Why Leading A Company Is Like Playing A Stadium Show

By John Caldwell

 

Hey Lady Gaga, we’re the same. And so are you, if you’re a CEO.

Stay with me.

I was at Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball show at Accor Stadium in Sydney. Roughly 70,000 people in the stadium, lights up, huge opening, full spectacle.

And then, somewhere in the middle, I started to turn.

I got bored. Irritated. I caught myself thinking, “This isn’t landing.” I even texted friends on the other side of the stadium: “Is it just me or is she falling flat?”

I looked around, decided people weren’t dancing as much, and made the classic move: I promoted myself to Chief Performance Critic of Lady Gaga.

Then towards the end, everything shifted.

She sat at the piano. She started talking to us like humans, not a crowd. She played in a way that felt stripped back and vulnerable.

And suddenly I was on my feet. Singing. Dancing. At one point, crying.

That moment hit me in the chest. It was exactly what I needed. But here’s the bit that matters:

When I was bored and grumpy, she was probably hitting it out of the park for someone else. When I was having my emotional epiphany, a different part of the stadium was checking their phones.

Same show. Same set list. Seventy thousand different experiences.

And that’s when it clicked: this is the reality of being a CEO.

We are all running a stadium show

Leadership, especially at CEO level, is one long attempt to run a coherent “show” for people who are all wanting something slightly different at the same time.

The board wants certainty. The exec team wants clarity. The team wants support. The market wants performance. Everyone wants something now.

You pull a strategic lever, and one group is up dancing, another group is sitting down with their arms folded, wondering why you “don’t get it”.

That doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re doing the job.

Success for a CEO is not “everyone loved every minute”. Success is “by the end, the stadium was on its feet”.

But that requires something people don’t like to talk about: patience.

You can’t judge the show at the halfway mark

If I’d left that concert when I was annoyed, I would have walked out telling everyone it was average.

I would have missed the moment where the whole stadium came together. I would have missed the part that stayed with me for days. And I would have been wrong about the show.

We do this with CEOs all the time.

We judge based on the first act of a transformation. We decide the strategy is off because the first quarter felt uncomfortable. We whisper about “culture issues” halfway through a reset that hasn’t even had time to land.

Meanwhile, the CEO is trying to keep 70,000 different expectations in the air and still land the finale with cash in the bank.

The dancer who fell and why leadership has to stop the music

At another Mayhem Ball show, one of Gaga’s dancers fell off the stage. The surface was wet, he slipped, and it was a nasty-looking fall.

She didn’t power through. She stopped the entire show.

Lights up. Music cut. Seventy thousand people waiting, mid-adrenaline, because one human needed attention and safety.

That is leadership.

Sometimes you have to stop the bus for one person, even when everyone else wants to keep driving. The rest of the crowd doesn’t always understand why you’re pausing. They get restless. They complain. They say you’re overreacting.

Until the day it’s them. Until the day they’re the one who’s burned out, sick, grieving, or hanging off the edge of the metaphorical stage.

Good CEOs know this. There are days when the entire company feels like it’s paused for “no good reason” because you are quietly dealing with something that absolutely cannot be done on a live mic.

The show still has to look effortless

I also found myself getting annoyed at the breaks.

Why is this taking so long? Why is nothing happening? Surely they could tighten this up?

As if a human belting out stadium vocals in head-to-toe costume under lights for two hours doesn’t need water, oxygen and time to reset.

And this is where CEOs and performers are frighteningly aligned.

The sales team is out front doing the show. The ops, tech, finance and people teams are backstage making sure the stage doesn’t crumble, the lights don’t blow, the contracts are watertight and payroll happens on time.

You miss one quiet, “boring” back-end piece and the whole performance falls over. No one claps for the person who fixed the system that prevented the disaster. They only notice when it breaks.

As CEOs, we live there. Your calendar might show a couple of visible “acts” a week. The rest is what I call the plumbing of leadership. Unseen, unsexy, absolutely essential.

“I hope when I come back in 20 years, you still want to see me.”

Towards the end of the Sydney show, Gaga said something like:

“I love you, Australia. I hope after I go away and write songs for 20 years and come back, you still want to see me.”

That line gutted me.

Because what we were watching that night wasn’t just a concert. It was the product of decades of work we never saw. Voice lessons. Failed ideas. Team changes. Injuries. Reinventions. Negotiations. Fifteen versions of a show before the one that made it to Sydney.

It’s the same question every CEO quietly asks, even if we never say it out loud:

If I go away and do the hard, invisible work for years – the decisions, the restructures, the risks, the late nights, the bets that don’t pay off immediately. Will you still want to be in my stadium when it all comes together?

What most people see is the “night of”. The town hall. The big email. The strategy deck. The one moment they directly interact with you.

What they don’t see is that once you’ve finished scripting that one moment, you still have to:

Make sure the stage works. Make sure the lights hold. Make sure the choreography (people, process, tech) is actually doable in real life. Make sure the money is there. Make sure the team behind you can still walk at the end of the tour. And write the next 20 years at the same time.

That’s the job. That’s the scale.

A small request, from one CEO to the rest of the stadium

So yes, Lady Gaga and CEOs have something in common.

We’re all trying to put on the best show possible, in real time, for a crowd that doesn’t share one brain, one taste, or one timing.

Sometimes you’re in the part of the show that isn’t for you. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad show. It means you’re not the only one in the room.

To my fellow CEOs: You’re not crazy. The job really is this big and this messy and F:*$ing HARD!. You are allowed to take an interval, fix the lighting, check on the dancer who fell, and still call it a good night.

To everyone else: Before you decide your CEO is “falling flat”, ask yourself: Is this just not my song? Am I judging the show too early?

Because at the end of that night in Sydney, the whole stadium was dancing. Different songs. Different moments. Same energy, together.

I’m glad I didn’t leave at halftime.