With Thunderous Applause: How George Lucas' Dream Dies

 

"After evaluating our position in the games market, we've decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company's risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games."

 

There was a time when a young George Lucas, frustrated with the monochrome, risk-adverse model of Big Studio Hollywood decided to branch out and do something different.  With substantial risk and a great deal of creativity, he gave the world Lucasfilm.  The money he made from his wickedly successful franchises went into future projects and companies including ILM, Skywalker Sound and LucasArts.

 

Under George Lucas, every employee who worked on one of his films, down to the janitor, gained something.  They were part of the team.

 

Fast-forward to now; The Disney Empire has taken over his beloved company.  No doubt they'll deliver some whiz-bang films that will make a lot of money for the studio, but everything else appears to be going out the window, including the ground-breaking Clone Wars cartoon.  Employees are being downsized, risk is being handed off to others and as a result, the innovative, daring spark that breathed life into Lucasfilm is being extinguished.  Or perhaps I should say, "their fire has gone out of the universe."

 

Naturally, this is all just good business.  Business isn't about innovation - it's about efficiency and control.  If you want innovation, you don't focus on the bottom line, you focus on the value-add, as Lucas has always done.  There's no small amount of irony in how the rise and consumption of Lucas' creative empire mirrors the narrative arc of the Star Wars films.

 

Innovation is a bit more of an adventure.  It's a dangerous business stepping out your front door; you never know where you'll be swept off to.  Bean-counters are adverse to adventure.  Thank goodness they don't rule the world.  If they did why, there'd be no innovation at all.  They can't win, though - there is always new hope out there, just waiting to be kindled.

 

Sometimes all innovators need is a little nudge out of the door.

 

Buyer Beware: If Your Trade is Money, You Still Have To Deal With People

What disturbs you most about this picture; that people are walking by nonchalantly, or that the homless guy has a pet he can't take care of?  We revist this at the bottom.

“It would be refreshing to have political leaders who connected the dots. This is important because if governments don't understand the causes of their troubles, then they cannot fix them.”

 I got all excited about the title of this article – then saw how clearly its author wasn’t connecting the dots herself.  It was, to say the least, disappointing.

Francis’ approach is not an atypical one for someone with an aggressive, pro-capitalist mentality.  She talks about economy and policy through a focus on commodity prices, the tax base, export markets, etc. 

The only time she talks about actual people is through a financial lens.  Health care costs, education costs, social expenditures outpacing economic growth, etc.  Immigrants are equated with additional taxpayer expenses.

“Tough-minded” folk like Francis take the approach that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, you have to stay competitive to get ahead, etc.  The only people we should encourage are the ones willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.  When it comes to business or politics, caveat emptor is the name of the game.

Of course, it’s this mentality that led to the spectacular rise and rapid decline of the capitalist system, just as it spurred the growth of and has now spurned support for the Conservative Party of Canada.

The big “risk takers” in the capitalist system aren’t the bravest – they’re the trickiest.  They’re the ones who find ways to download the consequences of risk to those with less money or less guile; that is, the lower-class, the disposable employee, the uneducated who spend without proper planning.  This might have been a model that worked back when Western feudalism or early in the industrial age, but it doesn’t cut it any more.

In the days where the rich sold products made on the back of cheap leabour to each other, crime was a bigger issue, as were epidemics.  The more condensed communities got, the worse the problem became.  Conversely, as public health care and centralized social service delivery grew, life got better.  Income disparity shrank as education, diversity, health and safety were regularized.  This trend led to the development of the modern middle class; the very group that is currently being squeezed.

As the “tough-minded” people sought ways to get ahead, they found increased justification for doing so at the expense of their less hawkish social peers.  What has resulted?  An increasingly polarized society with both ends embittered against each other.

Yet, the 1% simply cannot exist without the 99%.  You can’t run a business without people; you can’t compete in today’s emerging markets without properly developed and accommodated cognitive skills.  Labour is a transaction – a person sells their skills to an employer who benefits from the resulting products or services.  In this case, it’s the employer who needs to keep “buyer beware” in mind; if you’re not willing to invest in your human resources, it’s your own productivity that will suffer.

If you said that the homeless guy isn't fit to have a pet - what say you to the countless employers who are routinely causing stress-related illness in their employers, reducing their own productivity?

It's time for a systematic rethink.