Our Need For A Cadence Of Incremental Operational Improvements

This is going to be fun!

Perfect alignment is natural; we just need better roads to get there.

Start small. I think we can all agree that is good advice, right?

I’d follow it though with: aim for often.  Show yourself and all the others that you get things done, regularly — even if they are small things. Especially if!

Small & often, together those two can make the world a whole lot better. What do you get when you build a string of regularly occurring low key revolutions? Okay, maybe “revolution” is too hot a word. F that: just fix stuff. Make it better. Help it all find an order and something that resembles beauty.

Now we’re talking! You get a whole bunch of folks who know they can make a difference, and that is how you make a flash point – that magic moment where things will no longer remain the same and folks on all sides demand change. Ready to dig in?

For the sake of clarity, even though I am talking about the film industry here, I am talking about a lot more than the film business. You can apply this to everything and to every aspect of everything. We don’t have to wait for things to get a whole lot better; we just have to work together to bring a steady flow of small fixes into the different things we do. The need is there.

When I was at Amazon Studios I had a plan on how we could make something really special.  We were stuck in a rut and it was the same rut that the entire film business is always stuck in. We were picking projects out of the rapids, taking what was fed to us. The market provides, right? No, the market provides what the other folks already have. That’s what it does. It doesn’t give you what you need or actually want. We all get hypnotized by the good enough. Get off that horse!

“Good Enough” might be just dandy if you are the sort of conformist tool that delights in sameness but seriously, look where that gets you: six tales (and I know I am overlooking a bunch of others) of entrepreneurial enterprise (Barbie, Beanie Babies, Blackberry, Flamin’ Hot Doritos, Tetris, WeWork) told without much edge and all at the same time? Nothing against those films, but whatever happened to aiming for distinction in the marketplace. Okay, maybe it’s unfair to put Barbie in that group, but…

I get it. We all get it. When we have the same inputs, we get the same outputs. When everyone just wants to belong and not stand out (or risk their job) how can you make a work of distinction or something actually special? When I was at Amazon, I thought I had a simple solution: empower the executives to develop their own ideas. How’d that work out? Well, they are executives because they are executives, and it turns out very few have their own ideas. So, there’s that.

And as we know, it doesn’t pay to conflict with FilmBiz Rule #1, and if you give someone responsibility and don’t allow them to sufficient cloth to cover their ass or pass the buck, they aren’t going to risk Rule #1. But boy oh boy, would I like to end Rule #1.

I thought I could crack that code though. I thought all that was needed was