What can showbiz teach real biz?

Wednesday, June 08, 2011 | Posted by: Alex Connock
Categories: Business advice, Media sector | Tags: business, Alex Connock, media, CEO, tips, advice, management, PowerPoint, entertainment, rules, showbusiness, lessons

Showbusiness faces the same issues as real business, but with products you’ve heard of and characters you couldn’t make up. Alex Connock, CEO of TV and education producer Ten Alps, says that makes it a good place to learn universal business lessons, and picks out some rules to rule by.

I’ve been reading a clever book about the importance of conflict in the 100 Rules of Television. Despite actively studying TV for 20 years – ie, by wasting a lot of time watching nonsense like The Jeremy Kyle Show and the timeless Banzai – I’ve still learned a great deal from it that’s new.

* Rule 1: Never take on something that has been successful.
That’s good. To take over judging The X Factor now could actually be a questionable career move.

* Rule 2: Take on any disaster that has a chance of being saved.
Yup – nothing to lose.

* Rule 42: Do not film too much.
How very true. The more you film, the more it means you didn’t have a clear idea what the programme was supposed to be in the first place. The best films our people make are notable for their elegant simplicity.

The author, Robert Thirkell, styled the ‘TV Troubleshooter’ for his work on hit formats like Jamie’s School Dinners, could perhaps have embraced that minimalist principle himself and cut down his list to about the 30 best rules. But that’s just nit-picking. On the whole, it’s insightful stuff and you can apply a lot of the rules to the practical reality of a career in any walk of showbusiness.

* Rule 57: Tell the presenter the best idea is theirs.
This would work whether you’re producing the host of Newsnight or the policeman in The Mousetrap at the Macclesfield Amateur Dramatic Society.

* Rule 12: Drama needs heroes and heroes need opponents.
That would underpin the best in TV fiction (say, the BBC’s brilliant Sherlock reboot where the detective’s fraternal nemesis anchors the series). But it also drives the dramatic tension of most reality TV, where a clear opponent, from the jungle in I’m A Celebrity to a sceptical Simon Cowell in The X Factor, is the visceral driver of heavily formatted TV for hours in prime time every night.

But here’s my own glittering insight. These are not just the rules of television, they are the rules of business in general.

* Rule 62: Manage your boss’s boss.
That’s as good solution as any for the universal nonsense of office politics – in fact for real politics, too. (Mind you, that could be easier said than done in the case of one of my colleagues, Bob Geldof.)

And here’s the secret of a genuinely new and cutting-edge TV production or TV company, or startup in general:

* Rule 35: Employ the inexperienced but hungry.
Read the Ken Auletta biography of Google and that’s exactly what they did. Anyone who saw the Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie knows hiring nobodies is how Zuckerberg worked – not least because he was a nobody, too.

* Rule 25: Clear your mind of preconceptions and do open-minded research.
How often do people not do that? On the train from Manchester to London, I see row upon row of businessmen (always men) perfecting the fonts on boring PowerPoints (‘Rolling out the Operational Plan’), but very few just reading or researching something. Could they provide more insight to their colleagues in the meetings if they read more and PowerPointed less? I bet they could.

* Rule 8: Pick a mythic story and stick to it.
Much car advertising owes a nod to the narratives of Greek mythology and the elements of it, too: fire, water, earth and so forth.

And so it goes on.

There are superb books on the history of showbusiness that will teach you more about how to start a company or run a new project than any number of Harvard Business School cases on chemical factories in Dusseldorf with inventory issues.

Julia Phillips’ extraordinary romp through 1970s film production, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, chronicles madcap production goings-on from The Sting to Close Encounters, but is as good an account as you will get on how to build brands and burn bridges in any walk of business.

The outrageous Hit and Run (Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters) tells how two larger-than-life film guys came to dominate content investment for Sony as it moved into Hollywood, with predictably extraordinary results. It’s an acquisition morality play as good as any dry textbook on the cultural challenges of mergers and acquisitions in any field.

In fact, the great thing about showbusiness is that it has the exact same issues as real business – but with products you’ve heard of and characters you couldn’t make up. That makes it a good place to learn universal business lessons.

So even when a product launched is the very opposite of showbusiness craziness – such as our new online education video service Schoolsworld from dbda (for which I hope to be forgiven a plug) – the showbiz basics, such as clear branding and attractive content, are clear to behold.

And just one more thing. Once on the train I actually did see an interesting PowerPoint slide. A woman was working on it – for a major supermarket. I remember clearly what it said:

* Chocolate Team Goals: Visit one MAJOR chocolate factory every month.
Never mind showbusiness: that’s a job we could all enjoy.

Image: © Alex Connock.

Alex Connock co-founded Ten Alps and TV formats company Pretend and takes a lot of photos. He comments regularly on media issues on the Elevate blog for Grant Thornton.

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