What All Leaders Can Learn from Taylor Swift
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Hi, I'm Amy Bernstein, HBR's Editor-in-Chief. And I'm Amy Gallo, a longtime contributing editor to HBR. Along with Amy B., I host our Women at Work podcast, which now releases episodes every other Monday, year-round. That means more practical advice and more insights to make you feel seen and supported in your career. Subscribe to Women at Work wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard.

Anyone who's been following pop culture over the past decade knows the story of Taylor Swift. An aspiring teen songwriter, moves to Nashville and becomes a country music ingenue, then a country star. She crosses over into pop and becomes a star in that genre too, while also dabbling in indie rock. She wins multiple Grammys, she breaks album sales and streaming records, and then she does a two-year stadium concert tour that is an absolute sensation. The most popular and highest grossing of all time.

At age 35, she is now probably the most famous woman on the planet. That kind of ascent takes a whole lot of talent, no doubt. But it also takes business savvy, a clear vision, an innovative mindset, smart collaboration, and clever marketing. HBR's own senior editor, Kevin Evers, has done a deep dive into what's made Taylor Swift so successful. And he says there are lots of lessons for corporate leaders, and in fact, anyone trying to get ahead in their career.

He's the author of the new book, There's Nothing Like This, The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift. And he's here today to talk about how to bring a little of her magic to your own organization. Kevin, congrats on the book. I'm so excited to have you here today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Thank you.

First, I want to make sure that you disclose this at the top. You are a longtime HBR editor, a very serious business journalist, but also a longtime Swifty, thanks to your daughter, Macy, right? That is true. My daughter is eight years old now. She's been a Swifty for the last four years or so. She's a hardcore fan. And so you're bringing some fan biases to the table? Maybe a little bit. I did go into this trying to write a book from a neutral and authoritative standpoint, but...

Some of the fandom and my relationship with my daughter definitely played a little bit of a role, for sure. What do you say to people who might be initially skeptical that there are actually things everyday managers and even C-suite leaders can learn from this pop star, this once-in-a-generation talent? I've heard a lot of the skepticism. It did not take much soul-searching, I'll be perfectly honest with you. Taylor Swift...

has been in the music industry for 20 years. She's more successful and popular now than she was 20 years ago. And she was very popular 20 years ago.

She's a great songwriter. She's exceptional at songwriting, and that's contributed mightily to her success. But she has great entrepreneurial instincts. And the fact that she's a female pop star made it even more interesting to me because the music industry is fickle. It's a cutthroat market. But she's been able to find success and scale that success and popularity multiple times.

So after doing all of this research on her rise and longevity, what is one key business applicable lesson that really stood out to you? The first one is her fan obsession. She reminds me of Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos, in a very famous shareholder letter, I'm going to paraphrase here, said, our customers are delightfully dissatisfied. They may tell us that they love our services and that we're doing a great job, but deep down,

Our customers always want more. And it's our job to delight them and to use their dissatisfaction to drive innovation. And I think that fits Taylor to a T. She understands that superstars aren't self-made. They're created by fans. So she goes above and beyond. She has sent her fans Christmas presents. She has invited fans into her home for listening parties. And we saw this at the Eros tour. She could have played...

Two hours, two and a half hours. I think her fans would have been happy. But she plays three and a half hours. She devotes a mini set to every album in her career except her debut. That's going above and beyond. But this is the reason why she's been able to build such long-standing relationships with her fans. Because she doesn't take them for granted and she's always looking for ways to delight them. Talk about how she figures out what her fans want next. You know, how does she figure out how to...

Not just adapt and change, but make the right changes, make the right decisions. I think she has an innate sense of what they want, but she's also a lurker. She's online all the time. And she's our first extremely online superstar. She's used social media to great effect throughout her career. But she's always lurking in those message boards. She's always lurking on TikTok, trying to understand what her fans want.

and trying to find new ways to delight them based on what they're saying on social media. She's notorious for doing things like this. And community building is a big piece of it too, right? So what lessons can consumer-facing companies take away from sort of the guerrilla way that she's done that made people feel as if they have an intimate connection to her even when she has millions of fans and followers?

Her fan community at this point resembles true crime communities on Reddit. There's so much speculation on what she's doing. And Taylor has changed her strategies recently. She used to have a lot of direct contact with her fans on social media, and she doesn't as much anymore. There's more scarcity to her strategy these days. But that has actually increased engagement because whatever she does,

Whether she wears something on an outing and gets shot by a paparazzi or she's at an event, whatever she wears leads to a lot of speculation. And whatever she says on social media leads to a lot of speculation. And a lot of it, she's fueling this fire. She's dropping hints in everything that she does. So every interaction that she has with a fan has potential meaning.

That's really driven engagement, especially in this TikTok era. During the ERAs tour,

Between two and 300 million videos were viewed a day at the peak of the heiress tour about Swift. So she really has this innate sense of building curiosity and engagement with her fans. It's almost like gamification of being a fan. For sure. For sure. And it's in her lyrics, too. I don't think she's trying to game the system with her lyrics, but I do think that it leads fans to speculate. Everything she does increases some sort of engagement with her fans. Okay.

Her initial fan base was this, at the time, untapped market of teenage girls who might be interested in country music. So talk about how she knew that was a market to be tapped and then how she convinced others, you know, in the music industry that she could be the one to do it. This is a classic entrepreneurial story. She seized an opportunity that other people were not.

ignoring. So let's go back. She's 14 years old, 15 years old, and she's trying to make it in country music. And she had a very clear vision for what she wanted to do. And she was very headstrong about this. She wanted to write her own songs, which at the time was rare in country music, especially for someone her age. It's usually done by professional songwriters. And she wanted to write those songs for an audience of her peers, teenage girls. That was a market

that executives in country music, based on data and based on past failures, said that market doesn't exist. And she wanted to put out an album as soon as possible. And country music said, I think you need to wait, right? There's no market for this. But she said, I listen to country music. I'm not hearing songs that talk about my own perspective. My friends are listening to country music. So she was really close to her fan base, her customer base.

While others in country music, they looked at the data and they looked at past experiences and they said, I don't think this is going to work. But it did work. It's a classic blue ocean strategy, right? And this is something that Marvel did also in the 1960s. She went after an audience that people didn't think existed. And because of that, she found great success because she really didn't have much competition once she broke through.

So then how did she expand her fan base, especially when she was entering the really crowded pop music scene without alienating, you know, what we would call her core customer? How did she go big while also maintaining that intimate connection? Classic adjacency strategy. She made sure and her team made sure not to alienate country music. So after her first album, after that first breakout in country music, she

They still maintained a country first attitude. All of her singles went to country radio first, and then they released new versions to pop radio stations, right? So they really made sure that those relationships were fostered and cultivated in country music while at the same time expanding into pop music, right? So she was able to expand her audience into the pop market while not alienating country music at the same time. And that's a strategy that she used

The first three, three and a half albums of her career, and it worked really well for her. What's unique about Swift is she was able to transition out of teen-dom. That's something that a lot of artists struggle to do, right? But because she's been able to transition out of that, it feels like her fans are growing up alongside with her. So that core fan base has always remained. And then, of course, she's evolved her sound over time at the same time.

She moved to pop music. She's recently moved to more of an indie rock sound, and that has brought in new consumers, new fans. There's an authenticity, I think. You know, so she evolves, but it's always authentically and sort of reflecting who she is at the moment.

And so it's almost as if that's what people identify with. And I feel like you can see the same things in corporate America. You know, the brands that sort of always stick to their purpose or values are the ones that consumers, you know, really feel loyal to because they know what they're getting.

So this capacity for innovation and reinvention is pretty astonishing. You know, even though she's at her core a songwriter, always authentic, etc., she has made some colossal changes in terms of her image, in terms of her music. And you say that's a result of productive paranoia. So how did she avoid complacency that many people would feel being as successful as she was early on? And

And then again, sort of pick the right collaborators to ensure that she was changing just enough. Productive paranoia, it's a great term and it fits Taylor to a T.

She has voiced many times in her career that she was worried that her popularity would dwindle. This is something that most artists, especially musical artists, worry about. And businesses, right? And businesses, of course. Look at the startup market. MySpace in 2006 was the biggest social media platform. And now it's Facebook and TikTok and MySpace doesn't exist anymore. Right. Yeah. So she's always had this fear that her popularity may dwindle.

This is something that Elvis also stated. He said, I'm worried that the light will go out just as quickly as it went on. And Swift has also voiced that one of her biggest fears is that her songs will sound the same, that her audience will feel you're not growing. And this has really pushed her to make bold decisions at times when you wouldn't think that she really had to make such bold decisions.

So she made this huge transition to pop music in 2014. She left country music completely behind. She had three straight number one albums at that time. Her strategy of going after country music and pop was a great strategy. It was working really well for her.

But she decided, because she's a personal brand and she's a songwriter, that her music was evolving, her personal tastes were evolving, and she thought it would be much better for her and her fans if she chased what she was really passionate about. And in that case, it was pure pop music. That was risky. But again, it ended up really working out for her because she had multiple number one hits. And that album, 1989, is one of the best-selling albums of the 2010 decade.

So the advice for business leaders then is, you know, to be paranoid, to always be questioning your market position and figuring out ways to sort of pivot and capture new markets or move in a new direction so that you don't stay complacent. Yes. And be paranoid when things are going well. I think that's the key point here. And there's been research on this. Morten Hansen has done research on this. He looked at leaders across all different industries and he found that

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You mentioned MySpace before, and it is really amazing to think that Taylor started her career before the rise of all the social media platforms, before streaming, and she's now really thriving in this new digital era. So what were the key skills or strategies she used to make sure that she was ahead of a game when it came to all these new technologies? If you look at the Eris tour and how successful it was, it was successful because Swift had radically adapted her strategies,

to account for the changing behaviors of listeners in the streaming age. If you go back to 2019, Swift had arguably plateaued. She wasn't growing as quickly as she had earlier in her career. So she made big changes. She used to have a very precious release strategy. It's a very classic traditional strategy. Every two years, she'd release a new album. It would come out with great fanfare. She'd make a big deal out of it. Mass media push everywhere.

She'd go on tour, she'd stop, and then do it again. But around 2020 or so, she turned very prolific. In the last five years, she has released four studio albums, and she has released four re-recordings. She has two more re-recordings to go, and rumors are she'll release a new studio album soon as well. So that's a huge shift for her. That is so much content.

And it's a strategy that Marvel has used and Star Wars has used and other companies that have great IP. It's really hard to engage consumers and fans and listeners at this stage because of streaming and the attention economy. But once you have their attention, it's important to continually engage them. And that's what Swift has done. And I don't think the Heiress tour would have received so much demand otherwise.

if she didn't change her strategy to adjust to streaming and our changing behaviors in the attention economy. Now, she has been criticized for sort of insinuating that a lot of these moves are, you know, intuitive, whereas people think, no, this is totally calculated and you're more a businesswoman than you are a musician. What do you make of that?

I think her decisions are very intuitive, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's a good thing. She has a real innate sense of what her fans want and what she should be doing. She received an Innovator of the Year award by iHeartRadio a few years ago. And she said, I don't wake up every day saying, I'm going to innovate today. She really looks at the environment and she does what's best for her. And I think that's a big reason for her success. She's not a copycat.

She really has an innate sense of what she should be doing. And we saw this with her re-record project, right? That's another decision that seemed kind of crazy on paper. She decided to re-record all of her old music. Not re-release it, re-record it. And she was essentially telling her fans, don't listen to the old stuff, listen to the new recordings. And that was because her...

initial manager, Scott Borchetta, had owned the rights to the Masters. He then sold it to Scooter Braun, a producer who Taylor didn't like or respect or trust. And so she said, I don't want this guy to own my music. Yes, exactly. It was a classic battle between people who own stuff and people who make stuff. And people who make stuff usually lose those battles because they don't have a lot of leverage. And Swift didn't have much leverage either. Right.

But the only leverage she had was the fan community that she had built for so long. I think she knew innately that whatever decision that she made, that her fans would rally behind her. And that's exactly what they've done. Because those four re-recordings that she's released have been number one hits on the Billboard 200. So you mentioned that she is a woman in a male-dominated industry. How do you think that that's changed the way...

both she's perceived and then also the way she has operated and navigated in that environment. It's had a big impact on how she's perceived. Taylor's career follows a modified version of Newton's third law. For every positive reaction, there's an equal or greater negative reaction. And we saw this from the very early days of her career. Now, traditionally, artists who have predominantly female fan bases aren't taken that seriously. You can even go back to the Beatles.

Now, the Beatles are obviously a sensation, but that term Beatlemania, there's this idea that female fans are more driven by emotion and they're not driven by logic.

And this has affected Taylor in her career. She's gone through many controversies, especially earlier on in her career. We can go back to 2009 when Kanye West rushed the stage at the VMAs and took her microphone and said, I'm going to let you finish, but Beyonce has had the greatest video of all time. And what he was saying is you don't deserve to be here. You're not talented enough. And Swift was heavily criticized throughout her career.

for this, that her voice wasn't good enough, that she had a princess fixation, that her lyrics were twee. But I think what's really important about Taylor is that she has turned these moments into...

opportunities for empowerment for her and her fans, that even when she's faced these controversies and these harsh criticisms, she's doubled and tripled down on what she does best. And she did this after the Kanye controversy with her third album. She said, if you're going to criticize me, I'm going to write this album all by myself. I'm not going to use co-writers. And then she used that

as a big selling point for the album. That was a big part of the promotional campaign. She finds ways to improve and grow based on those criticisms, but also grow closer to her fans in the process. There's also been a lot of reporting on the kind of leadership that she showed during the course of the ERA's tour. You know, it was a massive operation. She wasn't obviously managing the day-to-day logistics of it,

But she did oversee the team, you know, for two years. So what most interested you about the way that she managed that? She's very humble. I've never met her in person. I've never talked to her, but... Soon, hopefully. Soon. Maybe, maybe. Who knows? Who knows? My daughter would be delighted. Yeah, she's very humble. Again, she's been doing this for 20 years. If she wasn't humble or if there's something off about her personality or if...

Her persona or the way that she presents herself to the world was manipulative or a fraud. We would know by now. And even though she's very headstrong and she makes bold decisions, she's humble, right? I think she understands that she's not self-made. She's created by her fans. And she's always had this innate sense that the people around her are just as important people.

as she is. And we saw this when she gave bonuses to her truck drivers and her crew, big bonuses, like over a hundred thousand dollars to her truck drivers. And you can see it in the air store. You can see that she's in control of every aspect of that production. And I think fans can sense that, right? I went twice to the air store with my daughter and she,

It was very clear that every detail was well thought out. It seemed like a very personal experience, even though we were watching a show with 70,000 other people. It's interesting. You think about the other musical acts that have been as commercially successful.

as Taylor Swift, you know, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, the stories around them weren't necessarily that they were savvy business people. You know, it's that they had good teams around them who knew how to make the best of their music and their talent. But with Taylor, it really does seem that she is the one in charge. Did your research confirm that, that it's really her talent

Driving the show? Yes, for sure. You could see it when she was 14, 15 years old. You could see it at every moment of her career. You can tell that she's the CEO of her own career. She has a great team around her. She runs her business like a small family business. Her parents are involved. Her brother is involved. And many of the members on her team have been there since the very beginning.

So, yes, she is the CEO of her own career and much of the decisions are driven by Taylor herself. But she also has a great team that she's been extremely loyal to over the last two decades. Yeah. And she trusts all of them, too. For sure. Yeah. So just to wrap up, you know, we've covered the sort of business lessons for managers and executives.

But I'm also really interested to hear what you think that each of us, you know, working in our day-to-day jobs can learn from Taylor. You know, how can we make better career decisions based on what she's done? You know, when Macy gets her first job, what's one way that you think she can bring like a Taylor Swift sensibility to whatever workplace she chooses? What I would tell my daughter is, based on my own research on Taylor Swift,

is keep creating stuff. Like whatever you do, don't stop. There's so many times in our careers where we stall, we struggle, and Taylor Swift has gone through all of that. She's gone through many challenges and many controversies, but the reason why she is as popular and successful as she is today is because she's never stopped making music. She's never stopped.

Every two years, she's released a new album. Didn't matter what was going on in her life or what was going on in her career at the time. And of course, over the last five years, that output has accelerated. And I think that's really important. I just wrote a book and I want to take a nap. But, you know, it's important that I keep going. I keep promoting and maybe I'll write another book.

I think that's important for all of us to know. We all hit plateaus in our career. We all struggle, but it's important to push as hard as we can every day. Yeah. Keep finding the thing that lights your fire, I guess, and pursue it. Keep going. And don't get complacent. Yeah. That's something that Taylor Swift has never...

has never been, and that's complacent. She's always trying to adapt and grow. Kevin, thank you so much. It's been terrific talking to you about this. Thank you. This was fun.

That's Kevin Evers, senior editor at Harvard Business Review and author of the book, There's Nothing Like This, The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift. And we now have more than a thousand IdeaCast episodes, plus many more HBR podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org slash podcasts or search HBR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Du, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhart. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Alison Beard.