My husband recently pointed to an old black speaker in our Brunswick property and told me it was valuable. I looked at its scratched cabinet and faded white cone. It did not look expensive or particularly impressive. But he explained that it was a Yamaha NS-10M Studio monitor, the kind of speaker that once appeared in recording studios around the world. Its value came from something unexpected: it did not make everything sound good.
The NS-10 began as a home speaker, but recording engineers adopted it because it could expose problems in a musical mix. Yamaha says it eventually became a global studio standard and received recognition through a Technical Grammy. One of the engineers most closely connected to the speaker was Bob Clearmountain. He helped popularize the NS-10 after bringing a pair into New York's famed Power Station studio. He even placed tissue over the tweeters because he found them too bright. Other engineers followed his lead, and the unassuming speaker became a fixture in professional studios.
Clearmountain later mixed Bruce Springsteen's landmark album Born in the U.S.A. The album's powerful combination of drums, guitars, keyboards and Springsteen's unmistakable voice helped make it one of the defining rock records of the 1980s. That connection brought the lesson home for me.
The NS-10 was not responsible for Springsteen's talent or the E Street Band's performance. Its role was different. It helped an experienced engineer hear whether all those individual parts worked together and whether the finished music could hold up beyond the controlled environment of the studio. Every organization needs something that plays the same role the NS-10 played for Clearmountain—not something that flatters the work, but something that reveals it.
At IBEX, we try to provide that service for organizations. Our work often involves helping clients hear, honestly, whether their people, technology and processes will hold up once a plan leaves the studio and meets the real world. At Nectar IQ, we do something similar with supplier data: bring scattered information together so leaders can hear what is actually going on, rather than the version that sounds fine in a polished report. Neither effort is about finding fault for the sake of it. It is about gaining enough clarity to make the final result stronger. Leaders naturally appreciate people and systems that reassure us. But the most valuable ones may be those that help us recognize what still needs work.
The speaker is still sitting in that room in Brunswick, scratched cabinet and all. I look at it differently now.
To learn more about how IBEX and Nectar IQ help organizations find clarity before it's needed, visit IBEXExperts.com.
By Tracey Grace, President & CEO, IBEX and Nectar IQ
