Everything I Know about Leadership, I Learned From the Movies

A look at 10 films that can help teach you how to inspire your organization, earn loyalty and respect from employees, turn crises into triumph, and become a successful member of a community.

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Want to inspire your organization? Earn the undying loyalty of employees? Turn crises into triumphs? Start by renting these 10 videos.

Every year around Christmas, Susan Schreter takes a refresher course in leadership. Her teacher is always the same: George Bailey, the sweetly earnest hero of It's a Wonderful Life, who risks his livelihood to prove that compassionate banking need not be an oxymoron. "Every time I see that movie, I want to be more like George," says Schreter, CEO of Coupons4Everything.com, a Seattle-based start-up that offers coupons and rebates for consumer goods over the Web. "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. The question isn't a frivolous one: movies -- like Shakespeare -- are becoming a staple of business school curricula, as professors screen Wall Street to teach ethics and leaven Tom Peters with Tom (Jerry Maguire) Cruise. "Films are a catalyst. They present dramatic problems, crises, and turnarounds," explains John K. Clemens, who incorporates works like Hoosiers and Citizen Kane into his graduate management and executive education courses at Hartwick College, in Oneonta, N.Y., and is the coauthor of Movies to Manage By: Lessons in Leadership from Great Films (NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group, 1999). "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. Some wrote or called several times to tweak their lists, while others left impassioned voice mail messages extolling their favorites. "If you haven't seen it, rent it today," these messages almost invariably concluded.

A few respondents described movies that had influenced their professional lives. One CEO said that Baby Boom, in which Diane Keaton trades the corporate piranha pool for motherhood and a gourmet baby food start-up, inspired her to go into business for herself. Another used insights gleaned from the Bill Murray comedy What About Bob? -- about a psychiatric patient tormenting his shrink -- to help him cope with a problem employee.

More often, however, readers praised films that grapple with ethical and personal quandaries played out by realistically nuanced characters. "The best leadership films deal with the fundamentals, such as the presence or absence of integrity and trust," says Clemens. "In Citizen Kane, for example, you see the classic trajectory of early integrity followed by its loss as the character climbs the power grid. In Dead Poets Society, Keating, an English teacher at a prep school, is fired, and there's a suicide. But he has enormous integrity. And at the end you have to ask yourself, 'Did he succeed or fail?' -- which is a wonderful question for anyone interested in leadership."

Readers, no doubt, will disagree with the inclusion of some of the films listed here and become apoplectic over the exclusion of others. But that's to be expected. As the Academy Awards remind us each year: Filmmaking is both an art and a science. Film ranking is neither.

Apollo 13 (1995)
From our readers' enthusiastic responses, we have to conclude that Apollo 13 's signature line, "Failure is not an option," has worked its way into at least half the mission statements in corporate America. And why not? The astronauts and ground personnel in Ron Howard's space opera provide levelheaded, creative leadership during a harrowing crisis. And if there's a better example out there of managing a far-flung organization (Texas, Florida, outer space), we haven't found it.

Gene Kranz (Ed Harris), in charge of flight operations in Houston, and Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), commander of the 1970 Apollo lunar mission, share leadership duties when there's an explosion on Lovell's craft. These aren't guys with big dreams and inspirational personalities; they're guys with an urgent problem that can be solved only through teamwork, ingenuity, and clearheaded direction. And they supply those attributes in spades. Kranz drives his team of wired, bleary-eyed technicians to ever greater lengths of inventiveness ("I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole, rapidly"), and Lovell oversees the implementation of the ground crew's ideas by men under the most horrific stress imaginable.

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Mike Hofman

Mike Hofman was previously editor of Inc.com and a deputy editor at Inc. magazine, which he joined in 1996. The site was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Digital Media in 2010, and was named the best business website by Folio Magazine. In 2006, Hofman was part of a team of writers nominated for a Webby Award for best business blog. He lives in New York City.

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