I have a friend who went to India, and was learning vocal technique there.

In Indian music, someone learning vocal music makes use of a drone maker, a tanpura, which has that 4 strings mostly tuned to just 2 notes.

Once, he was playing it and he managed to tune it so the sound seemed particularly clear and vibrant.

excited he went to see his teacher. His teacher said, "There are seven levels of tuning, and you've reached level 3"

"What are the business analogues to musical flash and technique that  get in the way of tone and soulfulness?"

For me, greed and speed, in their various ways, shapes and form, for two....which often detract from focus, flow and presence that drive a deeper, inner  purity, meaningfulness and purpose of work .

"Jimmy Day, he said, had a cable linking his foot and his soul.

And so in the throes of everyday business — doing, doing, doing — where is the link to our greater, higher, authentic self? One can, if one wants to, bring one's "soul" to work — be it music or anything else — but....only if one chooses. The $10 question is why so many consciously choose not to?

Lower down the business food chain - I probably wouldn't use the word "soulfulness" with respect to marketing - flash and technique getting in the way of tone happens quite often in marketing communications, collateral, web sites, that are more focused on making a creative "statement" than on conveying anything informative or useful.

One of my favorites was a brushed-aluminum clad brochure one company I worked for made. It looked quite beautiful, but the content was gibberish and, oh yeah, it weighed too much to mail out AND if you ran your finger over the edge you got cut. (We called this piece the "Full Metal Jacket.") Still, it sure did look pretty...

Another great post. You know, "standards" aren't really discussed much in the business world. But that's kind of what you're talking about. Jeff had standards for the basics and nothing less would do. What standards do we hold for ourselves? For our business?

Via the Singer's Blog Carnival, I just found and read this tremendous article on The End of the Great Big American Voice, and this passage jumped out at me:

"American vocal training has long been bruited as the best in the world and is supposed to be better than ever. Yet there has been no commensurate rise in great new talents. (...) Yet in the upper echelons of this fractious field, the one thing people seem to agree on is what's going wrong. In dozens of interviews with singers, teachers and administrators around the country, the same complaints emerged again and again. Young singers are not being taught the fundamentals, in particular, the proper use of breath."

(my bolding added)

Whether we're talking performing arts or business, I wonder how much of a preference for flash vs craft (which can be recast as short term vs long term payoffs) is a cultural issue?

I'm sure you've heard the (true) stories of how in Japan aspiring sushi chefs spend the first several years of an apprenticeship learning to cut a daikon radish in a transparently-thin and continuous spiral.  When I worked in Japan, I was surprised to learn that this approach applied to ALL fields, not just sushi.  My first big cultural conflicts were about me wanting to "jump in" and do the job I was hired for, when my office's expectation was that I would take at least a year of doing clerical and administrative tasks (and sitting around) before I had absorbed enough of the office culture to be in a position to make a contribution. 

My experience of working in various locations in Europe, East Asia, and North America has been that American culture tends to be the most focused on short term rewards, often regardless of the cost.  This might make a great driver for "entrepreneurial spirit," but it doesn't seem to foster the kind of dedication and commitment needed for mastering techniques, or long term thinking.

Shaula, how cool that is, an eerie similarity.  And Will also points out another musical example.  And Ian's brush technique is in the arts field too.

Another issue is the "why". One of the most frustrating things for me at my last job were the number of people doing it who knew what they were supposed to do, but didn't know why they were doing it that way.

Works fine, until something unusual occurs and then they were completely lost, because they couldn't reason from first principles. And since they didn't know why, they didn't know which things were really important, so when they cut corners (and let's face facts, at some point we all have to cut corners) they would often cut the wrong corners.

One day when the coach was on holiday I was approached to keep the new hires busy. So I asked them, "do you know how insurance works - why it lapses, how it's costed, and what the various values mean?"

They'd been there for over a month - not one of them did. So I went around to people who had been hired even before that group, told them I was teaching a class on how insurance worked, and wound up with 10 people clustered around while I explained it, including people who had work to do they'd have to make up later.

It wasn't even that they didn't want to know - they did - but they'd never had a chance to learn.