

To Springsteen fans—the devoted followers who had charted his rise, concert after concert, who had been uplifted by his music and felt their spirits touched by his songs—the decision verged on apostasy.

“I [had] played with some of the guys since we were eighteen,” Springsteen said of his decision. He added that he hadn’t had a chance to go out and see what other people were going to bring to what he was doing. “There’s some responsibility to step out a little bit, and it was frightening.”³⁴

The 90s marked a period of both personal growth and musical experimentation. Taking his foot off the gas pedal allowed him to experiment with other musicians and focus on his relationship with E Street Band backup singer Patti Scialfa and the family they began to create. The couple moved to Los Angeles, had their first son, Evan, in July 1990, and married the following year. Looking back on these years, Springsteen told Robert Wiersema in 2011, “Now I see that two of the best days of my life were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down.”³⁵

Therapy had helped Springsteen work through the scars of his childhood and learn how to create more space in his life for nonmusical activities. “It’s not necessarily for everybody,” he has said about therapy. “But I’ve accomplished things personally that felt simply impossible previously. It’s a sign of strength, you know, to put your hand out and ask for help, whether it’s a friend or a professional or whatever.”³⁶

Scialfa pushed Springsteen to become a more attentive father. As he explained to TV host Jon Stewart in 2012, “My argument was, ‘Don’t you understand, I’m thinking of a song! I have to lay another golden egg or we’re all going down!’”³⁷ But Springsteen came to realize that he couldn’t live long enough to make all of the music that was in his head and that his children wouldn’t be young forever. Although he continued to make music, Springsteen began devoting more time and energy to his family life, making the move back to New Jersey before his daughter, Jessica, was born at the end of 1991. He wanted for his children “to know where they came from, who came before them, what they went through.”³⁸

After reuniting the E Street Band briefly for a greatest hits album in 1995, Springsteen did several acoustic records on his own before reuniting the band in 1999. To ensure that his work didn’t interfere with his role as a husband and father—and to grant his three kids childhoods that were as normal as possible—Springsteen strictly separated the two spheres of his life and even insisted that his band members sign nondisclosure agreements.

Springsteen was back in his native New Jersey, married and raising his children only miles from his childhood home. He was back with the band. Then came the 9/11 terrorist attack, which hit Springsteen’s local community hard. Many of the firefighters, not to mention many daily commuters, who died that day lived in Springsteen’s own Monmouth County.

Obituaries in the local papers often mentioned that the victim had been a loyal Springsteen fan, and he began phoning their families to offer his condolences. To honor several first responders, he recorded new versions of his songs for their funerals. He called survivors, too, to see how he might be able to support them.³⁹

These conversations led to The Rising, his first album of new material in seven years. He and his band worked furiously, recording the album in less than a month and releasing it in the summer of 2002. Some songs were inspired by the heroism of the firefighters. Others reflected the stories he had heard from those who had lost a husband, mother, or sibling in the attack. The album, as a whole, aimed to heal the country’s sorrow.

“It comes down to trying to make people happy,” he said. Another purpose was “being a conduit for a dialogue about the events of the day, the issues that impact people’s lives, personal and social and political and religious. That’s how I always saw the job of our band. That was my service.”⁴⁰

Although The Boss had never been shy about expressing his opinions, he had stayed away from partisan politics. But in 2004, he endorsed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and revealed that he would join a group of fellow artists in a national concert tour called Vote for Change. Springsteen campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008.

Unlike efforts highlighting AIDS in Africa or children dying of hunger, causes nearly everyone can rally around, Springsteen’s progressive political positions rankled some fans. His popularity in the American South and Midwest declined. Yet those same positions buoyed his popularity in bluer parts of the country and internationally, where he is respected for celebrating America’s values even as he criticizes its moral and political failings.

On February 8, 2013, in Los Angeles, two nights before the Grammy Awards ceremony, Springsteen performed at the Recording Academy’s annual MusiCares gala, a star-studded concert and auction to raise money for the nonprofit, which provides financial and medical help to musicians in need.

Springsteen, along with other big-name musicians, had signed a new Telecaster guitar that the auctioneer hoped would sell for $50,000. When the bids seemed tepid, Springsteen jumped to the stage. He threw in a one-hour guitar lesson and a ride in the sidecar of his Harley-Davidson. The bidding picked up, and Springsteen upped the ante: eight tickets to an upcoming concert and a backstage tour by The Boss himself if the bids reached “two hundred thousand fucking dollars.” Once they had, he dangled one more carrot: “And lasagna made by my mom! Stand up, mom!” The guitar sold for $250,000.⁴¹

After the auction ended, Springsteen walked to the podium to accept an award as the organization’s Person of the Year. Springsteen lauded MusiCares, saying, “We are a brotherhood and sisterhood of magical fuck-ups, and we need you.” But, he went on to suggest, musicians not only needed to be saved from their worst habits, but also they needed to be saved for the rest of us. “I’ve been a part of the miracle of music. I’ve seen people tired, depressed, weary, worn out. And I’ve seen them revived, rise from their seats and dance,” he said.⁴²

Musicians, he said, “are always in search of the power to sustain the best of ourselves and to seek out the best in you, our fans and our audience. We want to be great. And we want to be important in your life … to make you want to move, to dance, to love, to make love, to be angry, to act. When we play we want the hair to stand up on your arms, we want you to feel the glory, and we want you to be glad of being alive.”

Springsteen wound up by thanking his fellow musicians for making him feel “like … person of the year.” He chuckled before demanding, “Now give me that damn guitar!”

The Skills Bruce Springsteen Exemplifies

Leader isn’t usually the first noun people would attach to Bruce Springsteen, the eldest of the people I’ve chosen for this book, and yet it fits. He is the executive of a high-performing organization. But more importantly, his persistent expression of hope and joy in the face of the disappointments of a cruel world—spoken not with resentment but with resilience—has inspired tens of millions of people the world over.

Throughout his career, Springsteen has sought opportunities to help others, to strengthen his broad community of fans by bringing people together in common cause. The poetry of his lyrics—with its universal themes about making our way in the world, struggling to hold on to joy, raging against injustice, and reveling in the laughter and sorrows of intimate relationships—unites listeners everywhere. The late Clarence Clemons, saxophonist in Springsteen’s E Street Band, once described the astonishing sight of countless Japanese fans proudly waving American and Japanese flags that had been sewn together. “I wish some of the politicians had seen these things,” Clemons remarked about that moment on tour. “Those kids didn’t understand the words to ‘Born in the U. S.A.,’ but they understood what we were singing about. Those things Bruce sings about—attention to self and country—pertain not only to America. They pertain to everybody.”⁴³

When Springsteen performed before a crowd of 160,000 in East Berlin in 1988, he declared from the stage in thickly accented German, “I want to tell you I’m not here for or against any government. I came to play rock ’n’ roll for you East Berliners in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.” Standing for his values was contagious. Again, Clemons: “He was always so straight and dedicated to what he believes. You became a believer simply by being around him.”⁴⁴

We see many skills in Bruce Springsteen’s quest for greatness in his work and coherence in his life, including the way he learned the skill of managing boundaries. He offers a particularly good illustration of the skills of acting in ways that are consistent with one’s values (being real), clarifying expectations (being whole), and learning continually (being innovative).

Be Real: Embody Values Consistently

Bruce Springsteen is able to be himself wherever he is, wherever he goes. He acts in ways that are consistent with his core values. In the confusing warp of fame and wealth, many rock and roll stars forsake their values and fall prey to scandal, artistic stagnation, and even early death. Springsteen is grounded by his musical mission, his family, his community of origin and the world community of fans he’s created, and his social and political views. This grounding has also allowed him to remain at heart the same down-to-earth Jersey boy he was before striking it big. From the earliest days of his career, Springsteen has performed only the songs that speak to him and played only with musicians who share his passion. No distraction, no matter how tempting—including the possibility of rapid popularity or easy money—has caused him to deviate from the mission that compels him.

The mature Springsteen is confident in his knowledge of himself, and this confidence allows him to be his authentic self wherever he goes. Rather than conform to external pressures, he relies on core values to guide his behavior. Rather than bend to social pressures, he makes choices that match what he believes in. He’s not afraid to speak his mind. Being real is not only a matter of spending time and attention on the people and things that matter most. It’s also about embodying your values consistently, in all the things you do, as we see with Springsteen.

He has been able to move his listeners because of his steadfastness. Rather than view him as just a guy with a guitar, legions of Springsteen fans think of him as a friend—even if they’ve never met him—and as a positive reflection of their own lives. One reason they relate to his music and lyrics on a deeply personal level is that he is consciously striving to be true to himself.⁴⁵ That’s what the effort to consistently embody one’s values yields: loyalty. People can see his striving to be himself wherever he goes. Springsteen builds relationships with his fans by devoting himself fully to the idea of his music and its power to elevate the human spirit, all the time. This faith is expressed in virtually all of his songs, as well as in the words he uses to describe his art in speeches he’s given, articles he’s written, and interviews he’s held.

Springsteen’s ability to give voice to the truth of his experience is a skill that he’s refined over the course of his career. In the aftermath of 9/11, Springsteen struggled to come to terms with the horrifying attack. In a way that was even more explicit than his previous albums, in The Rising he produced songs to express the grief and hope he found in himself, his family, and his community. Not only was this prodigious effort a way to articulate what was important in all aspects of his life, but also it was a turning point, for it put him on a path to becoming more directly involved in politics, even if doing so risked alienating some of his fans. “It’s unpatriotic at any given moment,” he said in a 60 Minutes interview in 2009, about his rising stature as a force in presidential politics, “to sit back and let things pass that are damaging to some place that you love so dearly. And that has given me so much. And that I believe in. I still feel and see us as a beacon of hope and possibility.”⁴⁶

Over time, Springsteen has grown more fervent in his appreciation of how important it is to take clear political stands that are rooted in his family, social, and spiritual domains. He tries to be the person he is, wherever he is. Staying true to his values in the different roles of his life has not only propelled him to the highest peaks of professional achievement but also has resulted in a rewarding and meaningful life beyond work.

Be Whole: Clarify Expectations

Bruce Springsteen communicates with people important to him about expectations they have of one another. He is willing to express his needs, values, and goals. He sets aside time for these conversations and is able to broach topics that may feel uncomfortable. A successful leader must listen well, take in constructive feedback, ask clarifying questions, and work to resolve disagreements.

The skill of clarifying expectations involves both advocacy for your own point of view and inquiry about what others see and want. Stemming from his intense desire to produce great music, Springsteen has always been insistent and very clear—with his fellow musicians as well as producers, engineers, and audiences—about the sounds inside his head that he’s striving to re-create. There are countless examples of his ardently expressing his artistic vision and making clear his expectations. It took days of laborious trial and error, for example, just to find the right timbre and volume for the drums on Darkness, but the young Springsteen (still in his twenties) wouldn’t stop driving his bandmates, producers, and engineers until everyone grasped exactly the sound he was looking for. Another episode, much further down the line, occurred during a live performance of “American Skin (41 Shots).” The audience was noisily rustling during the introductory refrain, and Springsteen demanded quiet. A hush ensued. He is highly skilled in letting people know what he wants.

His high standards compel him to be unrelenting. Witness his unwillingness to publish prematurely because an album “is forever.” Although his early obsessiveness and unending search for perfection have mellowed over the years, the energy that Springsteen and the E Streeters bring to the stage—still, even in their sixties—would not be possible without The Boss’s making clear (through his own example), night after night after night, his expectations for excellent performance and full commitment to extraordinary service for their audiences.

Springsteen has also made clear his needs when it comes to his family. To protect his children from the pressures of public scrutiny, the nondisclosure agreements he required of his band members set limits on the scope of what he deemed acceptable behavior; he let the band know, in legal terms, that he expected them to guard his family’s privacy. And as a father he has been clear about letting his children know what he believes in and why. The move from California back to New Jersey, for example, was to make his children mindful of their roots.

But communication about expectations must be a two-way street. Springsteen’s capacity to hear the rumblings around him has enabled him to stay current with the culture. A great storyteller must be a great listener. Springsteen said he got the inspiration for The Rising a few days after the 9/11 attacks, when a stranger in a car stopped next to him, rolled down his window, and said, “We need you now.”⁴⁷ Staying closely attuned to his audience’s changing interests is a signal feature of Springsteen’s leadership repertoire.

Listening to others—listening so that you understand what others really care about—often changes our point of view. Chris Christie, the current governor of New Jersey, boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire Springsteen oeuvre. But because of Christie’s conservative social views, The Boss would not speak with the governor—until, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Christie rose above partisanship and welcomed President Obama, and by doing so garnered federal support for New Jersey residents. Springsteen saw Christie’s commitment to the people, and he changed his position: he told Christie that they were now friends and publicly complimented the governor for his principled stand.⁴⁸ These episodes point to Springsteen’s skill in engaging in effective dialogue; people know what he needs from them, and he learns what they need from him.

Be Innovative: Create Cultures of Innovation

Bruce Springsteen looks for opportunities to show others how he’s learning new ways of doing things and encourages them to innovate. He creates cultures of innovation wherever he goes. He sees the service his band provides as producing opportunities for people to explore the important issues of the day. Leading by example, he empowers others to be creative. He displays both confidence, which grew with time and experience, and humility, as he shares with others both his successes and the obstacles he faces. His enthusiasm for learning and his fearlessness are contagious and inspire others to embrace new opportunities.⁴⁹

A main ingredient in Springsteen’s recipe for success, personally and professionally, is his thirst for useful knowledge and his desire to change the world—to create something new that makes things better—and to change himself. As a wise old man offering advice to up-and-coming musicians, he recounted how this is exactly what he was up to, back at the start: trying desperately to create a new person from what he had been. He talked to the South by Southwest crowd in 2012 about his hunger to learn and explained how he had to step out of the mold to discover his own musical style. He was urging them to innovate, continually.

Not only has he been on a lifelong search for better ways to express his ideas in music, but Springsteen also has been on a quest to better understand his inner life. Here, too, he has used his own experience to inspire others to try new ways of growing. His own psychotherapy demonstrates his belief in the value of disciplined self-discovery. Therapy helped Springsteen work through the traumas of his childhood and learn how to appreciate nonmusical activities in his life, especially intimacy and family.⁵⁰

Expressing insight about lessons he’s learned about himself encourages others to keep learning about themselves, whether through therapy or other means. His pursuit of self-knowledge through counseling turned him into a role model, destigmatizing it and opening doors for people, especially men, who might not otherwise seek help. It wasn’t easy to talk about these things publicly. But Springsteen mustered the will and the skill to do so. He compared therapy to getting a mechanic to check under the hood—an analogy sure to speak to his target audience. He shows others that there are practical means available to them—tools they can use—to heal their own scars.

Springsteen is a teacher.

 

Bruce Springsteen was lucky; he discovered very early that the only thing that made him feel right about his life was his guitar. He found what he was perfectly suited for and gave it everything. He devoted himself to learning his craft, remaining true to his beliefs, securing the resources he needed to build a world-class team, caring for the people who depend on him, and committing to serving his people and making them a bit happier and more informed about the joys and sorrows of the world through his music.

Ultimately, from the perspective of his life as a whole, his megastar success as a performing artist has come as a consequence of, and not at a cost to, his deep investments in his family, his community, and his private self. His music is greatly enriched by these other parts of his life. And his music is the vehicle through which he is able to live a rewarding life beyond it. As his wife and bandmate, Patti Scialfa, said to him at the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction of The E Street Band, “Thanks for making the best of both worlds possible.” ⁵¹

You too can strengthen your ability to pursue four-way wins and create a greater sense of harmony in your life. In Part II, which follows, I offer practical suggestions for ways you—on your own schedule and in your own style—can develop the skills of being real, being whole, and being innovative.