Make it sound like it’s on fire
When Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar on stage, it became iconic. But the flames weren’t the point.
A burning guitar makes no sound.
Hendrix knew that. Long before the lighter fluid, he had already done the harder thing — he made the guitar sound like it was on fire. Distorted, urgent, unstable. You didn’t need to see the flames. You could hear them.
And he wasn’t doing it for effect. He was trying to redraw the boundaries of popular music. Louder. Stranger. Less polite. The distortion wasn’t decoration. It was intent. He didn’t just want to play differently. He wanted to make the old way of playing sound obsolete.
Most leaders don’t get near that.
They announce change. They signal it. They brand it. They set fire to the guitar.
Restructures. Strategies. Resets. It looks dramatic. It reassures boards that something is happening.
But it makes no noise.
Walk into the organisation a week later. The meetings sound the same. The decisions take the same time. The risks avoided are the same risks as before. The culture — the lived experience of work — is untouched.
Most organisations look different. Very few feel different.
Real leadership starts somewhere else. Not with the spectacle, but with the sound.
It changes how things actually work.
Decisions move faster. Disagreement surfaces earlier. Risk is taken in daylight, not buried in committees.
You can hear it in the rhythm of the place — sharper, faster, more alive. Less deference. More edge.
This is not charisma. It is control of the instrument.
Hendrix could push his guitar to the edge because he had total command of it. What sounded like chaos was precision under pressure. Without that, the same moves would have been self-indulgence — noise without meaning.
Leadership is no different. The licence to be unconventional rests on credibility. Not the kind listed on a CV, but the kind that comes from knowing exactly how the organisation behaves when it is under strain. Where decisions stall. Where accountability dissolves. Where risk quietly goes to die.
Without that, bold leadership is just theatre.
Organisations claim they want a Jimi Hendrix. In practice, they recruit Hank Marvin — and call it stability.
Predictable. Controlled. Safe. Easy to explain to boards and ministers. Much less likely to produce uncomfortable noise.
It isn’t just preference. It’s fear.
Because meaningful change is uncomfortable. It rarely sounds like progress at first. It sounds like something breaking.
Faster decisions feel reckless. Open disagreement feels like loss of control. New ideas sound wrong.
Not “bold”. Not “innovative”. Just wrong.
So they are shut down early — not because they are wrong, but because they are unfamiliar.
What is later celebrated as innovation is, in the moment, dismissed as disruption for its own sake. Hendrix did not sound like the future when he started. He sounded like a problem.
That is still how real change arrives.
This is why so much transformation fails. It focuses on visible acts — new structures, new language, symbolic gestures — rather than the harder task of shifting behaviour. Leaders set fire to the guitar and assume the job is done.
But a burning guitar makes no sound.
If people inside the organisation cannot hear the difference — in pace, in candour, in accountability — then nothing of substance has changed.
The performance is dramatic. The experience is not.
Hendrix’s genius wasn’t the fire. It was the clarity of what he was trying to do and the intensity with which he pursued it. The sound came first. The spectacle was optional.
You can’t fake that. And you can’t outsource it.
That is what great leadership looks like.
Not the visible drama of change, but the audible reality of it. Not the illusion of movement, but the unmistakable shift in how things actually work.
Anyone can set fire to the guitar.
Very few can make you hear the flames — even when they’ve left the room.
blairmcpherson.co.uk
