Robert Redford’s take on creativity in business

A kid raised in a blue-collar home in Los Angeles, who got into trouble in school, who managed to scrape his way into an acting and directing career, and then went on to create a world-renowned film festival that changed the fortunes of independent filmmakers . . .

. . . Even a person like that, even a person like Robert Redford, can screw it up.

Redford's faults: hiring badly, impatience, inability to communicate, ineffective relations with subordinates.

He laid them all out Thursday before an audience of about 300 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre at a seminar sponsored by the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia and by Towers Watson & Co., a human resources consulting firm.

"I kind of stumbled into business," Redford said, sitting comfortably in an armchair on stage and speaking on the topic "Cultivating a Creative Workforce."

Redford's willingness to talk about his struggles resonated with Mae O'Brien, executive director of the HealthLink Medical Center, and it made her more receptive to Redford's main message - the importance of art and creativity in the workplace.

"I've done the same thing," she said, recalling her earliest hiring decisions. "You learn."

Mulling it over as she headed back to the nonprofit center in Southampton, she said she wanted to do more to bring creativity into the office. "I have a young staff, and they are all overworked and underpaid. I have to find a new way to liven things up."

O'Brien's staff numbers a dozen. In an interview after the seminar, Redford said he had no idea how many people his various enterprises employed. But a staff member later estimated that more than 800 work for him.

Besides the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Film Institute, Redford's ventures now include a small chain of movie theaters, a ski resort, and an apparel catalog.

For many of these initiatives, Redford needed financing, but found he could not communicate with bankers.

"It seemed like there was another language that businesspeople spoke. There was another language I needed to learn," he said. "I had to learn the value of the bottom line in thinking."

He had ideas, but found he was not very good at hiring people to carry them out.

"When I first started hiring, I didn't imagine that I'd be hiring anyone in my life," he said. "I made the wrong choices. I chose people by whether I liked them," he said, "and that didn't work."

Also, "blue-collar people are treated badly," he said, speaking from his parents' experience. So, to make up for it, when he began to hire work crews, "I went too far and would become their friends. Corruption started, and everything fell apart."

Later, in an interview in the theater's green room, Redford elaborated.

He said he tried to hire people who told him that they understood his vision, but then he found that they were trading on his friendship. "It created a tension," Redford said. "They claimed a power over other people.

"I saw I wasn't getting the straight story," he said. "I couldn't figure out why [my] people as a team weren't excited" about his ideas.

"I had to first realize that it was my fault," he said. "My mistake was being impatient. I was too much in the crush. Sometimes, they would feel that they would have to move before they were ready."

A visual thinker, he would create a movie of his business idea in his mind, complete with plot and players. The problem? No one else had access to Redford's personal mental theater. "The idea was fully developed in my head," he said. "I expected them to see the picture."

Over time, he said, he learned to make sure he and his top hires were in sync. He learned to allow them to bring their own visions to fruition.

"You have to let the leaders you hire run the show," Redford said. "I'm more involved on the creative side."

Now, he said, he favors incentive-based compensation. The resort staff, for example, gets a slice of the profit.

And while he now understands that he cannot be beer buddies with the ski resort's midnight maintenance crew, he can throw them a big party at the end of the season.

"You've got to make sure when you come into contact with the service people that you honor their work," he said.

At Thursday's event, Redford shared the Philadelphia Theatre Company's stage with Robert Lynch, president and chief executive officer of Americans for Arts, a national advocacy group. Both men talked about the importance of blending art and business.

Julie Gebauer, managing director of Towers Watson and the company's expert on creativity, told the audience that the chief barrier to innovation at work was the inability of the immediate supervisor to properly receive and act on employees' best ideas.

"You actually need structured processes to deliver on that idea," she said.

The Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia, headed by Karen B. Davis and supported by the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, cultivates business leaders as board members for arts organizations and runs a volunteer organization to connect businesses to the arts.