Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift - Hardcover

O'Sullivan, Sinéad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593834933 ISBN 13: 9780593834930

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A guide to the 10 power moves that have built Taylor Swift’s superstardom and empire, from a former Strategist at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy

Taylor Swift’s genius is not limited to her singing and songcraft: as the founder of her own multi-billion dollar enterprise she has higher returns than 99.9% of hedge funds, and has built a stronger global corporation than nearly every other American conglomerate CEO. She is the only person that the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank track with precision. She has a larger impact on the economy than most economists that have ever lived, and has done more for US antitrust law than any sitting member of Congress. There is a lot to learn from Taylor Swift.  

Global investment fund manager and former head of Strategy at HBS (and Swiftie!) Sinead O’Sullivan taps into the same genius that sells out stadiums and shuts down the internet to give Taylor—the CEO, the strategist—the respect she deserves. O’Sullivan sums up Swift’s business savvy into ten big, teachable lessons, including:

-Build a World (Not a Product): how to create value that is greater than the sum of its parts (or, how Taylor created the fan-centered Swiftverse that fosters community, belonging, and off-the-charts engagement)  
-Be Anti-Fragile: how to embrace volatility, build resilience, and thrive in uncertainty--when your competitors can't (or, how Taylor gamed the chaos of Covid shutdown to own the airwaves)
-Don’t Just Play the Game, Change It: how to rewrite the rules on your own terms when your chips are down (or, how Taylor almost lost control of her music catalog to Private Equity—but re-recorded all her masters and took them back)

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sinéad O'Sullivan

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POWER MOVE ONE
Be a Unicorn

Being like Taylor Swift is not impossible. However, it turns out that it's not exactly easy.

"But what happens if you get sick?" I asked my friend, a chef of a two-Michelin-star restaurant, over dinner.

It's a fascinating question, because it really highlighted the difference between our lives. If I were to get sick, I would send a few emails to postpone meetings, and when I'm feeling a bit better, I might even attempt to do some work from bed. This is the ultimate luxury of being a white-collar, work-from-anywhere worker.

My sister, who works in a hospital where she must be physically present to do her job, can even phone in sick and have someone cover her shift. Is it ideal? No. But is it catastrophic? Also no.

A two-Michelin-star restaurant, however, is slightly different.

Six-month waiting lists, for both lunch and dinner, and a small, ninja-like team of the most skilled chefs in the world performing what is essentially microsurgery on food to produce an extremely complex menu at high speed.

When your customers are spending hundreds of dollars per meal, at a minimum, the lowest acceptable outcome is complete perfection.

"Sick? You don't get sick. I haven't had a sick day in years," the chef tells me, baffled by the question in the first place. "It's not an option."

Of the estimated 15 million restaurants in the world, only 0.018 percent of them hold one or more Michelin stars. Of that, only 650 two- or three-Michelin-star restaurants exist today, putting my friend in the top 0.004 percent of chefs in the world.

I thought about a trip I took last winter, a four-hour flight each way with a three-day vacation in between. And afterward, a five-week battle with a chest and sinus infection that I definitely caught at the airport. If I were a chef, would I have not traveled so that I didn't get sick? Or would I have ignored being sick?

Then I thought about Taylor Swift's eighteen-month long Eras Tour across five continents, consisting of 152 shows in some of the most extreme weather conditions on Earth. What the hell? Just how?

I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere in the middle of her Brazilian shows, she performed her three-and-a-half-hour, ten-thousand-calories-burning show, boarded her plane still in her show attire, flew for ten hours to New York, and was papped the next day up to her usual shenanigans of recording a new album, hanging out with celebrity friends, and being the ultimate woman-about-town.

I say this as someone who is exactly the same age as Taylor Swift and would love going to the pub in pajamas to be normalized: How does she do it?

How does she not get sick? How does she have the energy? Has anybody actually verified that she doesn't have a twin?

To put this into the context of where I, part of the Taylor-aged cohort, am, one of my friends texted me yesterday asking me to congratulate her for wearing a bra for the first time in a week.

"I know I'm going on that stage whether I'm sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed. That's part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I'm going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure," Taylor said in a pre-Eras Tour interview.

I'm not entirely sure what the correct single metric for trying to measure Taylor's success as a singer-songwriter would be, and it's likely that the topic could be a long book on its own, but consider that in 2022, thirty-six million songs were released to the public. Figuring out which artist is best among those releasing these millions of songs is complex, but just bear with me when I make the assumption that across these releases, Taylor comes up top.

That means she is 1/36,000,000. Which means she is in the top 0.0000000027 percent of artists releasing music. And that is just wild.

So yeah, we live in a world where there are two types of people: the normal people who try their best to wear bras to work and the Taylor Swifts. The chefs of two-Michelin-star restaurants. The prima ballerinas. The Navy SEALs. The Nobel Prize winners. The statistical outliers.

The Unicorns.

But . . . Unicorns Are
Normal People Too

There is a huge paradox regarding people who do extraordinary things.

In one way, they are just ordinary people like you and me who just so happen to be doing extraordinary things. Sometimes I like to think that even someone as powerful as the president of the United States puts on his pajamas, gets into bed at night, and thinks, "Thank god. Another day at the office done," before watching cat videos on an anonymous account on Twitter.

I happen to be writing this book from a little village in Ireland that houses a beautiful castle, where celebrities sometimes visit. One day, I walked into the tiny corner pub only to be told that I had just missed a global music superstar. "I don't see the big deal," the bar lady retorted across the pub. "He's just another man who sits on the toilet every day, bored like the rest of us."

In fact, some people have not subscribed to the celebrity-culture obsession that has permeated our lives, including most of my friends and family, who are blissfully unaware of any "famous" people and are unable to see Unicorns as anything but ordinary people. The "extraordinary" things they do are seen as nothing more than part of their job, no different from being a builder or an accountant.

And this is, in fact, probably a good way to think about them.

I've had the benefit of meeting, working with, and even befriending many Unicorns, and they are indeed normal people in the ways that make people human. They are insecure. They are scared. They worry about people not liking them. They also find it hard to get dates (I know!). They, too, will stare at their phones wondering if the person they like will ever text them back. They have complex friends and families. They start their day by waking up, jumping in the shower, and wondering whether or not they can get away with using dry shampoo instead of the real stuff.

And this is largely who we think about when we think about Taylor Swift. Or at least this is the way most people have been thinking about her for the last twentyish years. Because she is the ultimate girl next door.

She is a beautiful, ultratalented, successful, fun, witty billionaire that everybody wants to date. But is there anything more relatable than the fact that she still happens to get ghosted by her dates like the rest of us?

The depths of her perceived-and, to a large degree her real-normalcy will be a central theme in later discussions in this book on her strategy, her engagement, and why we all still seem to love her so much despite her success (yes, we typically dislike successful people, and greatly despise successful women).

I mean, being "normal" is her thing. Normality is her multibillion-dollar business. There's nobody who does "normal" better than the most famous and influential billionaire alive, even with her private jets.

But before we get into the specifics of her normalcy, I want to take a chapter, just one, to talk about the ways in which the ordinary people who do extraordinary things are actually pretty damn extraordinary.

Because until you have a good sense of what makes a Unicorn extraordinary, and until you really understand their superpower, it's going to be hard to contextualize just how insanely talented and special they are, and how downright difficult everything they do is.

Or learn how to actually do extraordinary things yourself, as an ordinary person.

You see, all the things that Taylor manages to do, and all her power moves and good ideas and superstardom and cunning cleverness, come from the little bit of "extraordinary" that lives within her.

People...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593834933
• ISBN 13: 9780593834930
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: VIKING; https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY; New York; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland