Book Review: Who is Michael Ovitz?
Who is Michael Ovitz? By Michael Ovitz
A man of a specific time, place, and industry. A man who is willing to share what he wants you to think he is. At times the book is a burdensome description of transactions but has glimmers of insight and business philosophy. And, it seems to be honest. Whoever truly knows.
The book is a masterclass in sales, deal-making, manipulation, and cognitive dissonance. It also has reflections, particularly at the end, on mending old relationships and examining wrong career steps. Let's look at a few quotes. The rest are in this post.
If you want an ethos of 'ends justify the means' we got it here:
I never viewed this kind of misdirection as lying. Lying, to me, is a point-blank misstatement with no purpose in mind. I viewed what we did as positioning, molding, manipulating: taking fact sets, and making them work for the result we wanted. That mind-set underpinned every single conversation we had with the buyers, and they had with us, all day long.
They were never lies to me. They were tools I needed to use to get shit done.
Here is the business philosophy:
I would succeed at all costs.
The formulation - you're totally in or totally out - became my mantra. It helped me enormously later. And it hurt me in equal measure because it didn't allow for shades of gray. Most of life turns out to be in shades of gray.
Who you know matters.
I'd absorbed a basic rule for success: love what you do.
Service organizations live or die by time management.
Don't ever think that what is, is — because it isn't. Never count on anybody or anything.
Ron and I shared was a belief that any betrayal must be avenged.
Money is the scorecard of success.
It's personal. It's always personal. It's tough to delineate the transactional from the meaningful with Ovitz.
"Make your clients think they're your friends, but remember that they're not" was a mantra. Yet it would be my clients who'd stay loyal, for the most part, and my friend who'd betray me."
"I'd always thought it was vital to mix business and friendship. I was learning, painfully, that it was better to keep those realms far apart. Business always gets personal."
Why did he leave CAA and agenting? He got tired of it all:
I was tired of helping people who could help themselves but who preferred to pay me to do things for them. I wanted to give back on a large scale, but I felt I needed the credential of a public company job first. I was still looking for respect and validation.
Seeking respect and validation externally, that's a classic mistake.
After CAA, Ovitz endures the crushing pain of big company politics at Disney. You can be so at the pinnacle and yet vulnerable.
'In a big company, you're defined by who you report to and who reports to you.'
Yup. People don't want you to succeed. So you propose ideas. Great ideas. And they all get rejected without a fair shake. It's why every company is vulnerable. Classic human dynamic.
He also makes Michael Eisner seems like a psychopath. But, you know, one side of the story.
Who is Michael Ovitz at the end of the day? The ultimate agent.
“Agenting is a form of manipulation, of coercion,” Ovitz said. “I don’t mean in the negative or pejorative. It’s a form of getting what you need to get for yourself, or for your client. So if you’re agented, someone’s working on you, you know?" How can you tell when you’re being agented?, I had asked him. “Experience,” he answered.
But Ovitz has never, as far as I can tell, left agenting.
Other quotes:
CAA had four commandments:
1.) never lie to your clients or colleagues
2.) return every call by the end of day
3.) Follow up and don’t leave people guessing
4.) Never bad-mouth the competition.
We worked insanely hard, but we fostered the illusion of working impossibly hard. I believed momentum was everything — once a company relaxed, it was done for.
Creating a zone of calm, in a chronically overexcited world, proved disarming. Whenever disputes arose with a studio, and I had to deal with an exec sputtering with outrage, I’d go even calmer and say “I’m confused about something” Or, slightly more aggressively: “Could you education me?” They’re expecting you to ream them and you’ve put them at ease by being neutral and mildly curious. All you’ve gotten them talking, and you’re learning. It preserves our options.
Do I regret some screaming those sorts of threats, as I did whenever an agent left us? Yes and no. Yes, because it never worked and because it reinforced my image as a vindictive bastard. No, because it’s who I had to be.
On his protege: He was constantly using my name with clients, saying I’d said things that I hadn’t, pushing, overreaching. Almost every day I heard something about him that annoyed me, momentarily, before I let ego, because I, too, was nothing if not an overreacher, and because manipulating people was a big part of the job. If he was agenting me, then it meant he could become a great agent. I held him to a lower standard than anyone else and I dearly wish I hadn’t.
Mystique is ten times better than publicity; it’s much better to be thought of as the great and powerful Oz than to be revealed as merely another schemer behind a curtain.
That’s a move I still make, getting people’s kids to tell their influential parents what’s really going on.
And I was growing annoyed that I was in the office every Saturday morning working out tax deals and fretting about over overhead and not seeing my kids. The ceaseless work was taking its toll. Because I couldn’t afford to be human all day long — because I had to seem interested and attentive and farseeing and wise with everyone - it made me less human over time. I became insensitive, impatient, someone to be avoided if at all possible. Colleagues transferred their childhood issues onetime me I was everyone’s distant father or bad mother.