{"id":89825,"date":"2024-06-20T05:00:18","date_gmt":"2024-06-20T09:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=89825"},"modified":"2024-06-19T19:40:21","modified_gmt":"2024-06-19T23:40:21","slug":"the-idiot-nephew-theory-of-show-business-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/06\/20\/the-idiot-nephew-theory-of-show-business-management\/","title":{"rendered":"The &#8220;Idiot Nephew Theory&#8221; of show business management"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.honest-broker.com\/p\/how-picasso-turned-me-into-a-strategy\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Ted Gioia<\/a> recalls his hopes of getting into the entertainment industry after graduation:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner-480x160.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"160\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-84928\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner-480x160.png 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner-150x50.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Ted-Gioia-The-Honest-Broker-banner.png 728w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The story of how I became a strategy consultant is shameful.<\/p>\n<p>I was a student at Stanford&#8217;s Graduate School of Business, and needed a job after graduation. I wanted to work in the music or entertainment industries \u2014 but I soon learned this was an impossible dream.<\/p>\n<p>They didn&#8217;t want me. And they didn&#8217;t want my classmates either. <\/p>\n<p>Hundreds of companies came to our business school to recruit talent, and they included most of the leading US corporations. So I talked with everybody \u2014 Coca Cola, Morgan Stanley, Atari, Procter &#038; Gamble, you name it.<\/p>\n<p>But no record label or movie studio ever showed up. They didn&#8217;t even send job listings.<\/p>\n<p>Can you guess why?<\/p>\n<p>I asked around on campus and was told the following (off the record):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Come on, Ted. You will never see the entertainment business recruit here. Those folks are not looking for business talent.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>They give the choice jobs to their family members \u2014 the idiot nephew gets hired, not an MBA. Even better if it&#8217;s an idiot son.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>And if there are other openings? Well &#8230; You&#8217;ve heard about the casting couch, haven&#8217;t you? Let me give you a hint \u2014 that couch isn&#8217;t just for auditioning the cast.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>But you wouldn&#8217;t want a job there even if they gave you one. When time comes for a promotion, the drooling idiot nephew moves up \u2014 not you.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never shared that story before \u2014 because I know how people inside the music business hate hearing it.<\/p>\n<p>And maybe it&#8217;s not a fair story.<\/p>\n<p>All I can say is that I found this advice very helpful. I stopped planning on a career in the music business. And I also developed a very useful theory to explain why record labels are so bad at making strategic decisions.<\/p>\n<p>I call it the &#8220;Idiot Nephew Theory&#8221;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><strong>THE IDIOT NEPHEW THEORY<\/strong>: <em>Whenever a record label makes a strategic decision, it picks the option that the boss&#8217;s idiot nephew thinks is best<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And what does the idiot nephew decide? That&#8217;s easy \u2014 they always do whatever the company lawyer recommends.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Maybe this theory is wrong. All I can say is that it helps me predict events in the entertainment industry with a surprising degree of accuracy.<\/p>\n<p>I always operate on the assumption that there&#8217;s no business strategy in the music or movie business \u2014 only legal maneuvering.<\/p>\n<p>Years later, when the music business got totally reamed by tech companies \u2014 a phase we&#8217;re still living through, by the way \u2014 I wasn&#8217;t surprised in the least. The record labels respond to every new music technology by litigating, but whenever they encounter a company with more legal clout than them (Apple or Google\/YouTube, for example), they simply gave up.<\/p>\n<p>In the future, you can test this theory yourself. You will see that it possesses great explanatory power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ted Gioia recalls his hopes of getting into the entertainment industry after graduation: The story of how I became a strategy consultant is shameful. I was a student at Stanford&#8217;s Graduate School of Business, and needed a job after graduation. I wanted to work in the music or entertainment industries \u2014 but I soon learned [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,28,13],"tags":[409,968,529,261,200],"class_list":["post-89825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-media","category-usa","tag-corporations","tag-family","tag-lawyers","tag-management","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-nmN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89825"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89826,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89825\/revisions\/89826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}