DJ Teta
mathematician · musicologist · DJ · alchemist · strategist
“Music isn’t just what you listen to.
It’s what you’re willing to become in order to understand it.”
DJ Teta’s Weekly Song
One song a week. Not the most famous, not the most recent. The right one — for reasons only Teta can explain the way he does.
Waltzing Along by James is one of those songs that don’t ask your permission. They take you by the hand and lead you somewhere you didn’t know you wanted to go.
That’s what music does when it truly works — it doesn’t accompany life, it decides it. For three minutes and forty-six seconds, at least.”
The Manifesto Note
Every month Teta takes one of the sixteen words from his Manifesto and puts it to the test — in the journey, in music, in real life. What the sixteen words are — and how they fit together — you’ll discover in the book.
Music, Leadership and People
Before becoming a DJ Alchemist, Teta led teams, ran organisations, managed people in complex settings. Music and leadership share more than you’d think.
A conductor plays no instrument during the concert. And yet determines how everything sounds. What can Bernstein teach a CEO?
Here’s a fact that always surprises people the first time they hear it: a conductor, during a concert, produces zero useful decibels. They don’t play. They don’t sing. They wave their arms in the air, often with a little stick, in front of people who in many cases can read music better than they can. And yet, change the conductor and the same orchestra, with the same notes, sounds measurably different. It isn’t magic — it’s the management of relative time: the difference between ninety professionals each playing their own part correctly, and ninety professionals playing their parts in the same emotional instant.
Leonard Bernstein used to say that the podium’s hardest task isn’t keeping time — a metronome does that, and it costs twenty quid. The task is deciding which voice should emerge, and when, without ever playing an instrument with your own hands. It’s the exact opposite of “I’ll do it myself because I do it better,” which is every manager’s favourite trap once they’ve come up through a solid technical background — this writer included, before learning the lesson the hard way.
The operational paradox: the better a leader is, the less they should play. If you still catch them at the first violin, they’re probably not conducting — they’re simply refusing to leave the stage.
Feedback doesn’t work when it’s too loud. It works when it’s at the right frequency — at the right moment, with the right words, to the right person.
Behind the decks there’s a distinction every DJ learns in their first week, and one that oddly few managers ever learn: volume and frequency are not the same variable. Turning up the volume of a piece of feedback — saying it louder, repeating it more often, writing it in capitals in the email — doesn’t make it more effective. It just makes it more annoying, exactly like a bassist who thinks he can fix a poor mix by turning his own knob all the way up.
Feedback that genuinely changes behaviour isn’t the kind that’s shouted. It’s the kind that arrives at the exact frequency that person, at that specific point in their career, can actually hear — which sometimes means quieter, not louder; sometimes means waiting for Tuesday instead of Friday afternoon; sometimes means a single sentence instead of a three-point speech nobody will remember past the first point.
An equaliser doesn’t turn everything up. It cuts the useless frequencies and lets the ones that matter breathe. The best feedback I’ve ever received in my life lasted eleven seconds. The worst, forty-five minutes — and I don’t remember a single word of it.
Jazz lives in improvisation. But the best jazz musicians know theory better than anyone. Freedom and structure aren’t opposites — they presuppose each other.
There’s a very British myth about jazz improvisation worth politely dismantling: the idea that the musician steps on stage and “lets the genius flow”, with no net beneath them. In reality, whoever improvises best is almost always the one who knows the scales, the chords and the harmonic theory so deeply that they can consciously forget them for the three minutes of the solo. It isn’t freedom from structure. It’s freedom inside a structure internalised so well it becomes instinct.
It works identically in teams, with one typically English variant: many managers mistake “let’s give the team autonomy” for “let’s provide no framework whatsoever and hope for the best”, which is a bit like asking someone to improvise a solo without ever having taught them the scales. The result isn’t jazz. It’s noise, with more meetings.
Real autonomy is built the other way round: structure first — clear, shared, almost boring in its precision — and only then, and only then, the space for improvisation within that structure. Miles Davis never played a single random note in his life. He just made the work behind it invisible.
Sixteen words born from music. They work surprisingly well in managing people too — and in how you build something that lasts.
I didn’t write the Manifesto with leadership in mind. I wrote it thinking about a DJ set that wasn’t working — too much energy too soon, no patience, no reading of the room. Only afterwards, looking back at the teams I’d led before this life behind the decks, did I notice the mistakes were exactly the same: coming in too hot without tuning in first, pushing the volume instead of finding the frequency, mistaking structure for a cage.
The sixteen words remain reserved for those who’ve read the book — that’s a deliberate choice, not an editorial whim. But I can share the principle that holds them together: each word describes, at the same time, a moment behind the decks and a moment in the life of an organisation. It isn’t a metaphor forced on after the fact. It’s the exact same mechanics, observed from two different rooms.
If you lead people and haven’t reached the end of the novel yet: good news, the framework works even halfway through. Bad news for the British efficiency in me: I won’t shorten it for you.