INTRODUCTION



MacArthur Causeway Bridge, Miami Beach

10:00 P.M.

ONE NIGHT IN 1994, I found myself standing all alone in the middle of the shut-down MacArthur Causeway, a six-lane highway that connects the city of Miami Beach to the mainland via a double-leaf drawbridge. As I was looking out over Biscayne Bay and the Miami skyline, reflecting on what we were about to do and the role I would play in it, I was thinking that there isn’t another product that is manufactured with the same level of fragmented, incremental, and synchronized live effort than a major motion picture. It was day six of a tough car chase sequence that was about to culminate with an open bridge jump for the Warner Bros. picture Just Cause starring Sean Connery; a film budgeted at $60 million with fifty-three shooting days spread out between a number of locations in Florida and a few in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had been shooting the previous five nights using more than twenty stunt drivers and stunt doubles as the driver of the lead vehicle tore through the streets of Miami Beach in a tricked-out car weaving in and out of oncoming traffic at high speed, driving on the wrong side of the road along a meticulously planned route that went from the Eden Roc hotel, headed up Collins Avenue, and then onto the MacArthur Causeway.

But that was a cakewalk compared to what we were about to do now.

It was jump night—just three hours until go time—and I was responsible for leading and managing the coordinated efforts of our regular 120-person first-unit* film crew, the stunt coordinator, the stunt driver who would actually fly the car over the open drawbridge, thirteen camera crews (to get all our coverage in one take), a chopper pilot (for aerial photography), a bridge operator (to control the double-leaf bascule bridge), dozens of Dade County Police (to lock up the highway and roads) and rescue divers standing by in a boat below the bridge (in case things went south).

The stunt driver was going to get behind the wheel of his car, positioned roughly three hundred yards out from the open drawbridge, and on my cue, he would floor it, then roar up the road, accelerate to 70 mph, climb the near side of the ramp that was elevated at a forty-five-degree incline, and soar over the open span nine stories above the water of Biscayne Bay. After a heart-stopping, airborne five seconds, he would land squarely on the roadway on the far side of the open bridge in a spray of sparks, bounce, recover control of the car, barrel down the inclined section of road, and continue his high-speed getaway.

Standing on that roadway just a few hours before the jump, I was acutely aware of the fact that for the night to go well, I had to have two distinct sets of finely honed skills.

First, I had to have advanced and sophisticated knowledge of feature filmmaking.

And second, I had to have superlative leadership and management skills.

What had surprised me early in my career was that as complicated and technical as the filmmaking aspects of my job were, it was the management and leadership skills that would prove to be far more elusive and much harder to master. And I was quick to realize that it was those management and leadership skills that would make or break my career; that no matter how much I knew about the technical craft of filmmaking,† my ability to manage and lead would overshadow everything else. This is a dynamic not unique to me. In fact, there are two specific reasons that this applies to virtually everyone regardless of what field they happen to work in.

The first is that for many of us, the technical skill set necessary for us to excel at our jobs is inherently easier to learn than is the less concrete nature of management and leadership.

The second is that we are specifically trained in how to do the technical side of our jobs, but we often are not trained at all in how to manage and lead.

The paradox is that people are often promoted to management positions because they are good at something that has little to do with management itself. Then consider that virtually every one of us functions in the role of a manager at some point in our lives—in fact, we often do so across a variety of situations—and yet very few of us are actually taught the skills necessary to manage at all, let alone how to manage well.

And here’s the kicker. Management skills make or break not only individual careers but companies, too.

When Gallup conducted a study of employee engagement, they examined roughly fifty thousand businesses in thirty-four countries that collectively had close to 1.5 million employees, and what they discovered was that companies with above-average employee engagement had twice the likelihood of success as those with below-average employee engagement. Companies at the ninety-ninth percentile of employee engagement had quadruple the success rate. And for good reason. High employee engagement increases profit, productivity, and quality of output as it decreases absenteeism, safety incidents, and employee turnover. Gallup estimates that 70 percent of the US workforce functions at a low level of engagement, and that costs businesses in the vicinity of $500 billion a year in lost revenue.

And what exactly improves employee engagement?

Effective supervisors and good management‡—the very thing that so many of us struggle to get right.

Two simple facts: to a large degree, your individual career will likely succeed or fail based on your management and leadership skills, and the success of the company that employs you is equally dependent on how well it is managed.

So how do most of us learn management and leadership skills?

Unfortunately, for a lot of us, it’s through painful trial and error—even for those with MBAs.

And we read. In my case, I read everything I could get my hands on.

Early in my career, I pushed my film books off to the side and began to read management and leadership books written by the greats—books by business legends, sports coaches, and military leaders. But it quickly became apparent that while these books offered general advice and were often inspirational—I mean, who doesn’t love the maxims of George S. Patton, who gave us “A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood” or “Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom”?—they weren’t providing me with the actionable, easy-to-employ management and leadership strategies that would give me the results I wanted with the immediacy that I required. And that’s when it hit me.

What most of these existing books offered wasn’t specific enough for what I needed.

And there’s a reason for that, too.

Most businesses aren’t conducted in the extreme conditions or the short time frames that feature filmmaking is.

So to do my job effectively, I found that I had no choice but to develop my own leadership and management tenets.

Here’s why this matters to you: the tenets I developed actually work, and not just when managing a film set.

In fact, the motion picture industry is of particular interest as a source of insight into management and leadership directives for three very specific reasons.

The first is that film projects have a staggering number of diverse elements and component parts that often mandate working in extreme conditions—conditions that vary constantly—not just from project to project but day to day and even minute to minute. That means that we require strategies that are extremely effective.

The second reason is that when we use those strategies, we can actually tell—in real time—if they’re working. And that fact provides tremendous incentive for us to make sure that they do work.

And the third reason is shared by research biologists who study the fruit fly—with a life span of only fourteen days, a fruit fly cycles through generations quickly. That means the fruit fly provides researchers with rapid feedback loops. Scientists can test something, get results, modify their approach, and then test again.

A film project essentially does the same thing—it goes from start-up to shutdown really fast—in just six months to a year—which means that just as the fruit fly offers biologists a vehicle for cycling through generations—and modifications—quickly, filmmaking offers a manager like me, who’s looking to beta test new ideas and ways of doing things in business, rapid feedback loops, too.

What this means is that I was able to capitalize on the extreme nature and short feedback cycles of filmmaking to employ the agile development practices favored in the tech world—not to fine-tune a product but to develop a set of unique and highly honed management and leadership strategies that actually work.

And these leadership and management strategies happen to work, not only in the extreme conditions that I face but also in more mundane situations that others face, as well.

Business schools have long established that the best way to teach, and the best way to learn, is with a curriculum based on documented case studies. And the best case studies come from industries and brands that have faced a unique and particular set of challenges. In fact, the best case studies offer narratives that fall a few standard deviations from the norm and promise aha moments. They’re what Malcolm Gladwell would call outliers; they are extreme, dynamic, suspenseful, compelling, and memorable, presenting high stakes and big, quantifiable—and generalizable—outcomes. And that’s precisely what I am offering here. Decisive, actionable, broadly applicable management and leadership tenets derived from case studies in an industry that has extreme outlier status.

SO WHO AM I, AND WHAT EXACTLY DO I DO?

Once a film is green-lit, I am brought in as part of the production team that’s tasked with planning, scheduling, and overseeing the project while making sure that it is of the highest creative quality and also delivered on time with no cost overruns, unnecessary artistic compromises, or untenable safety issues. I learned to lead and manage on the streets of New York—and at locations around the world, shooting films with budgets that ran $200,000 per shooting day. Over the years, I’ve managed more than fifty A-list projects and worked for all the major studios and with many of the top actors, directors, producers, and cinematographers in the world, including over seventy Academy Award winners. If they were prorated in today’s dollars, those fifty projects would have racked up collective production budgets in excess of $2 billion and generated gross revenue well in excess of that.

In my job, I am essentially tasked with all the things that a corporate manager would normally deal with over the decades-long life cycle of a company, just minus the long-term vision statements and planning—everything from launch to personnel management, team building, day-to-day planning, scheduling, safety, concept execution, and innovation to the scaling of money, people, and time. And because the life cycle of a film project is measured in months, not decades, I was doing this within a dramatically accelerated time frame—which means that because filmmaking is an outlier with a short business cycle and rapid feedback loops, I was able to try out a management strategy, see if it worked, and if it didn’t, make adjustments and try over (and over) again until I found what did work.

Running large-scale film crews on soundstages and on location with one eye on cost control and the other on quality of output, wielding a stopwatch, and a sense of fair play—coupled with a love of the art—I developed strategies to keep a large workforce on schedule and on budget project after project, year after year. In fact, inclusive of cast and crews, during my career as a first assistant director, production manager, and associate producer, I’ve been responsible for overseeing somewhere in the vicinity of one hundred thousand employees. And what I learned was that to do my job well, I needed to become, above all else, an Oscar-worthy manager.

When I talk to managers or read about the corporate challenges and pain points team leaders and CEOs working in more traditional industries—and circumstances—face, I understand that very few people have the management experience—or perspective—that I do. Think about it; if you had managed fifty rapid-cycle start-up projects over thirty years, you’d have recognized patterns, seen what worked and what didn’t—and done it fast—too.

So, faced with the challenge of managing and leading large work crews in a business defined by extremes, I set out to find the small and relatively easy-to-implement management strategies that I could employ to effectively change outcomes for the better, and in the process, I spent a lot of time thinking about inefficiency and how to eliminate—or at least diminish—it. Take, for example, the assembly-line worker at Harley Davidson who deduced that the 1.2 extra seconds it took to snap in a poorly designed motorcycle part resulted in lowered annual production of 2,200 units and therefore millions of dollars in lost revenue for the company over the course of each and every year—I was looking to isolate management and leadership changes on that scale.

I was looking for small changes that lead to big results.

Here’s the good news—I found them.

And the best part is that the strategies I developed are universally applicable to virtually every other business and management situation where the goal is better return on investment (ROI), facilitated work flow, tighter cost and quality control, increased output, reduced friction, a high degree of safety, greater employee job satisfaction, low stress, and the highest possible quality product or service.

But if you’re not convinced that filmmaking offers a treasure trove of management and leadership challenges and directives, just consider the following scenario:

You being me for a single day. But this time you’re not about to jump a car over an open drawbridge at 70 mph. On this day, for that same project, you’re filming in an alligator-infested swamp.

* * *

YOU’VE READ THE best-of-the-best management and leadership books out there. In fact, you’ve scribbled directives from some of those books on the palms of your hands—hell, they’re inked halfway up your arms. Commitment. Passion. Trust. Make decisions slowly by consensus. Level out the workload … But you’re not on a factory floor or in some cushy corner office with a water cooler, Nespresso machine, wellness room, and air-conditioning. Today’s “office,” where you are managing a hundred-person crew who are toiling under enormously difficult conditions, is in the Florida Everglades, and you’re standing knee-deep in a swamp in 110-degree heat, getting ready to photograph the first scene of the day on a major motion picture for Warner Bros.

Your $10 million leading man, Sean Connery, has just exited the makeup-and-hair camper looking like the next cover model for an Abercrombie & Kent brochure for fly fishing in exotic locales. He’s about to step into water that would, under normal circumstances, be infested with the fiercest of predators—the American alligator—a reptile that can reach fifteen feet in length and weigh a thousand pounds. The aptly named “lord of the swamp,” (the gator, not Sean) you’ve been told, has a bone-crushing bite force of 2,980 pounds per square inch (psi)—higher by far than that of a hippo (1,821 psi), gorilla (1,300 psi), tiger (1,050 psi), or even a car-crushing machine (2,400 psi). The alligator wranglers carrying side arms and high-powered rifles that you insisted on having on set “just in case” bolster your confidence; after all, they’ve assured you that the area of the swamp where you are filming has been cleared of gators and (most) snakes, but you’re still on edge.

Along with the alligators, there are black widow spiders, fire ants, water moccasins, scorpions, swarms of mosquitos—nothing friendly here. In fact, every living thing in the Everglades has been designed by nature with a very basic goal: Kill. Eat. Reproduce. Repeat.

When you scouted this location a couple of months back, you counted over two hundred alligators within a hundred meters of where you were standing. As you stepped near the shore that day, they silently, and en masse, eased into the water and started gliding toward you. You were thinking, This looks like … well … a movie. But you were quite sure the gators were thinking something far more prosaic—that their lunch had arrived—and it’s you.

Now, eight weeks later, you’re back in the same spot with that hundred-person crew and ten tons of equipment brought in by a half dozen trucks and the same number of motor homes and vans. But unlike Sean Connery, who’s been in an air-conditioned motor home and is cool, ironed, and coiffed in the muggy, triple-digit heat, you, along with the crew, have already sweated through your clothes and have that unpleasant, sticky feeling of sunscreen mixed with insect repellent mixed with exhaustion and stress. You’re working with one eye focused on the swamp, since alligators can run faster than a man, and you’re responsible for everyone on set. Plus, you were told it’s mating season—alligator mating season, that is—which means that you can expect an even higher level of aggressive behavior than “normal.”

As you look around the swamp, the grip and camera departments have just finished rigging a Technocrane that will arm out over the water, the director is pacing back and forth, the director of photography (DP, or cinematographer), whose English is limited under normal circumstances, is having an even tougher time than usual understanding the lingo of the Everglades and keeps asking, to no avail, for the term water moccasin to be translated into Hungarian. You’re standing at the camera, the epicenter of activity where most of the decisions are made, surrounded by a small army of people working feverishly so that the two actors who will be in front of the camera (Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne) will be able to give their best performance in these adverse circumstances. As you plow through your day running the set, knowing that every single decision and buck stops with you, you are taking into consideration dozens of constantly changing variables that affect your work in uniquely debilitating ways. And when you look down at your arm where you inked those tips from the management books that you’ve read over the years, you realize that there’s no way any of that advice—Set goals for your employees! Look for opportunities to give praise! Don’t micromanage!—is going to get you through a day like this.

As if the heat and the swamp teeming with voracious mosquitoes, alligators, and venomous snakes aren’t bad enough, the clock is running at $20,000 per hour like some unrelenting fiscal timekeeper of doom. And you know that the money isn’t the only thing ticking like a time bomb. The earth is rotating, too. (This is significant because photography is light dependent, and the sun is critical for your work.) It may only be 9:07 A.M. in Florida, but the clock started running on the light at 7:00 A.M. when you left the hotel this morning and headed to this location, and it will continue to do so until it sets at 7:54 P.M. The union clock is running its meter, too—double time kicks in for the crew after eleven hours—so you will have to make sure that you arrive back in Miami, where the cast and crew are housed, by 7:00 P.M. Allowing an hour to load the trucks after you wrap shooting and an hour for travel means that you can only film until 5:00 P.M. You also need to break the crew for lunch for an hour by 1:00 P.M. (more union rules), so even though it’s early in the morning, you’re thinking far ahead, watching the time and making sure you hit your targets—which means cultivating an environment conducive to artistic work while shooting two and a half pages of the script, abiding by union rules, and staying on budget. Factored into the equation, among numerous other considerations, is that whenever you move to a new location (often daily), you are relocating one hundred men and women, dozens of cars, a caterer, honey wagons (bathrooms), a half dozen trucks, five motor homes, six vans, and a couple of flatbed trucks and cranes, and, in this case, an ambulance and EMTs equipped with snakebite kits.

Then there are the union rules about hours worked and the number of men on the job, along with the actors’ schedules to consider, as well. Sean, for example, has to fly—via private jet—to the Bahamas every Friday by contract (if he doesn’t, he could face costly US income tax ramifications), and it seems there’s never an airport close enough to where you’re shooting. Plus, he has a hard out date of August 1 because he is to start work on a new picture in London that week. If you run over on his time, the penalty the company would have to pay will be $200,000 per day. As you’re thinking about all of this, you have a huge crew to manage (half of whom appear to be standing thigh high in the reeds and looking fatigued and miserable already) as you try to get the day’s work done without anyone getting eaten or dismembered, to say nothing of accomplishing the end goal—capturing a few minutes of film with brilliant performances by the actors, coupled with a flawless technical job by the crew.

On a positive note, by the time 1:00 P.M. rolls around and you break the crew for lunch, you’re feeling pretty good—you’ve accomplished a half day’s work as scheduled. You shot the sequence where Paul Armstrong (played by Sean Connery) discovers the murder weapon—a knife that’s been stashed inside a culvert by a serial killer—and it went well, all things considered. Plus, the afternoon weather forecast seems hopeful (it rains almost daily during the summer in Florida, so time delays must be factored into your schedule). But 1:00 P.M. in Florida makes it 10:00 A.M. on the “left coast,” and the studio executives in LA will want to check in with you to see how the day’s work is going. Those executives at Warner’s can’t understand what it’s like filming in the gator-infested sauna, so you won’t bother them with the logistics the crew faced getting the equipment to where you were actually filming or the challenges they encountered when building the crane.§ You won’t bring up the extra time it took the electricians to run the cable through the reeds, or how dealing with the extreme heat and humidity meant a lot more time-consuming touch-ups for makeup and hair for Sean and Laurence after each and every take as well as wardrobe changes as needed as they sweated through their shirts. You won’t even tell them about the crew member who had to be medevaced out after he was bitten by a snake. Or about the seven-foot gator that the wranglers had to extract after it lunged ferociously out of a culvert, snapping and growling like a T. rex from a scene in Jurassic Park—the very culvert that Sean would be sticking his hand in to retrieve the knife. You don’t bother reporting any of those details or the management challenges they posed because the guys at the studio merely want to know if you shot scene sixty-nine yet and if the afternoon’s work looks promising. Since you did, and it does, you report that so far you’re on schedule—after all, that’s all they want to know. Then you get word from someone back at the office that one of the “suits” happened to mention that Steven Spielberg, husband of your leading lady, Kate Capshaw, may fly in the following week and drop by the set. And you’re thinking, That’ll really relax the director.

You’ve been at this location only a few hours and already know damn well there is nothing in all those management books that will help you navigate this swamp, the gators massing by the bridge, the IRS, OSHA, the setting sun, the unions, or the executives in LA, except perhaps one of your favorite “rally the troops” edicts from General George S. Patton, like “Pressure makes diamonds!” or perhaps “Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory!” But even though these might shore you up, they provide little specific, actionable management and leadership direction—so you fall back on a few of your own.

* * *

IF YOU THINK the car chase and bridge jump or the alligator-swamp–Sean Connery situation are one-offs—they aren’t. In fact, there’re fairly typical. When Robert De Niro was about to dive into the Atlantic Ocean on the film Great Expectations, I made it a point to talk to him about all the hammerhead sharks that inhabited those Florida waters. We had a stunt double standing by, but Bob just gave me one of his looks. (After seeing Raging Bull or Cape Fear, you might pity the shark that bothers Bob.) We decided it was safe, and he did the shots himself—with our usual package of motorboats and standby divers—but you can see that the challenges we continue to face in the motion picture industry are anything but conventional.

I’ve had to figure out how to get cows into a Manhattan storefront (they don’t like to climb stairs or ride in elevators), film an elephant on a beach on the Jersey shore, and dangle a ten-year-old kid out of a window on the fifth floor of an apartment building among thousands of other unconventional business tasks. Then, of course, there are the nude love scenes, helicopter shots, explosions, full-body fire burns, and stunt fights. And all these things are happening as I schedule the days of hundreds of people while staying mindful of the fact that we are spending $60 million in a matter of months. I’m talking maybe two hundred scenes to film on eighty locations with seventy actors and three thousand extras. We may be filming on a spaceship (built), or Normandy Beach (real), or in a state prison (real and unnerving); it matters not. The bottom line is that I am expected to play my part extremely well in an ever-changing, fluid environment. I must be an expert on everything, exude confidence, instill confidence, and above all make fast, hard decisions for the crew to follow. And if I don’t know an answer, I have to make that clear … and then get one. In filmmaking, there is a staccato intensity and a mandate for certitude as these decisions are made. So I learned a thing or two about hiring, team building, leading, achievement, flexibility, employee relations, stalwart perseverance, hot and cold cognition,** goal-directed decision-making, and day-to-day management and crisis intervention, along with salesmanship, confidence, coercion, deference, “moving the chains,” and humility over the years. And while most business leaders will never have to deal with the specific issues we deal with in film production, the specific methods employed to manage them apply across industries and to more quotidian circumstances.

Which begs the question:

How exactly do you build the kind of trust a manager needs leading up to moments like those that I have just described when so much is at stake?

Because that trust is the foundation for any manager or team leader in any business.

How do you architect a team and work environment where every member of your workforce has confidence that every single detail of every element of the project will be so well planned that the work will be accomplished as seamlessly—and executed as safely and as efficiently—as humanly possible? And how do you do it in a manner that affords all members of the team the individual freedoms and comforts they need to perform their jobs to their maximum technical and creative ability?

The Hollywood MBA will tell you. And it will also provide answers to questions like these:

How do you structure a broad management system that will automate positive outcomes?

How does one balance the individual needs of so many against the collective needs of the group and the project as a whole?

What is the key to improving functionality in industries with siloed departments?

Why is it important to recognize the significance of both assigned and emergent leaders in your workforce?

How do you build trust and confidence when you’re thrown together with a new workforce time and again?

How do you consistently get peak performances out of your employees?

And because productivity is such a critical issue for all managers, how do you craft an environment that produces a highly engaged and self-motivated workforce by replicating what I call the “Oscar Effect”?

What is the complicated truth behind employee accommodations and benefits?

Why should you reframe how you think about diversity, and why is it so important that you do?

How exactly do you build equity in your workforce that you can cash in when times get tough?

How do you make decision-making easier and systematically cut short the life cycle of problems using what I call the “hard corner” approach?

How do you create a crisis-management model, and why is it so important?

What are the differences between leading and managing, and how do you effectively do both?

After all, every manager will face some, if not all, of these key questions, whether he or she is managing a feature film, a small business, a big business, a Fortune 500 company, a community group—or even a family.



Copyright © 2016 by Tom Reilly