EP 15 - From Hollywood to the Boardroom: What High-Stakes Rooms Teach Us About Leadership
At first glance, Hollywood film studios and European boardrooms seem to be worlds apart. Yet when you sit inside those high-stakes rooms, the similarities are unmistakable. Decisions are shaped in real time. Egos must be managed. Pressure sharpens every word and silence.
In this Episode:
Francois Jacquemin and Neil Wirasinha discuss lessons from Hollywood studios and corporate boardrooms. This episode explores clarity, ego management, and presence in high-stakes leadership moments.
In this conversation with Neil Wirasinha, we explored what those moments reveal about leadership.
The energy of high-stakes rooms.
Neil described the intensity of meetings with producers, filmmakers, and movie stars. The energy was unmistakable: creativity colliding with commerce, personalities influencing direction, and executives under pressure to deliver. I recognised the same dynamics in corporate boardrooms. When stakes are high, the room itself carries weight, and presence is not optional.
The power of questions.
Both of us agreed: questions open more doors than statements. In a studio, a well-placed question can build trust with a creative team. In a boardroom, it can shift the debate from confrontation to collaboration. Leadership under pressure is often less about having the best answer and more about asking the right question at the right time.
Ego as part of leadership.
Ego is not confined to film stars. It exists in every boardroom. The challenge for leaders is not to suppress it but to direct it. Neil and I reflected on how constructive ego fuels conviction, while unchecked ego derails progress. Effective leaders know how to channel ego into energy that sustains vision rather than fragments it.
Respecting airtime.
Time is the scarcest resource in both industries. A poorly timed intervention wastes it. A clear, concise contribution strengthens it. Leadership in these rooms requires discipline: knowing when to speak, when to listen, and when to let others take the spotlight.
Clarity as the decisive strength.
The common thread between Hollywood and the boardroom is clarity. Under pressure, clarity of thought, clarity of expression, and clarity of vision determine outcomes. Leadership in these moments is not about controlling the room, but about guiding it, often with fewer, sharper words than instinct suggests.
The lesson for executives.
What Neil Wirasinha and I discovered in comparing these worlds is that high-stakes leadership is not an act of dominance. It is an act of balance. Between conviction and humility. Between ego and vision. Between speaking and listening.
Whether launching a film or steering a business strategy, the leader who prevails is the one who transforms pressure into clarity, and clarity into trust.
Timecode:
00:00 Introduction to the Film Industry
00:13 The Heart of the Movie Business: Los Angeles
00:36 Navigating Complex Business Decisions
01:43 The Importance of International Teams
02:29 Managing Upwards and Downwards
04:33 Creative Meetings and Improvisation
05:22 Taking Risks and Building Relationships
06:05 A Case Study: Global Strategy Development
08:58 Effective Meeting Strategies
09:45 Conclusion and Final
Francois Links:
Apple Podcast
Transcript:
The cultures within the film world and those closed meetings where you are meeting with a producer or a movie star, or a movie star producer, and also the faculty of your own business. So the movie business, it's Beating Heart and Soul is in Los Angeles. All the major studios are in Los Angeles. When you look at, when I look at the roles that I have had.
In, in different businesses. And I think about the longest serving part of my career at Universal Pictures, 20 years of my life. Um, you think about the energy, it's complex, right? They're complex, big businesses, but a lot of the decisions, to your point, a lot of those decisions stem from a filmmaker meeting a moment, a meeting of, uh, of a, of, of typically a US set of senior executives.
And, uh, a movie star producer, and you might be there as part of the international, uh, team, uh, as, as a part player to that. The, the, the feelings that you have in the rumor, you've gotta get pretty comfortable pretty quickly with That's a movie star. Yeah. Right? That's a movie star. That's a really important producer.
And you also get to see your US colleagues operating at the highest level because it's common. More commonplace for them doesn't mean they don't get nervous, but equally their job is to try and convince the creatives, the producer and the actors Yeah. To actually help them in the journey of marketing the movie.
Distributing the movie, helping with the partnerships for America. They're very much focused on America. And over time, that then changed into how do we become a good global team, hence the inclusion of some, uh, international folks in the room. So that's, so those rooms are really important now, as, as, as, as one of the handful of people that's traveled to the LA meets to meet with those folks.
And you are sat in the room. You can't be a passenger, right? Yeah. 'cause if you think about not just the, the carbon footprints of getting there, or even the moment to bask in the glory or the, the light of being in those meetings, you are nervous. Why are you nervous? Well, first of all, movie studios have like any complex business.
Your energies are focused probably in three ways, most likely three ways. First of all, as a department head that I was, I'm managing upwards to that LA based pseudo executive that have been around for, for a long time, and I've been around for 20 years. They've been around for longer, and they've, they've seen so many different iterations of.
Of, of movies and scenarios, you are always managing upwards. They're the same people that are on the email chains that when you are asking for more marketing budget or here's a challenge, or here's a problem that they're trying to solve. So you are not really yourself, the most natural version of yourself, right?
In a room like that where you are thinking, these are people I manage up to, to become an actor. You kind of have to, you kind of have to really think about what's the performance of, what do I need to do? What's the, the fewest, smartest words that I can choose? And that's a bit of a challenge for me. I'm not gonna lie, because I take into the room the other relationships that I have, uh, in the job that I'm, I'm holding, right?
So think about the, the, the energy also going downwards to the teams that I'm leading. The team would've put so much work in for me to be at those meetings. So the preparation of, uh, of comparative movies or things that Instagram's doing, or TikToks doing, or any of the data, digital trends that we want to try and talk about.
Or maybe let's not do another intro for a cinema chain. Let's do something that TikTok I've never seen before. And you are holding that idea in your head and you think, well, I can't let my team down, so I've gotta represent it well. Not only representing it well for your team, but also managing outwards.
Right? From when you are in that meeting, you are managing outwards from the teams that you are leading, that are not your direct reports. These are the people that are in the 50 international markets that have to release the movie. Yeah. So you're thinking, how do I respond and respect them and make sure that we can create enough focus on us.
To help with that. And, and that could be the agencies or it could be the marketing director of South Korea or Japan, or, or Mexico. Very different cultural needs. So as you are proposing your question, and nothing's really pre-prepared for these meetings with filmmakers, it's quite open space. It's not prepared.
It's not prepared. There is a degree of staging, but actually. It's a creative industry. Yes, of course it's a business, but creators want to also, so you need to improvise. You do You do okay. And, and you're thinking you may have some, some, some notions of some ideas you would like to ask, but you've gotta wait for the moment.
And as soon as the conversation starts to head towards the direction, it might not be a perfect fit, but a fit that's an semi awkward fit is better than no fit. Yeah. Imagine not making that opportunity, taking that question. Asking something. I think it's really important that you can lean in and, and take the risk.
Creatives have to take a risk and, and in those wholly unnatural situations where you are sat with the president of a studio, they're, they're board that's very impressive and filmmakers and. And you are a guy that's come in from London, jet lagged, you know, sort of three hours of sleep. You've gotta take the risk because you know, it means you can start that relationship and you know, you can ask a question.
I, and it is always good to ask a question, not make a statement. Imagine traveling that far to then go and make a statement that you make poorly. It's a question is a much easier route routine because it starts a conversation. Yeah. And you keep the card a bit closer to your chest. I'm very meeting when I was, uh.
I, it's, it is the beginning. I was in Munich for, for Alliance and, uh, I'd been a CEO for six years. But, you know, a regional local CEO is totally different when you have a board member and the stake are much higher than your simple, your team. Right? So, um, and we were developing a, a global strategy for steering employee benefit.
And we went in a room, there was several board members and there was the adversaries, you know, so if you, if you go in there, there's always this, um, yep. If you, if you have a team of people, uh, in whichever level it is, you tend to have people who have different views, different angle. Uh, there has to be, of course, have to be behind the vision, but they have to be different.
And they, if they always agree, then there is no competition between ideas and it's flop basically. You can get it right, but you can get it wrong. But if the competition between ideas and between people, as long as it's healthy, it's actually, uh, it, it can grow forward. Uh, this was the, the case there. The room was people, which are the, the board of the holding.
So there was the, the, the people were different, different views, different angles, different responsibilities. And, uh, when the subject came, the subject I was working for came on the, on, on, on, on the table. Uh, we were prepared. We, we had team of people on our side, but on the other side they were prepared as well.
And they were on the opposite side, let's say. Not necessarily completely anti the idea, but they didn't want to have the steering in the way that we proposed. So they came with their point and the argument, and what we needed to do is to get out of that meeting with a positive outcome, which was, uh, which was, uh, which happened by the way.
So, but everybody played a different role. I was playing the guy who was, uh, the, the project manager to, to implement, to, to develop the strategy and get the compromise. Um, my, my boss was there more like the, um, the bumper, I would say. And I found that amazing because there was, uh, a, a moment in time where.
A, a gentleman with a, the highest responsibility took, took actually a step back from the table circled around the table and start writing on the, on, on, on, on the board to make, to be the mediator. Yeah. And at the end of the day, if every, everybody has his role and it works to, to come back to your point earlier, he can't just step back.
You can't chicken, chicken out of this one. No. You gotta t you have to, you have to, to be there, you have to be very clear and. You can't be too long. If you're too long, you just put them asleep or they say is a, is a joker or whatever it is. But the strategy has to be clearly understood and if you know your place, the others will team up with you to get to do to the optimal result, which is uh, which is something I think interesting.
I think that's really making sure, I mean time management in a meeting like that, because it is. I've been there, right? Where somebody has an idea and, and then it perpetuates into something else. But there's a point in time that the airtime becomes stale Airtime. Yeah. And you've gotta respect, I think when you're in a meeting, a complex meeting, you've gotta respect the airtime that you've gone in.
You've had the opportunity to say your piece, support a project, um, but also be open-minded enough to support somebody else's thoughts as well. But also criticize thoughts. I think, I think to your point, competition, right? There's only, there's only so much resource, money, time, effort, all of those things. And you have to really lean in and get to the right ones. Yeah. And, and, and resilience, right? Because when you're working on movies, you, it's a seven year process.