THE NEW HOLLYWOOD LEADER

WHAT ARE YOUR COMPANY'S LEADERSHIP VALUES?

What are the essential skills, qualities and awareness' that you wish you could magically clone and implant into your company's future leaders?

The qualities are often silently embedded into the vision of a companies founders, their successful CEO, creative directors or leaders.

KNOW YOUR TEAM

Lacking the tools, time or sometimes simply the inclination to develop the next generation of a companies leaders often causes creative companies to rely on corporate leadership "instruments" and "assessments" that are expensive, time consuming, boring and ultimately ineffective for creative companies, departments or teams.

Creative companies are led, managed and inspired differently. Its employees are not motivated exclusively by money. For employees of creative companies, what matters is their ability to do good work, collaboratively with other creative people, in an environment where creativity is understood and respected.

KNOW HOW TO MANAGE DEADLINES

Even the most ethereal of creative artists understand and respect deadlines. But when they are working in an environment of seemingly arbitrary milestones, inane redundancies, and management inefficiencies, creative employees will flounder, lose interest and before long move to a company where they feel better appreciated and understood.

KNOW CREATIVE PROCESS

Yet the challenge of the modern entertainment company is how to manage creative talent in a way that allows them to do their best work and to have an entire team's efforts focused into a symphonic crescendo of original creation, finely focused by a creative leader, into a successful product that will be funneled into the market place at the right time in the right way.

Developing leadership talent for creative companies must start with an appreciation of the creative process.

Also essential are having both a clear vision of what the product will be, and the ability to articulate it, even though it will probably evolve.

KNOW YOUR BUSINESS

You must know your core creative and business values before you enter "The den of constant creation and change" or you will be lost forever, and worst of all, dismissed as simply a random, clueless "suit."

The best creative leaders know what matters and what doesn't. Know which battles to fight and which to give in on. And even know when to give in when they're right and the team is wrong (but may need to learn it for themselves.)

FEEDBACK, PLEASE?

The best creative leaders know how to give supportive feedback when the process is veering off course. Sometimes they can tell right away and sometimes it's impossible to tell until later. But knowing when, and how, to pull the plug on a creative exploration is the master's stroke.

KNOW YOUR SELF

Finding the right balance of compassion, sensitivity and certainty requires a leader to be grounded in an understanding of their own strengths, their own vulnerabilities, and their own aesthetic, business and market grounded ness.

Confident and knowledgeable enough about the creative process at hand, knowing the language and customs of the creative working, and when to listen to, and fight for their own intuitions are seldom discussed, rarely well articulated awareness's that the great creative leaders have.

They are respected, appreciated and loved. Their creative teams will work their hardest to make them happy if they trust that their work will be appreciated and their process understood.

KNOW LEADERSHIP

Some of these qualities come naturally to some. Some come through training in creative disciplines, some through apprenticing a great creative leaders.

But the essential skills of creative, collaborative leadership can be learned, experienced and transmitted.

Whenever you're ready.

AMAZING JOURNEY

(I wrote this on the topic/challenge of our great songwriters to stay lyrically relevant in the later stages of their careers. This was after watcing "Amazing Journey" the great documentary about The WHO on the plane to NY. (Virgin America Rocks.)

 

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ARTISTS GETTING OLDER

The problem with being an older songwriter, like Pete Townsend, or Paul McCartney, or Joni Mitchell, is that if you've lived long enough, you start to understand the meaning of things and you want to write about what you've seen and understand, have learned.

 

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

When they were younger and brash and confused and running a full tank of hormones they were able to spew and spout and rail with more directness, and less consciousness of what they were saying.

Now, years later they look at the songs they wrote as brilliant artists and young men and women and can actually see and hear what they were thinking about, wondering about, and searching for.

 

WHAT ME WORRY?

What they were drawn to like a moth to the flame, ran from like a bat out of hell, and angry about like a rolling stone.

But now, they're cursed, or challenged, with self knowledge and worldly awareness and it's a bit harder to pull out a good image without knowing it's meaning in our canon of past work, our library of clip part from our past journey, demon's, angels and all.

OK. I commit to give another listen to that recent WHO CD

CULTURE CLASH: HOLLYWOOD VS. SILIWOOD LEADERSHIP (Silicon Valley)

I've been thinking a lot about how a new form of leadership is being born, discovered, or perhaps like gems hidden underground, uncovered when it was always there the whole time.

 

SPLITSVILLE

My professional career was generally split between Hollywood and entertainment industry creation and Silicon Valley, technology type creation and development.

 

CONTROL FREAK?

 

Coming from the Hollywood style of creation and leadership, I understood and learned a more militaristic, hierarchical style of how things work. Predicated on a desire and a belief that everything could be planned, scheduled, and more or less controlled I/we believed that every shot could be well planned, well scheduled and highly anticipated.

 

OUT OF CONTROL? 

 

And despite the many ways and places where this system breaks down, or is at least imperfect, for large groups of expensive people, there's a definite logic to this approach.

The challenge is how to stay open to the creative shifts and unexpected magic. How to roll with unexpected delays (whether foreseeable or not) and find the opportunity. What wants to happen that we did not plan or schedule, but that the addition of will add to the value and understanding and excellence of the "whole?"

 

OUT-OF-CONTROL FREAKS?

 

The software/technology modality is more about all voices being heard and accepted. Software development recognizes that all members of the team have a special expertise and point of view.

But more importantly, great software teams, and team leaders, understand and accept that things are moving changing developing and morphing as we code and build them daily.

AND . . . THAT'S  A CUT

 
This wouldn't necessarily work on a film set. A film project that starts as a drama and morphs into a comedy would probably not really work. (Although unfortunately, it may have inadvertently happened occasionally in the history of cinema.)

But my point is that somewhere between the linear highly scheduled methodology of film production and the guided amorphous underwater creation of software, are lessons to be learned for anyone seeking to create and lead a creative team in business.

 

SYNTHESIS OR ANTI-THESIS?

 

The Leadership Trainings and Workshops I'm developing will help creative professional learn and integrate the best of these divergent leadership styles to form a new model of creative collaborative leadership for all creative industries and companies.

LEADERSHIP VALUE: SELF-MANAGEMENT

To contradict one of my favorite movies, Fight Club, the first rule of leadership is: Always talk about leadership.

HERE'S WHY:

The first step of leadership is really to begin becoming aware of leadership. Observing it in your self, in others and in the world at large.

We're creating a new form of leadership every day and it's actually very much a work-in-progress, changing every day sort of a thing.

We can start by looking at people in the world, in our lives and in our industry who we believe are acting "leader like" whether we currently think of them as leaders or not.

LEADERSHIP VALUES:

We do this to understand and become aware of "leadership values."  The qualities we value and notice that make us feel inspired to listen to someone, follow someone, trust someone or just give them the benefit of the doubt enough to let them finish talking.

We cannot effectively ask our collaborators to achieve skills that we are not working on ourselves.

SELF-MANAGEMENT:

While we'd often like the process to begin with ways that we can control and manage others, the journey actually must start with ourselves.

The skills required in self-managing are requirements/prerequisites for powerfully managing others.

How well do you handle your priorities and to do items? How can we expect to assign tasks and track progress with others when we can't do it well for ourselves?

If we can't manage our own responsibilities, time, tasks, or resources, how can we manage someone else's?

GOT PRIORITIES?

How can we expect others to be clear about their priorities and to think for themselves if we haven't clarified the vision for the project, company or period of time?

When we are in the process of gaining self-management skills, it helps us to be better aware of the challenges inherent in time management and self-management of modern workers.

400 E-MAILS:

One situation this is occurring now for many of us is the incredible barrage of emails we get each day. (Yes, including this one.) Many of my clients and friends report receiving 300 to 400 emails per day. After a lunch meeting with client recently, he showed me his black berry and said "See . . . 86 emails since we sat down to lunch."

Herein is a great opportunity for all of us to practice better self-management. And if we're overwhelmed, our staff will be too. And our clients and our colleagues up and down the food chain.

How many of you fear going on vacation because you'll come back to over 1000 emails when you get back?

How well do you manage your time?
Your priorities?
Your projects?
Your life, your friends, family, community?
Your email inbox?

What areas of your work or home life are out of control?

LEADERSHIP DEFINITIONS: THE JOURNEY BEGINS

(This is a work in progress. I'm still synthesizing and simplifying many of my notes and writing about leadership over the past few years. My apologies in advance for any potential redundancies.)

Hope you like it, here it goes:

DEFINITION/RIFF #1:

Leadership is the art of facilitating collaborative creation toward a powerful goal.

Leaders guide and empower a team of willing participants towards a visualized, articulated, actualized and constantly evolving end.

Leaders bring forth a deeply accessed vision, nurture their teams by facilitating inspiration and collaboration and manage results through supportive accountability.

Leadership can be practiced and applied by anyone at any level of a team or organization.

Leadership growth involves an ongoing process of developing the skills and awareness' for inspiring, nurturing and managing collaborative work in progress.

LEADERSHIP REMIX: BEYOND THE COMPOSITE SNOOZE

As a culture, and as a community, we are only recently beginning to understand, ask ourselves, and define, or actually redefine, leadership.

The word's been around, and we hear it often. Yet the composite snooze we experience around the word is a result of its apparent emptiness. It feels like tired corporate jargon because when the so-called leaders of business, industry or culture are asked about leadership they seem to have nothing to say that is inspiring, profound, or relevant.
 

OH, IT WAS NOTHING, REALLY

 

Maybe they'll point to decisions they made, or anecdotes or experiences that may have inadvertently and unconsciously shaped them. Or missions, agendas or strategies that they seem to have led or overseen, and are thus receiving and happy to take ownership in, some bit of public, corporate, or artistic success.

Yet the essence of leadership remains a mystery, except, perhaps to the many coaches and leadership experts who go on and on about how important it is to do our best to articulate, describe, and teach what it is.

MY QUESTION FOR WGA PRESIDENT PATRIC VERRONE (And his Answer)

I had the pleasure of doing a web-radio interview last week on one of my favorite topics: Hollywood Leadership and the Writer's Guild Strike. Hosted by Coach Tom Floyd, guests were Patric Verrone, President of the WGA, Jonathan Handel, attorney at TroyGould,  Coach (and friend) Sherry Ziff Lester and me.

THE LEADERSHIP LEARNING?

Of course I'm always listening for the leadership opportunities and ways we can do things differently in Hollywood. In the beginning of our conversation Patric was explaining the events and months preceding the vote and decision to strike. Obviously lots of frustrating time passed that led to the lengthy strike.

BUT HERE WAS MY QUESTION TO HIM:

BROWNSTEIN: Patric, obviously, it was a successful strike and you got great things.  With what you learned by the end of the strike —if you could go back in time now—what might have worked differently in July that you discovered in January?

VERRONE: Well, I think the key thing was the involvement of the CEOs. When we were bargaining from July through October, we were bargaining with what Tom referred to as the AMPTP (The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers). 

DAVID BROWNSTEIN, TOP THOUGHT LEADER

In the midst of hunkering down to write my new leadership book, I got notice that I'd been selected as a Top Thought Leader by Leadership Excellence Magazine.

Read on for my full press release on the matter.

"Top 100 Leadership Minds, David Brownstein, Develops Creative Leaders and Careers"

Los Angeles, California. January 14, 2008: David Brownstein is one of the top 100 thought leaders in the field of personal leadership development, according to the world’s leading executive advisory magazine, Leadership Excellence, founded in 1984 by Ken Shelton, Stephen R. Covey, Ken Blanchard and Charles Garfield.

Brownstein shares the spotlight with such recognizable names as Robert Kiyosaki, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Phil McGraw, David Allen, Patrick Lencioni, Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong, Tony Robbins and Suze Orman.

Ken Shelton, editor of Leadership Excellence, chose David Brownstein to be one of the Top 100 Leadership Thought Leaders, “…precisely because he represents an antidote to what commonly ails Hollywood… David’s coaching is based on natural laws and timeless principles, not on cosmetic quick fixes…He gets to the root of personal and professional problems.”

Brownstein is thrilled to be on a list with many of the people whose books sit on his reference shelf. “Many of their ideas have greatly influenced my own,” said Brownstein.

COACHING AND THERAPY

At the ICF conference in November, I had a great conversation the Dr. Carol Kaufman, a therapist, coach and Ass't Professor at Harvard about a whole bunch of stuff, but I was moved by this articulate statement about the differences between coaching and therapy.

“The role of therapy is decreasing depression, the role of coaching is increasing well being.”

Therapy follows the trail of tears with the goal of healing.

Coaching follows the trail of dreams with the goal of optimal living.

In Coaching, healing is a side effect. in therapy that’s your goal.”

Very poetic, clear and honoring of the tools and intentions of both paradigms.

What do you think?

CREATIVE CAREER WORKSHOP - 1/26/08

THE STRIKE ISN'T CHANGING HOLLYWOOD . . .

The deep changes we're seeing and contemplating have been progressing for years in quiet, lava-like slow motion. These changes ARE being highlighted and accelerated by the strike.

The internet has existed for years. The studios have been owned by big corporations for years. People have come to Hollywood with talent, a dream and varying degrees of a business plan for years.

The WGA's choice to strike, and the AMPTP's choice not to negotiate have combined to create an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and stasis few of us have experienced in our professional lives. (Who knew the AMPTP would negotiate like suicide bombers?)

And yet the uncertainty was here all along. The shutdown of production, development and awards shows has simply unmasked the great uncertainties that have always been upon us.

THE BIG QUESTIONS:

-What am I doing in Hollywood?
-What do I want out of my life?
-What sacrifices (or choices) have I made in my life to have a career in Show Business?
-Is my career going where I want it to go?