Here is part two of my conversation with Anthony Eaton on Leadership and More.
In this part we talk about influences from other leaders and MP proposes a leadership technique: “Understand what drives each of your team members and work with that knowledge to align their goals to yours.”
For part one of the conversation, click here
“Salaries, perks, benefits, severance…are all down”
This according to the head of the Executive Compensation practice at a leading NY media business law firm. 
Compounding the pain, he shared a graph showing that employment in what the US Government calls the information industry rose dramatically from 1990 to 2000 and then fell all the way back by 2011. Not an attractivepicture.
“But,” he says, “it looks as if 2013 is starting up from 2012.” So things are getting slightly better than awful.
This is very much a buyers’ market for talent – but be aware that when you do eventually get to discuss an offer, it means that they really want you. The employer will have been through all sorts of hoops and to come to a decision and now they will want to get it over with. The New York Times reports for example that the average Google interview process, always..ahem..thorough, has expanded in the last two years, to 30 days from 21.
Digital businesses are often looking for thought leaders. “I can’t interview fossils.” “Creatives have to live in the now, they can’t live in the past.” “I am looking for people who can enlighten our clients and these people are hard to find.”
So blog about your field and what is going on and where you see it headed. When hirers look online to check out prospects, you’d better be there with an effective and relevant digital presence – don’t be one of the “disappeared.”
As to that old “middle manager” level: be aware that in this economy you are expected to go back and utilize your core skills yourself, no-one is likely to hire you to just be a manager, however good you are.
And then there is the elusive Purple Squirrel. This is the candidate that all employers are dreaming of: the next to impossible find who has, according to Wikipedia: “precisely the right education, experience, and qualifications that perfectly fits a job’s multifaceted requirement. In theory, this prized “purple squirrel” could immediately handle all the expansive variety of responsibilities of a job description with no training and would allow businesses to function with fewer workers.”
It is the lure of the Purple Squirrel that makes hirers take so long. When you are going back for the fifth interview – know that they have been picturing this rarest of creatures – and it is your job to convince them that you are as purple as they are going to find!
More on reality TV. Herewith some remarks from network execs on pitches and formats and genres:
That show feels like kissing your sister.
In crime and justice programming the bar is unusually high.
Why are you against recreations? If you want males you gotta give em recreations with lots of blood.
This show is the Biggest Loser meets The Voice – these have both been done so well already – I don’t believe you can live up to either when you are trying to combine the two. Do one thing really well – don’t do a hybrid and try to do well at both and fail.
That’s an MOP. (Most Often Pitched = I’ve seen this idea so many times) And if you are going to pitch an MOP you have to have something that makes it special.
This is car pornography at its absolute best
Boring.
I love the character.
So your idea: how does it sustain? Who is it for?
I understand chapter 1 and I understand chapter 6 but how do you see chapters 2 through 5.
Does it have authenticity, heart, emotion?
Anyone who knows me knows I don’t buy dating shows
Oh no – not Coldplay on your sizzle reel. So many reels are cut to Coldplay. As you showed it, I just thought – it’s Coldplay again.
Behind me is a debris field as well as a pile of hits
Shiny floor shows: that’s what we call game shows.
Formats are hard.
In the food space: the simplest food shows are the dump stir and pour category. Then there is the barbeque world. Then there is the 10,000 lb Rice Krispie treat we made for MegaBites.
We have been accused of throwing a negative veil over reality – but come on – we are an entertainment group! We used to take ourselves too seriously.
Agents prowled the halls at the Realscreen Summit, and on panels they indulged in smug self-mockery: we know you hate us but we’re doing fine. Awkwardly, network biggies aimed “agent” jokes right in their faces on the platform. “The difference between a dead skunk in the road and a dead agent in the road = no skid marks leading up to the agent … Har har” thrown right at the agent on the stage. No wonder they put up defenses. But really their contribution to the ecosystem is praised on all sides for oiling the wheels of the deals and taking on the heavy lifting of negotiations so the people who do the work don’t have to sully themselves with contentious deal points that they don’t have experience with.
And finally there is of course Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Described by Discovery’s President Eileen O’Neill as “utterly wonderful, utterly absurd.” But then she also runs TLC, the channel that carries it.
So as a developer/producer of reality television you are just as good as your ideas, your access and your relationships.
The idea is the idea – and these are seemingly ten a penny. They are floating in the air to be plucked. Throw em against the wall and see what sticks. And if you can’t think of one, you put two of someone else’s together: The Biggest Loser meets The Voice, Storage Wars meets Strange Sex and so on.
The idea will ultimately be carried by the on-screen talent. This is where the oh-so-essential authenticity and heart will come from. They are what will make or break the show. So when you head into your pitch, the most important piece will be your sizzle reel that critically introduces us to those people whose job it will be to rivet us to the screens. Get them in your buyer’s face ASAP and remember that it is faces that work for you – so no doctors or firemen with face masks or shields hiding their essence.
Then it’s all about access. Two ways: to the sub-cultures, undercover bosses, axmen and wacky families on the one hand, and to the network execs on the other (who can often seem like their own wacky sub cultures themselves).
You have to be clear that not only have you identified the compelling and addictive characters who will be at the heart of your show but that they have agreed to do what it takes. Will the Amish allow your cameras in? Do you have the trust of the gypsies or the Addicts or those Real Housewives of NYC, MIA, ATL, Orange County etc? 
Will Honey Boo Boo’s mum play ball? (is that how she lost the weight?) And most importantly: do you have a written commitment from them that they will participate. If they need persuading, have them talk to other talent that you have worked with who can share how well it worked out for them. Business boosts for bosses who went undercover, Pawn Stars’ Chumlee getting to meet the girls of his dreams etc.
Even though you may eventually have the network do the talent deal directly, you need to get the talent to commit to you as a prodco – or you have nothing. Be aware that you will be dealing with people who will have read about “Snooki Money” (reportedly she’s getting $150k an episode) – but you’ll point out to your aspiring stars that when they make it to Season Six they may be coining it, but for now it’s all speculative.
The third piece is the relationship – by which I mean with the networks. This is not just about who will take your call and listen to your idea. The networks are very open to new good ideas. What the relationship does is build trust – and it gets you to the fount of the key information: what is a particular network looking for this month? What is its mandate? What is its brand? Do your homework of course – but get what you can from your contacts – understanding this is critical so you are pitching the right ideas to the right people. If you waste their time once through lack of preparation, you likely won’t get a second chance. So be smart and sensitive to their needs du jour and you will be on good ground. If you can’t bring yourself do it on your own, there are agents and companies like Gary Lico’s CableReady who can bring you all the relationships and inside dope you could want.
And for the networks, these prodco relationships means having trusted producers to depend on to turn the ideas into audience gold. They will steer work to people they know. And if they don’t know you but they love your idea, they will match you up with a producer with whom they already have a track record. Co-pro is often the way to go.
According to Eileen O’Neill, Discovery President, Discovery is generating up to 50% of its own ideas and handing them out to see which of their production pals can do something with it. For example the idea passed out one day from their TLC channel was: “Cake. Everyone loves cake. What can you do with it?” The result is Cake Boss, now in Season Five.
Reality TV is all about the idea and the relationships that will get it made and shown. The Renaissance Hotel in our nation’s capital during Realscreen Summit was dense with ideas and relationships. If this idea won’t work for you, then how about this one?
So if all it takes is the idea, access to the onscreen talent and a great pitch/sizzle reel, then it looks like it could be easy. So lots of producers strike out on their own to start their own production companies. Thom Beers (now CEO of Fremantle N. America), is a giant in the field, whose personal credits include Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men and Storage Wars. 
His advice: when you start a business “if you have any other skills keep on using them. I lived off my voice-over fees for 7 years” when he started his firm Original Productions. You can hear him on the pilot for 1000 Ways To Die. “To get into it you have to want it,” says Beers. “It’s a journey not a destination.” He recommends starting out as a PA and moving up through the ranks to coordinator and then on upwards.
Which is exactly what the rambunctious SallyAnn (SA) Salsano did. She interned on Howard Stern’s show and worked her way up on Sally Jesse Raphael. After rising to Producer on The Bachelor and Trista and Ryan’s Wedding, she started her own company and gifted the world the joys of Jersey Shore – inspired by her own Italian-American Long Island background. Her company is named 495, for the Long Island Expressway.
Even with her deep experience she says, “I always zero out on Season One. I make no money on it. It’s my calling card. But then you have to hope you get to make Season Two” – which in her bitter experience doesn’t always happen!
“On Jersey Shore, the network would only pay for 24 cameras – but I shot with 46. And they wouldn’t pay for the helicopter shots but I did them anyway and cut them in – if they wanted to use them I would make them pay for them. Otherwise I’d have some nice footage for something else.”
“People complain that we are giving direction, making story suggestions to the talent. Well of course we set things up – we have to make our days and the network won’t pay for any more days so we have to make it happen.”
“When I started the business” SA told Summit attendees, “I didn’t take a paycheck for a year. When you make your first fee – you put it all back into the business. If I’d have known how hard it would be – then out of fear I wouldn’t have done it.
And even when you hit it big “You’re only as good as your last show: so what’s your next one?”
I spent three days last week immersed in reality television, having been asked to speak at the outstanding Realscreen Summit in Washington DC. My panel done, I stayed for two more chock-full days and soaked it up. My next postings will cover some impressions and some how-tos for reality TV beginners and all other creative pros.
Show producers and prodcos, from wannabes to the creators of mega-hits Jersey Shore, Pawn Stars, Storage Wars, Honey Boo Boo, Real Housewives (now there’s a franchise!) and the rest, were there in droves. There too – and this was the point – were the buyers from Bravo and Discover, from Nat Geo, TLC, Science, History and on and on. And – newish to this sector – there were the agents from CAA and ICM and WME. Some of the most senior recruiters from the biggest media corporations were prowling and partying/networking with the crowd.
This event is a bazaar – fronted by some most informative and substantive panels. Meetings are scheduled in every corner. Business is being done. The bigger players have their own suites, the vast Delegates Lounge was clamorous with fired-up presenters leaning forward on white leather couches and every bar table was propped with an Ipad asizzle. To escape the hubbub some took their meetings to a specially erected (and heated) marquee outside the hotel.
If you were agent-less you were texting frantically to get your meeting going: “I’m waving from the middle of the lounge” to identify yourself to your next potential pitch recipient. If a producer had a ten-percenter on her team, then she was walked calmly from meet to meet and so could focus on the pitch and the relationship and not be stressing over scheduling and the maze-like geography of the hotel.
The air was burning with ideas and buzz and hope and disappointment and regrouping. This was 2,200 people buying and selling “factual TV”.
Sizzle sizzle sizzle!
Apparently recruiters consider 80% of the workforce to be “passive candidates”. These “candidates” are sending out signals about their readiness to move which combined with other relevant information can create a clear picture for a recruiter of who to call.
Take a look at this infographic that circulates among recruiters to see how they look at you when you didn’t think you had even made yourself available.
When our devices and their embedded software miracles fail, we call customer service. And then we complain when their magic wand is not instantly effective.
We have become so used to interacting with our screens large and small to do everything from paying bills and staying in touch with loved ones to ogling viral cats and launching birds to kill pigs.
But can we, in the words of the old song, “get out and get under and fix up that automobile.” The very idea is foreign to us. The sketchy understanding we have about how it all works can lead to the uncomfortable sense that we are not in control.
I’m not going to tell you how to fix your device – but I am going to recommend having a better understanding of what happens once you hit send or update. It is beautifully described by Andrew Blum in his book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
US Senator Ted Stevens described the internet as “a series of tubes” and was roundly ridiculed for his lack of understanding. But as we learn from this entertaining and eye opening book, Stevens was quite close to the mark.
Blum’s visits to the massive data centers built by Google and Facebook in remotest eastern Oregon are described in vivid detail – the rough with the smooth. He talks with the guys who are feeding the fiber into pipes under the streets of Lower Manhattan. He meets the fishermen on the rocky end of the British Isles where transatlantic fiber comes ashore and watches wetsuited divers off the coast of Spain connecting Africa’s internet to Europe’s. As my devices collect video and emails and social media “magically” out of the ether, I know that it has all passed through switchers and routers and tubes around the globe. Blum’s travelogue even conjures up the smells of the windowless hyper-air-conditioned rooms that my data has flown through.
Some of the “it’s magic” part has been removed for me and I think that is a good thing. And maybe I feel just a tad more in control.
I have been made aware recently of a lot of thinking about the value of cross-fertilizing ideas and working across disciplines to gain smarter insights and achieve greater success.
It started with Eric Kandel, the Nobelist godfather of neuroscience (thanks to his long and intense focus on sea snails) who I heard speaking about the intellectual ferment that was Vienna around 1900. In this hothouse era, doctors became painters and writers; painters and writers hung out with biologists; playwrights and scientists all mixed their ideas together. From this came the work of Freud, Schiele and Schnitzler; Kokoschka’s paintings that revealed medical symptoms unnoticed by doctors, and Klimt’s sensuous art that is layered with references to biological science. 
These artists and scientists were strongly influenced by anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl, who pointed out the absolute importance of looking beneath the surface of things to find out in depth what is really going on. Seems obvious, doesn’t it, but it was a revolutionary idea at the time.
Kandel’s new book the Age of Insight will likely turn out to be fundamental in helping us understand the young science of neuro-aesthetics – the study of how our body chemistry responds to the details, colors and textures in works of art. This exciting advance in understanding ourselves was made possible because Kandel turned away from his single-minded focus on the sea snails to bring science and art together.
Secondly, there’s Matt Ridley’s oft-quoted TED talk about how progress and prosperity are the children born when “ideas have sex” with each other. He emphasizes the importance of specialization in human development – and while in his TED talk he focuses on making objects, and how the coffee grower provides for the oil rigger who in turn supplies the plastics manufacturer and so on – Ridley’s catchy tag line “ideas have sex” takes us back to Kandel’s Vienna and how our progress and prosperity depend on us working together across disciplines.
And thirdly, an Internet entrepreneur told me that he has always gained enormous value in his career from asking questions of his friends who work in other fields. By asking filmmakers, musicians, photographers and writers how they solved problems, he has seen that each calling seems to have developed its own methodology for solving what are essentially the same problems of creating art and doing business. He has learnt something from each of them and brought together the best of the insights and techniques.
So it seems that this is the key: specialize, collaborate across disciplines, grant your ideas the freedom to mate and you will be smarter and achieve more.
You always should be preparing for the next thing you will do. Your career will almost certainly not be a linear thing with one job leading to the next to the next in a logical sequence. And as for a job-for-life? Well that is ending even for teachers.
But in media and technology and marketing? Constant evolution. Unless you are paying attention you could get left behind. Keep up with the media channels and the technology of course. But also the cultural references and the styles. I was recently pitching to turn a wonderful noir thriller into film. A major TV Executive Producer – lotsof big shows on his resume – asked me how I saw it. I said that the non-linear 
storytelling of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the wit and style of Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels were models that I thought could inform the way this story should be told. There was a pause – then he said and not in a constructive way “But those examples are twenty years old.” I was just at an Internet Week keynote where Shane Smith from Vice referenced Friends and Cheers – and quickly was made aware that they meant nothing to 90% of his Gen Y audience.
So yes – we have to keep on our toes on all fronts. Coasting is not an option. Be continuously aware. Talk to people in different disciplines and learn what they are excited about. Ask them what keeps them up at night. Brainstorm ways that they might advance or that their industry might advance. Look for the parallels and the intersections with what you are doing and try and project what might be next. Sit down once a month and write a blog post that expresses your ideas. Even if no-one reads it but you, it will get your brain in gear. Putting things down on paper (can I say that any more?) has a way of helping your thinking to crystallize and organizing your thoughts so you can have even smarter conversations.
Aim to become the thought leader on your team or in your company. Bring in the new ideas and have opinions about how they can affect your business. For example if you are in the TV industry, what do you see happening with TV on the web? Is it eating the lunch of broadcast or cable TV? How should you be addressing that change? What about the effects of spot skipping? Is the TV set now the third screen?
And don’t forget that you may have two agendas here: one for the business you are currently employed in, and one that is the development of what’s next in your own career. Wonderful if the two coincide, I am not encouraging revolt here – just that you have an evolving awareness of where and how you will provide value in the coming years.
