Excerpt: "Tell To Win"

IT WAS THE EARLY 1990s. I'd been named CEO of Sony's then recent acquisition, Columbia Pictures Entertainment. This multi-billion-dollar global media conglomerate was a later incarnation of Columbia Pictures, where I'd served as studio chief twenty years earlier, so at first this new job felt like a homecoming. But it wasn't long before I realized the company had lost its center.

For years before Sony came along, Columbia had been in the going-out-of-business business, with all divisions greased and oiled for sale to the highest bidder. Although the biggest revenue generator in the film industry at the time was video, Columbia and TriStar's video distribution had been sold to RCA, which was then acquired by General Electric before my arrival. The loss of that asset was a drag on company morale and productivity. And there was no unified direction or vision connecting the various surviving divisions. The assets of Sony's acquisition included two film studios (TriStar and Columbia Pictures), global television operations, and the Loews theater circuit. Its executives were spread among rental facilities from coast to coast, with the studio's production and management teams occupying the once-great but now dilapidated MGM lot. The lion on the sign at an adjacent building MGM still owned seemed to be pondering our future.

Not only were our new Japanese owners 7,000 miles and a major culture gap away, but recent history had shown that any time a foreign corporation such as Sony bought an American entertainment enterprise, the For Sale sign was bound to go up again before long. With our revenues in free fall, many of Columbia's veteran executives had taken their profits as shareholders from the sale to Sony and were now looking for more robust opportunities elsewhere. Since Columbia was no longer public, we couldn't even offer stock to incentivize them to stay. My only prayer of succeeding was to find some other, more creative way to persuade both Sony and the disparate, disgruntled but talented band of executives I'd inherited to unite and play for the future. But how?

This was the question consuming me when I was summoned to the phone late one afternoon from a financial PowerPoint presentation in the bowels of the historic Thalberg Building (named, of course, for Irving Thalberg, the hugely successful MGM studio chief of the 1920s and '30s). These were pre-cell phone days, and the nearest telephone was in a basement storage room, but since the call was from my Japanese colleagues, I settled in for the duration. Unable to concentrate on the halting Japanese-English discussion, I was flipping distractedly through some framed movie stills stacked against the wall when suddenly a photo graph of Peter O'Toole in a flowing white robe caught my attention. I recognized the image from one of Columbia Pictures' most cherished films, Lawrence of Arabia. In the scene, Lawrence was pondering an eerily familiar challenge: How do you unite a disparate group to fight for their future when none believe they can or should work together?

O'Toole's character, T. E. Lawrence, was a British military officer and expert in Arab affairs during the early 1900s, when Britain's rival, the Turkish Ottoman Empire, ruled Arabia. Lawrence realized that the only way to expel the Turks from the region was by uniting the Arab tribes against them. But the tribes all had different values, beliefs, and rules. And Lawrence, as the representative of another foreign empire, was considered suspect. The Brits in Arabia at the time were the equivalent of the Japanese in Culver City--tolerated but hardly understood. Nevertheless, Lawrence believed that if he could convince the tribes of their own power to achieve the impossible by acting together, they would unite as one. His epiphany: "Aqaba!"

Aqaba, the heavily fortified port city at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, was protected on the north by the seemingly impassable Nefud Desert. Certain that they could never be attacked from the desert side, the Turks had fixed all their gun emplacements to face the Red Sea. But Lawrence's plan was to do the impossible: march across the desert to surprise the Turks from the rear. "I'll do it if you will," he challenged the tribal leaders.

And they did. By charging Aqaba's undefended back, they crushed the Turks and shared the gold and glory. The story of that miracle was then told and retold across Arabia and around the world, turning an obscure battle into an immortal legend. This magical tale of accomplishing the impossible became the catalyst for a new world order.

Could this be the answer I was searching for? I quickly concluded my phone call and screened the whole film. Yes! This story might be perfect to inspire the people of this company to reclaim its storied heritage and profitability.

I began by telling the Aqaba story to our employees at our huge annual Christmas party. I showed them that seminal picture of Lawrence and gave Lucite-framed copies of the photograph to selected executives as a reminder of our mission.

"This is who we are," I told them. "We're a disparate group of businesses but we're one tribe. We need to believe we can make the impossible possible."

As Columbia's new mantra, the story of Aqaba traveled virally among the employees. It helped reverse the organization's mind-set, reshape attitudes, and frame our collective state of the heart. Lawrence's story prompted our tribe to envision an integrated future that would engage Japanese resources and prevent their retreat.

Now I had to spur my audience to action, aligning hearts with feet and wallets. Story was the call to action, the game-changer, but this was just the beginning. We had to take this story and run with it--on to Aqaba!

Our first order of business was to establish a base of operations as tangibly significant as Aqaba had been for Lawrence's tribes. In keeping with Sony's mission to build a state-of-the-art entertainment and technology empire, we invested $100 million to convert and expand our dilapidated Culver City lot into a cutting-edge headquarters that would showcase Sony's full technological prowess and accommodate our entire tribe at a single location.

Then we raised the flag of unity. We bought that adjacent building, took down its leering MGM lion, and replaced it with Sony's insignia. This announced to all comers that Columbia and Sony were one. And since Sony's highly protective Japanese board never would include us under their globally renowned brand unless they considered us part of their tribe, the display of this logo also secured our new owners' commitment to our employees. The executive exodus reversed. Soon we'd persuaded Sony to rename the company Sony Pictures Entertainment. We bought back the video library from Jack Welch's GE and placed the Sony trademark as a unifying imprimatur on each video--and everything else we owned or produced. And by integrating Sony's cutting-edge SDDS sound and IMAX systems into gleaming new multiplexes in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco, we gave our fading Loews exhibition circuit a radically successful makeover as Sony Theaters.

With the tribe now pulling together, our studios began to accomplish the impossible, releasing a string of hits that included Philadelphia, Sleepless in Seattle, Terminator 2, Groundhog Day, A Few Good Men, A League of Their Own, Boyz n the Hood, and Awakenings. Columbia and TriStar's films received more than one hundred Oscar nominations; the highest four year total for a studio in film history at that time, and in 1991 earned an industry best domestic box office market share.

The net result of all these changes is that, while Sony's rival Matsushita controlled our Hollywood competitor Universal Pictures for only five years before pulling out, Sony has stayed the course. Though I left in 1995, having faced both success and failure, Sony Pictures Entertainment today has morphed into an American company with its world head quarters still in New York City and a non-Japanese CEO, Howard Stringer. It generates annual sales of more than $7 billion, and its motion picture library of more than 3,500 films continues to grow.

As we made our incredible journey, I would check in regularly with the executives who'd come together to achieve our Aqaba-like victory. There in their offices, among the pictures of their families, sat the photo of O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia. There was no doubt that this story shaped the direction of our company. How? By moving every member of our tribe to feel--and therefore believe--that by pulling together we all could gain in security, opportunity, achievement, and pride.

Excerpted from Tell To Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story Copyright @ 2011 by Peter Guber. Reprinted by Permission of Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.