Archives for category: Movies

TV Review: The Pitt

October 10, 2025 //
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I should preface this review that I found The Pitt riveting television. I’ve always liked Noah Wyle as an actor and ER was always a favorite show of mine. This review will have some minor spoilers for the show so if you have not watched it – go watch it! Then come back and see whether the same things struck you as they struck me. The Pitt has a couple of problems, and they not only take me out of the show when they occur, they also perpetuate the myths that surround human and veterinary medicine (my world).

Administration is the Bad Guy

The character of Gloria Underwood, played by Michael Hyatt, who is credited as the Chief Medical Officer but acts as more of a non-medical Hospital Administrator, is portrayed, except for one scene (more on that later) as the bad guy throughout. This is not because they do anything particularly bad, but because they care about how long patients have been waiting and how they are treated by the doctors and nurses. The show treats this push back against the tyranny of customer service as a noble endeavor, as our hero character championing medicine over business.

The big problem with this mindset that can often be found in both human medicine and veterinary medicine is that “my time (the doctor) is more important than your time (the patient). There will always be wait times in medicine, but that does not mean they are a badge of honor that shows how much more important the medicine is from treating patients respectfully. Patients who leave because they won’t or can’t have an extended wait time are punished with worse outcomes. If we want what’s best for our patients we have to care about wait times.

The Pitt then seemingly redeems its portrayal of Gloria by showing just how good she is at her job. When the staff are informed of a mass casualty event, Gloria shows that she is three steps ahead of our hero Robbie, played by Noah Wyle, in having emergency supplies of all kinds already on the way. It’s a great moment and the disconnect between the doctors and nurses as they realize that this person who they consider the enemy is just someone who sees the wood for the trees.

…And then they go and spoil it by having Robbie curse Gloria out and call her a micromanager because she questions their use of unscreened blood from team members in patients.

The fact that Robbie is shown on multiple occasions to be struggling with his own mental health, and that while often right, he prefers to use his own intuition rather than facts or rules is shown as an honorable sacrifice. I hope that in season two we get to see Robbie be wrong because to do otherwise is disingenuous to the professions involved.

Likewise; Dr. Gregory House, from TV’s House, is a great and fun character to watch but nobody wants him as their doctor. When you are purporting to show a hyper realistic medical drama, falling into using these well-worn tropes does the show and its audience a disservice.

Poor Doctors

I have the upmost respect for human doctors and nurses, just as I do for veterinarians and veterinary nurses. I believe they all deserve to be paid well. However, The Pitt plays fast and loose with the socioeconomic realities of the ER and human medicine as a whole.

Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch  is a Senior Attending Physician and probably earns in the region of $361,072 per annum.

 All of the other doctors of The Pitt are residents who are likely to be earning $75,000 per annum although it seems this could increase to almost $100,000. The medical students shown in the show would not be paid.

Robbie is unlikely to walk to work, or take the train, as is implied by his backpack as he walks through the park late at night, after his shift, where he can share a beer with other members of his team. Many of his team will have to use public transportation because they won’t be able to afford not to. Robbie will drive his BMW, which is parked in the hospital parking garage, he may even have his own parking spot, to his home in the suburbs.

Just when you think I might be being unfair about Robbie, I should mention that Pittsburg’s cost of living is about 2% below the national average.

If Gloria is a Hospital Administrator, her salary would be in the range of $223,561

If the job title of chief medical officer is correct we are looking at a salary of $462,913

By making Robbie seem like just one of the team rather than a member of senior leadership it frames Gloria, and therefore by example all Hospital Administrators / Chief Medical Officers, as only interested in money – rather than the health of the hospital and the team as a whole. Whereas in truth, Robbie is much closer or even exceeds Gloria in compensation than to the doctors and students he works side by side with. By framing him as “one of the boys” and therefore the hero it paints Gloria as the villain.

When Robbie complains about the lack of nurses and Gloria points out that there is a national nursing shortage. His response is to say “pay them a living wage and they will be lining up to work here.”

The average wage for a registered nurse in Pittsburgh is $82,458.

As Gloria points out “other hospitals are managing” but Robbie dismisses this and  because he is our hero we are encouraged to dismiss this too – rather than see it as a failure of his management of the ER. I’m all in favor of paying nurses more, just as I am in favor of paying veterinary nurses more, but dismissing $82,000 as less than a living wage is ridiculous and manipulative.

You can do so much better “The Pitt.” These are real issues the divide the treatment of patients and the management of hospitals both in the human world and the veterinary world.

Buying into lazy tropes does not help.

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Categories Leadership, Management, medical, Movies, reviews

Book Review: Monsters by Claire Dederer

June 9, 2023 //
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How should we feel about those whose work we admire, or even love, when they turn out to be awful human beings or even just deeply flawed? Are you a better artist if you become more selfish? This is the subject of Claire Dederer’s exceptional book – Monsters: A Fans Dilemma.

Do great artists become assholes (or monsters) because of their singular commitment to their art or do assholes / monsters become great artists because they know their transgressions will be forgiven? How should we feel about Wagner, Miles Davis, Roman Polanski, Woody Allan, David Bowie, Sylvia Plath, Joni Mitchell, Valerie Solanas, Doris Lessing, and many, many more?

Male artists who are considered monsters are usually considered so because of violence or abuse. When female artists are considered monsters, it is usually because they have abandoned their children – something that male artists do without seeming consequence or judgement. There is also an added dimension of racism. As Ms. Dederer points out by quoting the often-maligned Kanye West; “I’m not a rap star, I’m a rock star.” Why? Because rock stars generally do not experience what Kanye West has experienced ad nauseam: repercussions. A fact that Ms. Dederer points out by not covering the army of white make rock stars accused of sexual predatory behavior.

This is perhaps one of the most complex questions of our times. Claire Dederer does a superlative job of sorting through the mixed emotions we all feel about such figures, and she herself feels as an artist with the choices she has made on her own artistic journey as a writer, a mother, a partner, and as an alcoholic. She also tackles whether this is a price too high for the #metoo movement (spoiler alert: it’s not.)

At its core, Monster is an exploration of the meetings of biographies; the biographies of those with fans and the biographies of the individual fans themselves. It also embraces the fracture points of our society, racism, sexism, and violence. Our reactions to the transgressions of those who make the art we love are subjective and are based on both the artist and the viewer. We can still consume the art of terrible people because there is a difference between what we feel – the emotional response to great art – and moral thoughts. We can look at great art and see the stain left by the actions of its creator. For some the stain will ruin the piece, for others they will see past the stain. What is right for one person will not necessarily be right for someone else.

Monster also places this discussion in a historical context. We often feel that we are in an enlightened time. That we are in an apolitical present where we know better than the past. As Ms. Dederer states – we don’t know better because we woke up, we know better because some people spoke up. We can all look back on the past and say we would have spoken up, however, how many of us do when the world around us burns? The things we thought we had transcended are still there – minority communities have always known this. It is not helped by the fact that everyone still loves an asshole. How any of our beloved characters in book, television, and film we would abhor in real life if we had to deal with them? “Don’t you know who I am,” is an awful and entitled addition to any disagreement. Yet we all love the scene where the clueless front desk clerk tries to stop someone from entering the building they actually own, and the clerk works in.

Stepping away from the art discussion for a moment. Monster is also an excellent discussion of the pressure of career vs. motherhood and the goals of careers in general. Returning to Kanye West for a moment, the line; “People want power and vacations” is an insightful view of what drives people in the modern world. But the balance of motherhood and career is where Monster shines brightest. If it is a real choice to trade levels of career success for the time a mother spends with their children – how does that express itself with professionals? How do both employers and employees recognize this dilemma and neutralize its effects for everyone to get what they want and need?

While the author eschews the term “cancel culture” as non-useful it permeates the book. Is a love of a piece of art enough to make up for the transgressions of the past by the artist? The is the fans dilemma – the subtitle of the book. Ms. Dederer gives no easy answers here but does give us a lot to think about. Is art, or career, worth the price that the artist (or professional) will have to pay or make others pay? Both the viewer and artist need to make that decision.

Monsters is a start to that conversation.  

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Categories Books, Management, Movies, Poltics, Race

Book and TV Review: Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

October 24, 2022 //
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After I reviewed both the TV show and book, Five Days at Memorial, I swore I was not going to make a habit of this.

And yet here we are.

Super Pumped, the book, is an in depth look at the rise and fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Impeccably researched, and detailed, it goes into the twists and turns of the Uber story. A story of hubris, a complete lack of ethics, a toxic working environment, and a deep dive into the cult of personality that often surrounds tech founders and CEOs. The book also has a few gonzo moments as the author finds themselves part of the story they are covering for both for good and bad.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, the TV Show, is the first season in an ongoing anthology series. The second series will be based on a forthcoming book, also by Mike Isaac, on Facebook. The TV show does an excellent job of capturing all the major beats and intrigues of the book, while also adding a distinctly more human face to its subjects. Kalanick is much more fleshed out in his relationships with girlfriends and family. There is also much more focus on how much the key figures start out liking each other rather than just being marriages of convenience. However, how much of this is “added drama” is unclear. But given the attention to detail of most of the rest of the story, I am inclined to believe the implication if not the actual events themselves.

Where the TV show really shines is in its portrayal of the side characters and their experiences with Kalanick and his “Bro” culture. Episode five is an extraordinary study in sexual harassment and a dysfunctional Human Resources department as experienced by regular employees. Another scene that stands out is when (spoiler) Kalanick’s girlfriend is breaking up with him, an event that clearly affects him, but yet he stops the argument so that he can answer an email on his phone. The book certainly focuses on the sexual harassment aspects of Uber’s culture, however, the visceral nature of the TV dramatization makes for uncomfortable viewing without straying into exploitative / voyeuristic territory. A thoughtful selection of scenes from this episode would make an excellent starting ground for understanding sexist work cultures and how to avoid them and the sexual harassment that ultimately results for managers – both new and old.

The story of Uber and Travis Kalanick is an extraordinary one and is worth your time as a cautionary tale and as a reflection on our cultural blind spot when it comes to convenience. What kind of world do we live in where convenience trumps ethics and the celebration of behavior this is, not to put too fine a point on it, despicable? Does success excuse bad behavior or does success breed a lack of respect for the rules? Does startup culture, which embraces out of the box solutions, also include the idea that as long as you are successful all will be forgiven?

While Travis Kalanick is undoubtedly an extraordinary individual, the TV show rarely makes the viewer feel anything other than deep unease if not downright dislike. The book, while less personal and emotional, is able to illicit sympathy for Kalanick during a meeting with the author and, when out of spite, one of the Uber board members leaks details of Kalanick’s departure from Uber – humiliating him, when the agreement was for a face-saving departure.

By the nature of a TV show, even a series, it can’t go into the detail that a book can. It is interesting that Super Pumped the TV Show starts when Uber is already a reality and uses conversations between protagonists to comment on its past founding and early days. Whereas the book starts from Kalanick’s previous start up and Uber’s humble beginnings as an idea of Garrett Camp when he could not get a cab. Likewise, the TV show ends with Kalanick’s ouster as CEO whereas the book continues into the intrigues of finding a successor and the settling of various lawsuits.

While Super Pumped the book is very much worth your time; Super Pumped: The Battle of Uber, the TV show, is the more extraordinary piece of media. Incredibly watchable, and a useful tool for managers when it comes to toxic internal cultures, the TV show is worth staying up till 2:00AM, as I did, to watch the entire thing in one hit.

Both will also make you download the Lyft app.

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Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management, Movies, Staff Meeting Resources

MoviePass and the Unclothing of the Masters of the Universe

October 5, 2022 //
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Have we really learned nothing over the past 20 years?

Last week, the SEC filed a lawsuit against former executives of the now defunct MoviePass. It alleges what has become an all too familiar tale. That MoviePass was not only a business that could never work, but that its owners knew it could never work, lied to customers, investors, and the markets, and to cap things off siphoned money away to executives through fraudulent invoices for services never delivered.

MoviePass was a service whereby movie patrons would pay $9.99 per month and see as many movies as they liked –  MoviePass would reimburse the movie theater for the price of the ticket. From the start there were those that said that this could never work. But the modern gods of data, analytics, and consumer research said otherwise – or so we were told. It turns out this was not the case. There was no research, no analytical software, and what boils down to no business plan – alleges the SEC. 

I for one am getting pretty sick of this.

Some new highflying new business comes along and promises to change the world and by implication telling us that we are doing it all wrong. And it leaves those who do not buy into the hype scratching their heads wondering what they are missing. What is rarely discussed is the reliance on venture capital. On creating market share above all else – stability and long-term viability be damned. The magicians point to Google, Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, YouTube, PayPal, et al. But for every one of these there are hundreds or thousands of companies that don’t, that can’t, work. And some of these flameout spectacularly: Theranos, WeWork, Enron, pets.com, remember these?

I can’t help thinking about the Michael Lewis book, and its surprisingly faithful movie adaptation; “The Big Short.” The Big Short is about the housing crisis and the subsequent crash and world recession. More precisely, the book is about those who saw that the subprime housing market was fundamentally flawed if not actually fraudulent and spend most of the book trying to figure out what they are missing. As it turns out there are missing anything other than the willingness of others to delude themselves. 

Business should be about delivering goods and services to the community. The contract being that if a business delivers a fair product, at a fair price, a business should be rewarded by being profitable, paying its employees fairly, and if the owners want, being able to sell that business as a going concern in the future.

Where things have gone wrong is the idea of using a business to create a narrative. A narrative of the potential of the future. One day we will be profitable. One day we will be sustainable because our competitors will be out of business. We’ve ran the numbers and by some magic it will all work out down the road – look at all our customers. South Park highlighted this nonsense best with a group of gnomes who collect underpants. Their three-step plan being step one: collect underpants and step three: being profit, but never actually figuring out what step two, the most important step, actually is.

Once those at the top realize that their emperor has no clothes the lies start, and then in some cases, the fraud. Even if it does not lead to lies and fraud, the implications for society can be dire when we up end markets on a promise rather than a sound financial plan. Rental arbitrage for example, where properties are rented and then put up for short term rentals using services such as Airbnb, have made renting impossibly expensive in many cities for people who just want somewhere to live.

Now I like to think I’m not an idiot. I understand that some industries need scale to be able to work. That a startup might well have significant burn rate (the rate at which it spends investors cash). Visionary ideas are often not recognized. Disruption can be painful – and there are businesses that do need to be disrupted. There are businesses that leave money on the table that become opportunities for others. Finally, I also get that startup culture has changed our world, for the better, in a lot of ways.

But in turn, that does not mean that we should blindly accept the narrative of a businesses that sounds too good to be true is actually just ahead of their time when actually the much simpler explanation of them actually being too good to be true is more accurate. What does is say about our business landscape when a company, or an existing industry which is profitable is put out of existence by a company that can never be profitable except in the minds of those willing to finance the risk up until the point they can sell the risk to someone else and make boat loads of cash?

Take Uber. The poster child for the disruption of an industry that needed disrupting. A radical change to how people get around cities. However, they still have not made a profit in any meaningful way. Just how big does a company like Uber need to be in order to be profitable? Lots of people have gotten rich, lots of other companies have gone out of business as a result, lots of ethical lapses, lots of legally questionable tactics, and an internal culture so toxic it got its own TV show – the excellent Super Pumped on Showtime.

https://youtu.be/eNn8YJYAyEo

Uber makes our lives easier but customers underpaying for something always makes customers happier. And that’s the problem. I would argue, that in the long run stability is what matters for society. The jury is still out as to whether Uber drivers are happier than Taxi drivers. Uber is certainly more convenient for drivers, they tend to be more productive, and the barriers to entry have been removed (although there is a significant argument that Lyft deserves more of the credit here). The recent lawsuits about employee classification would seem to suggest that all in not well in the space. But what happens when Uber is “too big to fail?” Does it become the very industry is sought to disrupt?

In the end, while traditional business can be seen as stale and boring, without the glamor and potential riches of startup culture, they have the advantage of adding to society and generally being profitable. The masters of the universe of startup culture, and venture capitalism, at times seem to be the peddlers of nothing but vision. While there is lots of talk about changing the world, this is often at the expense of internal culture and the norms of doing business. Breaking things is not always the best way to get what you want done. Not all startups / venture capital funded enterprises are toxic cesspits and not more traditional business are sweetness and light.

What is becoming obvious, however, is that just disruption and having a good vison are not enough to achieve results in the real world and there by bring benefit to society as a whole.

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Categories Business, Management, Marketing, Movies

Book and TV Review: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

August 27, 2022 //
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The TV show on Apple TV + “Five Days at Memorial” based on the book of the same name (which in turn is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning article) is about three quarters through as I finished the book and I write this. Therefore, my criticism and praise of the show should be seen in this context. I’ll try to keep this review free of major spoilers for the TV show, but it is difficult to discuss the issues of this true story without covering some of the events involved.

“Five Days at Memorial” tells the story of what happened to the doctors and patients at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans when they lost power, were flooded, were abandoned by authorities, and evacuation was difficult to impossible. It is a challenging story that involves issues of disaster preparedness, corporate ownership of hospitals, death, euthanasia, quality of life, triage, race relations, rationing of care, and the potential criminal culpability of doctors for decisions made during emergency situations.

The TV show seems to be told from a particular point of view which in a story like this means taking a particular side. It paints a bleak picture of hospital ownership, which according to the book, are certainly due for criticism; however, the lack of care and forethought shown is disingenuous. It does set a similar tone, but like many “docudramas” it combines characters, invents new ones, and seems to invent situations to fit story arcs and running times. The acrimonious relationship between the staff at Memorial and the staff of the Life Care Hospice hospital, that inhabited the same building, seems to be a fiction made for TV.  It also wholesale moves one situation from a different hospital, Memorial was not the only hospital with major issues during Katrina, to Memorial for dramatic effect.

While I’m painting a picture of the show as being an unreliable narrator that is not to say that it is not entertaining and emotionally engaging. It also shows the importance of disaster preparedness and the dedication of medical professionals. Being in the veterinary profession, the plight of pets and the role they play in the movement of people during emergencies, is of particular interest. While the book does an excellent job of recognizing the issues that looking after pets in an emergency raise, the TV show pays only lip service to this, except for one brutally accurate scene in episode six.

As of episode six, the show is of limited use as a teaching tool about disaster response and medical ethics although it is a show worth watching. It does do an excellent job of showing how rumors start and get out of control but provides no solution for controlling them – unlike the book which forays into comparing how other hospitals, during Katrina, dealt with the same issues as Memorial differently or made the same mistakes.

As a teaching tool for disaster response issues, the book is remarkable. It acts as the crucible for ideas that was never able to be had in public and really needed to be. These are issues that affect us to this day. The book, written in 2013, makes this clear with hindsight as it discusses the withdrawal of ventilators from patients during a potential Influenza pandemic. While Katrina changed many things about disaster response and emergency preparedness, this book shows how much still has to change nine years after its publication and 17 years after Hurricane Katrina.

The book swings wildly between differing points of view on the more contentious issues which buffets the reader much as the characters in the book must have felt. The research is impeccable and paints an impressively detailed picture of both Memorial during Katrina and  that of public opinion, law enforcement, politicians, and the medical community in the aftermath.

It also explores in depth not only moral quandaries faced by doctors and emergency personnel, but also the ethical and legal issues that also arise. It does an extraordinary job of showing how people in decision making positions get trapped by a lack of situational awareness and become prisoners of decisions made with different information at different times.

What Five Days at Memorial shows, both in written form and to a lesser extent its TV cousin, is that heroes can be flawed and that villains can do good. What really needs to be our focus is values. Do emergencies change our values or do our values inform how we respond to emergencies? We need to discuss that, particularly considering COVID 19, and if the TV show helps that happen then it will have done a great service to our society.

However, it will be the book that informs that discussion and that we should use as a foundation. This is what great books do. They focus our minds and give us evidence to think. There are no easy answers in Five days at Memorial and a lot of questions. But what Ms. Fink (more accurately addressed as Dr. Fink since she herself is an M.D.) has done is set us a table for us to dine over and have those discussions. These issues will not go away, and as the book makes clear in the epilogue, we are doomed to make the same mistakes, with the same justifications, or go down potentially dangerous roads, if we do not have frank discussions about how we as a society actually feel about ethical and moral quandaries that often arise in the most trying and difficult of times.

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Categories Books, Business, COVID19, disaster preparedness, Leadership, Management, Movies, Politics, Race

Book Review: Hit Makers by Derek Thompson

September 14, 2019 //
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hitmakers

Why do some ideas become wildly popular while others languish in obscurity?

Derek Thompson’s riveting, and impeccably researched, book; “Hit Makers,” postulates that there is a formula to making ideas popular. It argues that knowing how manipulate ideas to create successful products has major implications, but that it is also just as important is to understand when successful products are the result of manipulation.

At its core, Hit Makers asked two questions:

  1. What is the secret to making products that people like, whether they are music, movies, TV shows, or Apps in the vast cultural landscape of today?
  2. Why do some products fail, while similar ideas catch on and become massive hits?

Mr. Thompson tells us that people are both neophiliac, a love of the new, while also being neophobic, a fear of the new. People who are hit makers marry old and new ideas. They create familiar surprises. People tend to gravitate to the familiar – the most popular movies in recent times have all be sequels or reimagining of existing properties. People want new things, but they want those new things to seem familiar.

The most popular theory of modern content creation is that if you make great content, it will be recognized, shared, and go viral. However, Mr. Thompson states; “Content might be king, but distribution is the kingdom.” Catchy tunes that do not get air play on the radio will remain unknown. New tunes get on the radio by being new, but being familiar enough to listeners that they do not turn off.

Repetition, repeated exposure which creates familiarity, can actually be used to engineer popularity in groups of people. Politicians have known this for years. Consider this speech by Barack Obama:

“For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.”

Or this speech by Winston Churchill;

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Mr. Thompson makes a convincing case, although not guaranteed, that popularity can, and has been for centuries, been manufactured and manipulated, but that it can also occur spontaneously by specific sets of circumstances.

Hit Makers is a starting point for understanding how and why things become popular and how we can get our ideas to find their audience, and what we can do to create that audience in the first place. It postulates that we misunderstand terms such as “viral” and “influencer” therefore ideas are not spread in the ways that we hope.

Hit Makers is a phenomenal book for anyone who sees to understand ideas and popularity. It draws from history and the present day. It should, for better or worse, change the way you share ideas and see how ideas change the world.

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Categories Books, Business, Content Marketing, Marketing, Movies, Politics, Social Media

Movie Review: The Founder

February 10, 2018 //
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founder
I have been reviewing books for a number of years now; however, movies have always been my passion and on occasion I have used movies in staff meetings for the accessibility of the message, and for more personal management lessons. I decided that it was time to share some of these. Please note that this review does contain spoilers for the movie and is more of a reference for interesting scenes and themes.

The Founder is the true story of The McDonald Brothers, who created the first McDonald’s Burger Restaurant, and Ray Croc who saw the potential in what the McDonald Brothers had created and turned it into the franchise and behemoth that we know today. Starring Michael Keaton, as Ray Croc, The Founder is certainly a cautionary tail about choosing your business partners, but it is also a story about realizing potential, and understanding your business and your customers.

The movie starts by following Ray Croc as an ice cream mixer sales man to bad drive in restaurants. While it is obvious that he is an archetypal slimy sales man, the patter he uses is surprisingly modern and essentially comes down to “build it and they will come.”
When he comes across the McDonald Brothers’ restaurant, it is different from any that the traveling salesman has come across in the past: Bulk sales of three items, no plates or utensils, and the food is received in 30 seconds rather than 30 minutes.

While the story of how the brothers reached this point is interesting on many levels, the 20-minute mark is of particular note. The McDonald Brothers take their staff to a tennis court, lay out their new kitchen design in chalk, and have the staff act out the “speedy system” that will allow them to make burgers like nobody else. What is most interesting about this sequence is the McDonald Brothers attention to detail and choreography of how their staff moves. They recognize that they are creating a system and that it has to be right or it will not work at all – even if that mean them redesigning the kitchen multiple times.

At the 50-minute mark the discussion of franchising, and the potential for a drop in standards, is examined in detail. This in turn leads to the realization that franchise owners should be sales people who are wholly vested in the venture, and looking for an opportunity, rather than just investors looking to make money anyway they can. Again, this plays into a central theme of the movie – chose who you go into business with wisely.

One hour and 18 minutes marks the real revelation of the McDonald’s story. That the McDonald’s franchise is not in the burger business at all, but actually in the real-estate business. Rent provides steady revenue and it is capital that fuels expansion.
Things start to go seriously wrong for the McDonald Brothers at the one hour and 29-minute mark with the breaking of their contract with Ray Croc and how Ray Croc sees business. A significant take away from the movie is that the McDonald Brothers and the Ray Croc have fundamentally different views on business, what a business should be to the community, and how a business person behaves.

It is certainly a cautionary tale.

While it would be a mistake to paint Ray Croc as a mustache twirling villain, his ethical standards are dubious at best. Re-watching the movie, with the benefit of knowing what happens, it is interesting to note all the places where the McDonald Brothers treat Ray Croc less as a partner and more as an employee. They frustrate his attempts to monetize the franchise, and are unbending in their standards even if that creates a significant impediment to the creation of a viable business. One can certainly see the position that Ray Croc finds himself in, and while his solution is mean and dishonest, it is not one of his making. Unlike most business stories where the good guy visionary’s do battle against the dark hearted managers, “The Founder” is more a tale of restrictive managers with a good idea and a visionary with dubious morals.

A thoughtful viewing of “The Founder” should provide pause for anyone going into a partnership, and it should also serve as a cautionary tale of the value of communication in a business, the miracle of systems, and the power of vision.

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Categories Business, Customer Service, Management, Movies, Staff Meeting Resources

Book Review: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

December 23, 2017 //
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creativity inc

 

When I review books, I do so because they interest me, or occasionally I review books because I am following a theme.

I’ve had an interest, the way one has an interest in a train crash, with Disney for many years. This was solidified by reading James B. Steward’s excellent “Disney War” which details the infighting and board room drama of the Michael Eisner years at Disney. With Pixar’s Co-founder John Lasseter recent taking of a six-month sabbatical, from Pixar and Disney Animation, for unspecified “missteps,” reading about Pixar’s culture and management with the benefits of hindsight sounded extremely interesting.

What I did not expect was a candid and practical guide to managing creative people, and the creative process, from an obviously highly talented manager and successful business man. This is also one of the best general management books I have read in years.

Mr. Catmull, with the help of Amy Wallace, have written an extraordinary management book that is honest, practical, and one that does not gloss over mistakes while still celebrating their company’s culture. What could have been just a retelling of Pixar’s, undoubtedly interesting, and dramatic, history instead is a retelling of that history with a guide to the lessons learned and the mistakes made.

Books about the history of companies are often written by, or in conjunction with, the visionary leaders who have fantastic ideas and make great leaps of intuition. “Creativity Inc., however, is written by a working manager: Mr. Catmull. While visionary in his conception of wanting to make the first 3D computer animated movie, his role at Pixar, and later Disney Animation, has been one of the manager who makes things happen, assembles the people, and allows his people to be as creative as possible. He is not afraid to place caveats on things such as employee engagement and feedback, while at the same time obviously taking these subjects extremely seriously.

While the concepts in the book are legion, and makes the book well worth a second reading, Mr. Catmull’s belief that failure is not only to be tolerated but actively encouraged stands out. While many in management circles treat failure as a necessary evil, Mr. Catmull makes a convincing case that failure is not evil at all but an important and necessary part of the creative process. Coupled with this belief in failure, is that while “honesty” has many moral connotations, an insistence on “candor” when giving feedback, from any source, is central to preserving a creative culture.

Getting people to work together, being honest about the short comings of the processes, and considering culture as a constant and evolving thing makes “Creativity, Inc.” a different type of management book. The fact that almost everyone knows about Pixar, and hold the movies they make in high regard, makes this a very accessible book. It also manages to avoid the saccharine quality of a lot of management books that intersect with the world of Disney (Lee Cockerell’s “Creating Magic” in particular comes to mind.)

For those who have become a bit jaded by management books, “Creativity, Inc.” is for you. This is an honest, dare I say candid, tale that teaches us that all businesses should be creative and that unleashing the creative power of our employees, or at least to stop stifling it, is probably one of the best things we can do as managers for our business and our employees.

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Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management, Movies, reviews

Movie Review: Moneyball

January 28, 2017 //
1

I have been reviewing books for a number of years now; however, movies have always been my passion and on occasion I have used movies in staff meetings for the accessibility of the message. I decided that it was time to share some of these.

 (Clicking on the image above will take you to Amazon where a tiny percentage goes to help my movie and book buying habit.)

 

Moneyball, based on the excellent book by Michael Lewis of the same name, follows the real life story of the Oakland A’s baseball team. In particular, Moneyball documents the Oakland A’s struggles of trying to be successful with a budget a mere fraction of their competitors. The realization of their manger, Billy Beane – played by Brad Pitt, that they either have to “adapt or die” is one that many businesses can relate to. The solution that Oakland A’s adopted was to look at the data about players, which informs hiring and firing, objectively rather than emotionally.

Looking at a problem from outside the box and understanding what a problem actually is, not what you have always thought it was, is a huge lesson for most managers. It is also one that is difficult to teach. However, the lesson of being prepared to do what others will not is one that many from the business world will be familiar with – or at least should be. Overcoming the objections, and down right obstructionist behavior, of those who have not bought into your ideas should also be familiar territory for most managers. The movie treats these issues with respect, and although there is an obvious “good guy / bad guy” dynamic, it is easy to overlook this and see the issues being discussed from both sides.

Since the publication of the book, the statistical approach to fields that have previously been lacking such analysis has become know by the colloquialism “Moneyball.” And although the initially baseball was dramatically changed by Billy Beane and the Moneyball approach, there are signs of it falling out of favor.

However, it would be a mistake to dismiss the book, or the movie, because of this change in the idea’s fortunes. Indeed it actually signals a misunderstanding of the limitations of the approach and of statistics in general. As is stated in the movie: “The first person through the wall always gets bloody.”

The movie does break some of its own rules for dramatic effect; however, these are minor sins given how excellent the movie is as a whole. Interestingly, the movie also has two of the best scenes I have ever seen about terminating an employee. New managers could do a lot worse than follow Brad Pitt’s advice on the matter that can be found in Chapter 8 at the 1:00:00 mark explaining the right and wrong ways to go about a termination. Chapter 10 at the 1:18:00 mark actually shows Jonah Hill”s character putting that advice to use and it is a highly accurate and realistic portrayal of how a termination should be done.

As a management tool, Moneyball is a great business story cloaked in a sports jacket. Both the good and the bad of analytics are on display here, as well as the difficulty of being a pioneer and trying to overcome entrenched ideas whose only validity is “that’s the way we have always done things.”

You may not like baseball, but this is a smart story, based on a smart book, about smart people. It also has the added advantage of being highly entertaining.

You could do a lot worse.

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Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management, Movies

Movie Review: Burnt

September 9, 2016 //
0

I have been reviewing books for a number of years now; however, movies have always been my passion and on occasion I have used movies in staff meetings for the accessibility of the message. I decided that it was time to share some of these.

(Clicking on the image above will take you to Amazon where a tiny percentage goes to help my movie and book buying habit.

 

Burnt is a great movie. Staring Bradley Cooper, it’s the story of a chef seeking redemption by opening a new restaurant in London and winning a 3rd Michelin star after imploding and ruining his mentor’s restaurant in Paris.

It’s use as a management tool comes from the relationships of running a team and of how not to treat employees. It does contain swearing, so if that is incompatible with your company culture this movie is not for you.

I feel there two ways to use this particular movie. In whole; individually, to help illuminate how abusive management is contagious and ultimately counterproductive and in a general staff meeting. As a tool in a meeting I found the best way was to isolate certain scenes.

Chapter 5: @ 26:30 through to Chapter 6: @ 36:20 – The preparation for the opening of the restaurant. The attention to detail. Staff working at the top of their game, working as a team, and watching that disintegrate due the the behavior of one employee and then the abuse that is untenable.

Chapter 7: @ 40:44 through Chapter 7: @ 43:45 – Again, the preparation and attention to detail and that things have recovered after the events of Chapter 5 and 6. Does this mean the behavior that was seen in chapter 5 and 6 was ok and worked?

Chapter 9: @ 50:58 through Chapter 9: @ 52:23 – Contagion. Demonstrated behavior turns into learned behavior.

Chapter 10 through Chapter 10: @ 56:03 – More contagion, and now it is difficult to control.

Chapter 12: @ 1:11:52 through Chapter 12: @ 1:16:00 – Appalling behavior has a price to pay – even years afterwards.

Chapter 15: working as a team, and working together, is more important than anything else.

It is unusual to see actual work environments, even though this is quite a dysfunctional one, with the real kind of relationships that employees have between each other in a mainstream movie. A thoughtful viewing of “Burnt” should give any leader pause for thought or something to aspire to. And even with taking scenes in isolation it should allow staff to see how bad behavior from anyone can spread and create a workplace where no one wants to work. It is also nice to see a movie where unacceptable behavior is shown for what it is: unacceptable, rather than celebrated.

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Categories Business, Customer Service, Leadership, Management, Movies, Staff Meeting Resources, Uncategorized