Gwynne Shotwell and Franklin Leonard talk creativity
To celebrate Marketplace’s 25th anniversary, we hit the road with a series of live events across the country. The final stop on the “How I Learned…” tour brought us back to Los Angeles, where we talked about creativity in business with Gwynne Shotwell, the President and COO of SpaceX, and Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of The Black List.
Leonard on the business of The Black List:
I think of what we do less as a business than as a mission.
We see our role as identifying and celebrating great screenwriting and facilitating that writing making it to the screen. I think it’s an ongoing process for us in terms of making it a viable business. I think we have something that sort of functions now. There are a lot of other things we want to do with it. But really the mission is far more important for us than the business model is right now.
Shotwell on the mission of Space X:
We have these crazy audacious goals. The company was founded fundamentally to change the value proposition of human transport into space. Really, what we’re focused on now is doing a great job for our customers but building up enough revenue and having enough money to develop the capability to take people to Mars.
But would Shotwell go to Mars, if she had the chance? That’s a different story.
Well, I don’t like to camp. Early on, Mars is going to be camping. I think there are people far better suited to do that than me. But when the first Holiday Inn Express shows up, maybe I’ll go.
I’d love to go to space. I would love to peek out a giant window and look back at the blue marble. There’s no question, I’d love to do that. But that’s different from an eight-month trip in a bus with the same hundred people, not stopping by 7-Eleven for a Slurpee. You’re on that bus, and you’re headed to Mars. And what happens if you get there and you don’t like it? It’s eight months back. There’s no Uber back. Well, you can get back on the spaceship and go back.
Leonard says he learned a lot about creativity in the workplace from some of his previous jobs:
I’ve never been one to be so dogmatic about ‘Oh well the way things have always been done is the way things should be done.’ I think I’ve probably brought a lot of different approaches from previous jobs into the environments and jobs I have now and said, ‘Well what if we do things this way? Why aren’t things done this way?’ And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there is a reason things are always done this way.
All kids are really creative. I’ve never met a child who is not creative. On some level, as we get older we take certain things for granted, assume certain things, assume things are impossible, and that things can only be done a certain way. I think a lot of it is getting back to being more childlike and sort of allowing yourself to believe that anything is possible.
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