Occupational hazard - and I do mean hazard - but I end up reading a fair number of business books. Most of them are, for better or worse, set pieces, with a variation on the theme of business truths, bromides wrapped in anecdote or example. Generally somewhat useful, if only because you've forgotten the business truth and need to be reminded. Generally somewhat yawn inducing.
So I didn't have supremely high hopes when The Big Picture by Kevin Coupe and Michael Sansolo came over my transom.
And, indeed, there are the same business lessons we've all learned, neglected, forgotten, and re-learned, along with the 'here's an example of' stuff.
But lo and behold: it's all presented in an entertaining, interesting, novel, and quick-read manner, tying all those tried and tedious truisms to The Movies, with each chapter extracting some business lesson drawn from a popular flick.
The book covered some of movies that I particularly liked, so I'll focus on a couple of them here.
Working Girl is one of my all time faves. From the moment we see Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) on the Staten Island Ferry, heading into Manhattan - the World Trade Center towers gleaming, and Carly Simon's New Jerusalem revving on all engines - I love this movie. I will confess that this is not least of all because the heroine is a blue-collar Irish girl taking on the snotty, preppy, WASP establishment. (Come on, what's not to like there?) Just watching Tess transform herself from big-hair girl to polished exec, taking down her haughty boss (deliciously if age-inappropriately played by Sigourney Weaver) is widely entertaining.
The lessons that The Big Picture draws from Working Girl are that "idealism can matter", and that you need to keep your eyes open for "the creative and unexpected solution." No argument here, although I will note the use of the operative word "can" in that "idealism can matter," as opposed to "will" or "should" or "does."
But there are another couple of business lessons in Working Girl.
One, which we'd certainly all like to believe, is that "talent will out."
In the real world, of course, this is "talent may out." We all know that, as often as not, pedigree and politics rule the day. Still, it's nice to think that the meritocracy can and does work.
Another lesson, if less noble and grand, is that payback can be a bitch - and entirely satisfying to those other than the paybackee.
This seldom comes as dramatically as it does when Tess' boss Katherine is called out ("bony ass" and all), but it can, nonetheless, give you one of those memorable, 'ain't work grand?' moments.
Many years ago, I worked for a manager singularly lacking in redeeming features. She was snotty, condescending, sneaky, mean-spirited, malicious, and a credit-grabber. Other than the fact that she wasn't from a moneyed background, the Katherine character in Working Girl could have been based on "S."
At one point, after I was no longer reporting to "S", our company's president, the turnaround guy who was about to start a round of lay-offs, asked a few of us (individually) who we thought should be on the list.
I went through the names of the people I thought were expendable, giving my reasons and keeping it all very professional, rather than personal. At last, I got to "S" and laid out my thinking about why she should laid off.
The president gave a little laugh and said, "Nobody starts with 'S', but every one gets to her."
'S' was pink slipped, much to the relief and satisfaction of those of us who'd suffered under her - which was pretty nearly everyone in the company.
Hoosiers is another one of my favorites, and in The Big Picture, they cite the words that the basketball coach, played so brilliantly by Gene Hackman, uses to encourage and inspire both individuals and his team as a whole.
At least in my experience, most executives are not, alas, the inspiring type. As the BP authors point out, it's not just the inability to inspire that's the problem, it's the utter lack of credibility.
What the Hackman character does so effectively is avoid the false rah-rah, and focus on the real and the personal, without letting the real and the personal become a completely demoralizing downer.
Even if it's the truth, nobody wants to hear, 'At the rate we're going, we'll be out of business in six months.' That's the invitation to start pinging our network so that you can get out before the tumbrels show up to haul you off to the guillotine.
On the other hand, nobody's going to believe the 'prosperity is just around the corner' speech if there have been no measures put into place, or no external event, that might make it so.
I have been on the receiving end of so many falsely and inanely optimistic gung-ho speeches over over the years, that it's hard to select the least inspiring. (So many choices, so little time...)
Let me pick one out of what is a mighty full hat:
After yet another major lay-off at Wang Labs, the new president met with small-ish (50-100 people) employee groups to urge us all to stay.
There was nothing new or credible about our products, our markets, our strategy, or our tactics that would lead any of us to believe that we were in a turnaround. Spin around was more like it.
When our new president - who'd been brought in from the outside - spoke, the gist seemed to be that, now that he had landed, everything that was ineffective about Wang would just fall away. So far, whatever he'd been doing behind the scenes, out of view of the average peon employee, what we'd seen was that he had been focusing on nasty little initiatives like doing away with flex-time. He did so not by directive, but by hanging at the entrances and introducing himself to late-comers and early-leavers, and asking who they were and what they did. Management by intimidation. It just made a completely miserable situation - quarterly lay-offs, pretty much - even worse.
At the latest post-layoff meeting, the president's big question to us was "Why would anyone leave now?"
Well, Mr. President, perhaps because we see no future here, either with our own eyes or through what you've just non-outlined.
Maybe because, unlike you, none of us has a golden parachute, so all we'll have to show for our time-served at MCI-Wang is a couple of weeks severance.
How much better it would have been if he'd said something like, "I don't have all the answers, but here's where I think we have opportunities..." If he'd shared with us, in concrete terms, what he thought was good about the company (and us), why he thought we had a shot at making it - and how that might happen, maybe we would have said, 'Yeah, maybe I should stick around."
But, no, he just mouthed the standard, cookie-cutterisms about working hard, doing our best, etc.
With the predictable results: people fled the sinking ship; the ship sunk.
Anyhow, I can definitely see The Big Picture being used for a b-school course, or for a corporate training thing-y of some sort. It's a fresh take on some old business lessons, and is absolutely worth a look.
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