Leadership goes to the movies

Expert Warren Bennis on leadership lessons from the set and the screen.

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Leadership sage Warren Bennis has studied everyone from military generals to CEOs and political officials. And, being based down the road from Hollywood at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, he has also taken a special interest in studying the leadership of directors, interviewing filmmakers and television directors such as Sydney Pollack and Norman Lear over the years. “If one wants to learn about leadership, watch and observe directors,” Bennis told On Leadership. What follows are thoughts from one of the leadership field's biggest stars on the lessons he has taken from directors, movies and filmmaking.

Bret Hartman / For The Washington Post

In the closing scene [of "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930)], the hero, played by Lew Ayres, steps out of the trench to observe a butterfly and is shot dead. What still haunts me about that film is how soldiers’ lives are endangered by incompetent and uncaring leaders. It changed Lew Ayres’ life, too. In World War II, at great personal and professional risk, he became a conscientious objector. The film had an equally powerful but different impact on me. In 1943, two weeks before I was 18, I enlisted in the Army. Twenty months later, I was leading an infantry platoon in Germany. And since the end of World War II, I’ve devoted a good portion of my life to the study of leaders and how leadership can endanger or empower our lives.

File photo

“The King’s Speech” (2010) was a marvelous film about leadership in that it wasn’t about a person who went after a job, but who inherited it. It was a brilliant film because it showed this uncertain person learning to become a leader and to deliver a great speech -- a role we rarely see. All the stuff we have on leadership, it rarely shows the longitudinal, the person who inherits the throne and then has to learn to occupy it.

Laurie Sparham / AP

Steven Spielberg is a master of technology. He knows how to use special effects, and he’s a genius at that part of movies -- he’s changed the way movies are made. But the second thing he really has is a beautiful eye for casting. That’s what leaders do all the time. They have to hire people and fire people. What better way for learning those skills than as a director, who has to cast people for a precise role? It takes intuition, that sense of knowing the qualities of other people. Much of a director’s genius, including Spielberg’s, has to do with choosing the right people. He also knows a good idea when he sees one. Think of the economic cost and expense of doing a film. You’re making a multimillion-dollar investment. You’ve got to be pretty sure.

Paul Hackett / Reuters

“The Candidate” (1972) is all about Robert Redford running for office, a little reluctantly, but he gins himself up and gets elected. In the last scene, he’s in his dressing room preparing to go on TV to accept the nomination. He’s been trained by his campaign manager how to respond. He’s putting makeup on and the crowd -- the press -- is knocking at the door. As he sees them, he turns and says, “Now what do I do?” The only way you can really get what leadership is is by the experience of actually leading people. In a way, “The Candidate” is all about becoming a leader. You cannot actually do it vicariously.

Jim Burke, the former CEO of Johnson & Johnson who overcame the Tylenol crisis in the ‘80s, prompted my interest in movie and TV directors. He once asked who I thought was the most powerful leader in the United States. I served up several plausible candidates, including Paul Volker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve. He kept waving off my suggestions until I said, “OK, Jim, who?” “Norman Lear,” he replied. He was right. Consider the number of homes, the millions of families who Archie Bunker or “The Jeffersons” influenced. Jim’s point was that Lear’s shows were altering people’s behavior -- he had characters buckle their seat belts, for instance, and viewers did it. Leadership can be indirect, creating exemplars that influence others.

Jonathan Alcorn

There are two documentaries we show in our class: “Inside Job” (2010) by Charles Ferguson and the Errol Morris documentary “The Fog of War” (2003). They’re both about people not speaking truth to power. In the case of both “Inside Job” and “Fog of War,” someone who doesn’t lead the organization but is in a position of making a difference did not speak truth to power. Both films get at the tragedy of many bureaucracies.

Claire Folger

Another great film about bureaucracies is “Ikiru” (1952) by Akira Kurosawa. It’s about a little guy in a big bureaucracy who keeps trying to get the city he’s living in not to destroy a park. ... It’s a heart-breaking film. He finally gets the city council to approve [of not destroying the park], and it ends with him swinging in this little park in this large city. It’s about the problem of changing large bureaucracies. He is not himself a direct leader, but an indirect one.

I once asked Robert Zemeckis what his favorite film was. Without a beat of hesitation, he said “Forrest Gump.” Why, I asked him? “I guess it’s because we were all making the same movie. Everybody -- the actors, the producers, the writers, the sound people, the costumers, the caterers for goodness sakes, the gaffers, the grips, the best boys, the makeup people” were all on the same page. I’ve never heard that point so brilliantly made. Yes, it does take a village -- more than that, a village that is aligned, that is collaborating to create a great movie, a great product, a great nation. Filmmaking is collaborative almost by definition. But collaboration grows more important everyday in all institutions where creative individuals work together. It’s not just Hollywood. Whether the task is building a global business or discovering the mysteries of the human brain, one person can’t hope to accomplish it alone.

Phil Caruso, Paramount Pictures / ABC

Francis Ford Coppola once compared filmmaking to opening a hotel. He should know. He’s just finished building his fifth hotel which, according to press reports, has been in production for six years, longer than it took to make “Apocalypse Now.” “In a movie, the details are the things an audience will notice,” Coppola once told the Financial Times. “In a hotel, it’s everything the guests experience.” Leaders who respect their customers or viewers -- who pay attention to, look at and listen to everything they experience -- are focused on details, and tend to get them right.

Natacha Pisarenko / AP

Sydney Pollack was talking to me a long time ago about his movie “The Way We Were” (1973). There’s a scene where Barbara Streisand is supposed to run out of a classroom and start sobbing, and she couldn’t get the tears out. Pollack told me, “I knew there was juice going on in her, and she was just too tense to let it come out. She had built it up in her mind, and something touched her when I put my arms around her. I just was so convinced that she could cry, because I had seen so much emotion in her work. I don’t know where the impulse came from to hug her.” Directors are kind of midwives to feelings. He had so much trust with the actors that they found they could do things they didn’t previously think they were capable of doing.

Mark Garten

In “12 Angry Men,” (1957) director Sidney Lumet shows a group of strangers meeting -- and meeting and meeting and meeting -- as a jury. It shows how leadership emerges out of a group of strangers. They don’t know one another. No one was designated or crowned. That’s what happens an awful lot of the time. You’re not given the status -- you emerge as a leader. A jury is quite different from a huge organization. There is no hierarchy, just a bunch of people having to make a life-and-death decision.

/ File photo

“I’m concerned about everybody working together.” That’s Martin Scorsese’s response to a reporter who asked what he feels the first day on a set. The quintessential auteur, the dictatorial avatar of filmmaking, Scorsese has successfully morphed into a team leader. I would guess that his experience in the movie business led to the profound realization that it’s impossible to lead without the full inclusion, initiatives and cooperation of his partners and followers. That’s good advice for any leader. And for Scorsese, probably good enough to win another Oscar.

Karen Quincy Loberg / AP

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