Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Wolfgang Hammer, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I think that's exactly right. Someone called me, I hadn't heard from them in a while, and they said, we realized we've been selling to the wrong level. We have to sell to C-level as opposed to frontline manager level. And the sales pitch didn't work to the C-level. It was because they had not changed the framework, the subjective personal philosophy. The C-level has a very different worldview of what's happening in company than the line manager. And we worked on it and it was like magic. It was like magic. All of a sudden closing huge national deals with huge companies because they understood the psychology of the C-level manager business. I think it's easy to forget that you're dealing with human beings who have a human experience at the same time as having a professional experience, and story is really good at seeing these two layers at the same time. There's subjective experience that a human being has, and then there's the professional experience on top of it. And I think you want to combine these two and understand you're dealing with human beings first and foremost. And I think the greatest founders and the greatest builders understand this instinctively. [00:00:00] S0: What did you learn running studios? You've made or been a part of making so many things, so many movies.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Wolfgang Hammer
[00:00:00] S0: What did you learn running studios? You've made or been a part of making so many things, so many movies. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I always ran these sort of mid-sized places. I never ran a Warner Bros. type place simply because they don't make the kinds of movies I'm particularly good at or interested in at the same time. It's a very specific skill set to run the big ones. So I ran the mid-sized ones. I think it has to do with being able to communicate in different worlds, which is actually quite difficult because you have to speak the language of filmmakers who live in their own world, and then you have to speak the language of corporate, because there are reporting requirements, business requirements. You have to speak the language of marketing and sales. You're in these different worlds. And your job is to understand the language of filmmaking and the language of business and the language of marketing and run interference so the thing can happen. [00:00:00] S0: What could CEOs learn from filmmakers? Two groups that, like, lead a group of people to make a thing. I've always had this weird obsession with filmmakers. I don't know why. Maybe it's the fact that the thing they make, it ends, the project ends, and then it's on to the next. It's not just this continuous thing that you have to constantly build. And that's appealing to me in some way. You've worked with some of the amazing filmmakers and seen, appreciated their art. What could one learn from the other?
· Wolfgang Hammer
[00:00:00] S1: I come back to this ability and willingness to take ultimate responsibility, which is really not what most people want to do at all. And for some reason, especially filmmakers, I have a true vision of what it is they want to be doing, which means they're birthing this project and they take ultimate responsibility from beginning to end and then do it again, and then do it again, each time risking total failure, staking their entire being on this one next thing. They're running these pretty big temporary startups that get funding from the outside world. They get distribution from someone else, not themselves. So I think it's courage, and it's also courage to espouse their particular worldview. And all the great filmmakers have a very particular worldview. I think it's extraordinary it exists at all in the world, someone like that exists who will do that even if it fails, and then is willing to do it again. And some of the CEOs I've gotten to know are artists. In some ways this is difficult stuff, especially when you have 100,000 employees and you're owning it too. But to answer the question more precisely, I think it's the willingness and the courage to espouse a specific kind of worldview that perhaps is a little bit counter, but stands in some tension to the dominant worldview and own that anyways.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Having been and worked with lots of CEOs that have chosen this ultimate responsibility, how would you articulate the job of a CEO in your experience? When you've seen people do that job well or do it poorly, what are the good ones in some basic sense doing really well?
· Wolfgang Hammer
[00:00:00] S1: All society is communication, and because of its complexity, communication breaks down into buckets of specialty. But it's in essence being a master communicator of an almost infinite amount of buckets, and knowing to context switch between them and understanding the language games that each one of these buckets plays, but never forgetting the core principles underneath all this. Some of it is unspoken. So I think the people I've observed, especially one person that I admire enormously, is doing a massive turnaround. And he has been communicating the same marching orders for two years to this huge company. Everyone around him was in doubt, and the results are finally coming in. And he's right. So he imposed his will against all these obstacles, but he was able to do it because he could communicate exactly what he was doing almost in these three layers to anyone, but always adjusting—never the philosophy, but always sort of adjusting the emotional component to whomever he was speaking to so that each person could hear the point that needed to be conveyed so they could be at peace knowing that they'd done their bit for this thing to work out and to be able to communicate that in such a way that the people you're speaking to can hear it because you're adjusting this subjective, emotional component to them. I think that, to me, is the secret of great communication.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Wolfgang Hammer
[00:00:00] S0: What is an iconic character to you? And I ask that because I feel like most people, maybe selfishly, want themselves to be like an iconic character in their own story, their company to be an iconic thing in the world that it operates. When you think about iconic characters, what things come to mind? [00:00:00] S1: My view today, and it might change, but has probably to do with an ability to be a Greek hero, which means to live and espouse a worldview that is universally disliked. That's iconic. I'm really interested on this pure narrative level in what Elon Musk is doing, because it's so unconcerned with the traditional hero trajectory. It's almost Greek. And this idea of breaking societal rules, if you will, that you get to some Platonic ideal that is worth more than acceptance. And I think all stories have in common the idea of resilience, that the character will overcome these obstacles and things are not working and there isn't enough knowledge and enough power to go where one must go, or one has been impelled to go, and keep going anyways. So this idea of resilience and to keep going anyways, even though the obstacles are getting enormous, I think inspires that begrudging admiration. None of this is a moral evaluation. No one cares what I think was good or bad on a personal moral level. But on a narrative level, I think it's absolutely fascinating that you have someone willing to step out on such limbs all the time. [00:00:00] S0: Is that just fighting death?