Season 1: Episode 8 - The Tour Bus Test

...summer camp or sinking ship?

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the good(?) fortune to be out on the road with many of the artists I worked with while they were touring. I've always thought about how well the touring party serves as an effective example of the important role values alignment plays when working in groups or teams. Allow me to explain.

Most of them were not touring at an exceedingly high-level, so that meant vans, shared hotel rooms and lots and lots of time spent jammed together in boring crowded spaces. Even when a band was able to afford a tour bus, economics would usually dictate 12 people sharing a bus, spending show days sleeping in the casket-like bunks (surprisingly cozy once you get used to it) to minimize the expense of hotel rooms.

In these circumstances, cooped up together for weeks and often months at a time and in very close quarters, you can only begin to imagine how significant a role the people you are surrounded by play in whether that tour feels like heaven—or hell.

I’ve been on…