OR/MS Today - August 2001 - Was It Something I Said?

OR/MS Today - August 2001

Was It Something I Said?

Eyeing the Hollywood Model

By Vijay Mehrotra

Years ago, I read a terrific book called "The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Thomas Wolfe. Alas, the movie version of the film was a total mess, turning Wolfe's elegant prose into a lavish on-screen cartoon. How could this have happened?

Recently, after an out-of-town meeting, I dropped by a bookstore before my flight. I came across "The Devil's Candy" by Julie Salamon. The book's jacket promised "a riveting inside chronicle of an infamous film project": the making of "The Bonfire of the Vanities."

Salamon had observed the making of "Bonfire" throughout the entire process, with access to everyone from the studio executives and director Brian De Palma to the lowliest production assistant. The book was instructive because of its observations and explanations about how the movie industry works. Beyond that, the book unexpectedly provided me with a lot of lessons that were directly relevant:

Who is your audience? Because "Bonfire" is set in New York City and steeped in rich local color, there was a great deal of effort to make sure that the film would be relevant to the broader "Middle America" audience. The script was revised endlessly, the story lines were slanted to reveal least common denominators, and major characters were changed substantially, all towards simplifying the presentation.

At the same time, De Palma and his crew went to great lengths to pay homage to historical film precedents and arbitrary standards of excess, in one case squandering huge resources to create a rainy day to turn a little transitional scene into a paean to an Alfred Hitchcock shot.

Huh? I'm all for artistic control and lush detail. But so many of these extravagant little touches did little to advance the story but much to drive costs even farther over budget. Sound familiar? Where do we spend our incremental energy? How often is it focused on the essential modeling and data analysis? What kinds of unnoticed touches do we take great pain to include? At what cost?

It's a war. Richard Sylbert, the art director on "Bonfire" and film industry veteran, offers a perspective that is just as useful in the consulting world: "It's a war. And if you don't know it's a war then you're missing something. The war is between the problems, the people with the ideas, and the people with the money." Let's call this Sylbert's Law.

Yes, in theory our goals are well aligned with our clients: we seek to improve business performance through the successful application of the techniques that we know intimately and love dearly. However, executive sponsors and client project managers are focused on the "improve business performance," while we as a profession have historically clung to a successful-application-of-the-techniques point of view.

Recently, I have begun to appreciate the risk averse orientation of the potential client. While the benefits of what we can offer are usually uncertain and difficult to measure, the costs — money and effort — are real and immediate.

As their own jobs have become more tenuous, there is now a substantial risk to executive sponsors or internal champions to promote something that is hard to understand and re-sell internally. Their selling job is to convince the people with the money to fund it and to persuade the other people that the project's success depends on (peers, direct reports, data providers, hands-on users) to commit their best efforts to making it work.

In trying to sell consulting, I have in the past emphasized the value in terms of adjectives ("optimal," "improved," "effective," "efficient"), largely because I have had an inherent skepticism in the theoretical ROI models that included puffed-up financial benefits estimates. However, I have recently come to accept that the presentation of a success strawman, while inherently imprecise, is critical for opening eyes, sparking discussion and demonstrating that you have thought hard about what you are proposing.

So many roles. A huge number of people worked on "Bonfire," and Salamon illustrates this breadth, engaging with cinematographers, sound editors, line producers, assistant directors location scouts, video editors and many more.

I was struck by two facts. First, film is a world of on-the-job training, and people who are looking to succeed are not just doing their own jobs but also paying great attention to the roles they come in contact with. Secondly, nearly everyone working on this film was an independent contractor. They depended on one another not only for the success of this project but also for their reputations, future opportunities and referrals.

There is much talk these days about the American economy, particularly in the more specialized creative and technical areas that ORMS professionals work in, moving towards the "Hollywood Model" of employment [see Robert Reich's "The Future of Success"]. Outsourcing, contracting, whatever you call it — it is happening more and more and creating both stress and opportunities.

To thrive in this culture, we need to do more than just optimize our sub-projects; we need to look at how we can maximize our contribution to the whole — and it is unnerving to know that the larger venture may fail no matter how well we do. Many people did great work on "Bonfire," yet its place in history is as a critical and commercial flop. However, what is largely within our control are the relationships and reputations that we develop through the different projects we work on.

And many of the same people that enhance what we do on one project could in the future replace us, or worse yet, "film around us," if we do not continue to improve the value of what we do.

Vijay Mehrotra (vijay@onward-net.com) is the CEO of Onward Inc.

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