Who Knew

Key Takeaways

1. What paralyzed me was that I believed I didn’t deserve a future. Just like my parents’ life of impermanence, I was renting a life rather than making concrete plans for one.
2. I am sure, though, that my situation allowed me to take risks in business that would daunt others. My motivation to succeed was never counted in dollars. It was simply to count as a person in the eyes of others.
3. Serendipity, my lifelong lodestar, had made its first appearance. From being a complete nonentity, the lowest training-wheel employee of a talent agency, I was going to be the assistant to the programming head of one of the three national networks.
4. I experienced a perfect example of the difference in the three networks on my first morning at ABC. I walked into the building and into the elevator, where an ordinary-looking man of no physical or sartorial distinction stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, I’m Leonard Goldenson.” He was the founder and chairman. I shook his hand and shyly said, “I’m your newest employee.” He smiled and said “Welcome!” and up we went in the elevator. Together! The elegant and suave William S. Paley, CBS’s chairman, would never have introduced himself to a new employee in the public elevator, because Paley had his own private elevator. Also, he was a time-honored snob and would have looked at my unruly suit and bad shoes and wondered what the hell I was doing in his classic Eero Saarinen building. At NBC, I would never have been greeted by Robert Sarnoff, its leader at the time and son of the founder, David Sarnoff. I would have quivered in the ornate lobby of the grand RCA Building, wondering which of the fifteen elevators I was supposed to take.
5. One of the many wonderful things at ABC was that if you wanted responsibility, you could simply take it.
6. In that negotiation, I found out something about myself that has surprised me ever since. I actually love confrontation. Arguing principles forcefully, loudly, and passionately was becoming the definition of me. As long as I wasn’t arguing “self,” I was fearless.
7. The one person I never got my way with was the über-powerful chairman of MCA, the wildly feared then “king” of Hollywood, Lew Wasserman. I’d known him since I was eleven years old as the father of my schoolmate Lynne. He’d intimidated me then and forever since. The only time I ever tried to negotiate with him, he wouldn’t give an inch, not even a fraction of an inch. I first approached him in business when I was twenty-five and buying a package of films from his Universal studio. I went to his office and said, ever so tentatively, that given we were buying sixty-four units at $600,000 each, couldn’t you just cut one unit from that sixty-four? Two beats. He stared. He said, “No.” Nothing more. Just no. Silence. The stare. And I folded like the cheapest tent. But as I got up to go, dejectedly knowing the fool that I was, he walked me out and, in that very quiet voice of his, said, “Next time you try this, be fully prepared to call the whole deal off if you don’t get what you asked for. Because, otherwise, you never will.” Out I went as the door closed silently behind me. It was the best lesson in negotiating and has stayed with me ever after.
8. Those two principles—never done before and never done quite this way—have always got me going. If ideas don’t have qualities of either I’m just not very engaged. Without my ferocious curiosity and focus aroused, I’m just like the next dullard.
9. One dumb step in front of the other, making mistakes, bouncing off the walls, course-correcting as we went along, head down. That was my process and… over time Process became my one true mantra.
10. The very best way to learn to be a manager is to start something from zero, where each granular step in creating the next job teaches you every task. Managing top-down is exceptionally challenging if you haven’t had the experience of managing from the bottom up.
11. Any really solid story idea that could be explained in a declarative sentence qualified as a MOW. Judging a good idea from a bad idea is completely instinctual, and only effective if you can keep your instincts clean, not cluttered or corroded. The daily drip of cynicism that this business generates in carloads has to be constantly exorcised. It helps if you have broad avenues of mainstream, general interests. But those instincts have to be kept pure, not influenced by anything other than the idea—not by who the director is going to be, or by who the leading actor is going to be, or by relationships, or by anything other than the single qualification: Is this a good idea?
12. Instinct is what I prize. Not research or data. Those who try to apply metrics to these basic decisions waste a huge amount of time and money.
13. Sometimes the staff would ask, “Is it commercial?” and I would brutalize them, because rather than using their instincts, they were trying to predict the public’s appetite, which I said then and say now, over and over again, simply isn’t possible. Neither is using research to help make decisions. No amount of research on ideas is worth the paper (or computer screen) it’s printed on. Data can tell you what has happened, not what can or will happen. Data is often harmful to instinct, and I believe this to be true for making not only creative decisions but many business decisions.
14. Out of my blunt nature came my most defining aspect of management: I encouraged and insisted upon extreme argument in every creative area. It was loud and it was something of a free-for-all, and every voice got attention if that voice had passion. I was like a bandleader conducting lots of dissonant instruments clanging together. But if you listened, really listened to this cacophony, out would come, after exhaustion and sometimes late into the night, the refinement of an idea into something actionable. I called it “creative conflict,” and since then I’ve prized it as the best process for decision-making.
15. It’s a lot harder to come in on top of an organization than at the bottom if you want to know how a company actually works. And I’m no good unless I understand everything down to the smallest molecule.
16. Instinct, which I prize almost above all else, doesn’t work very well for me in abstruse matters. I have to get to the core DNA on any matter, its logical essence, before I can add anything of value. For me this takes a lot of time, often to the irritation of faster thinkers. But when it does crystallize, I can’t be deterred.
17. I came to understand that denial—refusing to accept an ad that didn’t jump off the page and resonate—was the only thing that mattered. I’ve always believed that if you push people past their endurance, good things come. Rarely does a great ad or a great TV spot appear on the first try, and when it does it’s clear instantly and you don’t have to talk around it. What I call “torturing the process” works. Saying “It’s okay” or “It’ll do” is repellent. Never compromise.
18. I hadn’t been able to compartmentalize, I wouldn’t have survived. When all the dots are against you, the only way out is to not connect them.
19. I’d learned many times before that I tend to fail first before I succeed. I need to make mistakes and then course-correct as fast as possible, one dumb step to the next less dumb step.
20. I had become so fed up with the way Paramount operated that I began to pick people from the lower ranks who hadn’t yet gotten inculcated into the egoistical methods of Yablans and Evans. I built up a group of young executives who understood my mantra: “What’s the idea?” After that, they began to grasp how necessary it was to tear that idea up and down and yank it every way imaginable to find its essence, to see if it could survive such a tough Socratic process. If it could, we’d take the next step, and if not we’d abandon it.
21. This is where I found a principle that is bedrock for me. The clock starts ticking the moment you’re made aware of the incident. From that second, you’re responsible for actions taken (or not), as well as the consequences of those actions.
22. At Paramount, we had almost no politics; we operated in a classic top-down structure with an absolute clarity of roles and responsibilities. Without organizational ambiguity there’s little internal political behavior.
23. Maybe it’s a simplistic formula, but it works: Give them responsibilities before they are considered ready. Drop them in the deep end and see who struggles and who survives. Keep promoting those who survive.
24. It’s far better to be discounted than to be seen as anyone’s sure thing.
25. I’ve never thought in terms of goals. Yes, if you want to be a doctor, you’ve got to get a license; a lawyer’s got to pass the bar. But if you’re in the entertainment business, setting an absolute goal such as “I want to be head of a studio” is antithetical to ever getting there. One of the things about the executive side of the entertainment business is that you don’t really need to know anything to prosper. You need smarts, mostly of a particular street kind, but what you truly need are instincts and willfulness. It’s that alchemy that makes for a significant career. Having specific goals on that path forward are often detriments. Better to just take opportunities whenever they come and not overplot.
26. Have a very poor memory for the details of being mistreated.
27. There was a little video monitor on the set that showed the number of calls coming in when a product was offered for sale. The vertical lines representing the calls rose during the period of the sales pitch, and then, when it ended, they subsided. I was thunderstruck. To me, those calls were like watching waves coming to shore. I thought, Screens don’t have to be just for narrative, for telling stories. Screens can interact with consumers—that was the epiphany. It was clunky and rudimentary and I had no clear idea how to turn that revelation into action, but it sat there for a while warming up on the back plate of my brain.
28. Shipping the next day was a big part of the appeal—instant gratification.
29. Tisch, without a pause, snapped back: “I don’t get into contests, and I don’t look at what might have been.”
30. Like almost everything in my life, iteration—one dumb step in front of the other, course-correcting as you go—is the only process I’m any good at. I’m best building things from scratch. I’ve learned I’m not a very good shepherd of things already built.

What I got out of it

1. Loved hearing about Diller’s journey and the process of ‘just putting one foot in front of another’ resonates a lot.