Courage. The foundation of risk-taking is courage, and in everchanging, disrupted businesses, risk-taking is essential, innovation is vital, and true innovation occurs only when people have This is true of acquisitions, investments, and capital allocations, and it particularly applies to creative decisions. Fear of failure destroys creativity.

If vou walk up and down the halls constantly telling people "the sky is falling," a sense of doom and gloom will, over time, permeate the company. You can't communicate pessimism to the people around you. It's ruinous to morale. No one wants to follow a pessimist.

And I tend to approach bad news as a problem that can be worked through and solved, something I have control over rather than something happening to me.

Of course, no two situations are alike. There’s a big difference between giving feedback to a seasoned director like J.J. Abrams or Steven Spielberg and someone with much less experience and confidence. The first time I sat down with Ryan Coogler to give him notes on Black Panther, I could see how visibly anxious he was. He’d never made a film as b

It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them.

Sometimes, even though you’re “in charge,” you need to be aware that in the moment you might have nothing to add, and so you don’t wade in. You trust your people to do their jobs and focus your energies on some other pressing issue.

If you’re in the business of making things, be in the business of making things great.

There have been many times over the years when I've had to deliver difficult news to accomplished people, some of whom were friends, and some of whom had been unable to flourish in positions that I had put them in. I try to be as direct about the problem as possible, explaining what wasn't working and why I didn't think it was going to change. Ther

Maybe this is the case for many of us: No matter who we become or what we accomplish, we still feel that we're essentially the kid we were at some simpler time long ago. Somehow that's the trick of leadership, too, I think, to hold on to that awareness of yourself even as the world tells you how powerful and important you are. The moment you start