While the Beatles blazed a trail to global fame, the Rolling Stones followed close behind, turning setbacks into strategic advantages. Author Rich Cohen uncovers the surprising business insights hidden in their competition.

The road to success in business is riddled with setbacks. Your software crashes, systems are hacked, products get lost in the cargo hanger, delayed by traffic, caught up in a strike, or end up addressing a need that no longer exists. You get knocked down? You get up and go again, as both Joe Biden and Mike Ditka advise. You fail better, then move on, sharpened by experience.

To anyone involved in a creative endeavor, which is everyone with an idea, the particularly paralyzing setback arrives with some version of the phrase: “Somebody is already doing that” (making that, selling that, singing that…). For whatever reason, new ideas seem to arise in not one but several minds at the same time. In twos or threes they come, like stunt riders at the rodeo. Genius is less invention than reception. The revolutionary idea is not created but received. It’s a signal tuned in from an offshore pirate radio station.

It happened in the 1600s, when Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz discovered calculus almost simultaneously, in the 1700s, when Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen at nearly the same moment. It happened with Natural Selection in the 1800s, with radio in 1920s, with TV in the 1950s, with the microchip in the 1960s.

Being told your invention or discovery has already been invented or discovered can be utterly deflating, the sort of development that causes you to burn your notebooks and seek out the nearest monastery. But this response is wrong. In case after case, reaching the market second has proven not only survivable but preferable. In hockey, it’s often the trailer, the forward who arrives late to the play, who scores. At NASA, it was the second group of astronauts, those who did not make the cut for the Mercury program, who actually got to walk on the moon.

Take the example of the Rolling Stones. Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts. The band, formed in the underground dives of post-war London, was designed as a hybrid, a way to turn something great but obscure (Chicago blues) into something new and sales-worthy (rock ’n’ roll).

In 1962, when not playing shows, the Stones met in their shabby walk-up at 102 Edith Grove in Chelsea to reverse-engineer and remake tunes by Chuck Berry and the Everly Brothers. In October, just months from finding their sound, Brian Jones, who founded the Stones, bounded up the stairs with a new record.

“Listen to this!”

Everyone gathered around, their young, handsomely ugly mugs staring at the spinning red Parlophone label with silver letters and silver words: “Love Me Do.” It was the first Beatles single, a song that was soon blasting from every radio and open door in Britain.  The Stones had never heard of the Beatles, a band following a parallel trajectory in Liverpool, which, as far as Jones and Jagger were concerned, was the sticks. The Stones’ initial reaction – Listen to the harmonica! The harmonies! These guys are great! – gave way to despondency. Might as well hang it up. They’ve already done it.

But, seeing as nothing else awaited them but careers in business or advertising, they did not quit, and persisted instead. With time, it’s become clear that the Stones’ bad luck was good luck. That arriving second would serve the Stones in many ways. It’s a lesson for all those who, beaten to market, might be on the verge of quitting.

Here are five ways that coming in second helped the Rolling Stones.

The pop charts were dominated by crooners and bubble gum acts when the Beatles arrived. Hardcore electric guitar bands, the amped-up blues, were thought to have no audience beyond aficionados. The Beatles had already been rejected by half a dozen record companies when George Martin, a producer at a small label called Parlophone, took a flyer on the band.

“Love Me Do,” which reached number 17 on the UK charts and topped the U.S. charts in the spring of 1963, put all the record men who’d turned down the Beatles to shame. This success and failure – success for the band, failure for the execs – remade the landscape for the Stones, who found themselves auditioning for producers who now knew there was a market, and did not want to blow it a second time.

When Dick Rowe signed the Stones to Decca in May 1963, he did it partly because he’d rejected the Beatles – a fact that would appear, as he feared, in the first graph of his obituary. He feared being known as the man who turned down both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. By getting bested by the Beatles, the Stones arrived at a market that had been remade – terraformed – for their success.

Because many of their influences were Black artists who could not get time on white radio and played the kind of songs that got kids dancing close, Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles, worked hard to sell the group as clean-cut and unthreatening. Hence the matching haircuts and suits. Hence the bubblegum interviews with fan magazines. Hence the radio-safe lyrics: “Love me do.” “I want to hold your hand.” “She loves you yeah yeah yeah.” 

When Bob Dylan told the Beatles he assumed their first single contained a coded reference to reefer (“I get high, I get high, I get high”), John Lennon was dumbfounded. Dylan rolled them a joint in response, changing the world.

Because they’d arrived on a scene already dominated by the Beatles, Andrew Loog Oldham, the PR man who managed the Stones, was able to market them as a kind of anti-Beatles. They’re clean, we’re dirty. They’re safe, we’re dangerous. As Keith put it, “The Beatles were wearing the white hats when we arrived. That left us the black hats.”

Oldham arranged PR stunts accordingly: he got the Stones kicked out of hotels and restaurants, making sure the press was there to cover the brouhaha. He encouraged lascivious lyrics: “Let’s Spend the Night Together;” “Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” He designed ads that showed the unkempt band members over the question: “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” By staking such a clear squeaky-clean identity, the Beatles had opened a niche in the market for the Stones.

The Beatles arrived in New York on February 7, 1964.  John Kennedy had been assassinated just three months before. December, January… those had been dark, brutal days. America was in mourning. Millions of people, especially the kids, were aching for a change. Though they arrived in advance of spring, the coming of the Beatles did indeed feel like a change of season. People grew obsessed with the band and the new life they seemed to represent. (“And now,” to quote Monty Python, “for something completely different.”)

The Beatles were soon the object of a frightening hysteria. It was, in many ways, too much of a good thing. It would’ve crushed most people to powder. The Beatles were able to survive, though not unchanged. The Stones, as well as the other members of the so-called British music invasion, were afforded the luxury of riding into America behind the Beatles, who took the brunt. Arriving second can mean slipping the curse of too much attention – another gift the Beatles afforded the Stones.

Competition is good. Being late to the market can be seen as a setback, but it can also be accepted as a gift. Setbacks are merely obstacles. In working to overcome them, you get stronger. How do we know that Muhammed Ali was the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time? Because he was gifted with great fighters to overcome: Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, George Forman. Unbeatable as he seemed, we will never really know where to rate the pre-Don-King Mike Tyson – because he had no true rivals, no one worthy to struggle against, no way to be valued. In other words, without Joe Frazier, Muhammed Ali would not be Muhammed Ali.

It was just like that with the Beatles and the Stones. Brian and Mick cursed when they heard “Love Me Do,” but they should have been counting their blessings. By being out front for years, blazing the path and topping the charts, the Beatles gave the Stones a path and a target. By the time Beatles split up in 1974, the Stones, having sharpened their image and sound against the whetstone of the Beatles, were ready to become the world’s greatest rock band.

Nothing can prepare a person for the pop-star level of fame. It can twist your mind and drive you mental. To be turned into a living deity is to be separated from everything and everyone you have ever known and loved. It’s the ultimate mind f—. Don’t believe me? Just look at the long list of rock star casualties. Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin. Jim Morrison. Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse as more recent examples. Almost all of them had been in search of a narcotic escape.

Worst off are those who have to ford that river alone, the classic example being Elvis. Why did the King wear jumpsuits festooned with piping and jewels? Why did he retreat to the velvet half-light of Vegas? Because he’d come to believe he was in fact a Sun God. Because he’d gone mad. Fame like that is a roller coaster that civilians can’t imagine. For the uber famous, no relationship can be trusted: what does he really want from me? Why is this person calling himself my friend? Hence the paranoia of the rock star.

The Stones had internal rivalries, which breeds its own kind of paranoia, and so had to reach out to the members of the other band for sympathy and advice. The Beatles knew exactly what the Stones were experiencing. That’s why Jagger and Lennon hung out in New York. When your life is utterly strange, it’s good to know people who have been through it.

All to say, when you experience what seems like a misfortune – getting beat to market, say – sit back and wait. You need only look to the story of Apple, whose late-mover perfectionist philosophy is well documented, to see how beneficial this approach can be. (See: PC graphical interface, the mouse, iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch…).  It might turn out to be your luckiest break.

Whether you’re pioneering or fast-following, we’d love to help you bring your most important digital visions to life. Get in touch to see how we can do that.

Rich Cohen is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, a co-creator of the HBO series Vinyl, an Editor at Large at Air Mail, and a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. He has written for Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. Most recently, Rich is the author of When the Game Was War: the NBAs Greatest Season. This article is part of our Beatles vs. Stones series, which also includes The Beatles, Stones, and the Algorithm and What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Beatles vs. Stones.

Two bands, two paths to greatness – while the Beatles changed the world in a few short years, the Rolling Stones built a legacy that endures today. Author Rich Cohen reveals the business lessons hidden in their journeys. 

For those of us who love business like we love rock ‘n’ roll, the world offers two great models. They are case studies for how to thrive as an organization: the Beatles and the Stones. 

The Beatles came first – they recorded their debut single, “Please, Please Me,” in a ten-hour session on February 11, 1963. They caught fire quicker, and burned brighter. The Rolling Stones, who, led by guitarist Brian Jones in that original iteration, nicked their name from a Muddy Waters tune (“Got a boy child coming, gonna be a rollin’ stone”), took longer to ignite, but burned longer.

The Stones’ debut, a weak jumpy cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” was released in June 1963. It did become a minor hit, but only because Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham sent the band’s friends and groupies into the record stores to buy out the first pressing. In other words, the Stones started after the Beatles, and, for that first seven years, from 1963 (“Please Please Me!”) to 1970 (“Let It Be”) when the Beatles split, trailed like a shambolic prince in their wake.

And yet, creatively freed by the dissolution of the Beatles – they last recorded together in 1969 – and thus the need to give chase, the Stones would put together the greatest run of LPs in rock history: Beggars Banquet (1968), Let it Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), and Exile on Main Street (1972). Like DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or Gretzky’s 1,963 career assists, it’s a record that will never be matched. Then they continued, producing solid and occasionally great sides in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and beyond. Their most recent album, Hackney Diamonds, was released in October 2023, by which time only two of the founding Stones – Mick and Keith – were still going. 

If you approach the careers of these bands as if they were case studies, you will come away with lessons. Call it the Beatles vs. the Stones: tips for business. 

They functioned beautifully as a band, but it was their writing that made them the Beatles. It was the strength that came from their individual talents. Between sessions, the bandmates went off to compose alone. Each Beatle was told to come back with at least one new tune. As a result, the Beatles, blessed with three of the 20th century’s great songwriters (sorry, Ringo), were able to tap the power of the individual to assemble a wildly diverse catalog, with works ranging from rock ‘n’ roll, to beer hall ballad, to showtune. 

The resulting battle of egos, with each Beatle trying to top the other, pushed them forward. Forever competing, forever inventing, forever new. It was a wave you could not ride forever. It was an engine pushed into the red. It sparked until the machine itself caught fire. 

The leeway given the individual, how each Beatle was allowed to find his own way, would eventually tear the band apart. It took just seven years. Proximate causes might be suggested – (“It was Yoko”; “It was George”) – but the split was inevitable. The freedom to grow was also the freedom to grow apart. And so that great corporation dissolved like salt in water.

They were built as a pale version of a Chicago blues band, and never aspired to be anything less or more than the equal of the electric combos Leonard and Phil Chess recorded at the Chess Records studio at 2120 South Michigan Avenue. Mick and Keith were tapped to write the songs, but did so less as individuals than as representatives of the band. They wrote for the Stones. They were its heart. Charley Watts (drums) and Bill Wyman (bass) were its engine. Brian Jones (lead guitar) was its musical gift. He was the best musician – as the first slide guitar player on the scene in London, Brian had performed as Elmo James – but could neither write hits nor cope with fame. 

Because they couldn’t match the creativity of the Beatles, the Stones were left in the wake during the first years of the British Invasion, trying and failing to copy Lennon and McCartney. Her Satanic Majesties Request was the Stones’ lame attempt to match the psychedelic weirdness and chart-topping success of Sergeant Pepper’s. And yet, while the Beatles eventually burned through their fuel, the Stones always had the mothership – the band and the blues, with its twelve bar structure and slangy lyrics – to carry them through.

While creating Seinfeld, Larry David famously told the writers that unlike Happy Days or All in the Family, there would be no character development on his show. “No hugging, no learning.” Each episode would end where it began, with the same cynical people having come away with neither moral nor lesson. Learning would mean improving, and improving would mean changing, and this is what leads to Archie Bunker speechifying on Civil Rights and Fonzy jumping the shark. 

Brian Jones expressed a similar sentiment in those first years with the Stones. Forget hit records and pop tunes. We’re a blues band. Stay close to that vision, and we’ll never get lost. At their best, the Stones have remained a bar band, at home in a rank club – two bucks at the door, ripple and Chivas at the bar – where, as Muddy Waters said, people party from  “Can ‘til can’t.” 

It was the doctrine that saved the Stones whenever they strayed. The badness of Satanic Majesties almost killed them, but the hard-driving tune that followed, “Jumpin Jack Flash,”  put them back on the rails. They might have limited themselves by sticking to that original vision, but it pointed north and saved them again and again.

If they had a founding vision, it was the love of music. If anything, they in fact seemed opposed to self-imposed constraints. No rules means the freedom to lay down your own tracks, to build your own railroad. They followed inspiration, instead, letting it carry them from early hard-driving tunes like the nearly punk “I Saw Her Standing There” all the way to “The Long and Winding Road,” which is less Joe Strummer than Marvin Hamlisch. 

But here’s the problem – the Beatles got so far from the music they’d played in Liverpool it became impossible to find their way back. Free to drift with every whim, they eventually drifted apart, with each Beatle lost in his own trippy dream by the early 1970s. Absent the anchoring terra firma of a strategic plan, the Beatles microbus drove straight off a cliff.

The band had two and possibly three, four, or even five leaders. There were John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who sat together in the pilot house, but also George Harrison, who gained strength as the years passed. Brian Epstein, the rich kid who discovered, managed, and promoted the band, and George Martin, the producer who mixed the records. It was Martin who added the classical elements that put the Beatles ahead of their time, which is why some call George Martin the Fifth Beatle. 

In the way of an executive board or politburo, the Beatles made decisions as a rivalrous collective, battling until a consensus emerged, a synthesis that was often greater than any of the original ideas. The result was friction, the tension out of which the Beatles’ breathtaking dynamism emerged. But it also caused jam-ups and feuds. That’s why more and more time elapsed between each new album. The Beatles slowed and slowed until they stopped recording altogether. The band was arguably at its greatest at the end – that’s what it means to burn out. 

Brian Jones founded the group, which started with a newspaper ad answered by Mick and Keith. Jones named it and laid out the vision. He taught Jagger how to play blues harmonica and how to dress. But Mick was the frontman, and the girls and journalists love the frontman. In this way, Jagger became the focus and then used that focus to wrest control from Brian, who sulked himself to death. For a time, it seemed like it would be Mick and Keith  (The Glimmer Twins) together at the helm, but Keith fell for heroin, taking himself out of command, leaving Jagger as a kind of  CEO.

It was the power that came with this office, as well as his business savvy, determination, and the realization that he’d never be as valuable to the world as a solo act as he was as a Rolling Stone, that enabled Jagger to push the band on and on. Though the Stones faced all the crises of big-time rock and roll  – drugs busts, trials, jail time, jealousies – the CEO-like power of Jagger allowed him to carry the band through the ‘80s, ‘90s, and beyond. Lesson: if you have a good leader, let him lead. 

As a business leader, if you’re lucky, you get to choose where you work. But you typically inherit your organization, which becomes yours to shape and mold. Or, if you’re a founder, you get to create your own organization from the start. Are you like the Beatles or the Stones? Figure that out, you will know how to survive and prosper. If you find yourself in the Beatles, you should behave more like the Stones. And vice versa. 

For non-musical cases in point, look no further than Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft started with stone cold, focused ambition like the Stones, but found new heights of success by embracing the Beatles-y creativity of gaming, open-source code, and artificial intelligence. And Apple has reached stratospheric new heights of success under efficiency-minded CEO Tim Cook, becoming the first U.S. company to reach a trillion-dollar valuation. 

On the other hand, sometimes the lesson is blurred. Apple struggled in the late ‘80s when the company shifted away from visionary innovation to focus on business and profitability, and an expansive product line under John Sculley. Yet, in his later venture NeXT, Jobs might have succeeded had he not massively overindulged on innovation. It could be that the ultimate lesson is to know when to act like the Stones and when to act like the Beatles, and to learn how to swing smartly between the roles.  

And that makes sense, because the bands were also similar in many ways. Same era, same nation, same love of the same music. Lennon and McCartney actually wrote the Stones’ second single, “I Wanna Be Your Man.” And there was talk of Brian Jones joining the Beatles after he was fired by the Stones in 1969. It’s not that they were so different that amazes. It’s that they were so alike while remaining different. Which may be why each found a way to function and adhered to it. Each lived out its destiny. Each went from “Can ‘til Can’t.” 

Rich Cohen is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, a co-creator of the HBO series Vinyl, an Editor at Large at Air Mail, and a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. He has written for Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. Most recently, Rich is the author of When the Game Was War: the NBAs Greatest Season. This article is part of our Beatles vs. Stones series, which also includes The Beatles, Stones, and the Algorithm and The Beatles, Stones, and the Business Benefits of Being Second.

Best-selling sportswriter Rich Cohen invokes legendary coaches to examine what it takes to build a winning franchise for the era.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that a business should be a kind of team – less a hierarchy than collective, with everyone working for the same goal, which, if it’s a good place to work, will be about more than money. 

In the case of a software company, it might look like a product or an app but really be a vision, a new way of looking at the world. The leader, founder, or boss will be akin to a coach in such a setup, which is why, if you want to build a great team, you can do worse than look to the great pro coaches for inspiration. The methods and tricks they used to build teams will be remembered for as long as the games are played.

Jackson had been a decent pro and a good minor league coach before he took the top job with the Chicago Bulls in 1990. Also: he was a hippie, a Deadhead, and a believer in Eastern wisdom. Jackson replaced Doug Collins, who’d not been able to get the team, with the future Hall of Famers Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, past the Pistons. 

The Bulls were talented but young when Jackson assumed command, and it was this youth, lack of experience, and inability to control the emotional flow – the Pistons would goad the Bulls into dumb fouls – that Jackson sought to address. How’d he do it? Mostly by letting the players play. 

In the past, when the team got in trouble, Collins would call time out, talk it over, and send in a play. Jackson let them carry on instead, knowing they’d learn to play through the trouble by necessity. The result, which included six titles in eight seasons, was one of the savviest teams in league history, the roster made of independent-minded athletes who believed, no matter how tight the trap, they’d always be able to figure their way out. 

Lesson: Let them struggle. The road to victory is paved with failures.

Sixty years ago, America was sandwiched between the Stateside debut of the Beatles and the Stones, and the culture was changed forever. Author Rich Cohen examines how the blossoming of AI in 2024 echoes the 1964 British Invasion in surprising ways.

The spring of 1964 rumbled and reverberated like no spring before it. In America, it was a season wedged between the Beatles’ winter appearance on Ed Sullivan and the Rolling Stones’ first U.S. recording session at the start of summer in Chicago. 

When Paul, George, John and Ringo kicked things off with a declaration that would overturn the status quo – I get high! I get high! I get high! – and Mick and Keith later tore into Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied” at Chess Records, the timing was neither footnote nor incidental detail. The timing was crucial, even determinative, because the technology behind the music had been quietly revolutionized. 

The cheap record player and the cheap vinyl LP, the megawatt A.M. radio stations, the television networks with their vast audience of aimless teens, the baby boomers – it was all firmly in place by 1964. It was a delivery system waiting to discover what it had been built to deliver. That turned out to be the Beatles and the catalog of English bands – the Kinks the Stones, Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Who – that followed in their wake and together constituted the British Invasion.

Do that moment (Spring 1964) and this moment (Spring 2024) rhyme?

Yes. Because it once again feels like the end of one era and the start of another. We have been exhausted by the same old players in public life, the old and mad politicians, the quarantines and protests, the humorless and super serious. We again feel the need to start something different. And again find ourselves in possession of a technology that waits to discover its reason for being.