Working Girl (1988)

 Working Girl (1988) is a movie about a young women’s efforts to succeed in the brokerage industry where men are bosses and women are secretaries. Melanie Griffith plays a secretary who has the ambition and drive to succeed, but finds all the cards stacked up against her. Her male bosses don’t take her seriously, and things don’t improve even when she is assigned to a female boss. She has a good idea for an acquisition, which her new boss steals and tries to pitch as her own. Of course, like with all Hollywood movies the good wins over the evil, the hard-working people succeed and the dishonest and unethical find themselves defeated.

Most people like to think that if you work hard, success will come. The movie does a realistic job portraying how most people usually remain trapped in the socio-economic strata in which they were born. It is really hard to break free and move up when most other forces are working to keep you where you were. Of course, Hollywood movies do an efficient and effective job of taking you from you are to where you want to be.

The movie is definitely worth watching!

Trading Places

 Trading Places (2002) is the story of a poor guy and a rich guy who cross paths by accident. This accident, however, changes life for both of them. Two rich and powerful men, Randolph and Marty Duke, make a million dollar bet as to whether the rich guy can maintain his virtues in the face of poverty and if the poor guy can become virtuous in affluence. The two brothers manipulate the situation and put each guy in the other guy’s situation. The movie is a business comedy about how the two guys think and act in situations that are completely alien to them.  Are people what they are because of genetics or of environment? This is a long standing debate in psychology and behavioral studies. The movie favors the environmental explanation as changing the environment influences the behavior of both the rich guy and the poor guy. However, that’s not only reason to watch the movie. It is also a fun movie to learn about many finance-related concepts that most people don’t think about in their daily lives.

Of course, Eddie Murphy makes the movie a fun watch anyway. The guy was made for comedy movies!    

Mad Money

  Have you ever wondered what happens to old, used, and worn-out currency bills? Mad Money (2008) is a comedy movie that can help you learn about what the government does with all the used and damaged money.   

The movie is about three female employees of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City who are tempted by all the money being shredded arounded them. They start smuggling soon-to-be-destroyed currency out of the bank, and are so succesful at it they soon accumulate more money than they know what to do with. However, the long hands of the law catch up to them and puts an end to their operation. Of course, in typical Hollywood style, just when you thought you knew how the movie was going to end, there is a surprise twist to the story.

The Efficiency Expert

 The Efficiency Expert (1992) is a socially-conscious comedy movie set in 1960s Australia. Anthony Hopkins plays Errol Wallace, an efficiency expert who is in the business of helping companies become more efficient. His preferred route towards better efficiency is downsizing and layoffs. The central plot of the movie is about Wallace’s experience with a small shoe factory (Ball Moccassin Factory) that has become a small shadow of what it once was. The company is family-run and all employees are treated like family. The company is in such a bad shape that it has made no money in many years and management has been running the company by selling off assets. Just when Wallace things he has figured out how the company can become profitable again, he learns new lessons from the workers that change his life, his outlook towards business, and the future of the company.    

The movie is interesting. In an era of globalization and corporate restructuring, it reminds us of the human side of doing business. At the same time, it also raises important questions about how to manage workers, and the kind of work environment management should strive for. It would be a good movie for students to watch, except that it is slow and drags at places.

Martha, Inc.

 Martha, Inc. (2003) is the story of Martha Sterwart, arguably one of the most succesful American women entrepreneurs of our time. The movie takes us to Martha’s childhood, her experiences in the family she grew up in, and her sense of competitiveness. It introduces us to her frustrations, her anxieties, and her failures. But, perhaps more importantly, it shows us her willingness to grab at and leverage every opportunity that came her way. The movie chronicles the rise and fall of Martha Stewart, but it is her rise from being a nobody to being an iconic entrepreneur in the country which most viewers of this movie are interested in (I think).

I don’t know how accurately this movie portrays the real life of Martha Stewart. We know that Hollywood movies, even those made on famous people, take at least some liberties with the truth. I admit that as yet I don’t know how much of the Martha Stewart presented in this movie is fictional and how much of her is real. Of course, if any of you know much about Martha, we would love to hear from you and what you think of the movie  

Barbarians at the Gate

 Do you know what a leveraged buyout is? If your answer is No, don’t feel bad, a majority of other people do not know either. But if you are one of those who want to learn what a leveraged buyout is without having to read boring and dull finance books (my apologies to my friends in finance!) Barbarians at the Gate is the movie you should watch. It is a fictionalized account of the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in the 1980s. Many characters and companies in the movie will be familiar to most students of business- F.Ross Johnson, the CEO of Nabisco, Henry Kravitz of KKR, American Express, Shearson Lehman etc.

Oh, but wait a minute! It gets even better- The movie is not just about corporate leveraged buyouts, the kind of business deals most people will never be involved in in their life time. It’s also about salesmanship, new inventions like the smokeless cigarette (yes, you read it right!), corporate raiders, corruption, greed and many other concepts and ideas that business students learn in school. A truly entertaining and informative movie!

North Country

 The tagline for North Country (2005) is “All she wanted to do was to make a living, Instead she made history”. The history in this case was the first major successful class-action sexual harassment case in the United States – Lois E. Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. The movie is a fictionalized account of the experiences Jenson had working at the company mines and her legal battle with the company that tolerated and implicitly encouraged the sexual abuse against Jenson and other female employees. In the movie Josie Ames (the fictionalized Lois Jensen) starts working at a mine, the only employment provider in the small Minnesota town where she grew up. However, mining has traditionally been a male-dominated industry, and Josie Ames finds herself fighting against commonly-held ideas her male co-workers and other people in the town had about the role of women in the mines. Josie goes from a single mother trying to make ends meet to becoming a social pariah in the community to winning a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the company. How times change!

Perhaps, the most interesting message the movie had for a business audience was that “a stitch in time saves nine”. There were many opportunities when the top management could have stepped in and taken some action to stop the abuse, but for some reason did not. One law firm gives a five-step plan for management when they find themselves in a similar situation:

 Implement an effective anti-harassment policy.

On receiving a harassment claim, have impartial employees investigate it.

When warranted, take appropriate and prompt corrective action.

Don’t retaliate against the complaining employee.

When confronted with egregious and credible evidence, consider every opportunity for early (and inexpensive) resolution.

I am curious why the top management of Eveleth did not do anything about it. None of the websites present I searched presented the company’s perspective on the whole case.

Anyway, those interested in reading the real story that inspired the movie, click here.  

Aviator

Aviator (2004) stars Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Howard Hughes, an American aviator, engineer, film producer and director, and an entrepreneur. The movie has three central themes- Hughes’ love for aviation and passion for building and flying airplanes, his vision and commitment to his dream, and his love for beautiful women. In a sub-plot the Father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud would have loved, Hughes’ relationship with his mother is shown to be responsible for many of the problems in his later life, such as his obsession with cleanliness and hygiene, and his relationship with other women. Despite Hughes’ family business of machine tools (Hughes’ tool company), his own success came primarily in the movie business (e.g. Hell’s Angels) and aviation (the H-4 Hercules and TWA). The movie does a great job of portraying the entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen Hughes had. It is definitely a movie worth watching (Warning: It runs 170 minutes, longer than most Hollywood movies).

I have to admit that before I watched the movie I knew almost nothing about Howard Hughes. I found it fun to learn of an entrepreneur who, despite his mental illness, became one of the wealthiest people in the world through his willingness to dream big and take the kind of risks most other people would have said no to. Unlike other real-world entrepreneurs whose life stories Hollywood usually capitalizes on, Howard Hughes was not a rags-to-riches story. On the contrary, he was born with the proverbial silver spoon to a financially successful inventor and entrepreneur. One of my favorite scenes from the movie is Hughes’ testimony in the Congress about international aviation and why it is in America’s interest to allow companies other than PanAm to fly international. If one remembers that back in those days PanAm was THE 800-pound gureilla in the airlines industry, one can see what Hughes’ was up against.

All in all, a good movie, with lots of things (e.g. obsession with hygiene, beautiful women) to distract the viewer from the business aspect of Hughes’ life and work. One blogger even puts Hughes’ in a list of “7 saints” he admires most, with Steve Jobs, Bill O’Reilly, and (hold your breath!) Atilla the Hun.  Another analyzes Hughes’ relationship with women. Bryan Caplan, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University presents an interesting and novel analysis of Howard Hughes’ mental illness as portrayed in the movie (I have to admit I have never heard this explanation before, so I think it’s worth reading). I could give more examples, but I think the point I am trying to make is clear- Aviator is a movie worth watching because it is about a seemingly-crazy guy all sorts of people continue to talk about till today.

2B Perfectly Honest

 2B Perfectly Honest (2003) is a strange movie about a young and ambitious entrepreneur Frank. The movie starts around the time Frank and his friend and junior partner Josh are losing their ad agency. The failure of his business is a financial loss to Frank, so much so that he had to move back to his parents house. However, Frank doesn’t share the news of the closure of his ad agency with his parents and continues to pretend going to work every day. During one of those days, Frank comes up with a new idea to start an internet-based business: web-boards. Web-boards are virtual cousins of billboards. Just like advertisements on billboards in the real-world, Frank’s idea is to put up advertisements on the internet by buying websites of companies that failed during the dot-com bust. Frank thinks the idea has potential and seeks external funding to finance his new venture. He meets with venture capitalists for some early-stage funding. The rest of the movie is strange- The best I can say is that an ambitious young entrepreneur ends up working as a paramedic. Life does have a funny way to twist and turn!

For some reason, watching 2B Perfectly Honest reminded me of Kevin Ham. His name may not ring any bells for most people, but Business 2.0 refers to him as “the man who owns the internet“.   Estimates of his net worth ranges anywhere from 300M to 1B US Dollars. He owns hundreds of thousands of domain names that he sells or puts advertising on them to sell to other companies. He made his money buying cheap domain names that became available after the dotcom bust and he was so good at doing what he did that today he is the biggest player in a business where there are many other millionaires who own hundreds of thousands of domain names. His latest idea, a pretty creative one, is to partner with the government of Cameroon (yes, you read correctly. It’s a small country in Africa! ) to put advertisements on websites ending in .cm so that anytime anybody clicks on these advertisements Ham and the government of Cameroon get a share of the pie. (No points for guessing why .cm websites and not others).

Why did Frank in the movie remind me of Kevin? In a way the two men couldn’t have been different- Frank was a failure while Kevin is a living legend in his line of work (There’s even a Kevin Ham fan site!). What made Frank seem similar to Kevin was that the simple brilliance of their idea. In 1999-2000 Kevin Ham was a nobody, it just the last seven years he has become a success story buying, selling, trading, and dealing in domain names.

The movie is not as good as I would have liked it to be, but it may still be worth watching for people interested in entrepreneurship. In fact, I would go as far as to say that if you are not interested in entrepreneurship or internet-based businesses then don’t watch the movie.  

Office Space

This 1999 movie starring Jennifer Aniston and Ron Livingstone is one of the funniest Hollywood movies I have seen. It is the story of three men working at a computer company (called Initech Corporation in the movie, but it could be any company in the world) just trying to make it though each workday without getting in trouble or getting laid off. The main character, Peter Gibbons, played by Ron Livingston, spends most of his day staring into space and doing almost nothing. He is also repeatedly nagged by different managers telling him over and over the things he is doing wrong, making him want to ignore his job even more. After some cajoling by his girl friend, Peter agrees to see a hypnotherapist, who dies after hypnotizing Peter into a new state of mind that changes his perspective on life. He doesn’t show up to work any more, and stops putting any effort into even pretending to work. Around the same time, his company brings in restructuring consultants to make major changes by downsizing and laying off workers. Peter’s candid remarks about the company, casual attitude towards work, and body language somehow impresses the consultants who reward him, while his two best friends Michael and Samir are fired. The three friends decide to take revenge from the company by planting a virus in the computer system that will withdraw pennies from the company’s account and put money into their personal account.  After the plan goes into effect, they realize that the virus is not stealing pennies, but is moving thousands of dollars. Peter decides to return the money to the company and take the blame so his friends don’t get into trouble. He writes an apology letter and leaves it under his boss’s door. However, when he goes to work next morning the office building has been burned down (by another disgruntled worker). The movie ends with the three friends doing whatever it is they like doing instead of sitting in their cubicle all day.

The movie does a good job of presenting the average workplace- boring and political. I especially liked the scene about the TPC report, where some obscure paper report employees need to complete becomes so important that everybody just wants to talk about it. Not only about its contents, but the proper way to complete it (with a cover sheet!). Having worked in a few places myself and seen how documentation takes a life of its own (becomes a goal in itself), I can see why a creative, hard working, and innovative employee would feel bored and useless. I recommend this movie to all those who like watching comedies, especially comedies about the workplace (be careful about the profanities and obscene language, especially if you have kids around).