What Business can Learn from Avatar
Over the last couple of days the Avatar movie has broken a Billion dollars in sales just 3 weeks after its release. I saw Avatar a couple of nights ago and was blown away. While I see a few people criticising aspects of the movie, it is difficult to deny the power of the totally immersive entertainment experience that this movie provides – unlike any other movie I have seen.
While I’m sure there are hundreds of things business can learn from Avatar, in this post I present four ideas that came to mind as I reflected on the movie over the last couple of days.
1. A visionary leader. James Cameron has had a vision for this movie for 14 years – he first wrote the movie script in 1995. The details were incredibly specific down to documented descriptions of the plants, animals, equipment on the Pandora planet. The ability and unwavering determination to take that vision and execute it with such precision across the hundreds of people involved in the making of the movie is remarkable.
Lesson for business: Do you or your leader have a remarkable vision for your business and an unwavering determination and passion to make it happen?
2. A vision that forces incredible innovation. The vision for Avatar was not able to be executed with the technologies that existed prior to the movie. The vision forced game changing innovation – 3-D camera innovations, facial expression camera technology, and computer generated visual effects advances.
Lesson for business: Will your business vision force game changing innovation that will alter the landscape of your industry and catapult you into the industry leader position?
3. Engage people emotionally in your story. I see that some people have criticised Avatar as being strong on visual effects but weaker on storyline. I have to disagree (although I would be first to admit that I am not an experienced film critic). Avatar really engaged me. I got weaved into the story. I’m still thinking about it a few days after watching the movie.
Lesson for business: Are you just selling clients on the features of your offerings? Or are you wrapping them up emotionally in the a remarkable breathtaking story that excites them and sticks in their mind like superglue?
4. Human profits should never come ahead of life. This point is a little different from the ones above – it is more about a key message in the movie rather than the approach to the movie itself. The message I took away from the story is that humans have destroyed their own planet and are prepared to destroy life on Pandora in the name of business and industry profit. My conclusion from the movie is that the value of preserving the rich living environment on Pandora is far greater than any value of profits to human business and industry.
Lesson for business: Let’s not get to the point where we have destroyed our planet and need to search for another planet to destroy in order to fulfil our profit needs. Instead let’s find ways to generate profits while preserving our precious resources, environment, and society on Earth.
On a final note, as a Wellingtonian (New Zealand), well done to Weta Digital who did much of the visual effects for Avatar - you make us proud yet again.
To find out more about the background of Avatar, check out the video below. Click here if you can’t see this video.
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Comments
Hi Nat
Thanks – great comment.
I can imagine that the Weta folks do work long hours as I expect the commercial pressures to hit movie production deadlines are intense. So a worthy observation to contrast this with my point 4.
I see that Avatar has now become the highest grossing film of all time ahead of Titanic (also Directed by James Cameron). It is the first film to gross more than $2 billion. Impressive.
Hi,
Nice post. I also enjoyed the movie, but found the storyline a bit corny/clichéd. The effects were undoubtedly amazing though.
I just wanted to pick up on your point number 4 – putting life ahead of profits. A colleague of mine socialises with special effects people in London, and apparently Weta Digital are notorious for expecting their employees to pull long hours to get the job done. It’s a good company to have on your CV, but it’s normal to only work there a year or two because of these long hours (all hearsay of course).
Undoubtedly Weta are ahead of the competition in their industry, and congratulations to them on their success – but what is the price of their success?
Thanks..