During a recent argument about the best film to emerge from the financial crisis, the chief executive I was quarrelling with said something interesting. He’d read any number of management books, but it was from films he’d learned the most enduring tips.
If you really want to understand something, there is, of course, no substitute for absorbing the written word. But the best screenwriters and directors are incredibly gifted at compressing meaning into a handful of words or gestures.
Films also offer up their nuggets twice over, in words and pictures (psychologists call this “dual coding”). And, let’s be honest, we are far more likely to rewatch films than reread books, which helps make them stick.
No wonder the “favourite film” box accompanying executive profiles is so alluring (although one lives more in hope than expectation of any answer that strays beyond The Shawshank Redemption). Here are some more interesting options.
Margin Call
JOHN TULD: Oh, Mr. Sullivan, you’re here. Good morning. Maybe you could tell me what you think is going on here. And please, speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever.
This line alone is priceless. But the real lesson in the famous boardroom scene is in the clarity of Tuld’s subsequent questions. What’s the problem? What does it mean for us? What can we do? Where will it hurt? Four questions, ten minutes, no digressions and not a PowerPoint presentation in sight. It’s the Platonic ideal of a meeting.
The senior staff of a fictional investment bank are meeting at an “uncommon hour” because a junior analyst has just discovered “the biggest bag of odorous excrement in the history of capitalism” sitting on the balance sheet.
Jeremy Irons’s hair is all wrong for a Wall Street chief executive. But his control of the agenda is flawless: strip complexity down to its essentials, demand everyone speak in plain English, collapse hierarchies, interrogate rather than pontificate, and leave the room with the information you need to make your decisions.
The Big Short
MARK BAUM: What do you mean “all my loans”? We’re talking about two loans on one house, right?
DANCER: (She stops and gives him a look.) I have five houses. And a condo.
Lots of people ask themselves what the data says. Few stop to ask whether they have the right data. Mark Baum’s team spots US mortgage-backed bubble not just by poring over the numbers but by doing the legwork, seeing what’s happening on the ground, and, in this case, getting a dancer in a Florida strip club to casually reveal she owns six properties bought on sub-sub-subprime credit.
(Financial) models can mislead, abstractions can anaesthetise. Where do you even look for information on how many abandoned swimming pools are now inhabited by alligators? Consequently, what can look perfectly sensible on a spreadsheet in New York may reveal itself to be a total fiasco on the ground in Boca Raton.
What’s more, if the whole world is looking at the same numbers, the edge comes from shoe leather, direct observation and common sense, testing your assumptions, and looking at the world as it really is.
The Martian
JOHANSSEN: Distance at intercept will be… We’ll be 68 kilometers apart.
BECK: Did she say 68 kilometers? Kilometers?
LEWIS: Keep it together. Work the problem.
Not all lessons come from celluloid depictions of Wall Street – or, indeed, Earth. When an astronaut is accidentally abandoned on Mars he survives by breaking down an impossible task into a set of solvable problems. Make water. Grow potatoes (in compost of last resort). Fix comms.
There’s a parallel situation on the spaceship initially heading back to Earth with the rest of the crew. Commander Lewis keeps her team from being overwhelmed or panicking by repeating the encouraging them to “work the problem”.
This line is a direct rip-off from Apollo 13. Both films are science-fact answers to that old question of how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.
Michael Clayton
MR GREER: And that’s it? That’s what you’ve got?
MICHAEL CLAYTON: There’s no play here. There’s no angle. There’s no champagne room. And I’m not a miracle worker, I’m a janitor. So the math on this is simple: the smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean up.
But not every problem can be solved; some can only be contained. In this early scene, the eponymous Clayton, the fixer for a remarkably shady law firm, is called to help a client who’s hit someone with his car and fled the scene.
He gives them the number of a local lawyer, much to the client’s chagrin. Sometimes in business as in life, the choice is between good and bad. But very often it is between bad and worse. The trick is recognising which situation you’re in and accepting it.
It’s also an exemplar in giving unpalatable advice. There’s a Headland legend about the advice one colleague pitched to a client in the middle of a huge crisis: “No amount of PR is getting you out of this. You have an operational issue. Here’s the number of someone who might be able to help.”
Then he wrote it down and slid it across the table. Presentation over.
Hail Caesar!
EDDIE MANNIX: (To himself) “It took care of itself”
The Coen Brothers’ love letter to 1940s Hollywood tracks a day in the life of studio fixer when everything that can go wrong does. He extinguishes one blaze only for another to flare up, from feuding stars and volatile directors to a kidnapped leading man.
At home, the stakes feel smaller but no less insistent. His wife keeps urging him to ring the baseball coach because their son refuses to play shortstop. He forgets. The boy takes the field anyway. Mannix is shocked to discover that not every problem requires his intervention.
As the canny reader will have noted, the lessons of these films pull in different directions. Some problems yield to effort. Some do not. Some resolve themselves. A clear appraisal of the facts and good data are important, but they rarely settle the question definitively.
Real life and good management – as reflected by the best art – requires us to get comfortable with ambiguity and able to exercise judgment when certainty isn’t part of the script.
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