Incompetent Men vs. Competent Women

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

Great article in the Harvard Business Review blog titled:  Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (hat tip: AWD member Klaudia Kovacs)  It seems that women's greater emotional intelligence prevents them from engaging as much in blowhardism about their abilities.

Here is an excerpt of the meat of the argument:

... the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women. 

This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women.

Followed by:

 The paradoxical implication is that the same psychological characteristics that enable male managers to rise to the top of the corporate or political ladder are actually responsible for their downfall. In other words, what it takes to get the job is not just different from, but also the reverse of, what it takes to do the job well. As a result, too many incompetent people are promoted to management jobs, and promoted over more competent people.

And capped with:

So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to "lean in" has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?

Most of the character traits that are truly advantageous for effective leadership are predominantly found in those who fail to impress others about their talent for management. This is especially true for women. There is now compelling scientific evidence for the notion that women are more likely to adopt more effective leadership strategies than do men. 

Scripts Needs an Audience

*cross-posted with Broadhumor.blogspot.com

Today, I'm thinking about the difference between playwrights and screenwriters, and in particular what screenwriters can learn from their theater counterparts.  It's a jumble, so this may or may not coalesce into lucid ideas.  I'll give it a go.

Playwrights exercise absolute control over material, screenwriters do not.  Part of the reason is that the playwright controls timing while in movies, the director and editor control timing. If you write comedy, timing can make or break a  laugh, but drama is also about the building and delivering of emotionally triggering moments. Screenplays just are not as complete as play scripts. Screenwriters don't know if their story works so long as it is only on the page, which makes it hard to grow and get better. 

Playwrights also can't know from the page either if their play works as theater, only if it works as literature the way Shakespeare does. Text on the page doesn't tell you if a joke will work as dialogue.  Reading Moliere, I don't laugh. Yet almost any production of Moliere delivers one belly laugh after another.  Playwrights have opportunities to get a read from real audiences on their work at every stage of their development. They get plays produced by small theaters and hear their words come out of the mouths of various performers. They cannot blame the director or actors if the same scene falls flat in two different productions. They learn how to write scenes that actors can act and that audiences will respond to.  Staged readings will draw an audience and allow playwrights to test their work in a theater with live actors.  But readings of scripts are not the same as readings of plays because the screen is not a stage.  What is a screenwriter to do?

The Seven-Minute Itch

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

I want to take a minute to talk about the 7-Minute Itch. After 8 years of looking at hundreds of short films for the Broad Humor Film Festival, films that started well but then sagged and died despite all the good work that went into them, I think many of the failures of comedy are in the structure of the overall script. In a short film, somewhere around 7 minutes, the story needs to take a turn. A big turn, to change the game entirely for the audience. It doesn't have to be a Hollywood change where the stakes for the main character suddenly escalate, thought it can. It could be any turn that wakes up the viewer lulled into "knowing" what the film was about and ready for it to be done. Curiosity is aroused. Instead of being ready for it to end, I want to see where it goes from there, at least for another 7 minutes. Then wrap it up. Or take yet another turn, a different turn, and then I'll be with you to the end of your half-hour. (Stories over a half-hour long need even more in terms of story, with almost as much depth as a feature, and they have a very hard time finding a home in film festivals.)

CAVEAT: When you hear 7 minutes, do not think of a stopwatch. Think of a cigarette. Cigarettes burn at different speeds depending on how much and how often you puff on them, but if a cigarette stays lit, it has a maximum span before it fizzles and goes out. If you want to keep smoking, you have to light another. A completely new cigarette. Likewise, your story after your 7-minute turn, should feel like a new movie. You can stretch it a bit if you are bringing your film to a bang-up finish. However, if you add another five minutes of interesting complications in the same vein as the rest, it causes a kind of despair: I'm tired of this. Let me go! You may love the charm of the moment, but if I feel the mental and emotional equivalent of an attack of claustrophobia, your charming scene becomes torture to me, no matter how well done.

 EXCEPTION: If you are making a film that is more experimental, an artistic deconstruction of comedy, or a recursive philosophical parody (we had a French film like that the first year that was 26 minutes) all bets are off. But a discussion of comedy and aesthetics has to be for another day.