Kevin Evers, a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review, is well-versed in the winning moves and missteps of business leaders.
In his new book,“There's Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift,” Evers takes a run at a case study of Swift’s strategic business moxie, which has propelled her stardom and wealth from a teenager singing in a Tennessee mall to a multibillion-dollar global business.
I asked Evers to share his analysis of what we can all learn from Swift about managing our careers and more. Below are excerpts of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Kerry Hannon: What are the big lessons startup founders or those of us managing career shifts can learn from how Taylor Swift has managed her career?
Kevin Evers: If you look at the early part of her career, the reason why she found so much success and popularity early on is that she tried to seize an opportunity that others had ignored. She was a teenager trying to write music for teenage girls, and the consensus in country music was there's no audience for that. She really pushed, and she ended up breaking into a market that others had ignored.
I don't think we'd be sitting here today talking about Taylor Swift if she hadn't been so headstrong about the artist she wanted to be and the market she wanted to reach.
Part of Taylor's success is that she's a great storyteller. What role can storytelling play for the rest of us as we pivot and change?
Storytelling is huge. Taylor never lets change just sit by itself. She always talks to her fans in a very intimate and personal way and explains why she's making changes. The biggest example of this is when she left country music behind and went full-on pop with her album "1989."
Around that time there were so many other artists who were coming up with novel ways to release their music. U2 partnered with Apple; Jay-Z partnered with Samsung; Beyoncé surprise dropped her album, but Taylor decided to have a livestream where she could talk to fans directly. She acted like an over-caffeinated "Good Morning America" host. And she talked in very personal terms. She talked about her change as a form of personal development and growth. If she didn't do that, I'm not so sure her fans would've gone along with the change so gracefully.
That's a really important point — you need to communicate why you're making changes, your values, and why that change is important for the people, your customers, your partners, or other relationships that you have.
What are the top leadership qualities that make her successful?
Talent is important. Skills are important, but Taylor has known from very early on in her career that her relationships are probably her most scalable asset.
She goes above and beyond for her fans, and that's really critical to her success. Her action shows that she understands that superstars aren't self-made, they're created by fans.
You could say the same thing for the rest of us too. Yes, it's important to be talented. Yes, it's important to grow your skills, but it's fostering those relationships around us that really contribute the most to our success.
You have a quote in the book from her: “What I tried to do is make the right decisions for me.” How can we learn from that mindset?
So many times when we're trying to do something new or trying to grow in our careers, we look around us, we look to copy other people — what have other people done?
But what makes Taylor so successful is she's always done what's right for her. She's never sat in a boardroom, at least as far as I know, and tried to strategize on what's the best way to go about something. She always looks at the context, and she does what's right for her. If she had tried to copy other people, I'm not so sure that she would've found such popularity and success.
What can we learn from how she navigated her missteps?
She's had plenty of missteps. What's important is she has a way of turning those missteps into sources of empowerment for her and her fans.
For example, in 2009, she had a very controversial moment at the "MTV Video Music Awards," where Kanye West went on stage, stole her microphone, and said, “I'm going to let you finish. But Beyoncé had the best video of all time.”
So what Kanye was saying is, you're not talented enough, you don't belong here. And Taylor has since said that that was a pretty devastating moment for her. Afterward, she was heavily criticized for her voice, her persona. She took some of that criticism to heart with her third album. She really tried to improve her vocals with vocal lessons. She turned that into a moment of growth.
But she also turned it into a moment of empowerment because, for that third album, she said, well, if you're going to criticize me, well, I'm going to write this album all by myself. I'm not going to use any co-writers. Then, she used that as promotion for her album to her fans. It turned into a moment of empowerment for her.
Author Kevin Evers and daughter at a Taylor Swift concert (Photo courtesy of Kevin Evers) ·photo courtesy of Kevin Evers
How does Taylor exemplify strategic thinking?
It’s hard to manage a career and gain new skills, to realize what skills you need, but it's much easier to navigate if you can find your own niche. And that's exactly what Taylor did. As all these other artists and all these other record companies were fighting over the same radio placements, Taylor saw an opportunity. She saw how she was different, and then she maximized that difference to great success.
That's something we can all learn from. You need to find your niche and then develop your strengths and your vision based on that niche.
What about gut instinct?
Taylor's very intuitive. This is something that surprised me the most when I wrote this book because she has a reputation for being calculated — and not in a good way.
I found that she's very intuitive. She makes a lot of her decisions based on gut instincts. And that doesn't mean that she's shooting from the hip. That instinct comes from experience and her clear vision for the artist she wants to be. If you look at a lot of her decisions, they're not based on boardroom analytics. She's not sitting around with her team and looking at the data and trying to strategize. Her move to pop music was driven by the fact that her musical tastes were evolving. She was more interested in pop music than country music. And so she went for it.
You write that she has commented that whenever anyone tells her she can’t do something, she wants to do it more. Elaborate?
Mindset is critical. She built her career on a more prevention-focused mindset about building trust and consistency and not changing so much that she alienated her fans. She really protected her music and really protected her brand. She didn't want to change too much. It was incremental changes, not rocking the boat.
Then when she moved to pop, that was a bold decision. She was very vocal about why she was making these changes. She was in her mid-twenties and she framed it as that. She's said: My life has changed, so my music needs to change with it. That mindset helped her push through because she got a lot of pushback from her team.
Taylor Swift performs on stage at the Paris La Defense Arena as part of her The Eras Tour, in Nanterre, northwestern France, on May 9, 2024. (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP) ·JULIEN DE ROSA via Getty Images
A lot of entrepreneurs get to a point where they built their product, and they think it should just speak for itself. How does Taylor’s approach toss that in the water?
One of the biggest mistakes founders make is that they're obsessed with their product, but they're not equally obsessed with their customers or their users.
Taylor is equally obsessed with her fans as she is with her product. She always has been. She's always gone to great lengths to delight her fans. She reminds me of a quote from Jeff Bezos in one of his shareholder letters, and I'm going to paraphrase here, but he said, our customers are delightfully dissatisfied. They may say that they like our business and they like our products, but deep down, customers always want more. And it's our job to delight them, to continually find new ways to delight them.
That fits Taylor to a T. Her actions have always shown that she knows that the fans are what got her here and that it's her job to continually delight them and to grow those relationships.
