A Curious Mind

by Brian Grazer

  Making the case also means answering the detail questions: Why these songs in that order on the soundtrack? Why that supporting actress? Why that scene?

  None of these are yes-or-no questions. They are open-ended questions—they are questions where the answer can itself be a story, sometimes short, sometimes a longer one.

  I ask these questions, and I listen to the answers. Sometimes I listen with a skeptical expression on my face, I’m sure. Sometimes I listen with a distracted look in my eye.

  And sometimes you need to ask questions that are even more open.

  What are you focused on?

  Why are you focused on that?

  What are you worried about?

  What’s your plan?

  I think asking questions creates a lot more engagement in the people with whom you work. It’s subtle. Let’s say you have a movie that’s in trouble. You ask the executive responsible for moving that movie along what her plan is. You’re doing two things just by asking the question. You’re making it clear that she should have a plan, and you’re making it clear that she is in charge of that plan. The question itself implies both the responsibility for the problem and the authority to come up with the solution.

  If you work with talented people who want to do the work they are doing, then they’ll want to step up. But it’s a simple quality of human nature that people prefer to choose to do things rather than be ordered to do them. In fact, as soon as you tell me I have to do something—give a speech, attend a banquet, go to Cannes—I immediately start looking for ways to avoid doing it. If you invite me to do something, I’m much more likely to want to do it.

  I work every day with actors, with beautiful, charming, charismatic people whose job is to persuade you to believe them. That’s what being a great actor means—it means having the ability to cast a spell over the audience, to persuade them you are the character you’re portraying. A great actor creates believability.

  But if you pause for a moment and think about it, you’ll realize that employing people like that is really hard. Actors are hard to manage because they are often used to getting what they want, and because their talent is persuading you to see the world the way they want you to. That’s why you’ve hired them in the first place.

  Am I the “boss” of the movie? Is the director the “boss” of the movie? In different ways, of course, the producer and the director are the “bosses” of the movie.

  When you’re out on location, you can be spending $300,000 a day to make a movie. That’s $12,500 an hour, even while everyone is sleeping.

  So if an actor gets mad, or pouty, or wants their jet refueled, they are the person shaking the cage. They are the person in charge.

  You can’t let people behave badly. But you also can’t screw up the psyche of an actor. If someone ends up with a bad attitude, you don’t get the performance you want.

  When there’s a problem, when there’s trouble at $300,000 a day, you want to find a way to have a conversation so that you can convince your star or stars to help you. You want to draw them in, not order them around.

  Back in 1991, we shot the movie Far and Away. We had Tom Cruise as the lead. Tom was at the top of his career. He was only twenty-nine years old, but he had already made Top Gun (1986), The Color of Money (1986), Rain Man (1988), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).

  Tom isn’t difficult to work with. But Far and Away was a challenging movie to get made. It was an old-fashioned epic, a story of two immigrants leaving Ireland for America at the turn of the last century. We shot in Ireland and the western United States. It got expensive, but it wasn’t overtly commercial. When we figured out what it was going to cost, the studio told me to find ways of cutting the budget.

  I went to Tom on the set. We talked. I said, “Look, you’re not the producer of this movie. But we all want to make it, we all have this vision of a movie we’re doing as artists, a story we care about. It’s going to be expensive, but we can’t spend as much money as it looks like we’re going to. We need to hold the line.”

  I said to Tom, “Can you be the team leader here with the cast and crew? Can you be the guy that sets an example?”

  He looked at me and said, “I’m one hundred percent that guy!”

  He said, “When I have to go to the bathroom, I’m going to run to the trailer and run back to the set. I’m going to set the pace for excellence, and respect, and tightening up.”

  And that’s exactly what he did. He led. He was motivated. And he motivated other people.

  I didn’t walk in and tell Tom what to do. I didn’t order everybody to work harder, to make do with less. I explained where we were. And I went to the key player, the person other people would respect, and I asked that person a question: “Can you be the leader here?”

  Being persuasive, being successful, in a situation like that is hardly guaranteed. Some of it is in how you present yourself. I think Tom appreciated that I came to him with a problem, that I treated him as an equal, that I treated him as part of the solution. I allowed Tom to be curious about both the problem and how to fix it.

  Some of that is Tom’s character—he isn’t just thinking of himself.

  But you have a much greater chance of success at a key moment like that if you ask someone to step up in a big way, rather than order them to step up in a big way. Tom did it.

  I think asking for people’s help—rather than directing it—is almost always the smart way of doing things, regardless of the stakes.

  For instance, I think my partnership with Ron Howard only works because we never tell each other what to do. We always ask.

  If I need Ron to call Russell Crowe, I don’t say, “Ron, I need you to call Russell Crowe.” I say something like:

  “How would you feel about calling Russell Crowe?”

  Or, “Do you think it’s a good idea if you call Russell Crowe?”

  Or, “How do you think Russell Crowe would feel if you called him?”

  Unless Ron asks me a specific yes-or-no question, I never tell him what to do.

  The same is true of my relationship with Tom Hanks. Tom Cruise. Denzel Washington. I don’t tell, I ask.

  I am, of course, communicating what I want. But I’m leaving them the choice. They know what I want, but they have free will. They can say no.

  This isn’t just a matter of personal style. The real benefit of asking rather than telling is that it creates the space for a conversation, for a different idea, a different strategy.

  I trust Ron Howard completely—I trust his artistic instincts, I trust his business judgment, I trust his affection and respect for me and for what we’ve created.

  So I don’t want to say, “Ron, I need you to call Russell Crowe.”

  I want to say, “Ron, what would happen if you called Russell Crowe?” Because then Ron can wrinkle his brow, and come up with a different way of approaching Russell with whatever idea we’ve got.

  I’ve discovered another unexpected characteristic of using questions: they transmit values. In fact, questions can quietly transmit values more powerfully than a direct statement telling people what you want them to stand for, or exhorting them about what you want them to stand for.

  Why do I ask my movie production executive if she loves that movie that isn’t moving along? Because I want her to love the movies she’s making for us. We’ve been doing this business for a long time, and at this point the only reason to do a project is because we love it. If I say to her, or anyone else: “Let’s only do movies you really love,” it’s easy for that to sound like a goal, or a theory, or, worst of all, a platitude.

  If I ask directly, “Do you love this movie?”—the question makes it clear what I think our priorities really are.

  It worked exactly the same way with Tom Cruise and Far and Away. If I fly to Ireland from Los Angeles and start telling everybody that we need to save money, we need to film faster, cut effects, save costs on the catering—well then I’m just the LA executive who flies in with
the bad news and the marching orders.

  If I sit down quietly with Tom and ask the question, “Can you be the leader here?”—it’s a moment packed with values. We care about this movie. We’ve got to find a way of protecting the integrity of the story while living within a reasonable budget. I need help. And I have so much respect for Tom that I’m asking him to help me solve this problem, to help me manage the whole movie. This is a powerful message, packed into only six words, with a question mark at the end instead of a period.

  • • •

  CURIOSITY AT WORK ISN’T a matter of style. It’s much more consequential than that.

  If you’re the boss, and you manage by asking questions, you’re laying the foundation for the culture of your company or your group.

  You’re letting people know that the boss is willing to listen. This isn’t about being “warm” or “friendly.” It’s about understanding how complicated the modern business world is, how indispensable diversity of perspective is, and how hard creative work is.

  Here’s why it’s hard: because often there is no right answer.

  Consider for a moment an example that seems really simple: the design of Google’s search page.

  How many ways are there to design a web page? How many ways are there to design a page for searching the web? An infinite number, of course.

  Google’s page is legendary for its spare, almost stark appearance. There’s a clean page, a search box, a Google logo, two search buttons: “Google search” and “I’m feeling lucky.” And wide open white space. Today, the Google home page is considered a triumph of graphic design, a brilliant example of taking something as complex and chaotic as the World Wide Web and making it simple and accessible. (Both Bing and Twitter seem to try to channel Google’s simplicity and drama on their home pages—but neither can resist cluttering up the look.)

  Two things are fascinating from the story of the design of Google’s search page. First, it’s an accident. Sergey Brin, one of Google’s two cofounders, didn’t know how to do HTML computer code when he and Larry Page first launched the search engine in 1998, so he designed the simplest possible page—because that’s all he had the skills to do.

  Second, people found the simple page so different from the rest of the cluttered web that they didn’t understand what to do. People routinely sat in front of the clean page waiting for the rest of it to load instead of typing in their search. Google solved that confusion by putting a tiny copyright line at the bottom of the search page (it’s not there anymore), so users would know the page had finished loading.2

  So the story of Google’s brilliant home page is surprising mostly because it wasn’t done by design, and its brilliance took a while to become clear. Brin didn’t know how to code anything fancy, so he didn’t. And what has now become an influential example of online design usability was so baffling when it was first unveiled that people couldn’t figure out how to use it.

  But the home page isn’t really Google at all. Google is the vast array of computer code and algorithms that allow the company to search the web and present those results. There are millions of lines of code behind a Google search—and millions more behind Google mail, Google Chrome, Google ads.

  If we can envision dozens, hundreds of ways of designing a search page, imagine for a moment the ways that all that computer code could be written. It’s like imagining the ways a book can be written, like imagining the ways a story could be told on screen. For Google, it is a story, just written in zeroes and ones.

  That’s why asking questions at work, instead of giving orders, is so valuable. Because most modern problems—lowering someone’s cholesterol, getting passengers onto an airplane efficiently, or searching all of human knowledge—don’t have a right answer. They have all kinds of answers, many of them wonderful.

  To get at the possibilities, you have to find out what ideas and reactions are in other people’s minds. You have to ask them questions.

  How do you see this problem?

  What are we missing?

  Is there another way of tackling this?

  How would we solve this if we were the customer?

  That’s as true in movies as in any other business. I love the movies we’ve made. But we didn’t produce the “right” version of the iconic films Apollo 13 or A Beautiful Mind. We have the version of the story that we made—the very best version, with the cast and crew and script and budget we had.

  Tom Hanks is the face of Apollo 13, as real-life astronaut Jim Lovell.

  Russell Crowe captures the spirit, the struggles, and the interior intellectual life of mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

  They both executed those roles brilliantly.

  But clearly that isn’t the only version of those movies that could have been made—what if we hadn’t been able to sign Hanks or Crowe for those leading roles? We would have hired another actor. And the whole movie would have been different—even if every other actor, every other behind-the-scenes person, and every word of the script had been identical.

  Anna Culp, who is senior vice president for movie production at Imagine, has been at the company sixteen years, having started as my assistant.

  “We do approach everything as ‘case-building,’ ” Anna says about the culture at Imagine. “Being asked questions means you always have the chance to make the movie better, and to make the case for making the movie better.

  “For me, the questions mean no one is ever wrong. Most of the time, these aren’t those kinds of right-or-wrong decisions.

  “The movies we end up loving, you can’t really imagine them having come out any other way. But with something like the James Brown movie, Get On Up, well, over sixteen years, at different times, there have been very different versions of that movie.

  “For me, questions have become a habit I use myself. I’m always asking, ‘Why am I doing this material, this movie?’

  “And you know, if something doesn’t work out financially—if it’s not a success, you want to be able to stand back and say, ‘This is still something I’m proud of.’

  “The disadvantages of the questions are, in some sense, the same as the advantages. You wonder if you are delivering, and if you are delivering the right thing. Because the boss isn’t telling you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back to my office after a meeting, and I’m thinking, ‘Are we doing the right movie? Are we doing the movie the right way? Am I delivering?’

  “This isn’t a science. It’s a creative business.”

  As Anna makes so clear, this kind of “management curiosity” ripples into the corners of how people think about their work, and their approach to their work, every day.

  Questions create both the authority in people to come up with ideas and take action, and the responsibility for moving things forward.

  Questions create the space for all kinds of ideas, and the sparks to come up with those ideas.

  Most important, questions send a very clear message: we’re willing to listen, even to ideas or suggestions or problems we weren’t expecting.

  As valuable as questions are when you’re the boss, I think they are just as important in every other direction in the workplace. People should ask their bosses questions. I appreciate it when people ask me the same kind of open-ended questions I so often ask.

  What are you hoping for?

  What are you expecting?

  What’s the most important part of this for you?

  Those kinds of questions allow a boss to be clear about things that the boss might think are clear, but which often aren’t clear at all.

  Indeed, people at all levels should ask each other questions. That helps break down the barriers between job functions in our company, and in any workplace, and also helps puncture the idea that the job hierarchy determines who can have a good idea.

  I like when people at Imagine ask me questions for many reasons, but here’s the simplest and most powerful reason: if they ask the question, then they almost
always listen to the answer.

  People are more likely to consider a piece of advice, or a flat-out instruction, if they’ve asked for it in the first place.

  Imagine is hardly a perfect workplace. We have our share of dull meetings and unproductive brainstorming sessions. We miscommunicate, we misinterpret, we miss out on some opportunities, and we push forward some projects we should let go.

  But nobody is afraid to ask a question.

  Nobody is afraid to answer a question.

  Making questions a central part of managing people and projects is hard. I do it instinctively, from years of using questions to draw people out, and from a natural inclination to hear how projects are moving along rather than giving orders about them.

  I think questions are an underappreciated management tool. But if it’s not the way you normally interact with people, it will take a conscious effort to change. And you have to be prepared that, initially, asking questions slows things down. If you really want to know what people think, if you really want people to take more responsibility, if you really want a conversation around the problems and opportunities—rather than having people execute marching orders—that takes more time.

  It’s like being a reporter inside your own organization.

  If asking questions isn’t your typical style, this approach may puzzle people at first. So the best way to start might be to pick a particular project, and manage that project with questions. If you can start using curiosity in the office, you’ll find that after a while, the benefits are remarkable. People’s creativity gradually blossoms. And you end up knowing a lot more—you know more about the people you work with every day, and how their minds work, and you know more about what’s going on with the work itself.

  The most important element of this kind of culture is that you can’t simply unleash a welter of questions—like a police detective or a lawyer doing a cross-examination in court. We’re not asking questions for the sake of hearing ourselves ask them.

  There are two key elements to a questioning culture. The first is the atmosphere around the question. You can’t ask a question in a tone of voice or with a facial expression that indicates you already know the answer. You can’t ask a question with that impatience that indicates you can’t wait to ask the next question.