Why George Lucas is more than just a creative genius

Would Star Wars be the blockbuster that it is without these superboss qualities?

With the opening of the new Star Wars film The Force Awakens there’s been an outpouring of commentary about George Lucas and his incredible film legacy and genius.

But there’s more to the man than even that. The creation of a film is, in its way, no different than the creation of a business. Both require strong leadership, a compelling vision, and the ability to motivate and manage smart people so they can effectively execute on that vision.

It turns out that George Lucas was exceptional in this regard as well.

The environment at Lucasfilm was intensely collaborative — more so, it seems, than many of today’s digital workplaces, even those that loudly tout their team-oriented cultures. Groups at Lucasfilm sometimes collaborated across divisions. The computer division might work with the division that handled special effects or the division that developed games.

At Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilm’s VFX and animation studio, employees didn’t even have job descriptions that would relegate them to specific silos. Rather, they were assigned tasks on various projects according to what was needed and who was available, freeing them to move around and collaborate with colleagues they might not have encountered otherwise. Utilising people in this way often requires extreme flexibility, as well as a willingness to relinquish a degree of control.

It requires boldness. And that was and is a hallmark of Lucas’s personality.

George Lucas was driven to re-create the type of freewheeling, creative, open environment he experienced at University of Southern California’s film school. Visual effects artist Clint Goldman, who worked at ILM for seven years in the early 1990’s, said, “George sort of created this thing which was like a business art school that allowed all these people to kind of learn from one another.”

Within groups at Skywalker Ranch —  the bucolic Lucas headquarters in Marin County, California —  colleagues worked so closely together that they often developed a melding of the minds, a deeply intuitive sense of one another’s creativity.

As former Lucas employee and Academy Award winner Phil Tippett recalled, “You develop a language that is almost telepathic where your understanding of film history and your references and the kinds of things that had inspired you in the past kind of become a touchstone so in the context of any particular discussion you can cut through hours and hours and hours of description by saying, ‘Yeah, well, it’s gotta feel more like the third act battle in The Wild Bunch’ and immediately you know what that means.”

Rick McCallum, producer of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, told Michael Rubin, author of Droidmaker, that in the course of collaboration, Lucasfilm’s employees also developed personal relationships that far surpassed those that usually exist between colleagues — the kind of bonds that persist throughout an entire career.

Skywalker Ranch “was a real place where people could work together, party together, and try to write and come up with things.  We’d be [at the Ranch] for a month at a time.  We’d get drunk every night, and we’d be back in story meetings at eight in the morning and wouldn’t leave until eight at night… it was filmmaking camp,” McCallum said.

Collaboration wasn’t the only thing special about how Lucas managed people. Ironically, his approach to technology seems a throwback to a simpler time. But that “simple” approach to creativity and technological innovation turned out to work rather well, didn’t it? This is most evident when we compare what happened at Skywalker Ranch to modern business today.  

Many businesses, even those in so-called creative industries, bring lots of science into the creative process. They deploy insights from fields like cognitive science, neuroscience, consumer behaviour, and behavioural economics to collect untold reams of data to help with creative decisions. Software is smarter than we are. Clicks and bits outweigh intuition and raw talent.

It’s a trend that is rapidly intensifying. According to a 2015 report by researcher VB Insight, companies are poised to increase their spending on marketing analytics — including “audience insights,” “brand analytics”, and “advertising effectiveness” — by more than 70% over the next few years.

It’s hard to argue against the rise of Big Data and all that it entails, at least until you start to think about what is lost. Are modern, technology-driven management methods really the best way to come up with the big ideas that we’ll all wind up talking about? What would today’s tech-savvy companies say to Albert Einstein, who after all was just a guy with an idea and no data to back it up?

Lucas believed in technology and used it to create his films, but he didn’t use it to shape the creative process inside Lucas films. When I asked Ron Gilbert, who worked in the games division of Lucasfilm during the late-1980s and 1990s, about the creative process under Lucas, he noted that many video games today are informed by consumer research, with game designers bounded by their sophisticated understanding of consumer tastes and habits.

At Lucasfilm, room existed for a purer and less analytical creative process, leaving people freer to go where their imaginations led them. Such a creative environment, in Gilbert’s estimation, “just produces very interesting and different ideas; it just kind of makes you feel that it is OK to explore.”

I get that exploration may be expensive, and it sure doesn’t seem very efficient, but major breakthroughs — even in Silicon Valley — don’t come from Big Data hyper-analytical processes. Let’s not forget that companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple may actively leverage Big Data today to grow their businesses, but the spark that led to their creation was personal, entrepreneurial and even idiosyncratic. 

Collaboration and creative exploration were two of the keys to what helped translate the vision of George Lucas into a series of era-defining films, and technologies. As we sit down to watch The Force Awakens this holiday season, let’s take a moment to recall that the entire Star Wars franchise could not have come to life without that most mundane of wizardry we call management.

Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management and Director of the Leadership Center at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. You can learn more about George Lucas, and 17 other superboss leaders, in his new book Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Manage the Flow of Talent (Portfolio/Penguin, February 2016).