War is the most unforgiving environment for a leader, with every decision affecting both your own life and that of others. It’s an environment vividly painted in Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott’s re-telling of the US military’s ill-fated incursion into Mogadishu in 1993. Based on Mark Bowden’s absorbing book, Black… Read More »Leading under pressure: Black Hawk Down
Advisers who can’t be trusted. Threats from more powerful competitors. A divided organisation who have no faith in your ability to lead, and are deeply suspicious of your motives Oh, and potential assassins at every turn. That’s the scenario confronting the new monarch in Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur’s fascinating film on… Read More »Baptism of fire: how Elizabeth stabilised her nation
Organisations with a strong sense of tradition and history can sometimes close the door to new approaches that might yield better results. In Moneyball, Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) shakes up one such establishment: professional baseball. Dispensing with traditional player scouting techniques, Beane uses statistical measurement of… Read More »Three major league leadership lessons from Moneyball
Humour is a powerful weapon in learning and you can find plenty of it in Chicken Run, the brilliant animated pastiche of World War II escape movies. Our heroine is Ginger, the plucky hen who leads her fellow inmates of Tweedy’s Chicken Farm in an audacious mass breakout to secure their freedom.… Read More »Lead like Ginger: five lessons from Chicken Run
When I first watched Thirteen Days, I was shocked how close the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us to armageddon. I’m old enough to remember the end of the Cold War, but the hair’s breadth from conflict that the film portrays is eye opening. The film dramatises the traumatic period in 1962… Read More »Top five leadership movies: Thirteen Days
There’s a scene in Apollo 13 when Flight Controller John Aaron declares that, to get the stricken shuttle back to Earth, they’ll need to get the shuttle power output down to 12 amps. The response? ‘You can’t run a vacuum cleaner on 12 amps John!’ It’s a moment that perfectly… Read More »Top five leadership movies: Apollo 13