167. Hollywood Lessons For Successful Communication
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When you think about your favourite movie, my hunch is, you like IT so much because of its emotion and connection. IT has to you. The use of emotion and connecting techniques can make all of our communication Better.

My name is math hams, and I teach strategic communication at stampede graduate school of business. Welcome to think fast, talk smart. The podcast I am really excited today to talk with jeff small.

Jeff is the CEO of amylin partners, one of the world's leading independent film and television companies. He regularly guessed lectures at the stamford, G, S, B, and is a member of stamford, los Angeles arts council. Welcome, jeff.

I'm so happy to be here. And sure we get started. Let's do IT. As someone who helps spring major motion pictures to the world, you often have a front room IT, sometimes literally, to some of the biggest stories ever told to your mind. What makes for a good story?

Wow, there are so many elements, right? Is that an entertaining story? What's the style of the story is a unique. But the element that I always come back to is doesn't make you feel something.

Are you happy? Are you sad? Do you think about the story after you've heard IT or you've seen IT? I think about after moving you're talking about the next day, or or a books that you've read does IT move you.

And I think my boss, Stephen spoelberch, is the best at that. He's the master of making you feel something. Every movie that he does makes you feel something, and often times many things. And what that does is that gives the audience a connection to the story and to the story tell her. That's often what I think about a good story makes you .

feel something he had. The idea of feeling is so important. And yet in a lot of business communication, we leave feeling out. It's all about the facts and the information. Do you purposely think about how to bring a motion into the communication you have when you're doing the work you do sure what you're .

talking about this connection, right? Are you connecting with the person that you're talking to? You have to get across to your audience that whatever the communication is, is personal to you, otherwise thus smell and those and you won't connect. And it's kind of a waste time at that point. You really need the audience to understand that you care.

So it's about showing that you care, and it's about really focusing on that connection and feelings help you do that when you visit stanford and electoral students, you make the case that story telling is critical to success in many facts of life. Can you share with all of our listeners the arguments you make for the importance of storytelling in our personal and our professionalize?

I think it's really important. I do try to drive this home. Think about the really impressive practitioners that you come across in your life. So let's say it's a great doctor or an incredible teacher or a brilliant architect, right? Or maybe even the waiter at your favor restaurant down the right, they have something in common.

And it's typically that they are good story tellers, that doctor who has a good bedside manner has to explain to you what's going on inside your body or make you what's going to happen inside of your body with care and compassion. And they have to communicate clearly to you. Teachers are the greatest storytellers, right? Teachers and professors.

They can tell stories across all sorts of disciplines and architect, every angle, every flourish, every feature of whatever structure they're designing that's telling a story. What place does this structure have and whatever environment that you're in. I don't know about you, but I have a much more fun time at a restaurant when you connect with the waiter and the waiter telling you about a great dish or a great bottle of wine.

I think the point that i'm making is whatever walk of life you're in, you have to be able to tell a story to connect with people to get across the messes that you're trying to get across. Even at stanford, there maybe a stigma that you have a Better people who wants to go into coding, and there's a signal that codes don't really interact with humanity that often. But the reality is that code, that's also a story.

But what's the thesis of the code? And what's the purpose of the code? The end user of the code is how here SHE gona feel about the code? Maybe it's an investor.

What is this an investor going to feel about IT? And in my own life, I think about my two daughters. I tell them all sorts of stories all the time, and they roll their eyes often. But I certainly hope that my storytelling skills are good enough that they get some life lessons out of IT.

We share so much information through story, but many of us don't think of ourselves as story tellers. And I am often confronted, as you just eluded to, by people who do technology work, financial work, medical work. And I say, hey, i'm just dealing with bits and bites.

And really, I like to say, if you're impacting saving life, saving trees, saving money, there is a story that you can tell there in hooing. That ability really makes a difference. And I love the jerk going that so effective stories, as you have shared, are moving in memorable. What are some of the advice you give our students and maybe your daughters and others for what makes an effective story in terms of how you craft that? What are the elements that go into a good story?

Putting aside the typical three act play beginning a middle in the end, I think you have to start with yourself. You can start with yourself because and in the day, you're either the creator, the story or you are the delivery mechanism for the story. So it's okay.

Start with yourself and think about the story that you're telling and why IT matters to you. Why is IT personal to you? What is your connection to IT? If there's no connection, audience can smell IT, but there's going to be some reason that is personal to you.

Let's say that you're giving a presentation in front of bunch of random people, try to find some sort of connection that might be even as simple as I want to get this deal done, right. I certainly in my life, I remember doing a real estate deal years and years ago, and i'm not that interested in real estate, but I felt like I really wanted to achieve this. I wanted to get this deal done.

And so I could be compassionate about IT. And I think my audience could feel that this is something that I wanted to get done. And I think that coming across that way and thinking about why this matters to you, then you can turn around and think about your audience. Then you can say, okay, this is for me now. I'm going to turn around and i'm going to connect IT to you.

I really like the advice of reflecting on the value and importance to you to help you focus, to help bring the right emotion that's concurrent with the message, and then you turn the attention to the audience. Once you have that audience in mind, are there certain things that you look for in a good story, from the students who teach, from the people who bring stories to you, to perhaps be made into some kind of production of movie television? What are some of the elements that you look for besides the emotion that you've already talked about?

I think especially these days, you want stories to be unique. You don't want to hear the same thing over over again. There's the stereotype that there's only five stories in hollywood, fish out of water and this and that the other.

But basically there are a lot of stories and a lot story tellers who really do the same thing over over, find something unique. This is not necessarily unique to you, but find something that maybe your audience is there. And thanks, I ve only seen IT like that before. I ve been experiencing story that way before. Because, again, that's what's going to make that conversation or that story memorable.

So part of IT IT sounds like is not just thinking of what your story is, but what makes you unique and how can you share that in a way that might be different than what others have heard when IT comes to managing a creative business, IT seems to me that there could be lot of friction and chAllenges around creative people. Business needs to be very predictable. You need to be able to lay things out and forecast, and creativity doesn't always work that way. How do you think about this and how do you navigate this tension .

is a great question. I'm not sure that everyone in our business feels this way of a very specific point of view, and that's that self awareness is undated. And I feel like i'm very self aware about my place in the industry and also my place at amblen ambuLance is a business IT is and I came up through the business side.

But our greatest asset is Stephen spiller g and our team and the creativity that flows through him. And then and when talented artists and creative types want to do business at I amlin, they want to do IT because of Stephen, right? And our team, it's not necessarily because of me, because of that the creativity and the art has to be the primary priority of what we do.

That's our focus. And I really firmly believe that really good stories will win more than they lose. And the earnings will follow all of the earnings issues and output minimums and whatever financial metrics that you want to put on top of things.

Good stories when there's a theme in the work you do. Stories are important in good stories when recognizing and having that self awareness is really important. And I can imagine, just like you come from the business side, having the creative people. Recognize their contribution to the business and that IT is a business can be helpful as well. What best practices do leverage to help manage and negotiate the inevitable conflicts and chAllenges that arrive in, in any organization?

Nobody likes conflict. Actually, some people do like conflict, and I i've certainly dealt with a lot of this. Just assume that most people prefer not to have conflict, but it's inevitable, right? And I certainly end up in conflict a lot of times myself.

My rule of thun is you need to work IT out a person face to face, not on email, not on text, where you can hide behind whatever device you have. I would like to sit with the person that i'm in conflict with and talk IT out. You make contact, and you learn so much more about what that person is thinking or going through, or their point of view.

Maybe I need to apologize for something I did. Maybe i'm wrong about something. Maybe I just have a Better insight as to why we are in conflict.

But i've definitely found looking at conflict that way makes IT much, much easier to resolve in a way they do not feel terrible about IT. In the end, you certainly, there's a lot of times that I am brought in or ask to mediate a conflict between two thirteen members. I prefer not to do that.

At first. I always give them the the advice that they should meet together in person and try to work IT out that way. If the boss comes in, it'll feel like i'm taking sides and people feel bit afterwards and no one wants to do that.

I will come in and help mediate if I need to. But the first thing that should always happen is let's talk IT out. Let's make contact with each other. Let's try to figure out what IT is that we're all trying to achieve. And I would say, more often than not, that makes people feel Better at the end.

Again, a theme through what you've been talking about is this notion of connection, something that helps you manage conflict, but you encourage others to do, is to connect face to face in person. And then IT sounds like listen and appreciate what the other person's perspective vist to help get IT that. And if nothing else, at least we all can feel Better about how IT went down.

Even if I didn't resolve in the way we wanted. I have a question heartening back to something we touch about earlier. Strikes me that a lot of your life is putting things on screens at the same time.

I know you have two kids. What's your position on screen time and social media? You play a role in that I feel in your business perspective. How do you think about that?

I'll go two ways at IT. okay. So with my kids, I encourage them to watch a lot of movies. But look, I grew up in that and I got a lot of value. And I was a kid watching movies.

I just love them, right? T, V, two, I watch a lot TV and watch a lot of sports, so they watch a lot of movies in one of the reasons as I want them to experience what I experience. But also I like to talk to them about IT.

When it's over, it's another top of of conversation. What did you think of that? All of the movies I love, they do not love. It's slow for them and that's okay. But so as hard as those screens are concerned, I encourage that my daughters don't spend a lot of time on social media, and I don't think that's any great parenting on my portage is the way that they are.

I do feel a little bit lucky about that again because I think I would rather have a situation where they are interacting with their friends and talking to them and connecting with them, then hiding behind their phones and escaping in that manner at their school. They just recently had instituted in no cell phone rule. And it's not really about testing.

It's about social media. It's about connecting and having human touch with each other. And I very support of that. I think that's great.

I really like that. You take the time to use the screen time, the watching the movies, the television, as an opportunity to then initiate in Spark conversation. In some ways, that's what storytelling does, is IT affects us. And then you have conversations about IT in impact.

So I love that you're living that out in your own life and distinguishing between what happens on a big screen and a television and a small screen when amazing social media is really important to content is different in the impact is different. I know you work in an industry that had a tremendous amount of flux, a lot of change internally and also externally with what's going on streaming AI of these things. How do you lead and manage through change like that and flux like that? I can imagine that can be very disorienting in .

IT is i'm sure generations before us have all said that they've gone through all sorts of turmoil. But I feel like in the last decade, the entertainment industry has gone through more turmoil. And maybe one hundred years before IT, we've had code, we've had labor stoppages, we've had the disruption of streamers, we've had all sorts of things that make IT really hard to manage.

The industry has been difficult. And so for my team, IT can be paralyzing for them. They might one day there and think, okay, what am I supposed to be doing? How do I do IT right?

How do I know that i'm picking the right scripts? How do I know that people are going to like the things that i'm picking? Making commercial art is really difficult when there are tornado flying around all over the place, right?

So here's the way that I look at IT. First of all, don't stop communicating. Don't go silent, let everyone feel like they can talk about how hard IT is. Look, i'm an optimum st by nature, but sometimes you can be an optimist. It's hard and I think it's OK for people to talk about their chAllenges that they are going through and whatever the role is at the studio.

The second thing is to remind them why they do what they do, right? We're in the movie, in television business is fun, okay? They get to work for Steven spielberg.

That's amazing. That's why they got into this businesses to tell stories and do the things that we do. They believe in the stories that Stephen tells and that they tell. And so get to remind them, that's why you're here. The last thing is that they are really good at what they do. And I try to remind them of that and thank them for that as much as I can, because I think that people actually like to do things that they're good at, and they like to be appreciated for what they do.

taking that time to really again, connect, to recognize and to help remind people about what the motivation is and will be can help bring a calmness when that toronto is spinning around you.

I think there's a lesson for all of us in this, even if we're not in an industry that's being disrupted and and chAllenged as as yours, that we can really come back to the connecting with the people, honoring and respecting what they do in reminding folks about how fox we are. Jeff, before we end, I asked everybody three questions. The first one I make up just for you, and the other two are similar.

Are you ready for this? No, a one. okay.

You and I were talking immediately prior to some big changes coming up for people in our family. What advice do you give to people who are on the precipice of big change, big opportunities? They're something you tell them to focus on.

Don't fight IT right experience IT. I think about my daughter as she's about to go to college, go experience IT, go fine things, go do things that you're not used to doing if you're walking into a to a big new change that's giving you some sort of opportunity. But lean into IT, go for IT experience at how are you ever going to find out about the rest of the world or yourself if you don't experience these new things? You might be nervous or you might be anxious about that new job. But this is great.

Go do IT. Yeah, I think it's very Normal and natural to get into the worry and the fear in the what ifs. But I agree it's all about seized the opportunity and leaning into IT and really explore a little bit reflection along the way can really help to question number two. And i'll be really curious to know your answer to this, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

So obviously, there are so many possible answers to this, and I think that no brainer would be Stephen. But i'm going to go off book, right? So i'm a baseball nut, all right? So i'm going to choose vin skull, who was the legended broadcaster for the dodgers. You know, i've heard a thousand zillion baseball broadcast in my life, and then was the best.

So what vin would do is that he would take a two to three hour baseball game and he would walk you through the game, and he would modulate his tone of voice, and he would tell incredible stories while the action is going on. But what then did really, really well. He makes red river m okay, because then that he wasn't the star, right? The game was the star.

So what then knew how to do was then knew how to explain what was happening. He also knew when to shut up so that you could experience what was going on on the field yourself. My favorite vince kui call of all time was his call of hankerings seven hundred and fifteen home run, which be baboos all time record in one thousand nine hundred seventy four.

I want to read IT. So here's what he does. Fast ball, there's a high drive into deeper left center field.

Bucker goes back to the fence. It's gone full. Okay, then stops at that moment for twenty six seconds.

Okay, twenty six seconds, which is an eternity on air hand care and rounding the basis there's a couple guys that run on the field and and run the basis with hank. He comes around in, he scores. And then, after twenty six seconds, then starts up again.

And this is what he says, what a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for lana and the state of georgia. What a marvel moment for the country and the world.

A black man is getting a standing ovation on in the deep self for breaking a record of an all time baseball idle and IT is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry iron. It's just perfect. He's not just a naratu, but he's enabling us and allowing us to feel the gravity of that moment. It's beautiful.

It's all about the fields there. Thank you for reading that and sharing IT, and you did so expertly. By the way, I really appreciate you helping us understand. Rythm is important in story telling, and sometimes it's what you don't say that can actually make you an effective communicator. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

Okay, so thought about this. The first one is purpose. Why are you telling the story? What is the goal you have to have that? Or your audience will check out if there's no goal, they will smell IT right away. You have to have some purpose behind what you're trying to communicate, and the audience has to know IT. The second one is to listen, and I mean, listening with your ears, but also your eyes.

What is your audience telling you while you're telling the story? Are they bored? Are they ignoring you? Are they angry? There's so much information that goes back and forth between the story teller and the audience, and being able to read and interpret that information not only makes your story Better, the one that you're telling right now, but IT also makes you a Better storyteller in life, right? Being able to read that audience that way. The last thing is care about your audience. Make sure you show that you actually is not a one side of dialogue.

You actually want the audience to care about what you are trying to tell them, I think of successful marketing campaigns, okay, there, the type of marketing campaign, some of them where they just shove the material down your throat, there are the other ones that are much more delicate and they sell their movie in a way that makes the audience want to have ownership of IT to find IT themselves, right? You're caring about your audience wanting to really love what you're selling and then tell their friends about IT, right? Those are often some of the biggest word of mouth hits ever.

And that's because the people who are marketing IT, they care. They they're showing that they care. They want you to own this movie.

right? Having a clear purpose, taking the time to listen, and then finally, really caring about the audience and seeing IT from their perspective. Important ingredients for sure, and certainly helps ingredients in all communication. Jeff, this has been fantastic. The emphasis on storytelling through connection in emotion, really important in all communication, in the insight that you provide IT into how we can be Better managers and leaders through conflict, through change, really beneficial.

Thank you. I really enjoying to thank you.

Thank you for joining us for another episode of think fast talk a smart the podcast to learn more about leadership, please listen to episode one fifty three with tar of endeavor and episode thirty five with jeff email. This ephod was produced by jane luna ryan campus h. Ash and me, my brahms. Our music is from floyd wonder with special thanks to the podium podcast company, we recorded this episode of the spotify studios in los Angeles, and we are grateful for the help of hay news and travis morning star. Please find us on youtube and wherever you get your podcasts.

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