This interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation SKG, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
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Ruby Washington/The New York TimesJeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation SKG, says his departure from Disney “fueled me to get on and understand that, if anything, I had been held back.”
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More ‘Corner Office’ Columns »Every Sunday, Adam Bryant talks with top executives about the challenges of leading and managing.
Q. Do you remember the first time you started managing somebody?
A. When I was a teenager, I was here in New York City and I was a volunteer for John Lindsay when he ran for mayor in 1965. I organized a couple hundred school kids from my school and other schools to come down to campaign headquarters on Friday night where there was free pizza and soda and kind of a party. We would stuff envelopes and print fliers.
Q. What did you learn from that?
A. Two guys, Sid Davidoff and Dick Aurelio, were really great role models early on about showing up on time, respecting people’s time, returning every phone call every day, even if it’s to tell them you never want to talk to them again. Sid explained to me that time is the single most valuable thing to almost all of us. The thing we all actually wished we had more of was time. I’ve never forgotten that. I’m always very punctual, and when I’m not, I have high, high anxiety.
Q. What did you learn from other bosses you’ve had?
A. I’ve had great bosses and I’ve had terrible bosses, and I have actually learned my greatest lessons and my most important lessons from my worst bosses.
Q. Can you elaborate?
A. There are things you’re able to observe in people, the mistakes they make. None of us is objective about our own mistakes, I think. I’m not particularly good at looking in the mirror and being self-critical. But I consider myself a student of human nature, and so you can observe in other people the qualities that you both most admire and those that you most dislike.
Q. Can you talk more about those qualities?
A. You cannot surround yourself with the smartest and most talented people and then start looking over your shoulder or behind your back, worried that somebody smarter or better might be on your heels. Big mistake.
Being respectful of people, I think, is the single most important quality in leadership — earning the respect of people who work with you, for you, your customers, your investors. That really to me is what defines successful leadership — earning that respect.
Q. How has your leadership style evolved?
A. In the world we live in today, the single most important thing is making people feel secure. It’s a very different era today than it was five or 10 years ago, even two years ago. We’re in a moment in time when people don’t want to take risks, they don’t want to gamble. In my business, you must. If you stop being creative and innovative, you’re finished.
And so striking this balance, the equation works quite simply like this: In order to succeed at the high end of the movie business, you must be original and unique. Now if you were putting an equation up on the white board and you wrote “original + unique = what?” Then the answer would have to be “risky.” And if you said, “risky = what?” The answer would be “some failure.” It has to, by definition, just sort of in the most fundamental way.
If you don’t make failure acceptable, you can’t have original and unique. And so in a world today that punishes, brutally punishes, any of us for failure, it’s the single most important quality that I think we work so hard to provide for our 2,000 employees, the understanding that they are expected to take risks.
We have a need, if not a demand, for innovation and for creativity, and we accept that there will be a degree of misses that will come with it and it’s O.K. We’re prepared for it. They’re not as good as hits, by the way. A miss is not a good thing, but we don’t run the enterprise on the edge of thinking that every single thing we do will be a hit. It can’t be. That’s what I’d call a gravity-defier. There are no such things.
Q. Is this something you communicate often to your employees?
A. We’ve done it multiple times in the last 15 to 18 months. I’ve been reassuring people that we’re safe, that inside the four walls of our company, we are safe. We’ve hired almost 300 people this year. We are growing our company. We have no debt and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars of cash. Those are not things that I would talk to employees about in the past.
Q. What other lessons have you learned?
A. I would say one of the most difficult and painful and ultimately most valuable lessons came from being fired from Disney.Q. How so?
Recommend Next Article in Business (26 of 26) » A version of this article appeared in print on November 8, 2009, on page BU2 of the New York edition.
via nytimes.com