Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift

A guide to the 10 power moves that have built Taylor Swift’s superstardom and empire, from a former Strategist at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy

Taylor Swift’s genius is not limited to her singing and songcraft: as the founder of her own multi-billion dollar enterprise she has higher returns than 99.9% of hedge funds, and has built a stronger global corporation than nearly every other American conglomerate CEO. She is the only person that the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank track with precision. She has a larger impact on the economy than most economists that have ever lived, and has done more for US antitrust law than any sitting member of Congress. There is a lot to learn from Taylor Swift.  

Global investment fund manager and former head of Strategy at HBS (and Swiftie!) Sinead O’Sullivan taps into the same genius that sells out stadiums and shuts down the internet to give Taylor—the CEO, the strategist—the respect she deserves. O’Sullivan sums up Swift’s business savvy into ten big, teachable lessons, including:

-Build a World (Not a Product): how to create value that is greater than the sum of its parts (or, how Taylor created the fan-centered Swiftverse that fosters community, belonging, and off-the-charts engagement)  
-Be Anti-Fragile: how to embrace volatility, build resilience, and thrive in uncertainty--when your competitors can't (or, how Taylor gamed the chaos of Covid shutdown to own the airwaves)
-Don’t Just Play the Game, Change It: how to rewrite the rules on your own terms when your chips are down (or, how Taylor almost lost control of her music catalog to Private Equity—but re-recorded all her masters and took them back)

Sinéad O’Sullivan has an MBA from Harvard Business School where she formerly served as the chief strategist of the HBS Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, working with top business economists, global CEOs, prime ministers, and financiers. She has also worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and was a professor at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business. She has served as an aerospace engineer and a human spaceflight designer at NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her writing has appearing in The New Yorker, Financial Times, FT Alphaville, Vogue, British Vogue, and The Currency. She is the cofounder of a global investment fund and is in the top 0.01 percent of Taylor Swift fans worldwide, as ranked on Spotify. She splits her time between London and Boston.