Movie Executive Decision

[Carmen Kalua]

Drawingon the latest research in the psychology of judgment, you will learn to improve your negotiation skills, your influence, and your decision-making process. You'll learn to recognize flaws in your negotiation and decision-making processes, develop frameworks for making sound decisions, and create a system to monitor, improve, and implement your skills. You'll learn how to negotiate hard, with integrity, using the basic influence techniques of professional negotiators. You'll also acquire techniques based on the latest advancements in the field of negotiation and decision strategy that will enhance your influence with your clients, vendors, employees and/or colleagues.

By attending this program, you will:

Managers in every functional area of responsibility, in all industry types, will benefit by attending this program. In particular, executives in areas such as marketing, sales, manufacturing, engineering, mergers and acquisitions, purchasing, human resources, strategy, and finance, as well as general managers who have been promoted through these routes, will find this program highly beneficial.

Prior to joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 1997, Wu was on the faculty of Harvard Business School as an assistant and associate professor in the managerial economics area and then in the negotiation and decision making group. He also has worked as a lecturer at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to graduate school, Wu worked as a decision analyst at Procter Gamble.

Wu is a Department Editor of Management Science and is on numerous other editorial boards, including Decision Analysis, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and Theory and Decision. He earned a bachelor's degree cum laude in applied mathematics with a concentration in decision and control in 1985, a master's degree in applied mathematics in 1987, and a PhD in decision sciences in 1991, all from Harvard.

Fishbach is an expert on motivation and decision making. Her groundbreaking research on human motivation has won the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's Best Dissertation Award and Career Trajectory Award, and the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award. She further received the Provost's Teaching Award from the University of Chicago.

Fishbach earned a bachelor's degree with distinction in psychology in 1992, a master's degree summa cum laude in psychology in 1995, and a PhD magna cum laude in psychology in 1999, all from Tel Aviv University. She joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2002.

I have undertaken a number of professional training courses involving negotiation skills. This one is the most comprehensive in terms of pulling together theory, psychology, and practical elements allowing for conducting a well-structured and potentially more successful negotiation in a variety of situations.

I think this session really allows for creating a level of self-awareness about your own style that you might have had. The topic, material, and faculty are world-class and a great investment on my part.

I thought I knew a fair amount about negotiation before I took the course. I have been in commercial real estate for 25 years. This course taught me a lot about my negotiating strengths and weaknesses, how to improve and how to make a lot more deals!

I prefer ED to AF1 now - when they are on TV, I'll stick around for ED and skip AF1 usually.

A funny cross-over: in the pilot of NCIS, Gibbs (Mark Harmon) uses AF1 to know something is up. [W is president.] (loved that show since the beginning...)

rlaWTX -

What's interesting is a friend of mine, who likes to make fun of me for enjoying ED so much, agrees with me, too. And AF1 has been on TV a lot lately, which gave me the idea for this article.

I've seen a handful of NCIS episodes but I'm not entirely clear what the gag is. Can you elaborate?

Scott, I like ED better as well. I always feels like a shark jumping moment when they include the president in films and Ford strikes me as too hammy to be the president. Plus, as you note, all the fluff.

Scott, I got a chance to watch both recently, which is good as I hadn't watched them in years. I agree entirely with your analysis.

AF1, while the bigger film, strikes me as less believable, more cluttered, and melodramatic. ED strikes me as more streamlined and more interesting.

I think it's fascinating seeing these two films side by side to see the similarities and the differences, especially with two films beigns o narrow in terms of what is possible within the film because there is only so much you can do on the airplane. It's almost like these are remakes of each other.

Now, all that said, I think both films ultimately think too small. Compare this film to Flightplan. I think Flightplan had a better, more tense story than either of these and I wonder if that isn't because Flightplan made a decision to focus on the characters more than the plane itself?

Doc -

Presidents don't bother me per se but I see what you mean. I only thought the dialogue was hammy; if the script had been given a polish, I don't think Ford's acting would've been a problem. Besides, he was less president and more "generic action hero."

Scott and Doc, With rare exceptions, I feel that using presidents is like blowing up a city -- it's the film version of the nuclear option: if your story isn't strong enough, just make the good/bad guy more important... and nothing is more important than the President.

In fact, a film I really lament is Absolute Power because it pushed thrillers to the nuclear level by having the president commit the crime. And once that genie was out of the bottle, all the other thrillers followed. Suddenly every single thrilled involved a corrupt president. Stupidity.

Scott, I am a huge believer in subtlety. If there's one thing I have learned from extensive reading and writing, it is that people respond so much better when they are forced to do a little work to "earn" the story. That's why hints are better than reveals, why subtle schemes which may or may not be real, and which even the characters refuse to believe at first are so much stronger than the blunt force so many films use to tell stories.

That's what Flightplan has going for it. You spend half the film not even sure if what is going on is real or if she's just imagining it. And then she has to convince people, which adds so much conflict. By comparison, in AF1 and ED the conflict is all action scenes with brief fake moments of betrayal added in.

It would be interesting to re-write AF1/ED as something more subtle and see what we could produce using more brains and less action.

Scott, Nice analysis. I enjoyed both movies enough when I saw them, but haven't rewatched them. I think the whole "Russian terrorist" feels like a cop out. And films which start with a cop out lose me.

RE NCIS: the guy holding the "football" dies on Air Force 1 after being invited to eat BBQ with the Pres (W). Death is investigated as attack on Pres. President has been removed so plane isn't AF1 anymore, and Gibbs gets to look around it. He makes comments about what is different in the plane's design than in the movie AF1. He is told that it is a new model of plane. Because first one's a crime scene, president uses an older plane as AF1. Gibbs cages a ride on that one and realizes that the new updates would make an attack harder than on the old one. Figures out that the "football" holder was killed so they'd go back to old model. Thwarts attack by vetted member of press corps who is really a sleeper terrorist. YAY! The End.

Andrew -

In the commentary for Armageddon, Michael Bay says he hates seeing presidents in movies and, as an example, cites the (then recent) film Contact in which Robert Zemeckis inserted Bill Clinton. Obviously, he wasn't a main character but I could see where his presence would take you out of the film (and the effects weren't great to begin with).

In Bay's case, he later ate his words and put W. in Transformers. :-)

I saw Absolute Power for the first time just last year. It was okay and I didn't have a problem with the president as a character, especially with Gene Hackman playing the role. I can see where having a president as a main character limits the story because there are only so many things a president is capable of.

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