Author Description

In terms of ambition and organization, producing a complex movie in 2010--something at the level of Where the Wild Things Are--is, in some ways, similar to producing the first conquest of the South Pole, as Amundsen did in 1911. Each venture required a magnetic producer able to envision an alluring goal, raise money, recruit talent, set rigorous standards, and lead an elite team through enormous physical and emotional hardship to a glorious finale. John Kao embodies the qualities that make that possible. Every era has its archetype of the successful business practitioner, the figure who steps forward in answer to the attitudes and issues of the times. In the fifties, the organization man (and it was always a man) with his orderly and structured regimen, symbolized the large corporation, which itself was modeled after the industrial factory. As an acolyte of the mechanical age in which the organization man lived, he drove the top-down organization hard to achieve peak performance. In the seventies, the organization man was replaced by the gamesman. He was adept at guerrilla warfare and could make his way through the corporate jungle largely unscathed. The rigid architecture so prized by the organization man no longer worked in the more flexible and decentralized environment of that era. The end of the twentieth century was dominated by what novelist Tom Wolfe dubbed the masters of the universe--near-infallible leaders who lived and led in larger-than-life style.