Peter Guber has magic
How this maverick built a successful and sustaining career in entertainment, sports, and education
How this maverick built a successful and sustaining career in entertainment, sports, and education.
At the recently concluded “ANC Leadership Series: Telling Stories Winning Games,” featuring Peter Guber, the chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group and co-owner and co-executive chairman of the NBA Champion Golden State Warriors mentioned failure as the key to his leadership success.
“I failed with every venture that I ever was in, every single one,” says this Oscar-winning film producer. He also experienced people walking out of his films. “Disruption is part of the business. Taking major risks as well as learning from the failures is key to be the leader of the pack.”
Guber has produced notable Hollywood hits, namely Flashdance (1983), The Color Purple (1985), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Rain Man (1988), Batman
(1989), Tango and Cash (1989), The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and Enemy at the Gates (2001).
When producing, he wants to explain and know the story’s benefit. “People do not remember movies. They remember scenes from movies—two or three scenes or a joke from the movie. You can’t remember all,” says the 76-year-old executive.
His tip is to begin with an emotionally-connecting narrative. “Pick a story that will work years from now. You have to ask yourself is this a narrative that’s compelling?”
He also takes into consideration these components: “Do you have the director? The right cast? Are you spending enough money to make it work?”
Tried and tested formulas sometimes do wonder in the box-office. “We are always balancing what is the valued proposition of the film,” says the former president of Columbia Pictures. “If it’s a comedy, we can make people have five great laughs. If it’s a horror film, scare them. You got to make people watch three or four scenes, that they cannot hold their breath.”
Before his stint at Mandalay, Guber worked as chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, chairman and CEO of Polygram Entertainment, and co-founder of Casablanca Record & Filmworks.
He was also a full professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Last year, he was appointed to the University of California board of regents by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.
On the value of education, he muses, “The job starts with the teachers. Culture is moving so fast today that the method of both hearing the content, presenting the content, look- ing at the content then evaluating the content has to change.”
The recipient of the UCLA Medal, the highest honor given for extraordinary accomplishment, affirms, “It has to be a mixed model. You can’t just build more buildings, you got to figure out a way to connect in more useful ways and gauge them.”
When asked by one of the 400member audience, if he was facing his 20-year-old younger self, what would be his business advice now? “A constant and never ending learning environment,” he insisted. “In order to be effective, you have to be curious, never defending incompetency.”
Guber would also like to contribute more to the “wellbeing of my society, my planet and see myself invest in it at the time when I have the most energy and resources.” He reflects, “How can I be a strong contributor to the safety of the environment? I did not know how to do that when I was in my 20s. Maybe I was too consumed by how to be successful. I did not find those tools, resources, and inspiration until the third act of my life.”
Information and intuition are his guiding forces in making his deals. “Everybody has the information now. It’s not hidden from anybody. It’s there,” says the 2016 Business Person of the Year by the Los Angeles Business Journal. “Information can’t be the reason you’re successful. It’s how you manage the information. It means how you work together, how you forecast the future. There’s an expression—not to see the visible. This is what the intuition is saying. The information may not always be the answer, but trust in your intuition, that’s a very important factor. The idea is you have to be curious.”
In the end, he sums up his business technique with the acronym “MAGIC,” which means Motivating your Audience to your Goal, through Interactivity, and great Content.
His book, Tell To Win—Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story, was the #1 bestseller in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.
‘Everybody has the information now. It’s not hidden from anybody. It’s there. Information can’t be the reason you’re successful.’