The Curious Case of Steve Jobs: Intuition and the Entrepreneur

“Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

- Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005

Wow it’s been a long time since I’ve written an entry (the last once was written just before I sold my iPhone gaming company, Gameview Studios, to DeNA) in 2010. I’d like to re-start my blog with two topics that are dear and near to my heart: following your intuition and the death of Steve jobs.

Steve’s death on October 5, 2011 caused a literal outflowing of emotion, analysis and opining: hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages have been written in the last month alone since his death. And that’s not counting Walter Isaacson’s 600 plus page biography.

Some of these focused on his achievements at Apple and Pixar, some on his tumultuous personality, some on his “insanely great” products like the Mac and the iPhone, some on how he ran Apple after his comeback, some on the impact he’s had on (count them) at least five different industries, some comparing him to Walt Disney and Henry Ford combined.

So...what’s left to say?

For me one of the most inspiring (and overlooked) aspects of Jobs’ career and philosophy was his reliance on his own intuition even in the face of the “noise of others’ opinions”. I haven’t seen much written on it, so using his own words as much as possible, here goes:

Most writers about successful business persons like to try to reduce what they did to a set of pithy “principles” you can follow to be just “like Mike”. With Jobs, I think that’s pretty much impossible. It’s like asking for the “step-by-step formula” for how to “think different”! If it could be reduced to a formula…well you get the point.

Intuition vs. Analysis

Jobs attributed much of his success to his ability to follow his own “inner knowing”, even when analysts and the “experts” disagreed. He was quoted as saying he hated focus groups because consumers “don’t know what they want until we show it to them”. Instead, he insisted on having an “intuitive” feel for when a product was “just right” and when it felt “wrong”.

This is pretty much the opposite of what you will learn from business schools (even more progressive west coast ones like Stanford) about building products and companies. It’s even different from what most venture capitalists and startup gurus here in the valley will tell you - which is to analyze a market, make sure the analysis confirms that the market is “big enough”, then interview the people in that market to find out their needs. It’s kind of ironic that one of the biggest icons of Silicon Valley would disagree with the way business is being done here.

Tim Cook, who replaced Jobs as the CEO at Apple, talks about following his own intuition when he decided to join Apple after meeting with Jobs. “Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically but there are times when relying on gut or intuition are indispensable.”

Where did Jobs get this mindset from? A big part of his reliance on intuition vs. analysis came as a result of his own search for truth. When he was young, he dropped out of Reed College (again the opposite of what logic would tell you to do if you want to be a successful entrepreneur) and followed his own intuition down several notable paths.

The first path, his quest for enlightenment, led him first on a trip to India chasing some guru, and later transformed into his study of Zen meditation here in the Bay area. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, “ said Jobs. “They use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world.”

He concluded with: “Intuition is a very powerful thing.” (src: Isaacson's biography).

Continuing his search for enlightenment when he came back to the US in the 1970’s he experimented with Zen meditation (an interest he kept up for the rest of his life) and mind-altering drugs (which as far as I know, he did not keep up for the rest of his life). Now I can’t speak for LSD (since I’ve never taken it), but I can vouch that meditation can be indispensible for learning about different states of mind and teaching you how to follow your own intuition.

Steve Jobs said: “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time, it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things- that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment.”

According to his longtime friend, Daniel Kottke, who’d known him since his college days: “Steve is very much Zen. It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.”

Zen influenced Steve Jobs in other ways too – including his appreciation of a minimalist ethic that rubbed off on his insistence that user interfaces and products be as simple as possible. When creating great products like the Macintosh and the original iPod, Jobs talked about having this intuitive knowing when something had met this ethic of simplicity and when it could be improved. Although he wasn't always right, he was right way more often than he was wrong.

Connecting the Dots: One thing leads to another

Of course, it’s not always easy to follow your intuition when it’s telling you something that’s different from what others tell you should “logically” be done. Jobs own life is a good example – ranging from his decision to drop out of Reed to what looked like a very poor investment decision to fund Pixar, a money-losing operation that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million in the eighties, and then continued to fund for years (to the tune of $50 million of his own personal money), until they came out with Toy Story in the nineties and became the landmark success story we know about today.

I think it only happens if you can have confidence in yourself and your own ability to find what’s right for you. Following your intuition often means follow your own path, even if you can’t see exactly where it’s taking you.

Jobs often gave an example from the time when he dropped out of college. He said that once he’d officially dropped out, he could take the classes that he “wanted to take” rather than the ones that “they were requiring him to take”, showing a streak of his habitual disrespect for authority.

He saw a flyers on campus for a calligraphy class, and decided to follow his intuition and take this class, where he learned about proportional fonts, serif vs. non-serif fonts. Jobs would say about this time: “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.”

Later, when it came time to design the Mac, he insisted that there be “fonts” of different types, rather than the usual stale green fonts that were popular at the time. Again in his own words:

“And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

This was perhaps the most important example of what Jobs referred to as “connecting the dots” – when something in your life unexpectedly connects to something at a far later date, but you are completely unaware of the influence it’ll have at the time.

I think that most successful entrepreneurs benefit from “connecting the dots” – bringing together seemingly unconnected experiences into a single whole that somehow is more than the sum of the parts. How do you know? You don’t – you have to have the courage though to follow your intuition.

I’ll end, as I began, with Steve Jobs in his own words from the now famous Stanford speech:

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Stanford Sloan, Entry 22: The Last Entry: Final Finals, Ethics in B-School, the World According to Pixar

Tis the eve of our final final (approximately 11pm when I stared writing this), and throughout the b-school campus, not a mouse is stirring. Well, that’s not entirely true – many MBA’s are out at the final FOAM of the season held at some club in Palo Alto.

As for Sloans, we have our final final exam tomorrow morning, our very last bit of academic nonsense (er, rather, I mean our last serious academic endeavor) during our Sloan year: the HR final exam. The HR class (as per my past post) is one of two Sloan required classes in our final quarter.

Today was officially our last day of class at the GSB, but like many Sloans, I didn’t have any classes today. While many of us were busy studying for our final tomorrow, I took a trip up to San Francisco to wander around a little bit.

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Our other Sloan required class, Non Market Strategy, had a professor who decided to give us our final exam last Thursday. In hindsight this seemed like a brilliant move, because it allowed us to enjoy the beautiful late May/early June weather without stressing about academics last weekend.

This also meant that two of my courses were officially finished last Thursday (the required class, Non Market Strategy, and my elective class, The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry through literature).

Yesterday (Monday, June 1st) I had my last session of the Leadership Entertainment Industry class (more on this, including our visit to Pixar and the visit of David E. Kelly later). Which means three out of four classes are done, and in less than 12 hours, my academic experience at the Stanford Sloan program will be complete!

As I sit here, I should be cramming for this final exam in HR, I can’t help but reflect what an odd class ithe HR class been. In this class, doing data regression about HR was often emphasized more than actual HR strategy, and cases that we wrote about our co-workers companies seemed much more interesting than the “official cases” from Harvard and Stanford Business School that we were supposed to be learning from. Oh well, learning from our peers has been one of the keys to making business school worthwhile, so I guess this shouldn’t’ surprise me!

Ethics and Morality in Business?

One component of the our Non-Market Strategy class that came up over the past few weeks was the “ethics” component. Despite being a little philosophically abstract (Kantian vs. Utilitarian, anyone? I think I’d rather debate Tastes Great vs. Less Filling!), there was some valuable self-reflection this class forced us to do, at least for a few minutes.

In the wide world, MBA’s aren’t generally perceived to have any ethics, really. Just a constant stream of number-crunchers coming out of business schools who calculate the path to maximum profits with the least weighted average cost of capital, and always recommend the path of most borrowing at the least interest rate, regardless of the long term consequences.

Case in point: our recent financial crisis.

Well, I can’t really argue that this isn’t what business school teaches us. It actually is, for the most part, what we learn in our finance classes. But, there are bright spots of moral reflection in our other classes too, which shouldn’t be overlooked.

In our Non-market class, we were presented with some ethical dilemmas and asked our opinion.

Our professor called it Trolley-ology. A trolley is coming down the track and it is very likely to kill 5 people who are on the track. You have the option to change the track the trolley is on, to another track where only one person will get killed.

What do you do?

OK next step. Forget about the second track. Suppose you are on a bridge overlooking the trolley that is rolling towards killing 5 people. There is one person on the bridge with you. You could push that person off the bridge, which would kill them, but would stop the trolley, and with certainty save the lives of the 5 people down the road.

What would you do now?

Hmmm. If you’re like me, I don’t know that these hypothetical ethical dilemmas about Trolleys really impact our day to day decision in the business world, however much they do help illuminate how we think about ethical issues.

I’m sure that most MBA’s who were involved with institutions that spear-headed the financial crisis (as well as earlier excesses like Enron and Worldcom) probably had ethics classes like this one, but it’s not clear that they did any good.

More interesting and impactful on my long term view though, was my Moral and Spiritual Inquiry Through Literature class. This class, which was taught in seminar format, put a much more textured and personalized spin on these kinds of moral dilemmas.

By reading a fictional story (a novel a week, mind you) of a character who, for example, is staunchly anti-corruption at the beginning of the novel, but succumbs to taking a bribe by the end of the novel, we move beyond platitudes and abstract philosophy and hopefully gain some insight into human nature.

When Ivan Ilyich, described as a career corporate ladder climber in mercilessly accurate prose by Tolstoy, is about to die prematurely and reflects on what was missing from his materially oriented life, it’s not much of a stretch to see the comparison between this late 19th century Ruppy (Russian upwardly mobile professional) and the corporate climbing business school student of the twenty first century!

By being forced to discuss the nature of ethics and the role of religion and spirituality in our lives (and our work), we get, I think, to a much more personalized view of how we as human beings with vying impulses including greed and self-sufficiency might act in a materially obsessed world.

Moreover, by writing a 4000 word essay on how these books had an impact on my own views on morality and spirituality in the business world, I was forced to think through these issues at a deeper level than even trolleys would allow.

For those of my readers who wonder why I’m taking a class on Literature in Business School, I can only say that I wish everyone who had gotten an MBA over the past 10-20 years had to take this class (Moral and Spiritual Inquiry Through Literature), since it’s taught me more about reflecting on what’s important in life and business than all of my other classes combined.

The Law Acccording to Pixar

As always, I like to write about my Entertainment Industry class. Why? Not only because it’s a fun class, but because everyone likes the movies.

Last week, we went on a class visit to Pixar, which is, as we’ve learned the only major studio which has not had a box office failure. The visit was very eye-opening, not just because there statues of one-eyed monsters in the lobby (from Monsters, Inc), but because it made me (and the rest of the class) think about creativity, business, and the importance of modifying stories (whether in business or entertainment) until we get them right.

Pixar is a very creativity driven place. This comes across from the conversations we had with the CFO of Pixar, and from Andrew Stanton, who was the writer on the Toy Story movies, and the writer/director of Finding Nemo and Wall-e.

The first thing that strikes you when you walk into Pixar these days is that it’s all about one film: Up, the new movie that was just released this last weekend. I loved this movie, and it looks like it’s going to be a commercial success, despite analysts ravings that a movie about “a grumpy old man and a fat kid” has limited market appeal and no toy merchandising possibilities.

The thing about this focus is that for much of its history (going back to Toy Story) the folks at Pixar focused almost exclusively on one film. This is contrary to what we learn at business school and contrary to what almost every major studio in Hollywood says – that you need a diversified portfolio of films every year because you never know which of them are going to be successful.

But, as Andrew described to us their process – it can take 4-5 years to produce a Pixar film, one of their reasons for this success became apparent. Pixar is a mixture of Hollywood and Silicon Valley (Steve Jobs was the CEO and investor for many years, and Pixar grew out of Lucasfilm, and was a technology company for most of it’s life). They focus incessantly on the story for the first 2.5 years of this time – recording the whole film using hand drawn sketches and only when/if they get the story right, do they invest in the very costly 3d animation for which they are known.

They also allow for a certain amount of honest creative tension. While the director has the final say, the Pixar brain trust watches early screenings (of hand-drawn sketches with employee-recorded voices) and they “duke it out” with each other for ideas on how to make the story better. According to Stanton, after some painful disputes, they almost always emerged with a better story, which really has been the key to Pixar’s success I think. I could continue writing about Pixar forever, since it's such an interesting company, but will have to leave it at that!

We also had David E. Kelley visit our Entertainment Industry class. He was the creator of such hit television legal dramas as The Practice, Ally McBeal, and the more recent Boston Legal.

I won’t say much about his visit, except that it was also very insightful about the creative process in general and how television works in particular. Two things he said that surprised me?
1) that James Spader didn’t want to work with William Shatner at the beginning of Boston legal (though this changed quickly when they started working together), and
2) the head of the TV network programming (I think it was ABC) thought that the show ‘Lost’ was the “biggest piece of shit” he’d ever seen and he only let it go on the air because he had to contractually (the same executive later happily took credit for what became one of the biggest successes in the networks history).

Sign Off: The Last Entry

This is probably my last entry of the Sloan academic year in this blog. It’s been great fun writing this blog, even when it’s done in the middle of the night before an important exam.

I’d like to remind everyone for posterity that these have been my own personal impressions and rants of a thirty-something software entrepreneur who decided to go back to school and relive his high-school dream of attending Stanford University.

Several of next year’s Sloan’s have told me that they heard about the program or decided to join the Sloan program at Stanford because of my blog (or maybe it was despite my blog?? – just kidding!). For those of you who’ve been reading it regulary, I thank you and feel free to drop me a note any time.

From now on, I’ll be heading back to the world of work, dipping my toe in Venture Capital, and continuing to work on my organization, BayView Labs.

As for the blog, I’m going to go back to writing about entrepreneurship, zen, personal growth, and of course, the movies!

So what did I learn about succeeding in the business world in business school?

Well, speaking of the movies, perhaps the best way to sum up what I learned in business school is also in fact the best way to sum up my class about the Entertainment Industry.

This line, which was quoted to us by both David E. Kelley and our professor (Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Bill Guttentag), was from the book “Adventures in the Screen Trade”, by William Goldman.

Goldman summed up his own experiences in Hollywood with the very simple line: “Nobody knows anything!”

Stanford Sloan GSB, Entry 21: The Spring Quarter, Star Wars, and the Class of 2010

The Class of 2010

We just met members of the Stanford Sloan Program class of 2010, who are having their orientation this weekend, as I write this. We gave them a “welcome” presentation (“The opening ceremonies for the class of 2010”, as our Master of Ceremonies, Tim, Tim, described it), in Bishop auditorium, the main auditorium at the GSB.

In the words of Darth Vader from Star Wars (more on the Star Wars theme later in this blog post): “The Circle is Now Complete”.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we sat in Bishop, watching the Sloan class of 2008 give us their wacky and informative presentation about what life was like in the Sloan program, amidst the MBA's at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

I can remember sitting in the theater, with my then future-friends/classmates, watching these guys and wondering: “Wow, these guys seem to be such good friends and having such a good time – I wonder if our class is going to gel like that?”

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I remember the 2008 class members, with their private jokes about texting each other at night and hurrying to a restaurant, bar, or social gathering in Palo Alto. It was clear they were having a good time, and I doubted whether we'd be like that in under a year's time.

I sat with my own personal combination of excitement, anticipation, and even anxiousness, about how I’d fit in to the Stanford GSB. I wondered if I’d like taking classes again (it had been 15 years since I’d been to school), wondering if I’d get along well with my classmates, and more importantly, whether I’d be able to relate to any of them personally.

The Sloan program, after all, consists of a very diverse group of people, from a large number of countries, at very different stages of life (from single Sloanies to families with 4 kids) and stages of work (from entrepreneurs to unemployed to Employed for Life).

As I sat in the audience yesterday, that question was finally answered. We have gelled as a class and it was funny to see in our skits and videos just how well we’ve gotten to know each other (and the faculty and administration, who several members of our class played during the skits). Particularly hilarious was our classmate Bree’s imitation of the director of the Sloan program, Marie – who knew we had such a good impersonator in our class?

The experience turned out to be more emotional for many of us than we expected - Of course our first priority was to welcome the new class with open arms and to give them a preview of what they might be like a year from now – which we did. But it also brought forth the realization that we have come full circle and our year at Stanford is almost over! In fact, there are only 4 weeks of classes left, only one big Sloan party left (The Latin party), and then finals, and finally graduation in June.

Many of us are going on the international study trip to South America, though some of us are more concerned about what we’re doing afterwards, with the job market and economy as it is and won't be attending.

What a year it’s been and what great friendships we’ve formed. I find it funny that even those classmates who I didn’t always get along with, or those I didn’t relate to very much during the school year - have become trusted friends that I’m looking forward to seeing sometime after graduation.

The Spring Quarter
Several of the new members of the class told me they’d been reading this blog regularly (one even said that was how he learned about the program), and asked why I hadn’t written any entries lately.

Honestly this last semester has been really busy – not so much with academics, but since it’s my last semester at Stanford, I’ve been trying to meet with as many interesting folks on and off campus, and figuring out exactly what I might be working on next that academics have fallen to a “lower priority”.

Which leads to a piece of un-asked for advice that I’d give to the new class: Think about why you’re coming to Stanford and what your priorities will be. Of course, there will always be academic, social, and professional aspects of your year here, and in the fall quarter they will be all mixed together. But come January, I would suggest it’s important to have a sense of what you’d like to get out of it – is it more experience with Finance? Is it to meet a team (MBA’s, Engineers) that you’d like to start a company with after the program? Is it to get to know professors that you want to keep in touch with? Is it to break into a new industry? Is it to socialize?

Whatever it is, you've got to focus on what's right for you!

Spring Electives
So to give our future Sloanies and others who are interested in classes at the Stanford Business Schoool, here’s the low down on the classes I’m taking this quarter.

I decided to take only four classes this quarter. There are two required core classes (as part of the Sloan curriculum). I took two electives this quarter, which should (fingers crossed) give me the right number of credits to graduate. I intentionally took a light load this quarter (I had 5 classes in the winter quarter, several of which were very demanding). Again, this gets back to priorities – one of our classmates is taking 6 classes this quarter, because it’s our last quarter at Stanford and he wants to take as many classes as possible.

The core classes:

•Non-market strategy.
This was a term that I hadn’t heard before. The idea of this class is that while most business focus on the “market strategy of a firm” (what are competitors doing, what is my product strategy, m&a, marketing, etc.), many firms (particularly big multi-nationals) have to deal with things that are not directly market-related. What things? A big thing called the government is a good example – many firms are in industries that are regulated, that might face environmental issues, that are attacked by citizen groups, and on and on.

As an example, our first case was about Shell and greenpeace and the media. More recently, we spoke about patents, trademarks, and intellectual property protection. Last week we did simulation based on the Microsoft anti-trust case – where one study group (my study group) played Microsoft and another study group played the Department of Justice and we argued whether Microsoft had violated anti-trust laws or not.

The best thing about this class? It makes me think about things I really don’t think about much. The worst thing about this class? It’s at 8:00 am in the morning – I call it my “sleep killer” class.

• HR class.
This class is about HR-related issues and how to structure personnel and compensation based on the strategy of the firm. Some cases we studied include Southwest Airlines, the Portman hotel, and InfoSys, to name a few.

I like the general theme of this class, because I don’t always think about HR issues as being strategic, but rather operational. However, contrary to my expectations, all the assignments in the class are data regressions, which has cause more than one of my classmates to wonder: “Is this a class about financial modeling, or Human Resources?”.

It seems like many professors here at the GSB in what I would consider “soft subjects” (HR, organizational behavior, marketing.) really want to hammer in the point that business-school in general and their field in particular is about data analysis and quantitative techniques – i.e. that it’s not really touchy feely, but rather quanty-crunchy.

I remember our negotiations instructor, when someone said "negotiation is more of an art than a science". She got very upset and yelled at him: “what have I been teaching you? This is a science, not art!” Of course anyone who’s done complex negotiation in the real world knows that it is as much (if not more) of an art involving personalities as it is a science, so I ask you: what gives?

It seems to me that teachers of soft subjects want to portray their subject as “real science” in order to get “academic respectability” from their peers and of course, to get tenure (can't say I blame them). I remember our Organizational Behavior professor’s grading of our final papers, refusing to acknowledge that the case that he laid out for us had more than one way to come up with a “right answer”.

Oh well what can you do? How about running a data regression on it and see if what I say can be backed up with empirical data LOL!!

Best thing about this HR class? The case discussions. Worst thing about this class? The data regressions, and the fact that it’s a “3-day weekend killer” class – it’s on Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon.

My two electives:
Of course everyone has taken different electives this quarter. I’ve taken two classes that I really like and help me to branch out in my own thinking:

• The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry through Literature.
It might seem funny to be taking a literature class in business school. But this class has been hailed by many MBA’s as a class to take in your last quarter of business school because it provides a good way to “cap” your experience and to think about larger issues of life, purpose, and where we’re headed in our lives and our careers.

I can’t agree more. Each week we read one book, and then we have our three hour class session on Thursday to have a discussion/debate about the book and the themes that were raised by the book, and how/if they have any relevance in our own lives and careers.

We started off by reading F. Scott Fitzgerald (the Last Tycoon) followed by two well known US plays about salesmen – Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, and Glengarry Glen Ross, by David Mamet. We then read a novel that had very strong elements of Jewish-American culture post WW II in it – The Ghost Writer, by Phillip Roth. Then we read a novel about post WW II Japan – An Artist in the Floating World. We’re now reading a spiritual novel about a Japanese characters who travel to India on a spiritual quest – Deep River, by Endo. We have a few more international readings, ending a Tolstoy story..

This class might seem like a lot of work, because we’re supposed to read an entire book every week. But, the books are all pretty small (especially compared to the 800 page Tome we have in Non-Market Strategy) and very easy to read. In fact, I can honestly say that this is the only class in my entire business school experience for which I expect to do 100% of the readings – Why? Because they’re all classic works of literature and all very well written.


• Leadership in the Entertainment Industry.
My final class this term is about the entertainment industry – yes – film-making and TV. Given my interest in the film industry (I have been an executive producer and investor on a few indie film projects in my spare time), this is one of my favorite classes. It is taught by an Oscar-winning documentary film-maker (it was cool to go to Blockbuster after we’d started the class and see Professor Guttentag’s name on a movie there).

Each week, we have speakers from the entertainment industry come by and give us a talk, after which we pepper them with questions. This is definitely the fun part of the class. For example, we had the head of Fox TV channel come by and talk about the issues facing the entertainment industry as it goes on line (they funded Hulu for example, but haven’t figured out how to make advertising profitable online). He talked about the history as well. I tried to get him to tell us if Fox was going to renew “Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles” but he was mum on the subject, since he hadn’t even told the producers yet.

We also had Alexander Payne, the director of the film Sideways come in and talk about directing and his experience in the film industry. He was particularly terse in his answers. It kind of made me laugh when one of us would ask some high-minded artistic question and ask his opinion of it and he’d just stroke his chin and say “I don’t know. Never thought about it. Next question.”

Of course the class has more than speakers – it has field trips, which are particularly fun.

The House that Lucas Built
Last week we went to the Presidio in San Francisco and visited Industrial Light and Magic, the company built by George Lucas after the success of Star Wars.. There are actually several companies housed in this gorgeous complex built on a very large park area on San Francisco Bay.

Anyone who is a fan of movies know about the Star Wars films and George Lucas. It was incredible to be able to go the company and see how people work and how the offices are laid out. We were told that they don’t generally do public tours, so we were very lucky to have gotten a tour. The hallways are lined with artifacts from movies that ILM has worked on. This of course, included props and costumes from the Star Wars films – including Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Yoda, C3PO, and even Han Solo in carbonite!

ILM also did the special effects for the Indiana Jones movies, and (unbeknownst to many) the Star Trek movies, among many many others. In fact, they did all the special effects for the new Star Trek movie that’s coming out next week. There were artifacts from all these movies strewn throughout the hallways - it was so cool! My favorites turned out to be the Matte paintings that were used as backdrops for scenes in the film. Needless to say a classmate and I "got lost" on this tour, and had to be picked up and led back to the tour!

The complex actually houses several of Lucas’ companies – ILM (the special effects company), Lucasfilm (which is the film production company which owns the Star Wars films), and LucasArts (the video game company). We got a private Q&A with the heads of these companies, which was great. One thing that was interesting to me was the key role of the video games in this entertainment empire as it moves forward.

Since this trip wasn’t listed in the syllabus it came as a surprise to all of us, and definitely contributed to making this one of my favorite classes at the GSB.

We have one more field trip scheduled in the Bay area, which also relates to George Lucas in a roundabout way:

'In the 1980’s Lucasfilm/ILM had developed some animation rendering technology which was spun out as a separate company and was funded by a famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur. That company worked on 3d animation and rendering technology, and eventually used that technology to make animated 3d films. I’ve heard that they don’t give public tours either, but we’re going to visit them the week after next. The company? Pixar!

Now who says Business school isn’t cool?