Mick Jagger reinvented himself last night at the Grammys. Lady Gaga reinvents herself with every album and performance—“Born This Way” won because she does it like she’s born again every time she performs. And The Dark Side of Eminem was brilliant. Even Kanye West tweeted in approval of all this.

Jagger was amazing because he believed the awards mattered and were relevant. He was relevant to the Grammys. It was so easy to see who was “getting it” and making it happen. And who was not. The greats were totally on. There was no room for same-ole-same-ole from the old or the young. It had to be…well…fresh. And what makes that that difference?

It’s about being relevant to what is in front of you. Right now. Relevancy gives us what Umair Haque calls “thick value.” Anything without relevance becomes what I call “value absorbing.” It sucks the life out of everything.

Value absorbing happens when people think in terms of commodities, focusing on efficiency and  low-end competitiveness. Or when they attempt to homogenize and make it all look the same, ignoring the fact that people are unique and seek to make their lives matter. Value absorbing is about standardization, which leaves no room for anyone in an organization to fail or to cause something really new to happen. Old as I am, I love whatever’s fresh and creative. It makes me feel alive. Fresh and creative makes everyone feel alive.

Music is business and it is reinventing itself. Record labels are mostly not getting it, but bands and musicians are. They’re finding their own audiences. They’re making direct connections and selling stuff, including their music. They’re making people feel alive and people are responding by buying. If you are still doing market research, then you are disconnected from what tells you what and how to create. You are disconnected from life. Data, even analyzed data, is dead. Human energy is alive. We feel it and embrace it.

Good business is about giving people new experiences of life every time they encounter what you offer and are immersed it is effects. Customers want specialness; they want to become part of what they consume by experiencing their story in it or adding their own touch. This includes feeling healthy and feeling good about how they are helping to regenerate the planet and their community. Real responsibility starts with the consumer’s life. Business needs to think of creating for and with people the same experiences that great music creates. Music I love is authentic and it makes me feel authentic.

Every member of a band and crew member behind the scenes knows what they are feeding. They bring unique discovery to every experience. Every dancer, every songwriter is creating with an audience’s experience in mind. There is no question about what it takes to create that experience.

There is a tendency in corporate America to want to standardize anything that is not thought of as the “creative” side of the business, such as marketing—and sometimes even there. Customer service ends up becoming a set of procedures, which requires customers to manage interactions. Employees are lost in the homogenization of their jobs, with no way to connect their creativity to the customer’s experience of life.

Several authors are currently screaming about the insanity of the commodity-homogeneity-standardization approach to business that results in hierarchies, boring work, poor innovation, and ineffectual responsibility for Earth, communities, and suppliers. Some of them are John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison in The Power of Pull; Umair Haque in The New Capitalist Manifesto, Steve Denning in The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, and Ori Brafman in The Starfish and the Spider. Fifty years of revolutionary companies and creative business systems are only now beginning to surface into public awareness. It is my honor to bring some of these stories to light in my own book, The Responsible Business, which will be out in two weeks.

I wrote The Responsible Business as an invitation to see responsibility as a system that re-enlivens everything it touches. I start from the reason a company is in business in the first place—to offer something people cannot create for themselves. Grammy winners never forget to thank their fans. Why do businesses lose touch with their own fans, their customer and their customers’ lives? Why disconnect everyone in the creative process—from  employees, to suppliers, to contractors—from the lives of customers. In much of the world today, even Earth and the communities where companies do business are just part of the commoditization process. Nothing is alive.

Corporate America could take a clue from one of the surprise Grammy winners, Muse, the English rock band. The Title of their album is The Resistance; they’re refrain is “We will be victorious.”  For me Responsibility starts with this kind of revolutionary spirit and passionate connection to real customers and their real-life experiences. When this revolution occurs, businesses will produce a lot less crap and many fewer “value-added” production processes that bring no real value to life.

Read The Responsible Business. It will make a believer of you.