Final comments about learnings from the project

Diana

When we talked about Leadership, Communication, Decision-Making skills and so forth, almost all the times I thought about Managers or Directors within a company or corporative. Sometimes we are so “inside the box” that we don´t realize that we find leaders in all the environments. For me, that is one of the reasons that make our topic so interesting. I realized the big importance that the film directors have as leaders to get a successful movie for the rest of the human being eyes achieving the expected results for them and in the billboard.

Is not that easy to work directing a team that does not always agree with everything you said. Actors that have the decision to be part of your cast or not, crew that could reject your ideas or proposals, etc.  There could be a lot of combinations of different personalities that could match or not, and learn how to deal with it and get the outcome you planned is a big challenge that a leader should accomplish. 

With the comparison that we did in our project with the 4 directors (4 different styles), the big learning that I got is that you don´t need to follow a specific path to be a great leader, there is not a checklist to fulfill to see if you are good enough or not, you can be as you want taking care of your skills and opportunity areas improvement and it would work… being a great manager or director in the environment that you select.

Héctor

In this project I learned that a lot about how different styles of leaderships can have a common ending. With these directors we found people that were less social interactive but still were able to lead and make people want to work for them because of how they did things, even if that didn’t represented exactly the vocal leader we always imagine when they tell us to think about a leader.

I did spend more time on Coppola and was able to see many qualities of a leader and even though he is also not the prototypical style of leader, he had so many qualities that are needed in that profession to be defined as a leader that may not be so in other industries like his reckless personality and doing things even when nobody backed him up that you probably can’t do in a business, he gambled and he won sometimes but sometimes he lost big time but yet if he wasn’t like that he may not have achieved what he did.

There are different things among these four directors but really in the end they were a lot to be difference makers on their own style. Yet ,in of my learning from looking at these 4 directors is how they imposed their will and never let anyone decide for them or settle with something they weren’t happy with, they always went for what they thought was what they needed, they never stopped believing in themselves so that’s a big learning for me. 

Ernesto

We analyze and contrast four film directors with different profiles and styles in order to have a more comprehensive view of the challenges, strengths and conflicts that directors have to face during filming.

With this project I learned that there is not a unique formula to follow to achieve success, and this thought can be related to any other profession. I think what is important is the dedication, commitment, and your attitude in doing what you really like.

Many qualities of being a leader can be acquired over time, the importance is to know how communicate and transmit motivation to achieve persuasion of others, often the leader is not the one giving orders, but the one who gives the example to others.

Félix

I've always been passionate about cinema and so this project was kind of a challenge for me as I really wanted us to do it well and go deeply in our analysis. I already knew the four directors we decides to work on (or at least their movies) but this project really allowed me to know them better (as persons) and to understand their work.

I got to understand a lot more about them all and so about their movies. It was kind of  challenging, maybe even frightening at the beginning not to know where we were going, in the sense that we didn't know starting to analyze the directors if we could draw any sensible conclusion or find enough traits in common to be able to draw something out. But I finally was kind of proud we could and it helped to understand a lot more about the work of directors and the essential qualities it requires.

I don't think we had any "director" properly speaking in our team, but it was really interesting to work on this kind of subject which was a little bit "out of the frame" of scholar topics I was used to work on in groups.