Start Me Up and Keep Me Growing: Management Learnings from the Rolling Stones

The world's most famous and long-living band started out 60 years ago in London as a mission to bring American blues music to a European audience. They expected to last for two years at best. The rest is history. In this easy-to-read book, Bertold Bär-Bouyssiere, a Brussels-based Stones aficionado and seasoned international business lawyer with significant management and governance experience in the world's largest law firms, tells us how the world's greatest rock band managed to adapt, to innovate, to grow, and to overcome the inevitable challenges of interpersonal dynamics in their life-spanning career. This look at the Stones from a business and management point of view emphasises the commonality of all business collaborations where individuals must work together and bear with each other to bring about long-term success. Start-up founders, talent managers in large corporates and executive coaches can find a wealth of inspiration in this short account while having a lot of fun reading it.

Many people know the Rolling Stones, their famous songs, their industrial-scale concerts, and their enormous wealth. However, what looks like a straightforward career path was in fact fraught with many threats and obstacles. There were many dramatic incidents where the Rolling Stones were on the verge of extinction, and there was the constant risk of becoming obsolete. However, through an infinite sequence of wise business decisions, artistic and commercial adjustments, and unbelievable painful efforts to overcome the centrifugal forces inherent in multi-person long-term interpersonal dynamics, the Stones became the greatest societal influencers of the post-war world, inspiring several generations as a model for perseverance, effort, creativity, and fun.

This easy-to-read book, inspired by the Harvard Business School Case Study format, narrates the band history with a focus on business aspects, management learnings and the interpersonal dynamics that repeatedly threatened to end the greatest success story of rock 'n' roll, but eventually culminated in an unrivalled planetary success.

The short book is aimed at company founders, talent managers in large corporates and executive coaches, who seek inspiration for their own workplace, want to hear how the Stones made it, while still enjoying a good read.