In his first term, President Barack Obama played a cautious manager navigating the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and cleaning up the messes left by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I am an animator. I feel like I'm the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I'm rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.
But especially if you have the wrong people within your circle. Truthfully, at the end of the day, no one cares about you in this business whether they are your agent or your manager or your publicist.
The prevailing - and foolish - attitude is that a good manager can be a good manager anywhere, with no special knowledge of the production process he's managing. A man with a financial background may know nothing about manufacturing shoes or cars, but he's put in charge anyway.
I spent 10 years as a marketing manager. I've found my experience in the financial world invaluable background for writing about white-collar crimes.
A leader is the one who can outline the broad vision and the direction, and say here's where we are going to go, here's why we need to go there, and here's how we are going to get there. A manager is the one who actually gets up under the hood and tunes the carburetor.
I think what's important in a good manager and a good agent is that they know your vision and that they are passionate about you and believe in you. Because if they don't, then they're not going to work hard for you, and they're going to send you out on things that you don't want to do.
When I became the manager of the New York Yankees, it was an opportunity to realize my lifelong dream of winning the World Series. We were fortunate enough to succeed in our first season in 1996, and in the years that followed, we wrote some great new chapters in Yankee history.
A manager is not a person who can do the work better than his men; he is a person who can get his men to do the work better than he can.
For example, for me, my brother helped me get a manager, which I don't take for granted. It's tough getting a manager, let alone one that actually cares about you and is smart. But from there, no one's going to cast me just because I'm James Franco's little brother.