Protect the Vision

The claim

Michael Ovitz's answer to why great creative people have a hard side is direct: "Not at all disagreeableness. I think they are protecting their vision." His account is that creative people run a hard side and a soft side simultaneously, the sensitivity is what produces the work in the first place, and the hardness exists specifically to defend it once it exists, activating only when the vision itself is under threat.¹

The examples

Ovitz watched Martin Scorsese take Harvey Weinstein apart in a room, "like he was a toothpick," over what he calls the dumbest notes imaginable; Scorsese was right, and Ovitz ended the meeting quickly, since a producer did not belong in the editing room discussing the core of the film at all. The rule he extracts is narrow and specific: notes are good if a person gives them and then genuinely lets the creator do what they want, and nobody should be giving notes to a director like Scorsese on the core of his film, on a character's basic conceit, or on where the camera goes.

A second example runs the opposite direction on cost rather than confrontation. Dustin Hoffman could not find his character in the first week of shooting Rain Man, and director Barry Levinson had the patience to let him keep searching, an expensive choice since the production was losing money every day it continued, until the right balance of improvisation and script emerged, what Ovitz calls simply "the movie is perfect." Protecting a vision, in this case, meant protecting the process that let the vision arrive, at a real and ongoing cost.

The founder version

Asked whether founders carry the same instinct, Ovitz generalizes it past Hollywood entirely: "I think it's a common denominator of anyone who's successful. Dedication, work ethic, intelligence, curiosity. Protect the vision." The founder-side formulation comes from Sidney Harman, the founder of Harman Kardon, in his book Mind Your Business, by way of David Senra: the founder is the guardian of the company's soul. Steve Jobs is offered as an example of a person who holds their ground on a vision until someone actually proves them wrong, the same trait Ovitz names in the investor Josh Kushner: wildly smart, low-key, and willing to yield a position only if a person can genuinely talk him out of it, never before.

The intake side

Protecting a vision is not the same as closed-mindedness. Ovitz's own method for taking in new ideas is to collect them, let them sit, and see what survives: "Find things that give you food for thought for the vision. Inventory them in your head. Let them marinate. Because if they stay in your head, that means you're on to something." He describes using the identical filter when collecting art, seeing many images and letting his own reaction tell him which ones actually matter to him. The people who hold vision best, in his account, are persuadable at the right threshold rather than never persuadable at all: they hold their ground until someone proves them wrong, not forever.