Invest Like the Best: Turning Potential into Prominence

“He said, 'Teddy, there's only one thing you can do. You need to recruit a board that becomes the greatest set of super salesmen in history, because you don't need our advice, you don't need our financial engineering, you don't need us to read balance sheets, you need us to sell airplanes.' And what he did is he went out and he put a list together and he brought it back to me, and we went through it.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 6

Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship

DUR_ENDURING

Board as distribution channel

“Herb Allen II was my mentor, telling me what to do, what not to do, if I was going to do something incredibly stupid. He had the nicest way of telling me how stupid I was. We were on the phone ten times a day. He didn't push me away. He didn't think I was nuts. He thought it was a great idea that he and I do it together. Every other bank tried to push me out. And Herb said to me, 'Don't ask anybody for anything.' When I closed the deal with Matsushita, he said to me, 'What would you like?”— Michael Ovitz

p. 20

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior

DUR_ENDURING

Trust through contingent payment

“Every Sunday for 50 years, I do the same exercise. Hell or high water, I've never not done it. I look at my calendar the week before. I go through every single meeting I had, every transaction, every human I met could be social. And I decide if they go on what's called the Sunday list. Which is on Sundays, since I don't do anything, I put names of people I want to get to know better, and then I parse through the week. The names from the week before that I want to re-engage with.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 30

Operations & Execution · Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making

DUR_ENDURING

50 year Sunday review ritual

“We were lucky enough to stumble on a man named Glenn Lowry, who had absolutely no contemporary art background. He had a PhD in Islamic Art, knew nothing about contemporary art, but was smart, articulate, well-spoken, handled people brilliantly, and had this extraordinary burning desire to learn. And everyone that was debating it was saying, well, he doesn't know anything about art. Well, that's true, but neither did I when I started and you learn.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 3

Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior

DUR_ENDURING

Hire for learning rate over credentials

“I realized that what was going to happen is that these companies were going to need sponsors, they were going to need money. They were dying for cash flow. I could tell because we were having trouble collecting. And I said, wouldn't it be great if CAA not only had all the clients, but we had all the owners. We were the ones that they had to talk to.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 18

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship

DUR_ENDURING

Control clients AND owners

“We met monthly, not quarterly. And the attendance at the meetings was 100% every time because everyone had assignments. We had so much fun at the board meetings and board dinners that after we sold the company seven years later, we all continued the board meeting. And we used to stand up at the beginning of each meeting and announce what we'd sold. At the board meetings. Teddy had approved the minutes, 100% attendance. Board meetings were always like 5 o'clock.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 7

Operations & Execution · Leadership & Management

DUR_ENDURING

Monthly meetings, 100% attendance, public reporting

“That benchmarking exercise applies not just to artists, but to everything in life. All the people you mentioned, I identified early as people I wanted to be involved with. When I met Alex Karp 20 years ago, who Peter Thiel introduced me to, he wasn't the Alex Karp he is today. He was highly profiled, incredibly well-spoken, and dogmatically passionate about his point of view. Wasn't that guy.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 5

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

DUR_ENDURING

See talent before they prove themselves

“He did something that I did at CAA, which was I thought really smart to do. He didn't get the idea from me. One of his partners, Stefan Cohen, brilliant young engineer, would take one meeting every 10 minutes with an engineer and they were lined up for 10 minutes with Stefan and he'd interview 50 engineers and take one. If they don't get this question in 10 seconds, then it's over, it's over.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 9

Operations & Execution · Leadership & Management

DUR_ENDURING

50 interviews, 10 minutes each, take 1

“All these people that I've been fortunate enough to come in contact with all have very similar traits. They're interesting, they're aggressive to certain degrees in their own way. Some blatantly, some not so. They're wicked intelligent, they are perceptive, and they all have this extraordinary burning desire to learn. They want to learn something every minute of the day, and they don't want to waste time. Time is a valuable commodity.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 6

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

DUR_ENDURING

5 traits all great talents share

“We never had a written document. In 25 years at CAA, I didn't have written documents with employees or clients. We never lost a client the whole time I was there. Sometimes we had what's called Guild authorization papers. But they didn't mean anything because under the Screen Actors Guild within, if a client didn't work for 91 days, they had the right to fire you. Why have a contract? Because it just gives them something to look forward to. I had people stay with us 25, 30 years.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 21

Business & Entrepreneurship · Leadership & Management

DUR_ENDURING

25 years, no written contracts, zero client loss

“Secondly, he populated the board with the most diverse, amazing group of men and women. But they had one common denominator. They were all art collectors of something. There's a huge difference between an institution with trustees that are financially responsible or socially responsible, but don't have the passion to collect something.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 4

Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making

DUR_ENDURING

Trustees must have skin in game

“My checklist is a series of things that fit into my cognitive frame of reference that is weighted, predicated on previous experiences. How the person behaves, what their interests are, what their social capacity is. It doesn't have to be great in the traditional way, what their quest for knowledge is. Are they motivated? Do they want to work hard? Do they enjoy working? Why are they working? What's the goal? And what's their raw processing power?”— Michael Ovitz

p. 10

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

DUR_ENDURING

Complete talent evaluation rubric

“All these people are all about momentum. In other words, they remind me of this toy I bought my grandson that's a remote control truck that when it hits a wall, it bounces off and turns in the other direction. That's kind of these people. There's no stopping them. And there's no idea that isn't worth considering.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 16

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

DUR_ENDURING

Bounce off walls, keep moving

“Loss of confidence, fear of failure. Fear of failure is the greatest problem outside the United States. I was in London a couple months ago in a business meeting and one of them looked at me and said, 'How do we do this? You've been up, down, and sideways, but you never stop. You don't take no for an answer. And you just keep building. But you know how to build off success and off failure.' He said, 'If we fail in Europe, it's over.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 17

Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society · Business & Entrepreneurship

DUR_CONTEXTUAL

US treats failure as badge of honor

“When I started as an agent, I was 21 years old, and I knew right off the bat that time was my enemy, even at that age. Because if I went and met with someone to judge if I could do something for them, if I made a mistake, that mistake was irreparable and a time sink that can't be recovered. And it's not a hiatus, it's a loss. There's a big difference. It's a loss. You could be doing something else with that time.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 6

Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution

DUR_ENDURING

Wrong meetings are permanent losses

“Well, first of all, you have to see if there's a visceral connection. That's not anything that's on a list. You know, do you feel some rapport with the person? That's a given and a critical. The list is amorphous. I learned a long time ago from a client and a good friend, Marty Scorsese, who's a genius, and he said, when you're looking at actors, what are you looking at? He said, 'Their eyes.' And it spoke volumes to me. I also have a frame of reference because I've met so many people.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 8

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

DUR_ENDURING

Scorsese: look at their eyes

“So I started to make a set of parameters when I met people about why I want to continue the dialogue. And I have kind of like a pilot's checklist in my head of things that are important to me. And it doesn't really matter what the vocation of the person is.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 6

Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution

DUR_ENDURING

Pilot checklist for people

“We needed someone that could make a dynamic turn in the museum. Because the one thing about an art museum is at the end of the day, it's entertainment for different strata of social culture. And MoMA basically was a commercial show place for people that were tourists to come and look. We needed to move to the next level.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 2

Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making

DUR_ENDURING

Tourist trap to cultural force

“I learned on the job every day. I watched Steve Schwarzman, I watched Pete Peterson. I used to go to lunch with Roger Altman and pick his brain. I am an insatiable sponge. If I can get 30 minutes with Marc Andreessen or a meal with Peter Thiel just to listen to me, that's a quadruple net positive. Because I learned so much.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 20

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

DUR_ENDURING

Insatiable sponge for knowledge

“For me, time's the foundation of everything, then relationship, because I can't get the relationship without the time. If I make a mistake, when I met you, I didn't know if I wanted to do your podcast. For me, time's my enemy. And it's been that way since I was a kid. It's got nothing to do with my age chronologically. I remember being in high school and I was running for student body president of a 4,000 kid high school.”— Michael Ovitz

p. 11

Operations & Execution · Philosophy & Reasoning

DUR_ENDURING

Time enemy since high school