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Acknowledge the failures of “Taylorism”
I remember a young man that was really strong in the mobile world. I had connected him to a VP of engineering and said, “I think this guy might be the kind of talent you were looking for when you needed somebody to run your mobile thing.” And both parties called me at the end of their interview. One said, “Oh my God, I totally asked a ton of questions; I understand how to help the organization now.” And the VP of Engineering called and said, “That guy, he drove us nuts because he asked us all these questions.” And what the VP of Engineering was doing as I talked to him was figuring out how to get that guy to fit inside a box. Here’s this job spec, and if he can match these checklist items of qualifications, then he’s the right guy. He wasn’t asking for someone to own the large problem; he was asking to figure out, how do I contain this.
And it’s actually the opposite of what we need today. We need people to own the big problem, we need people to show up with their creativity and decision-making, and yet most of how we organize work is around this idea of boxes. It’s got a long history, actually, and most of us, sometimes to understand the future you have to understand the past and how come we do this boxing. So the reason that most management models use the box kind of construct of hierarchy is because when jobs were first created, when it was sort of the Ford manufacturing plant, the only way you could actually create value was you hired a relatively uneducated person, you broke down super complex tasks into simple ones, you optimized for productivity (so if you could put on 112 widgets and I could put on 110, then you were better than I was, and if I could only do five, you could fire me for that lack of productivity).
And so we did those three things: we broke down big tasks into small, we optimized for the individual performance, and then we basically paid for that performance. And so that legacy, which is Taylorism, that’s the management construct, that legacy continues on today. And yet we need just the opposite, we need us to own big problems so that we work together, we want to drive collaboration not individual performance, and we actually want to reward creativity and innovation, not productivity. So we can’t really invent the next model of management until we acknowledge that the current one is actually causing us to fail.
Don’t be afraid of the “Black List”
Creative ideas get lost in every field because once the industry gets created what it’s optimized for, and Taylorism is optimized for, is the notion of productivity. So, if we are focused entirely about how fast we can do things, actually we’re trying to commoditize people, we’re trying to say, oh, we need a script reader, we need an admin, and we start to think about, again, the silhouette of the person, the general skills, instead of saying, what could you bring to the situation? Can I give you a specific example?
Franklin Leonard is this relatively young man as we pick him up in the story and relatively powerless in Hollywood standards. He keeps imagining that Hollywood could find more original scripts, scripts that reflected this range of humanity instead of these trite scripts that were coming across his desk. And so he thought, one day I’m just going to see if I can do this better. He was embarrassed, however, to actually ask that question because he thought, if I was good at my job shouldn’t I already be seeing those scripts? But he went through his Rolodex, found the 89 people he had met during the course of his first year in Hollywood (mind you, his job was, like, schlepping coffee as one of like his roles), but he thought, I’ll just ask these people to help me. And he created an alias because he was worried his boss might find out that he was doing this, and he sent out a note saying, “Send me the scripts you’ve seen in the last year that you’ve loved but haven’t been put into production.” And people did that. And he said, “In return, I will roll up” (he turned out to be a McKenzie analyst in his prior life), “I will roll up all that data and send it back to you as the sort of give/get mix.”
It turns out, that this thing that he created, which is called The Blacklist, ended up finding really novel and new ideas that didn’t fit the prototype of what Hollywood kept creating over and over again. They found really fresh and unusual ideas: Juno, the story of a young pregnant teenager actually wanting to keep the baby… I’m trying to think of some of the other scripts… Moonlight, which was a really original idea; Lars and the Girl, which was about a boyfriend relationship with a sex doll. It was just some really unusual ideas. And when I asked Franklin what did he do and what did he do right, he said, “Well, I‘d just shown a bigger light onto a problem or opportunity.”
And as I was listening to him, I was thinking, “No actually that’s not what you did. And I don’t mean to offend that you, Franklin, but I think you actually did something much fresher than that. You asked a brand new question and then you gave people the permission to join in your purpose, which is to find original fresh ideas.” And that tilt was drastically different than how Hollywood was sorting it already. Hollywood was sorting by this question, which is, how do we make money? And Franklin, by asking the question he did, which is, what do you love?, and in the anonymity of this email process I will basically shield you from the repercussions of not picking what your boss might want, actually got people to surface their own original interests, their own passion. And then gathering together in that nice distributed networked way, actually able to do something with it. And the numbers are unbelievable in terms of how many awards those movies have received and recognition.
But I think the best part about it is it showed the power of an individual connected in meaning with others having that ripple effect to actually change an industry. And that’s what I think the profound impact of any of us are, however young or powerless we are by society standards, can raise our hand and say, I have a different question I want to ask, and how do I actually mobilize other people around those questions that I think matter?