Corporate Song

What it is

You write a song from nothing and you record it. The lyrics come out of the words people genuinely use inside the company: values, slogans, and the running jokes everybody recognises. The music can be a melody everybody knows or something composed for the occasion. What’s left at the end is a recording with everyone’s voices in it, and it goes on being hummed in the corridors.

When it makes sense to choose it

It works well when the group is large and people pass each other in corridors without knowing each other’s names. In a big organisation there’s rarely time to stop and talk, and that alone slows down how a team aligns. Singing together is one of the few things two hundred people can do without splitting into teams.

It works well too at the turning points: a merger, an anniversary, a change of direction, the end of a hard year. The activity alternates moments of reflection with moments of creation, and what comes out is an object that stays and can be played again.

It works less well if you want something physical or competitive: nobody wins here, you deliver.

How it actually works

You start from the words, not the music. An hour of brainstorming to pull out the terms that keep coming back: what the company says about itself, what colleagues say to each other, the phrases everybody recognises and nobody has ever written down. They end up on a wall, and from there you choose the ones that will carry a rhyme.

This part is the most useful and the most uncomfortable: lining up the words that represent you forces a decision about which ones actually count. Anyone who has worked on values and mission recognises the same argument, but with a constraint that helps: it has to fit in a line.

Then you choose the melody and write the lyrics on top of it. The group splits into smaller teams, each one writing its own verse with paper, pens and the backing track, while professional musicians make sure every verse fits the melody. Finally you record: the room gets set up with microphones that pick up the whole choir, speakers carrying the melody, headphones to follow the tempo, and a sound engineer recording.

Nobody sings alone. All the verses get heard together in one hall, and the finale is the whole group performing the complete song live. The choir covers the individual voices, and that’s exactly why people are happy to be inside it. The day after, somebody starts humming it and a colleague they’ve never spoken to joins in, which is the whole point of the exercise in four seconds.

Three questions

Do you need to be able to sing?

No. You record all together and no voice comes out isolated. Anyone who really doesn’t want to can work on the lyrics.

How long does it take?

Half a day. The writing takes longer than the recording, almost every time.

Do you need a special room?

You need a quiet room rather than a studio. It runs well in a hotel room with a soundproofed area for the recording, and equally well in a low-impact green venue out of town. We bring the equipment and the sound engineer.