Revolver, and the role of passion vs love in innovation

I could make all kinds of claims that The Beatles' Revolver is one of those game-changing albums. I remember, on a road trip down Route 66 with my 16 year old son, listening to it all of the way through (that was our road trip rule: only 'all the way through' records...), and us both being astonished that a 50 year old record could sound so fresh.

Anyhow, rather than debate the record, there are interesting thoughts for innovation that I wanted to draw out… 

First of all, think about how fast The Beatles turned from a covers band (not just their time in Hamburg, but even their debut album, Please, Please Me, 3 years earlier). I own a record label, and I know how hard it is to get bands to collect an album’s worth of originals even once a year! (Never mind doing it while making TV series, and movies, and touring…) In pharma, I hear people dismiss ‘incrementalism’ as if that isn’t also how great creatives innovate. That’s how The Beatles got from Love Me Do to Tomorrow Never Knows in 3 years (often being 'inspired' by those around them). Too often, I hear people decry the development of ‘me toos’. But I would reject out of hand that even a ‘class’ like the statins has ‘biosimilars’ in it - atorvastatin does things that other statins don’t, for example, and some of those things are enormously valuable. 

Then, think about how, in this golden period for the band, they still weren’t democratic, but strongly led by their visionaries. It’s perhaps an unpopular opinion, but the idea that ideas have to be ‘bought into’ by everyone, or, even worse, developed by the group from the bottom up, is a paralysing one in today’s environment. Enabling an idea is as great a contribution to innovation as the original idea itself, and it is wrong to think that everyone needed to be there for that idea. Revolver could, perhaps, argue that there were 6 Beatles… George Martin and Geoff Emerick were critical for enabling the music to be the way it is.

However, the thing I really wanted to draw out is how many people ‘made’ Revolver. This doesn’t contradict the last paragraph, but empowers it: 

Band - 4 Beatles

Producer - George Martin

Recording Engineer - Geoff Emerick

Studio Musicians (22, admittedly many of them only on Yellow Submarine!), including

	•	Anil Bhagwat 

	•	Alan Civil 

	•	Mal Evans

	•	Neil Aspinall

	•	Brian Jones

	•	Pattie Boyd

	•	Marianne Faithfull

	•	Alf Bicknell

	•	Tony Gilbert, Sidney Sax, John Sharpe, Jurgen Hess; Stephen Shingles, John Underwood; Derek Simpson, Norman Jones

	•	Eddie Thornton, Ian Hamer, Les Condon, Peter Coe, Alan Branscombe

Album Art - Klaus Voormann

Photography - Robert Freeman

Management -Brian Epstein

Released through Parlophone Records and Capitol Records (We couldn’t find the number of people within each of these who’d be involved, but when The Beatles started Apple Records to release their music, that had a team of 6)

So that’s at least 40 people just to get that far, then you get to the pressing and distribution and retail… 

People routinely think innovation is about creativity. It is not. It is about the steady pursuit of a deliverable, where lots of people play in position to achieve a goal. It is like the difference between passion and love - passion may work well for the early part of a relationship, but it’s love that sustains when it becomes more like work. Most of an album is work, long hours, dedicated hours, boring hours. Most of the people involved do it not for the credit, but to be part of putting something great out, across the universe. And that is why I wanted to write this. For Revolver, substitute any of the great medicines. Drugs are often credited to inventors, but I guarantee that the formulation scientists, the statisticians, the regulatory team - they’re all just as critical to those drugs getting to patients. And that is how we define innovation in pharma - great medicines that create return on invention.