Michael Lynton

What you're referring to is a movie called The Interview.

It's about two hapless journalists, played by Seth Rogen and James Franco, who go off to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un.

I jumped up and said, let's make the movie, and disaster ensued.

Failures are when people, in our description of it, when people come together to make a calculated decision with analysis that has ambition, and for whatever reason, it doesn't work.

In the case of mistakes, typically what happens is it's an individual, they make a decision in the moment, the decision is charged by emotion, and it doesn't work, and that mistake leads to regret.

And specifically, in addition to all of that, we didn't want to talk about humble bragging, which is oftentimes how failures are dealt with in books where they say, oh, this kind of thing, you know, didn't work out.

But lo and behold, over in the corner, there was a pot of gold we didn't realize was there.

No, these mistakes had no happy outcomes.

And when we also looked into the field and tried to find literature on it, we discovered there was very little, if any.

I would add one other thing, Mike, which is that very few people actually have the opportunity to have failures outside perhaps of their own marriage because, you know, it does require a big decision and not everybody has that opportunity.

Everybody makes mistakes and everybody makes mistakes almost every day.

The unfortunate part of it is, is that oftentimes, myself included, people try and avoid looking at those mistakes after you've made them.

And if you avoid that process, then you're not gonna learn from them by definition.

Exactly.

And I think when you say my fault, I think actually in my looking at it, one of the reasons I think why people are so reluctant to talk about their mistakes is it's really down to you.

It's really your responsibility for having made the mistake.

Failure, you can blame on a number of different people who might have might or might not have been involved, but a mistake, it's just on you.

I had been at Sony Pictures at the time for a little more than a decade, and we had a very good process in place for green lighting movies.

We typically got them to a point where we knew who all the actors were, we knew the budget, and then we brought a group of people together in a room, people from marketing, finance, public policy, et cetera, and then we would come to a decision along the lines of what I said earlier about things that have ambition.

Sometimes it worked.