Developing Leaders Quarterly - Hollywood - issue 50

Developing Leaders Quarterly (DLQ) is jointly published by Ideas for Leaders (the leadership focused publisher that works with the world's premier thinkers around leadership and organizational behaviour related themes) and the Center for the Future of Organization at the Drucker School of Management.

To mark its 50th issue - and over fifteen years of publication - DLQ turns its attention to Hollywood. Filmmaking is one of the most sophisticated experiments we have in organizing human effort under conditions of uncertainty: a handful of dominant studios, a layer of mid-sized talent agencies, law firms and specialist companies, and around them a vast, shifting population of individual talent - actors, writers, directors, producers - circulating through an endless dance of projects that can thrive or dive on reputation alone. This issue asks what organizations in every sector can learn from an ecosystem built on mobile talent, distributed expertise and commitment without control - and how leaders might use those lessons to build more human-centred organizations of their own.

Curated by co-publisher Roland Deiser from his extensive LA network, the issue opens with Deiser's anchor essay 'The Hollywood Model', on what the film-making ecosystem teaches about aligning autonomous people around a shared vision. From there a wide-ranging series of conversations takes the reader inside the industry: entertainment lawyer Mark Litwak on the new reality facing independent filmmakers; filmmaker Dominic Savage on making work that lasts; Adam Davidson on 'The Guest in the Room'; writer and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan on 'The Leg That Got Cut Off'; Mark Young on Hollywood's structural reset; and Nancy Sanders on finding the real deal. Benjamin Bell widens the lens to game development, where the players themselves define the outcome, and Deiser closes the Hollywood section with a note on the industry's AI challenge.

In other pieces, the DLQ Drucker Principles Series asks 'What Would Peter Do?'; Roddy Millar sets out the relevance of Relevance Centred Leadership, and why 'Do I matter here?' is the question leaders most need to answer; and Kayla K. Parker, Rebecca J. Reichard and Renee Washington examine mentorship as the missing link in developing Black women leaders. The issue also carries three pieces from the 'Ideas' series - on conflict and synergy, scaling deep and scripting change - alongside book reviews and the latest business book summaries from getAbstract.

DLQ's strapline, 'making organizations more human', has never mattered more than now, as AI reshapes how decisions get made and where people find meaning at work. It is a theme Roddy Millar's own article takes up directly - and one DLQ will keep returning to on the way to issue 100.