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Business Matters
WATCH AND LEARN
Those blockbuster movies can teach us a thing or two about management skills.
Consider these…
The world’s bookshelves are groaning with
bestsellers that promise to make us all better
managers, but are managers improving? The
evidence, from the Bank of England to Northern
Rock, hardly suggests that’s the case. That’s
possibly because we’re all too busy – or too
bored – to read all these bestsellers and put
them into practice. Or maybe we’re looking in
the wrong place. The movies can entertain and
inform at the same time. Here are nine lessons
that can be drawn from the big screen.
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What pirates can teach us about leadership.
James Surowiecki, author of
the business bestseller ‘The Wisdom Of
Crowds’, believes managers can learn a lot
from pirates. Not necessarily from Johnny
Depp and his crew in the Caribbean but from the
Pirate Code they often refer to. Real pirates did
have a code and one of the things it did was
encourage the crew to have a say in the running
of the ship. In battle, when decisions need to be
made fast, the captain’s authority was
paramount. But in times of peace, the ship was
ruled by the quartermaster who was in charge of
discipline, provisions and plunder. The division
of authority reflected the fact that a captain,
though good in battle, might not be the best
manager for the long haul. It’s a division
recommended, centuries later, by the Cadbury
report which recommended that companies have
separate chairmen and CEOs. The other point
about the code was that, unlike companies like
Enron, it stipulated a relatively even distribution
of bonuses: a captain’s share of treasure might
only be twice as great as a crew member’s. |
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You need someone to tell you the unvarnished truth.
In ‘The Godfather’
movies, Michael Corleone’s decline begins
when he distances himself from his
consigliere Tom Hagen, the one man
trusted to bring the bad news the Mafioso bosses
needed to make accurate decisions. Every
business needs a Tom Hagen. Too many bosses
behave like movie producer Sam Goldwyn who said: “I don’t want any yes men around me, I
want men who tell me the truth even if it costs
them their jobs”. |
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Heroic leadership has limits.
We have all
been nurtured in the tradition that there
are great leaders and that these leaders
behave in certain heroic ways. Yet as ‘Dead
Poets Society’ shows us, such leadership –
even when personified by someone as
charismatic and witty as Robin Williams – can
fail. Ultimately, Williams’ inspirational teacher
doesn’t change the prep school because he
doesn’t build any support within the
organisation for change. And sometimes,
creating the mechanisms for change can be as
difficult as spotting a necessary change.
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Trust your hunch.
In ‘The Hunt For Red
October’, Sean Connery’s submarine
commander plays his hunch brilliantly,
twisting his sub around to use echoes to
avoid a torpedo. Equally, young CIA
analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) has a hunch
too. That Connery – and his crew – are trying to
defect, not blow up the West. That hunch saves
the world from frying. As Manchester United
manager Sir Alex Ferguson says, you must: “Trust
your gut instinct”. |
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Your strength can become your weakness.
Butch Cassidy and Sundance
are a charming, glamorous twosome but
they come to a sticky end – in the film
anyway, the matter is less clear in real life
– because they have outlived their usefulness.
One of the recurring reasons for corporate failure
is that companies fail to move with the times.
And one explanation for that is it is hard to
recognise when the strengths that took you to
the top – in Butch and Sundance’s case, smarts
with a gun and an aptitude for robbing banks –
are no longer working. Actually, Butch and
Sundance do recognise this but by then it’s too
late. Behind a lot of the great business mistakes
– such as Decca turning down the Beatles – is the naïve, smug assumption that things will
continue to be as they are and that we, as
managers, know best. |
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Think outside the box.
In Robert Altman’s
seminal Hollywood satire ‘The Player’, Tim
Robbins’ studio executive listens to
thousands of pitches a year. And most of
them fail because they are dire retreads of
previous hits – ‘The Graduate Part II’ or ‘Ghost
meets The Manchurian Candidate’. Altman’s
exaggerating for effect but how many companies
suffer from a similar syndrome when trying to
generate new ideas? |
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Ditch the jargon.
Think of the most
successful movie franchise in history.
That’s right James Bond. Now there are
probably at least 007 business lessons to be
drawn from these spy movies but one
constant, which runs through from Connery via
Moore to Brosnan and Craig, is that 007 doesn’t
bandy around acronyms or cryptic nomenclature.
Bond is direct, colloquial and always
understandable – possibly because in the
business he’s in, any misunderstandings could
prove fatal. If all managers could ditch the
360degree feedback, the recurrent – almost
obsessive – reference to some undefined strategy
and acronymitis, companies would be much more
efficient. |
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Don’t think like the Queen
In Stephen
Frears’ acclaimed movie ‘The Queen’, we
admire Helen Mirren as Her Majesty but
it’s actually Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair
who accurately gauges the popular
mood. The Queen is suffering from an
institutionalised version of a phenomenon
known in business as “CEO disease”. Effectively,
it goes back to the Goldwyn remark, quoted
above. The higher up an organisation a manager
is, the less likely they are to grasp what is
happening on the shopfloor or in the
marketplace they serve. Their information is
normally fed through directors who depend on
their approval, so criticisms or data that
contradicts the accepted view is often buried.
And, as Frears’ movie shows, this phenomenon
can isolate even intelligent experienced
leaders like the Queen and lead them to make
bad decisions. |
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How to be more inventive.
According to
Willie Wonka (as played in the original
version by Gene Wilder), “Invention my
dear friends is 93percent perspiration,
six percent electricity, four percent
evaporation and two percent butterscotch
ripple”. Yes, that does add up to 105% but that’s
Wonka for you. He’s right about the 93percent
perspiration though. |
... I don’t want any yes men around me, I want men who tell me
the truth even if it costs them their jobs.
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