Brian Grazer : A Curious Mind
One of the most important ways I use curiosity is to see the world through other people's eyes.
One of the concepts that really animates me is what I think of as "mastery." I want to know what it takes to really master something - not just to be a police officer but to be the chief, not just to be an intelligence agent but to be the head of the CIA, not just to be a trial attorney but to be F. Lee Bailey. That's a quiet thread through my curiosity. It's also a theme, in some form, of every one of my movies. The stories touch the whole range of the human experience, I hope, but the central struggle is often about achievement or the struggle for achievement. What does success look like? What does success feel like?
Isaac Asimov actually wrote more non-fiction books than fiction books. He wrote seven books about mathematics, 68 books on astronomy; he wrote a biochemistry textbook. He wrote books titled "Photosynthesis" and "Neutrino: Ghost Particle of the Atom." He wrote literary guides to the bible - two volumes, Shakespeare and Paradise Lost. He had a boy's mischievous love of jokes and wrote eight books or collections of humour including: "Lecherous Limericks," "More Lecherous Limericks" and "Still More Lecherous Limericks." In the last decade of his life, Asimov wrote 15 or more books a year.
Isaac Asimov met me at the Ritz Carlton with his second wife, Janet Jebson Asimov, a psychiatrist with degrees from Stanford and NYU. I found her more intimidating than I found him. Isaac was relaxed; his wife was more on guard. She was clearly the boss, or at least, his protector. Both Isaac and his wife ordered ginger ale. Apparently, it wasn't going that well although I didn't realize how poorly it was going.
FYI, Grazer overheard a conversation between two people from inside the room he was living in and used that info to apply for a job. A day later, he had that job. He used a trick to get to meet the movers and shakers. His job required delivering packages - legal contracts. He would tell the gatekeepers that he could only hand the package over to the actual big-shot. And that was it - he got to meet tonnes of tycoons.
It was John Calley who really showed me what being in the entertainment business was all about, and he also showed me what it could be like. Calley was a huge figure and an important creative force in the movies in the 19605 and 19703.
When I was working just down the hall from him, Calley was forty—four or forty-five years old, at the height of his power, and already a legend—intelligent, eccentric, Machiavellian. Warner Bros. in those days was making a movie a month, and Calley was always thinking a hundred moves ahead. A handful of people loved him, a slightly larger group admired him, and a lot of people feared him.
I think what he found appealing about me was my innocence, my utter nai'veté. I wasn’t working any angles. I was so new, I didn’t even know where the angles were.
Calley would say, “Grazer, come sit in my office. He’d put me on the couch, and I’d watch him work.
The whole thing was a revelation. My own father was a lawyer, a sole practitioner, and he struggled to be successful. I was headed to law school—a life of manila file folders, stacks of briefs, thick casebooks, working away at a Naugahyde-topped desk.
Calley worked out of a huge office that was beautiful and elegant. It was set up like a living room. He had no desk. He had a couple of sofas, and he worked all day sitting on the sofa.
He didn’t do any writing or typing, he didn’t carry piles of work home from the office each day. He talked. He sat in this elegant living room, on the couch, and talked all day. In fact, the contracts I delivered were just the final act, formalizing all the talk. Sitting there on Calley’s sofa, it was clear that the business part of show business was all about conversation.
Managing/Leading with Questions
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 one project and manage that project with questions. If you can start using curiosity in the office, you find that, after a while, the benefits are remarkable. Peoples' 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. You know more about what's going on with the work itself.
The most important element about 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 with a tone of voice or a facial expression that indicates you already know the answer. You can't ask a question with that impatience that indicates that you can't wait to ask the next question. The point of the question has to be the answer. The questions and the answers have to be driving a project or a decision forward and you have to listen to the answer. You have to take the answer seriously. As a boss or a colleague, or as a subordinate, if you don't take the answer seriously, no one will take the question seriously. You'll just get the answers calculated to take everyone out of the conversation quickly.
The questions, in other w, have to come from genuine curiosity. If you're not curious enough to listen to the answer, all the question does is increase cynicism and decrease trust and engagement.
Arrest: The most effective way to make an arrest is to use the element of surprise, achieving "the maximum amount of mental discomfort."
"The ideal time at which to make an arrest is in the early hours of the morning. When arrested at this time, most subjects experience intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress and for the most part have difficulty adjusting to the situation."
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