Reel Lessons
Six films. Six leadership lessons. One unexpected career path.
7/28/20265 min read
An Emmy sits not too far from my desk.
It's a nice reminder that I once had a completely different career.
I started college as an accounting major and eventually graduated from Syracuse University's Newhouse School with a B.S. in Television, Radio & Film with a management specialization. After graduation, I spent years editing content for museums, marketing teams, and music venues, as well as later serving as a production coordinator and production manager on PBS documentaries and other non-fiction projects. I have a modest IMDB entry.
I was also the person people kept calling when they needed help reviewing a budget, sorting through a contract, or figuring out why the numbers weren't working.
Then the 2007–08 WGA strike happened.
What I thought would be a temporary detour, temping for a management consulting firm, became a second career. I intended to ride out the strike and eventually head back into production. Instead, I found myself helping organizations stand-up their operations, build better teams, and solve business problems. Nearly two decades later, I'm still doing it.
I've always enjoyed reading books about leadership, management, and business. But some of the lessons that have stuck with me the longest didn't come from business books at all. They came from movies.
Not because these films are secretly MBA courses. Most of them aren't.
They're memorable because they put people under pressure. They force leaders to make decisions with incomplete information, teams to work through conflict, and organizations to confront difficult realities. That's where the interesting lessons tend to live.
Here are six films (some more well-known than others) that have shaped how I think about leadership, teamwork, execution, and decision-making.
BlackBerry (2023)
Success Can Be a Dangerous Thing
Most startup stories focus on innovation.
BlackBerry is a story about what happens when success makes adaptation harder.
For a period of time, BlackBerry was everywhere. The company built a product people loved and became the standard for mobile communication. The challenge wasn't getting to the top. The challenge was recognizing that the market was changing around them.
What struck me most about the film wasn't a failure of technology or talent. It was how the assumptions that fueled BlackBerry's success eventually became blind spots.
I've seen versions of this in organizations of all sizes. A company finds a winning formula and slowly becomes committed to protecting it.
BlackBerry wasn't killed by a lack of innovation. It was killed by a refusal to adapt.
The Founder (2016)
Growth Changes the Equation
The Founder is an uncomfortable film because there isn't a clear hero.
The McDonald brothers are innovators and idealists. They obsess over quality, consistency, and doing things the right way. They build something remarkable and are fiercely protective of what makes it special.
Ray Kroc sees something else. He sees scale.
What makes the film compelling is that both perspectives have merit. The brothers understand the product. Kroc understands the opportunity.
I've seen versions of this tension throughout my career. Founders often focus on protecting the qualities that made their organization successful. Growth-minded leaders focus on expanding what works. Both instincts are important, but they can pull an organization in very different directions.
The McDonald brothers built something people loved.
Ray Kroc built something that could be everywhere.
Few organizations ever stop wrestling with the tension between the two.
Saturday Night (2024)
Sometimes Leadership Means Getting the Show On the Air
One of the most overlooked films of the last few years, Saturday Night captures the frantic hours leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live.
The film is a masterclass in managing chaos.
When people think about leadership, they often picture strategic vision, keynote speeches, and big decisions. In reality, leadership frequently looks a lot less glamorous. It's resolving conflicts, calming nerves, making imperfect choices with incomplete information, and somehow crossing the finish line before the deadline arrives.
Anyone who has ever launched a product, implemented a new system, or managed a major project will recognize the feeling.
Sometimes success isn't elegance.
Sometimes success is simply getting the show on the air.
Apollo 13 (1995)
Great Teams Focus on Solutions
Few films capture the way high-performing teams respond to a crisis as well as Apollo 13.
The lesson isn't the famous line, "Failure is not an option."
It's what happens after the crisis begins.
Nobody wastes time assigning blame. Nobody argues about who should have seen the problem coming. Nobody gets distracted by politics or optics.
The entire team aligns around one question: How do we solve this?
The best organizations I've encountered operate the same way. They don't pretend mistakes won't happen. They understand that when problems emerge, energy spent on blame is energy not spent on solutions.
Under pressure, focus becomes a competitive advantage.
Master and Commander (2003)
Leadership Is Earned Daily
If I were teaching a management course, this film would be required viewing.
Captain Jack Aubrey leads through competence, consistency, and trust. His authority comes from more than rank. It comes from the confidence his crew has in his judgment and his willingness to share both risk and responsibility.
Over the years, I've worked with leaders who believed leadership was primarily about authority.
The best leaders I've encountered understood something different.
Leadership is a relationship.
People willingly follow leaders who demonstrate competence, fairness, accountability, and genuine concern for both the mission and the team.
Trust isn't granted once.
It's earned repeatedly.
Margin Call (2011)
When Every Option Comes With a Cost
Many Wall Street movies focus on greed. Margin Call focuses on decision-making.
The premise is simple: a group of executives discovers a potentially catastrophic problem and must decide how to respond before markets open the next morning.
What makes the film fascinating isn't the financial crisis itself. It's watching smart people respond to the same information in dramatically different ways.
Some avoid responsibility.
Some rationalize.
Some confront reality.
I've always connected with Margin Call a bit more than most business films because I happened to be working in Lower Manhattan during the 2008 financial crisis, just a couple of doors down from Goldman Sachs. I certainly wasn't in the boardroom, but it was impossible not to feel the uncertainty and anxiety that spread through the financial district as events unfolded.
What's equally unsettling about the film is the implication that some people saw the warning signs long before the crisis arrived. Incentives were misaligned. Risks were known. Questions went unasked because the system continued to reward the desired outcome.
By the time the executives gather in the boardroom, there are no good options left—only tradeoffs.
Over the years, I've sat in conversations that felt surprisingly similar. Not because anyone was managing a financial collapse, but because leadership teams had arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: the business needed to be sold, a struggling division needed to be shut down, or staffing reductions were necessary to achieve what came next.
Those moments are difficult because the discussion is no longer about what people want to do. It's about what reality requires.
What Margin Call captures so well is that leadership failures often begin long before the crisis. Problems are ignored. Assumptions go unchallenged. Short-term success masks long-term risk.
Then eventually the bill comes due.
The hardest leadership decisions are often organizational, not personal. And by the time those decisions arrive, the best options may already be gone.
The goal isn't to avoid difficult choices.
It's to recognize problems early enough that difficult choices don't become impossible ones.
Final Cut
Looking back, it probably shouldn't surprise me that I still learn things about business from movies.
Film productions and businesses have more in common than most people realize. Both are groups of people trying to accomplish something difficult with limited time, limited resources, and no guarantee that the original plan will survive first contact with reality.
The settings in these films couldn't be more different—a smartphone company, a fast-food empire, a television studio, a spacecraft, a warship, and an investment bank—but the challenges are familiar. Organizations have to adapt. Leaders have to make difficult decisions. Teams have to work together under pressure.
I still read plenty of business books and will probably always have one on my nightstand.
But every now and then, a movie manages to explain a leadership challenge, an organizational problem, or a strategic decision more clearly than a 300-page management book ever could.
