High Performance: Why Business Must Take A Chance On Unconventional Talent

When Robert Wallace, CEO of the Stanford Management Company, took his first finance job at the Yale University endowment he was surprised that the office was so quiet. His colleagues didn’t notice anything unusual. But for Wallace, who was beginning a new profession after 16 years as a leading dancer with the Washington Ballet and soloist and principal at the American Ballet Theater and Boston Ballet, the silence was profound.

“I had spent most of my life listening to the orchestra or the rehearsal piano playing music all day long and many, many nights. Suddenly not to have that music accompany every minute of every day was a big adjustment,” said Wallace in an interview. “I really missed it.”

Changing careers can be jarring for anyone, but for those transitioning from a life in the performing arts it can feel like a whole new world.

Does career shape identity, or the other way around?

“I could never introduce myself when I was leaving my career as a cellist,” remembered Margo Drakos, managing director at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation. “I could only say ‘I’m Margo who plays the cello.’ My entire identification was as Margo who plays the cello,” she said in an interview.

After studies at the esteemed Curtis Institute of Music and Marlboro Music Festival, Drakos served as principal cellist of the Oregon, San Diego, and Seattle Symphonies, associate principal of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and cellist of the American String Quartet. She had been performing and recording since early childhood. So the prospect of creating an identity outside of music was terrifying for her—but also incredibly freeing.

“Nobody cared that I was principal of whatever orchestra. They didn’t know I had a $7 million cello on loan to me,” said Drakos. “It’s very healthy to realize that you’re not defined just by the instrument you play.”

Performing artists have spent a lifetime developing the skills companies need.

What the public sees on stage appears effortless—a dancer gracefully lifting his partner, a cellist blending her sound into the orchestra around her.

But that artistry requires decades of practice and significant personal, physical and financial sacrifice. With an arts economy still reeling from the pandemic, many performers are wondering if their long experience has value off the stage. The answer, increasingly, is “Yes.”

In her role as managing director, Drakos not only identifies promising start-ups for the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation to support, but also provides guidance as they navigate their critical, and often challenging, early years.

“When do you push them, and when do you listen?” said Drakos. “How are you earning their trust? It is so important in your relationship with the founder, the board and the executive leadership.”

Not surprisingly, this is the same kind of emotional intelligence that Drakos cultivated in her years as an orchestral and chamber musician. “How do you feel the vibe of your colleagues? Should your voice be primary or secondary? Should you drive? Should you respond? All those nuances, all those soft skills.”

The arts hold up a mirror to business culture and language.

Nicholas King, a concert pianist who trained at the Royal Conservatory and the Juilliard School of Music and is now managing director at Fort Point Capital Partners, was so amused by the metaphors he heard around the office during his first year in finance that he wrote them down.

“There are hundreds of weird phrases and idioms on my list—things like ‘I knocked the cover off the ball’ or ‘I gotta move the goal post,’“ said King in an interview. “And it’s all the language of a zero-sum framework. We were always trying to win. And winning equaled someone else losing.”

As King sees it, that zero-sum framework doesn’t work in a global economy. When one person loses, everyone loses.

“You want creative solutions that take everyone into account and make sure that everyone is made whole,” said King. “Musicians are very good at that. They’re good at thoughtful compromise where everyone comes out okay and one person doesn’t walk away in a huff. And from a hiring perspective I want people who are collaborative, who understand what it means to work together—not just work together on a team to beat other people.”

The importance of finding a champion—someone who believes in you.

Robert Wallace was looking for a part-time job when he answered a classified in the Yale student newspaper placed by the Yale Investments Office. The intern position they were advertising paid $8 an hour, but with a young and growing family Wallace needed something to supplement what he was earning teaching ballet to kids in New Haven, Connecticut.

“My three children were all born while I was an undergraduate at Yale. At the time I was in my mid-thirties with no experience in investment management,” said Wallace. “The Yale Investments Office just happened to be led by a legendary investor named David Swensen and his right-hand man, Dean Takahashi. They were the ones who gave me a shot.”

Wallace recalled that Swensen didn’t particularly ask him about the job during the interview. “I think he understood that I didn’t know much about it. We had a great conversation about my life and about ballet.”

They clicked. Wallace ended up becoming an intern in the office, which manages the Yale University endowment, and then landed a full-time job there when he graduated. That led to a position running Alta Advisers, a private investment firm in London, and eventually heading up the Stanford Management Company in 2015.

“My journey from the arts to investment management was dependent on a bunch of very idiosyncratic bottom-up factors—but meeting people like David Swensen and Dean Takahashi? It was just dumb luck.”

For Margo Drakos, that champion was venture capitalist Bill Stensrud. She first met him while performing at the Aspen Music Festival and presenting at the Aspen Institute. They reconnected in San Diego, and on a flight back to New York City got into a deep conversation about the disruption that streaming and downloads were beginning to create for classical music and the performing arts.

“I told him that when I was outside the hall after concerts somebody always wanted to buy the performance they just heard. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could swipe a card, make a donation, and download that concert?’ And he said, ‘Let’s build the company.’”

Drakos resigned from her tenured positions, and with Stensrud’s help founded Instant Encore, the world’s largest provider of mobile and web infrastructure for the performing arts.

“Bill understood the skillset I had from my background in music, and he took a chance on me,” said Drakos. “I didn’t know how to start a mobile company or run a software company, but he trusted that I would somehow figure it out.”

Why take a chance on talent? The real risk is playing it safe.

Whether it is a mentor who recognizes transferable skills in a non-traditional background, or a company willing to look beyond the narrow qualifications that automated screening systems are optimized for, those who hold the power in our society owe it to themselves to experience other worlds.

This is one of the strongest arguments for the merits of arts education—the way it demonstrates the value of what can’t be quantified. And according to Nicholas King, that’s a value sorely needed in our free market economy. “If more people understood the arts on a visceral level—not just intellectually—but if they could feel that experience, I think it could help shape some of their decision making, how they choose to orient their lives and even how they conduct business.”

It’s easier to justify taking a chance on someone when their work history is typical, when their resume contains all the familiar names and places. Easier, for sure, but not necessarily better.

The value of an unusual background is the way it shapes a person—their different worldview, their way around conflict, their fresh approach to problems and new ideas.

Musicians, dancers, and other artists are not what most companies think they are looking for. But with the rise of AI and the challenges of navigating our increasingly connected world, these exceptionally trained professionals bring skills that ChatGPT will never master.

Maybe it’s time to roll the dice.