3 ms·

So you lose the company $100M and you shouldn't be accountable either? Also, think about this, these people were promoted multiple times for going "above & bey

So you lose the company $100M and you shouldn't be accountable either? Also, think about this, these people were promoted multiple times for going "above & beyond". They just weren't an optimal fit for their last roles.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago
More like: don't be a department head on an unlucky project.
nehal3m 3y ago
They were laid off, not fired. Accountability was not necessarily a consideration here.
mynameisvlad 3y ago
Our industry is blameless for a reason, and this extends to this situation fully. Please explain to me exactly how it was that one director's fault that the movie lost $100M. Because in reality, it's going to be a lot more than one person's fault that a movie was a dud. Especially when there are so many moving pieces behind a piece of content's popularity.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Usually, losses at that scale, started from the original pitch and greenlight. It was a bad idea from the start, and was never given a chance to correct. Steve McConnell was a big proponent of the worst bugs start in the Requirements Phase. Same goes for almost any project. The people that greenlight garbage are frequently fired, too, but that usually means they need to delay buying that second private island. People further down the food chain, might actually end up having to put their kids to work at McDonald's, instead of sending them to college.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    That's not even remotely true. There are many reasons for a movie (or literally any other project) to not do well and many inflection points among the movie's development process which could have massively changed the impact. Politics in this case also played a big part around the movie's launch, for instance. It's impossible for you to say with certainty that a single decision caused the movie to flop and it's disingenuous to think so. Especially disingenuous to say it's one person's fault that an entire movie was pitched, greenlit, made, and then flopped. There are literally thousands of people who made decisions along the way, starting from the initial greenlight which would have been given by multiple people.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      > That's not even remotely true. That's a rather bold statement (mine was equally rash). I suspect the reality comes in, somewhere between. In any case, I am not into excusing the top management, when it comes to these failures. I think that lower-echelon bus-fodder hunts can be symptoms of terrible, unaccountable, higher-level managers. Even if someone lower down the chain made the error, it can often be determined that the environment (maybe even the reason they have the ability to screw things up), was because of top management. When I was a manager, successes were owned by my team, and the failures were 100% mine. Managers are critical, and I have come to learn that the vast majority of them are ... shall we say ... works in progress?
  - closeparen 3y ago
    One of the most interesting points in Creativity Inc is that ~every Pixar movie started out as garbage, they just had the patience for lots of cycles for critique and rework, and the budget to produce a lot of animation that never saw the light of day. Perhaps part of the problem here is new leadership rushing things out the door or succumbing to sunk cost fallacy.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      That sounds like a cool development environment! Yes, it would require extreme buy-in from senior management.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

More like: don't be a department head on an unlucky project.

nehal3m 3y ago

They were laid off, not fired. Accountability was not necessarily a consideration here.

mynameisvlad 3y ago

Our industry is blameless for a reason, and this extends to this situation fully. Please explain to me exactly how it was that one director's fault that the movie lost $100M. Because in reality, it's going to be a lot more than one person's fault that a movie was a dud. Especially when there are so many moving pieces behind a piece of content's popularity.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Usually, losses at that scale, started from the original pitch and greenlight. It was a bad idea from the start, and was never given a chance to correct. Steve McConnell was a big proponent of the worst bugs start in the Requirements Phase. Same goes for almost any project. The people that greenlight garbage are frequently fired, too, but that usually means they need to delay buying that second private island. People further down the food chain, might actually end up having to put their kids to work at McDonald's, instead of sending them to college.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  That's not even remotely true. There are many reasons for a movie (or literally any other project) to not do well and many inflection points among the movie's development process which could have massively changed the impact. Politics in this case also played a big part around the movie's launch, for instance. It's impossible for you to say with certainty that a single decision caused the movie to flop and it's disingenuous to think so. Especially disingenuous to say it's one person's fault that an entire movie was pitched, greenlit, made, and then flopped. There are literally thousands of people who made decisions along the way, starting from the initial greenlight which would have been given by multiple people.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    > That's not even remotely true. That's a rather bold statement (mine was equally rash). I suspect the reality comes in, somewhere between. In any case, I am not into excusing the top management, when it comes to these failures. I think that lower-echelon bus-fodder hunts can be symptoms of terrible, unaccountable, higher-level managers. Even if someone lower down the chain made the error, it can often be determined that the environment (maybe even the reason they have the ability to screw things up), was because of top management. When I was a manager, successes were owned by my team, and the failures were 100% mine. Managers are critical, and I have come to learn that the vast majority of them are ... shall we say ... works in progress?
- closeparen 3y ago
  One of the most interesting points in Creativity Inc is that ~every Pixar movie started out as garbage, they just had the patience for lots of cycles for critique and rework, and the budget to produce a lot of animation that never saw the light of day. Perhaps part of the problem here is new leadership rushing things out the door or succumbing to sunk cost fallacy.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    That sounds like a cool development environment! Yes, it would require extreme buy-in from senior management.