Start by renting these 10 videos. Every year around Christmas, Susan Schreter takes a refresher course in leadership. It's a Wonderful Life, who risks his livelihood to prove that compassionate banking need not be an oxymoron. He reminds me that the important thing is to be respected, not as a rich entrepreneur but as a socially minded, successful member of a community. Schreter's paean to the saint of Bedford Falls came in response to a recent Inc. survey that asked small-company CEOs and senior executives to name the movies that inspired business leaders best.
Films are a catalyst.
Films beg to be interpreted and discussed, and from those discussions businesspeople come up with principles for their own jobs. Academic validation notwithstanding, we expected the cold shoulder when we recently asked approximately 100 readers to don Roger Ebert hats. Company builders, after all, are generally too busy to haunt the local cineplex, let alone mull the business implications of what they might see there. Or so we thought. To our surprise, almost two-thirds of those surveyed responded, many almost immediately.