The public cares little about how long Olympians train or how many practices football teams suffer before playing a game; the public cares about gold medals and victories. Big wins define success. Many successful companies grew by the hand of all-nighters and sweat, others by beer and four-day work weeks. What matters at the end of the day is attitude, strategy and inspiration. With a team on the same page and in good mental health, the engine can plow forward full steam ahead. Through calculated innovation and disruption, an organization can leapfrog the competition overnight. If everyone believes in what they are doing and work hard to make a difference, anything is possible. Long work days are symptomatic of success and passion – hardly ever the source. Man hours do not scale an organization – that’s industrial era nonsense. Asking your people to work longer days will not shovel fresh coal into the fire. The message should be: care more. If your team does not inherently care a lot, then find different ways to get them charged. Set the vision. Plaster a mission statement to the wall. Whatever it takes to remind everyone why they wake up everyday and come together.
Monthly Archives: May 2012
Looking Back & Forth
It’s very difficult to routinely switch gears between inward-facing and outward-facing responsibilities in an organization. One minute, you’re hunting outside for growth opportunities. Next, you’re back home taking care of chores and drama. It takes a special kind of person to juggle both simultaneously and not twist his or her head off looking back and forth all the time. One of my mentors in college made a point to hunt outside in the morning and clean up internal messes in the afternoon. By batching his processes, he was able to oversee a very large company and scale it with relative stability. I struggle to build that structure into my day-to-day management, but I see how necessary it is to find focus and routine in your operations.
Just Ask
We preoccupy ourselves with speculation. More than half of our stress comes from inferred details that may not even be true. We can keep working ourselves up over nothing. Or we can just ask. Ask the truth. Try to get to the bottom of things. You don’t need to be confrontational. If it helps to fight ambiguity with more ambiguity to sound less direct or confrontational, that’s fine. However you do it, just do it.
Exercising A Healthy Attitude
Charles Swindoll said, “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” It’s all about attitude and what you take personally. If you don’t let things bother you, life rolls on pretty pain-free. I do not promote ignorance, however, so people with an inherent “whatever” attitude disappoint me with how disconnected they are from the people and issues around them. You need to care – often care a lot – to make a difference in this world. It takes the balance of a monk and the stamina of an olympian to put your heart everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It’s exhausting and you need to make sure you stay in good shape to keep the balance alive. My brother said it well: “If you don’t have the energy to be positive, it’s impossible to be positive – your health is your first priority.” Your reaction to life depends solely on your frame of mind. If you are mentally or physically beat to hell, it’s pretty difficult to muster a positive reaction to anything. Make a point to sleep well, eat well and take real breaks. Take care of yourself. With a healthy mind, you can meet life with a healthy attitude and virtuous reactions. Otherwise, you will foster an exponential geyser of negativity that will only drag you down and keep making life worse.
Consolidating the Online Content Experience
Image via CrunchBase
Marvel’s The Avengers raking in a $200M+ opening weekend leaves little room to tell Hollywood that they are doing it wrong. The 40-year old blockbuster model continues to pay for the movie business. In the early days, the cinema experience was not far removed from attending a Broadway show: dressing up and cozying into ornate movie palaces staffed by ushers and orchestras. To expand the experience, multiplexes cropped up everywhere. To augment the experience further, Hollywood learned to tentpole a film, merchandise it and open theme park rides. The cinema experience is larger than life.
While all of that may work for three or four titles, hundreds of motion pictures barely scrape by each year. The internet and a proliferation of choice in the new millennium continues to threaten the sustainability of the movie business. The entertainment industry as a whole keeps falling behind the times. They still depend on Nielsen‘s myopic ratings and surveys to make strategic market decisions. They collect little to no data on their viewers to leverage repeat conversions. They build no intimate relationships with their customers and create few opportunities outside the theater to communitize their content. They embrace an antiquated scarcity model by rolling content out onto different platforms across rigid windows weeks and months apart, thereby eliciting content access demand and piracy. Merchandise still sits on retail shelves or on random websites online, far from the experience of seeing the movie itself. Without update, these practices may be fatal. While box office may be up (due largely to increased ticket prices and 3D or IMAX premiums), attendance is down – even more painful when considering population growth.
All of these issues could be solved by incorporating a thicker web layer into and consolidating the filmgoing experience under one roof – literally and figuratively. By converging merchandise, community and content into a digital or real world platform, Hollywood could make all facets of their business more accessible and leverage entire catalogs toward a more scalable, niche-friendly or cost-effective practice. Loved the movie you just saw? The theaters should make it as easy as possible to leave the theater and impulse buy a plush or action figure of your favorite character. Imagine if you could buy merchandise from and connect with other fans on a movie’s page in Netflix? Organize public screenings or petition for a sequel with the masses online? The community layer would add to the consumer experience and give filmmakers a platform to understand how people engage with their work.
I love the movies. I love the theater. I want the industry to succeed. These issues are reparable. If the industry can recruit key talent from the web tech sector, surrender a century’s worth of logic around brick and mortar business practices, build relationships with consumers online and put storytelling first, there may be a glimmer of stability and hope for film professionals and moviegoers alike. We’ve got work to do. There’s plenty of stories to tell and opportunities to make a living by producing great content.
Related articles
- Hollywood, Silicon Valley need unity, leader says (sfgate.com)
- Letter to the theater…… (rapidreviews.wordpress.com)
We’re Hiring
For those who do not know, I moved to Denver in November and joined Sympoz, the team behind Craftsy, to help oversee production of the site’s video course product. Together, we are building an online video education platform that helps people follow their passions and learn from renowned experts. As one of Denver’s fastest growing startups, it’s an exciting, creative and challenging place to work. I left Hollywood because no one was figuring out how to platform content online. We’ve figured it out. And it is thrilling.
We’re growing at breakneck pace and we need help. I’m looking for a dozen or more talented filmmaking professionals interested in joining the team full time, producing meaningful content and building a production division together. Specifically, I’m looking for solid cinematographers, editors and producers. Creative producers with experience directing instructional content or talent without on-camera experience. Videographers who can light small spaces dynamically, operate jibs or other dynamic rigs and anticipate action like no other. Fast editors with live switching experience or an eye for long form. I’m looking for specialists that are not one-trick ponies – willing to do it all and get your hands dirty. There’s a fair amount of travel involved. I hope to find work-hard/play-hard people with great ideas on optimizing process and raising the bar. Benefits. Medical. Dental. Vision. Life. Equity in the company. Open vacation policy. Booze, ball games and a lot of fun. We have a blast and we’re making a difference in people’s lives.
Not a film professional? There’s plenty of other open positions. If you are interested in any of them, let me know and I can help direct you. Email me directly at craig@sympoz.com.
Embrace Age Gaps
We all have a lot to learn from elders. Even from a young age, I embraced relationships with older people. Many peers accused me of sucking up to adults, but they missed the point entirely. I enjoyed the company and exposure to the experiences of older people. By engaging with adults, I picked up on a lot of necessary skills, knowledge and behavior that continue to help me in social and professional circles. Sure, relationships with mentors help personalize education and augment exposure to curriculum outside the mainstream. Sure, relationships with babysitters and supervisors help reinforce a level of trust that enables freedoms most subservients fail to earn. I developed relationships with superiors that accelerated my success and opened doors otherwise unbeknownst to me. To this day, I embrace and pursue relationships with people – regardless of age. Young or old, it doesn’t matter. The older you get, the less age matters. Age only matters with liquor and cheese.
Burning The Midnight Oil
Sometimes you’ve just gotta do it. If you aspire to work hard, make a difference and get the job done, it takes sacrifices. Not all the time, of course, because that’s not sustainable. But every once in a while, all-nighters, hundred-hour weeks and late Fridays do the trick. If you are able to crumple up your to-do list at the end of the night and call it an accomplished day, very little feels better. Crumpled paper, a glass of wine and a sigh of relief. That’s the stuff.
With that, I’m leaving the office. Fifteen hour day. Suck it.
Time
No, you can’t have anymore of it – no matter how hard you ask or whine. All you can do is make the best with the time you have. Spend less worrying about time and more on making decisions. Do not be afraid to take action on a whim. Sometimes the most spontaneous and uninformed choices can make the biggest impact on your life. Don’t fight time or dread it – spend it efficiently and wisely.
Embrace the New Day
Every day is a new day. Put yesterday behind you and start out fresh. No grudges, no lingering stress, no bad memories – only the positive energy to move forward and seize the day. Ignore the past if you need to – whatever it takes to move forward with confidence and peace of mind. A fresh attitude and perspective can make a big difference in tackling life’s persisting problems. Get a good night sleep, forgive your past and face the day with the determination to make it a good one.
Craig Ormiston 