A jazz musician, corporate manager, author and educator, Adrian Cho applies the concepts of jazz to everything he does. With twenty-plus years in music and business in a variety of domains and disciplines, Adrian helps organizations improve performance by developing cultures that facilitate collaboration, innovation, and agility.
At IBM Adrian is currently leading a strategic initiative across IBM software group brands to improve engagement with technical practitioners at digital properties. In his previous role as a software development leader at IBM Adrian managed a complex, globally distributed, agile software development project coordinating contributions from four hundred people working at twenty-five locations in ten countries. A band leader and innovative artistic collaborator, he performs as a bassist and conductor and is the founder and artistic director of the Ottawa Jazz Orchestra, a unique, critically acclaimed symphonic jazz ensemble that brings together an impressive array of professional jazz and symphony musicians. Under his leadership the orchestra has presented almost thirty major concerts and premiered over ten seminal jazz works in the past seven years. Adrian teaches and speaks to university and business audiences about software development, jazz history, collaboration, innovation and agility. Colleagues, clients, audiences and press have described him as “a cool guide to hot jazz,” “a musical missionary,” “a gifted teacher,” “a visionary and true collaborator” and “an extraordinary leader.”
Combining his experiences in arts and business, Adrian developed The Jazz Process, an execution-oriented framework for collaboration, innovation, and agility that can help teams in any domain improve their performance. Adrian speaks and blogs about high-performance teamwork on a regular basis. His book, The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation and Agility, has been endorsed by a diverse collection of thought leaders. Reviewers have praised the book as “a huge payback for the time invested in reading it,” “a deep exploration of collaborative know-how,” “a concept of leadership and teamwork that’s well suited for the Google-age workplace” and “a top pick for any business collection!”
For a more detailed résumé, see Adrian’s profile page on LinkedIn.