Jerry Maguire’s Manifesto Revisited, The Things We Think And Do Not Say
With one late-night manifesto, fictional sports agent – Jerry Maguire, played spot-on by Tom Cruise – removed himself from corporate contention and revolutionized his life and career. How many of us today can say the same without nervously eyeing our 401K’s or reviewing our latest Chase credit statements? It’s not easy to “Show. Me. The. Money.” as Rod Tidwell (Maguire’s lone client, aka Cuba Gooding Jr.) demanded Jerry repeat, when the money is the check – as paychecks so often arrive “paycheck to paycheck.” This post is the preamble to the “Anti-Studio: Future of the Mega-Agency” article that we’re all writing at New Medici. You have to ask yourself, given the recession: are you doing what you love? And is your business – whether executive or entrepreneurial – a long-time affair? Is this recession a crisis point or a moment to celebrate that we can innovate our way back to greatness? An overly long excerpt from Jerry Maguire’s “The Things We Think And Do Not Say” manifesto after the jump…
The “Things We Think And Do Not Say” manifesto versus “The New Ballgame” memo:
As a realistic comparison via Slate, that we’re going to have to chase with dogged blog-journalistic fervor is uncovering past manifestos. The manifesto memo is well known in Hollywood (and EVEN with the sport metaphors).
In the early 80s, Michael Eisner of Disney wrote a long call to action, while Jeffrey Katzenberg, Eisner’s #2, cribbed his own version in 1990. This was followed by Peter Guber running Columbia Pictures, with a 15,000 word memo in 1999 called “The New Ballgame.”
And more recently, Modi Wiczy, co-CEO of MRC in another ‘future of Hollywood’ memo entitled “Another New Ball Game.”
Without further ado, more (and most) of Maguire’s late-night memo with highlights:
Miami Hilton, 1 AM
It’s 1 AM and this might be the bad pizza I had earlier talking, but I believe I have something to say. Or rather, I have something to say that I believe in. My father once said, “Get the bad news over with first. You be the one to say the tough stuff.” Well, here goes. There is a cruel wind blowing through our business. We all feel it, and if we don’t, perhaps we’ve forgotten how to feel. But here is the truth. We are less ourselves than we were when we started this organization.
Sports Management International began as a small company. I was hired by Jack Scully in 1981, I was fresh out of college, I didn’t even watch much sports. But a young man came to me, and his name was Bill Apodaca. He asked me to look at a contract he’d acquired to play football for the Atlanta Falcons. Before long I was overseeing the business of another member of the Falcons, and two baseball players. The nuances and the small miracles of professional sports would soon hook me – there was something simple and perfect about the way a stadium felt. The way you felt when a player you’d helped and represented made his stand in front of 54,000 people. And I remember the conversation Mr. Scully and I had by an elevator, standing next to one of those sand-filled ashtray posts, right before he hired me as one of the first agents in this company. “You and I are blessed, he said, “we do something that we love.”
Tonight, I find those words guiding me back to an important place, and an important truth. I care very much about the fact that I have learned to care less. Now our company is one of the top three in this business, and we represent over a thousand athletes. Over sixty agents work at our huge new office, and I still haven’t met all of you. The business of sports has never been bigger, or tougher, or more written about. And we are at the forefront. But I wonder tonight, as we leave our 13th annual conference … we’ve talked a lot and partied a lot over the last three days, but I dare say that not one of us, our diet Pepsis and sheaf of papers in hand, have said what we really think.
It is beyond the easy arguments waged against sports, and our business on the editorial pages of the New York Times. It is beyond the huge salaries, the endorsements all our clients now want because “I’m a better actor than Michael Jordan.” Beyond the globalization and merchandization of the games. It’s more subtle than the baseball strike, more about loyalty than the Colts moving to Indiana, the Rams going to St. Louis, or the Cleveland Browns moving to … someplace. I’m talking about something they don’t write about. I’m talking about something we don’t talk about.
We are losing our battle with all that is personal and real about our business. Every day I can look at a list of phone calls only partially returned. Driving home, I think of what was not accomplished, instead of what was accomplished. The gnawing feeling continues. That families are sitting waiting for a call from us, waiting to hear the word on a contract, or a General Manager’s thoughts on an upcoming season. We are pushing numbers around, doing our best, but is there any real satisfaction in success without pride? Is there any real satisfaction in a success that exists only when we push the messiness of real human contact from our lives and minds? When we learn not to care enough about the very guy we promised the world to, just to get him to sign. Or to let it bother us that a hockey player’s son is worried about his dad getting that fifth concussion.
There is a good bet that I will erase all of this from my laptop, and you will never read it. But if you are reading it, and you’re reading it right now, it is only because I was unable to stop. I was unable to forget the quiet questions in the hallways, when some of you, usually the younger agents, or interns, asked me on the side: “How do you keep all these lives, all these clients, separated in your mind?”
Chances are, I didn’t say much. I might have told you “it’s easy,” or, “you’re not working hard enough.” Chances are, I said something that you expected, maybe even wanted to hear. But it wasn’t the truth, and it wasn’t what I felt. And if you ever wondered about the drawbacks of being quiet about important things, talk to yourself in the mirror some time, say the truth. Yell the truth to yourself, when no one is listening. See how good it feels?
My father worked for the United Way for 38 years. We lived in San Diego for many years, before I left to move up the coast to Los Angeles. One of the things my father said was: “Every time you allow a problem in your life, you are actually at a point of transformation. Crisis is a powerful point of transformation.” (Never mind that he sat at the same chair for 38 years, and when he retired said only that he’d wished he’d asked for a more comfortable place to sit.)
We are now at a point of transformation with this company. But this is not something to fear, it is something to celebrate. Because I come to you tonight, looking out at the dark Miami skyline, not only with a challenge. I come to you with answers too.
But first let us define our position.
Right now we are a breaking point with our client list. We are not so huge that we must hire more agents, and not so small that we have not experienced huge success. We are at a point of neutrality. We are all, right now, neutral. Neutral, as in not black or white. Not bad or good. Even. neutral.
Even in my own life, after 35 years, I feel that I have never done that one thing, that noble thing that defines a life. Even writing this Mission Statement is odd for me. I am used to flying below the radar, enjoying my life and friends. But I have not been truly tested. I have not gone to India to explore my life, as my brother has. I have not been in a major car accident, or fathered a child. I have not created a life, nor have I killed anyone. I am neutral. I haven’t started a war and I haven’t stopped a war. I have broken even with my life. I have a nice home, a nice car, a fiancee who makes my heart race. But I have not taken that step, or risk, that makes the air I have breathed for 35 years worthwhile. I once had a yellow couch. I got rid of it because it was neutral. My life is now like that yellow couch.
And yet, as I sit here in the wonderful Miami Hilton, I have never been so happy to be alive. I have said “later” to most anything that required true sacrifice. Later I will spend a weekend reading real books, not just magazines. Later I will visit my grandmother who is 100 and unable to really know the difference. Later I will visit the clients whose careers are over, but of course I promised to stay in touch. Later later later later. It is too easy to say “later” because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Make no mistake, I am a huge fan of success. But tonight, I propose a better kind of success. I could be wrong, but if you keep reading and I keep writing, we might get there together.
[...] Somehow all this has been bubbling up inside me. A man is the sum total of his experiences. And it is now that I am interested in shaping the experiences to come. What is the future of what we do? Give me a goal, and I will achieve it. That has been my secret design for most of my life. Perhaps you are the same. We’re all goal-oriented, so I hereby present a goal.
How can we do something surprising, and memorable with our lives? How can we turn this job, in small but important ways, into a better representation of ourselves? Most of us would easily say that we are our jobs. That’s obvious from the late hours we all keep. So then, it is bigger than work, isn’t it? It is about us.
How do we wish to define our lives? So that when we are sixty, or seventy, or eighty and we’re sinking down onto that cool floor of O’Hare airport, with playoff tickets in our pockets, perhaps we too can know that we led A Happy Life? Is it important to be a Person and not just a slave to the commerce of Professional Sport? Do we want to be Remembered?
Or do we just want to be the guy who sold the guy who sold shoes that came with the little pump?
Recently I was asked by the son of a client, in so many words, “What do you stand for?” I was lost for an answer. At 14, I wasn’t lost for that answer. At 18, I wasn’t lost for an answer. At 35, I was blown away that I had no answer. I could only look at the fade of a 12 year-old boy, concerned about his dad, needing my help, just looking at me for the answer I didn’t have.
The look on that kid’s face is a part of me now. And the feeling I had, and have now, is pushing me forward, writing this Mission Statement.
[...] Let’s bring soul and character to what is already there. I propose that we recreate everything that we’re currently about. Right now we’re at the top of our game. Traditionally people do one thing at this point in their success. They try like hell to maintain what they did to get there.
Their personal and intense road to success, their original inspiration (which is at the heart of every success) is now lost in the pursuit to keep the money machine smoothly rolling forward. Delivering crisp green sheets of greater and greater amounts of fortune. But there is a problem with this stage in the success game. In so doing this maintain-success cycle, they forget the original glimmer of passion that got them there.
And historically, no one successful ever pauses to think that they might tumble like everyone before them who forgot. The whole success cycle dooms the very thing that causes the success in the first place – it puts shutters on the windows of reality. It makes us all forget that monetary success comes from something very pure. It comes from a desire to do well, to make life better, not just to do well with financial regularity. [...]
Miami, 2:37 AM, Thoughts:
Coffee tastes different at night. It tastes like college.
I’m back. just checked the messages at home, and sure enough one of them was a man I will call Client X. Client X was watching ESPN and he saw Athlete Y talking about the many many millions he has in contracts both in football, baseball and product representation. We have all been on the receiving end of a message like the one I just picked up on my answering machine.
“Why aren’t I making what Athlete Y makes,” said my client. And the truth is obvious to everyone but Client X.
Athlete Y is a superstar, and is more talented. But to tell this to Client X would be asking him to become Ex-Client X. And so begins the game of flattery, of lip service, of doing everything possible to soothe and stroke. It is part of our lives, and part of our jobs. The game of agenting. The tapdance. Not only will Client X be a tapdance, but there will be a tapdance involved in explaining why I didn’t return the call and begin the tapdance earlier. I know it is a tapdance, and so does he. I have seventy-two clients, and over sixty of them are full-time tapdances. I sign ten or twelve new ones a year. As many of you know, it is going in the wrong direction.
But as I sit here in the darkness of this hotel I room, the answer to the future is rather obvious. If the tapdancing becomes less constant, less furious, less necessary, what will the result be? The result will be more honesty, more focus, fewer clients, but eventually the revenues will be the same. Because the new day of honesty will create a machine more personalized, more truthful, and the client that wasn’t bullshitted this year, has a greater chance of greatness next year.
And now we get to the answer that Dicky Fox knew years ago. The answer is fewer clients. Less dancing. More truth. We must crack open the tightly clenched fist of commerce and give a little back for the greater good. Eventually revenues will be the same, and that goodness will be infectious. We will have taken our number oneness and turned it into something greater. And eventually smaller will become bigger, in every way, and especially in our hearts.
Forget the dance.
Focus.
Learn who these people are. That is the stuff of your relationship. That is what will matter. It is inevitable, at our current size, to keep many athletes from leaving anyway. People always respond best to personal attention, it is the simplest and easiest truth to forget.
Love the job. Be the job.
The phone calls will still come in at 2 AM, but on the other end of that phone at 2 AM will be someone deserving of your time, and you will be honored to share their time. And that will be what the road to greatness feels like. A little rocky at first. But think how good it will feel to wake up in the morning and know that when the phone rings, it is not Client X demanding the tapdance. It will be Client K, whose life we know and share in.
Let us be honest with ourselves.
Let us be honest with them.
Forget the dance.
Focus. [...]
Miami, 3:13 AM, Thoughts:
I have the distinct feeling that what I have written is “touchy feely.” I don’t care. I have lost the ability to bullshit.
I feel so good about not erasing this Mission Statement. There is so little that we are able to create in this business.
Most of the time, we are creating nothing. We are shoving digits around. But to address the growing pains of our business, and to create a new way of looking at what we do … because these growing pains could easily be dying pains. But we are meant to live at this company.
Our work actually does have an effect on people. In a cynical world, we make people happy. We let them know that one athlete can make a difference. The same can be said of one company.
[...] I propose also that we step up our concerns to build in non-profit areas of our contracts. It is something that we often talk about, sitting in those athletes’ living rooms, but often we let these factors slip away. How often have we advised clients to move to Florida, this very state, where taxes are lenient? Let us use the same sharp thinking not just to set up Charity Golf tournaments, but to help build schools in the communities where many of our finest athletes first found the inspiration to helped them onto greatness.
It is important to tweak the greater concerns of our athletes as well. Because the ability to forget social causes happens easily, in the night. Suddenly the desire to survive obscures the quest to give back to a community. If we don’t exercise the muscle of charity, one day it is dead. It doesn’t respond, it’s just a fiber in your body that serves no purpose. And the next thing that happens is the lack of depth that comes with financial prosperity. How many rich people have said this in our presence: “I thought I would feel better when I was rich, but I don’t.”
That happens when we don’t listen to the loud sound of the quiet voice inside. Life, I believe, is not a country club where we forget the difficulties and anxieties. Life is the duty of confronting all of that within ourselves. I am the most successful male in my family, but I am hardly the happiest. My brother works for NASA, helping grow blue-green algae that will one day feed the world. He was originally targeted as the “successful” one in my family. But he gave up early, for a quieter kind of success. He was once tortured, now he is quietly making the world a better place. He learned earlier what I am just now starting to wake up to. He sleeps well at night. And he doesn’t worry about being too preoccupied or too busy to get the dance right. He dances for something greater.
3:32 AM, Miami, Thoughts:
[...] I am wondering what that exact moment is when we truly, truly love our jobs. Is it during the day, or at the end of the day, or is it years later looking back on all we accomplished? I think perhaps truly loving something is the ability to love it at that moment. It is an elusive ability, something I have never been able to quite accomplish. I must go home, and take my experiences like a squirrel, and consider them, before I can truly enjoy them. I must work on this. The daily journey is everything. Being able to enjoy enjoyment while it is happening. I might erase this part.
4:45 AM, Miami, Thoughts:
[...] Let us work less hard to sign the clients that we know won’t matter in the long run, and work twice as hard to keep the ones who will. I believe in these words, and while they may not yet be true for you, they are true for me. And I ask that you read this with that in mind. I am dictating not what I want us to be, but what I wish us to be. There is a difference. You can only get there if I have written this correctly, and if you are inspired. I am reaching out to you, personally. I choose to be passionate again. I choose to reclaim everything that was once exciting about this job. I wonder if this might just be the best idea I’ve ever had. I hope you understand. In the words of Martin Luther King, whose suit I suggest you all visit before they move it from its display in the Atlanta airport: “A life is not worth living until you have something to die for.”
A life is not worth living if you are sleepwalking through it. Because that is what feels like death. That is what causes athletes to, out of despair, get drunk and wrap their cars around a pole. Or lash out at someone they love. [...] It is the feeling of sleepwalking. Of others living life around you, keeping their fists tightly wound around whatever dollars they can muster, caring little more than nothing about those around you. We cannot sleepwalk. We cannot just survive, anything goes. We can take control of our lives, we can quit sleepwalking, we can say – right now, these are our lives, it is time to start living it. It is time to not second guess, to move forward, to make mistakes if we have to, but to do it with a greater good in mind.
Let us start a revolution. Let us start a revolution that is not just about basketball shoes, or official licensed merchandise. I am prepared to die for something. I am prepared to live for our cause. The cause is caring about each other. The secret to this job is personal relationships.
Time to focus on wherever you’re at, and take control. From YouTube:
[...] Chunnel, one can only imagine a CAA or a UTA calmly reviewing their respective clients – i.e., Jerry Maguire or his protege, ‘Bob Sugar’ (expertly played by Jay Mohr) calmly calling all the agents [...]
Kanda optical…
Good blog on New Medici – Media Strategy + Lifestyle Network | Jerry … It is very informative but I don’t fully agree with it as I have read other online views on the same. It was good to spend evening going through internet on Wednesday . I’ll vis…