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Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead John Perry Barlow What a Long, Strange Trip It’S Been… —Grateful Dead, “Truckin’ ” No Shit

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Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead John Perry Barlow What a Long, Strange Trip It’S Been… —Grateful Dead, “Truckin’ ” No Shit Begin Reading Table of Contents Newsletters Copyright Page In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. This book is deadicated to Augustus Owsley “Bear” Stanley III. Without Bear’s efforts and involvement, it’s hard to know if there would have been a Grateful Dead or what shape the band might have taken. Owsley produced the purest, finest LSD used in the Bay Area and in the Acid Tests that ultimately became the model for a Grateful Dead concert. He was the band’s patron and supported them in the early years. And he was the soundman who helped and inspired the band to create the world’s finest sound system. He passed away in March 2011. Acknowledgments Over the years, I’ve read many books and their many “acknowledgments.” Typically I’ve glanced at the acknowledgments, but more often than not, I’ve simply skipped them, because I didn’t appreciate their importance or value. But now that I’ve written my own book, the need for an acknowledgments section is clear: this book wouldn’t be in your hands without the many contributions of the folks I’m going to acknowledge and thank here. Some have made a nearly lifelong contribution, others a more recent but significant contribution, and I’m very grateful to all of them and the countless others who aren’t mentioned here by name. So let me start with Mark Essig, my personal editor. Mark took my writings on the Dead’s approaches to an improvisational business model— shared leadership, customer service, teamwork, core values, do-it-yourself business innovation, and nurturing the Deadhead culture—and helped me present them in a coherent, smooth-flowing, and engaging story. He helped me shape the lessons in a way I couldn’t have by myself. Next to thank and acknowledge is John Perry Barlow, who was on the scene with the Dead before I was even a serious listener. He was a Dead lyricist, road manager, and rancher who helped bring a cowboy culture to the early Dead scene, and who went on to cofound the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which established the early rules of the Internet game to keep the Web free and wide open. His foreword to this book is greatly appreciated because it complements and amplifies many of the Grateful Dead lessons I present. Sara Weiss at Grand Central Publishing has been a wonderful collaborator throughout the book process and overlooked my lack of knowledge about writing and publishing while helping me fine-tune the book to be sure it would be the best it could possibly be. Howard Yoon, my agent, helped me work my way through the publishing labyrinth and connected me to Grand Central Publishing and to Mark Essig. He held my hand in the early stages, and he and his partner, Gail Ross, worked hard to keep the process moving forward. Nicholas Meriwether, the Grateful Dead archivist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, McHenry Library, has been a remarkable source of inspiration and support for more than a dozen years. Nick led by example with a Grateful Dead book of his own, All Graceful Instruments, and four volumes of the Dead Letters journal. He’s kept after me to tell the business side of the Grateful Dead story, and I’m pleased to finally be able to have finished it. Josh Green is responsible for lighting the fire in me that started me writing this book. He interviewed me in July 2009 for an article he wrote in The Atlantic titled, “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.” After the interview, I knew it was time to finally sit down and write, so I began in earnest then. When his article was published in March 2010, it was clear there was tremendous interest in the topic. Rob Weiner, founder of the annual Grateful Dead Caucus of Dead scholars, has been another source of ongoing support and inspiration, and has led the way by authoring three Grateful Dead books himself. I’m grateful for his assistance with documents, citations, and moral support, and for getting me started on the path to this book. David Gans is a wonderful friend who was reticent about my book when I first began talking with him about it in 1998. But his knowledge and contributions over the years have made a big difference in this book. Alan Trist first met Jerry Garcia in 1960 and worked for the Dead organization for many years, and still runs Ice Nine Publishing. His remarkable insight into the operation of the Dead organization, his willingness to discuss how things really worked, and his internal document “A Balanced Objective” were all invaluable for helping me understand how the business operated, and helping me tell the story. Dennis McNally provided tremendous detail on the inner workings of the Dead organization and was extremely helpful whenever I reached out to him. Rebecca Adams is a pioneer in the academic world for taking the risk to legitimize the study of the Grateful Dead. She generously shared her unpublished manuscript on Deadhead culture and has long been a supporter of my Dead business research. Stan Spector and Jim Tuedio have been involved in the Grateful Dead Caucus of Dead Scholars for many years and were kind enough to publish my essay on strategic improvisation in their book The Grateful Dead in Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation. Art Weinstein is a friend and colleague who shares my passion for music and was the first to publish my work on the Grateful Dead. My case study on customer service appears in his book Superior Customer Value in the New Economy: Concepts, Cases, and Applications. Randy Pohlman, the dean emeritus of the Huizenga School, not only supported my business research on the Dead but encouraged it as well. That’s hard to find in the academic world. My brother, Chuc Barnes, has helped me in countless ways throughout my life, including giving me a life-changing writing lesson when I was in eighth grade. He has shared my passion for the Grateful Dead and has always provided tremendous support for my research and writing. This book would not have been possible without the ongoing support and love I’ve received from my wonderful wife, Chris. She allowed me to take her to 150 Dead concerts, put up with my taping of the shows, accepted my continual listening to concert recordings, and has always encouraged my writing efforts. Many others have helped shape this book and contributed to it in many different ways. They include David Parker, Jan Simmons, Dan Healy, Peter McQuaid, Jerilyn Lee Brandelius, Traci Fordham, Kitty Preziosi, Kenneth Mackenzie, Bill Johnson, Glenn Rifkin, Wayne Huizenga, Blair Jackson, David Dodd, and Mary Eisenhart. Finally, I must thank Jerry, Phil, Bobby, Billy, Pigpen, Mickey, Brent, and Vince. These guys are the best! They created a remarkable musical group that spawned an unrivaled following of Deadheads, created a new business model for the music industry, and set an example for an alternative approach to business in general. Long live the Dead! Foreword Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead John Perry Barlow What a long, strange trip it’s been… —Grateful Dead, “Truckin’ ” No shit. The real marvel is that the Grateful Dead made this declaration back in 1969. Considering all that went down during the four very weird decades since then, it becomes obvious that we1 didn’t begin to know the meaning of “long” or “strange” at that point. (We did, however, have a pretty firm grasp of the meaning of “trip”…) I have been intimately involved with the assembly of phenomena generally referred to as the Grateful Dead since my dewy youth forty-four years ago, during which time my sense of irony has been honed and burnished to a high sheen by the operation of something called enantiodromia, the process by which everything is continually becoming its opposite. According to Heraclitus, this is the fundamental operating principle of the universe, and, whether that’s true or not, it has certainly been visibly in evidence around the Grateful Dead, about whom the opposite of any accurate statement one might make was also generally true—or at least became so eventually. Consider, for example, that I’m now writing a foreword to a book proposing that this anarchic, antimaterialistic, profligate, reckless, besotted, impractical, idealistic, spontaneity-obsessed, dynamically careless, and acid- addled mob added up to a sharp business organization. This doesn’t surprise me as it would someone of a more linear view. It’s ironic, sure, but what isn’t? When I first heard of this project, I thought that what was being proposed was a book about the larger dimensions of our having pioneered, however accidentally, one of the most important innovations of the information economy: viral marketing. There is much to be said on this subject, and there is much that I have said and written about over the last twenty years. But, no, further discussion clarified for me that this was to be a book about how the Grateful Dead had successfully created or harnessed a broad range of strategic practices in management and business that might be emulated by other commercial organizations.
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