Filmy Manager - Business Insights from Bollywood Films

I've been writing movie reviews since 2004 on this site. It's been a while since I wrote one, so here goes. I've released a new book 'Filmy Manager' with the aim to provide business insights from Bollywood movies and have profiled 18 movies and mapped them to Leadership, Strategy, Organizational Behaviour, Entrepreneurship and Storytelling - 5 essential skills I believe every manager should have.

I've always watched movies more deeply than others. I get very reflective while watching movies and would often liken situations on screen with my own personal or professional life. I would always look for what a movie could teach me, apart from entertaining me. So movies became my library and my window to the world and they continue to be. 

As I progressed in my career, I had the opportunity to get a first-hand experience in various aspects of running a business and learnt by closely watching industry leaders who I have worked with personally. I figured that the basic qualities that all good managers require are –the ability to lead, the ability to strategize, to manage people and organizations, to take risks and innovate and to communicate.

During my MBA I realized that a lot of the management literature and teaching followed the case method. While this is a globally accepted practice, it is also an impersonal way of learning a concept – you can’t always relate to that exact situation a company found itself in thirty years ago. And in reality management decisions are always taken with imperfect information – you rely on what you can find and let your experience and instincts kick in. 

On the other hand, we always relate to movies in a personal way and at the core of every movie story is conflict borne out of imperfection. And then it struck me – why not combine the insights that I have gained by watching movies and map them to these five qualities that good management must have. That’s how ‘Filmy Manager’ was born.

Uniqueness

My vision for this book is that, readers will start looking for more in movies than just entertainment and that movies will become reference libraries for our professional and personal lives. Writing Filmy Manager was like conducting a Film Appreciation class and an MBA class at the same time! 

The 18 movies were stripped down scene by scene and analysed to pick out nuances. Apart from my own experience, I have consulted published management research in journals as well as practical management opinion across books, articles and speeches. As the research is done from a movie and management point of view, the writing needed to be done in such a way that a person who has seen a movie featured in the book sees it in a new light and a person who has not seen a movie will understand what the movie is about without having to watch it. ‘Business lessons from Bollywood movies’ is an interesting cocktail and it has been the most rewarding experience developing and writing this book.

'Filmy Manager' is available in paperback (http://amzn.to/1pa31Pp) and kindle http://amzn.to/1TTfpjx  versions around the world. It is available in all leading bookstores across India

I hope you enjoy reading it.