delayed gratification

Last night I caught In Good Company on one of the movie channels. When it first came out, it got great reviews, and it sounded like a movie that would be fun. But it also sounded like a movie that would make a successful transition to the small screen, and I knew it would hit one of the movie channels eventually. I made the small gamble that it would come to either HBO or Starz, and luckily, it did. I'm happy to say that it worked just fine on the small screen.

There are a lot of things to like about In Good Company. For one, it shows a functional family, albeit one dealing with the combined stresses of sending one daughter off to an expensive college while mom is in the throes of a late pregnancy. In the meantime, of course, the dad is dealing with re-organization after re-organization at his office, where he has worked for more than 20 years. The cast is tremendously appealing, attractive in a real world way, without being too pretty or plastic. Even Scarlet Johannson, who plays the college-bound daughter and can be drop-dead gorgeous, seems refreshingly normal here. But best of all are Dennis Quaid as Dan, and Topher Grace as his new 26-year-old boss.

For the first time in a long time, I can say I watched a movie without being embarrassed for the characters. That's saying a lot, especially considering how Quaid's character surprises everyone who is waiting to yell "Surprise!" to him on his birthday.

But the biggest surprise was the watershed moment for Dan at the office, when Teddy K, played by Malcolm McDowell, is giving this rah-rah speech about synergy. It's all this B-school jargon laced with flowery promises, basically a bunch of hot air. And Dan, the old dinosaur that he is, actually laughs at one point and says, "I don't get it." And then he goes on to question the whole point of Teddy K's speech. While Teddy K. was speaking, the director focussed primarily on reaction shots among the staff, and everyone had this bright, glazed look of admiration in their eyes. Then when Dan starts talking, again they pan the crowd, and the reaction shots are just brilliant: first shock that anyone would contradict the great Teddy K, then some wincing as people think that Dan must be soooo stupid not to 'get' what Teddy's saying, and then the dawning realization that what Dan is saying makes a whole lot more sense than what Teddy was spouting.

Of course, Teddy K. handles Dan by saying, "These are excellent questions. I'm leaving it up to all of you to answer them," and he walks out -- totally ducking the question!

I loved this scene because it reminded me of my own little "Dan" moment, seven-and-a-half years ago, when I was still working for Oracle. The uppity-ups called for a big off-site meeting, and since I was on the East Coast, I drove up from my Mom's for the day to attend: in other words, I interrupted my vacation for it. We sat around all day through presentation after presentation, all of it clearly geared for the sales force. There were literally hundreds of engineers there, since they had brought in the folks from the New Hampshire data center as well, and we were all bored out of our skulls. So during the Q&A I got up asked "Why are we here?"

Stunned blinks from the VP of whatever who was speaking, "I'm sorry, what do you mean?"

Me: "Well, this is all very nice but it doesn't have anything at all to do with development or support or engineering, and yet you specifically required all of us to be here. Can you tell me why?"

Lots of sputtering. It didn't help the guy that I was about 6 months pregnant at the time, and the total female population of the room was well under 25%. So he couldn't be too harsh on me, because, you know, yelling at the pregnant female engineer would just make him come off as a bully. His reply was basically the same as Teddy K.'s: Good questions; I'm leaving it up to you to answer them. In other words, he had been caught with his pants down, and was too busy pulling them up to come up with anything more coherent.

My boss was pissed at me later for creating a scene, but all the cog-in-the-wheel engineers were wearing huge grins. It was the highlight of the day. And best of all, after that, they didn't drag us all out to stupid all-day off-site meetings.

I hadn't thought about that incident in years, but watching Dan take down Teddy K. was a really fun reminder. It was fun on its own, too, watching the real-world guy take down the high-talking windbag. But the film as a whole has a little too much "old ways are best" miasma hanging over it, and it also wants to ignore some realities of business as well. What works is keeping a clear eye on what your business is, doing your job and making sure your people can do theirs. Not every new idea sucks, and not every old way of doing business is best, either. You have to be willing to try new things while hanging onto the core. It's hard, which is why a lot of businesses flounder after they've achieved initial success. So In Good Company may not be the best place to be looking for business advice, but it is a great example of family.

I'm glad I finally got to see it.