Executive Suite [Media Notes 61]

Michael Liss brought this film clip to my attention:

It’s from a film called Executive Suite. I’ve not seen it but according to the Wikipedia write-up it’s about board-room wheeling and dealing. The very skilled and highly respected president of the Tredway Corporation suddenly drops dead on the street. A board member tries to take advantage of the situation by purchasing shares with the intention to sell them short. He’s aided in this scheme by the company controller, Loren Shaw, who wants to be the next president. But Don Walling, the VP for Design and Development, isn’t buying it.

In this scene he delivers a jeremiad decrying Shaw’s short-sighted by milking the company for quarterly gains by putting out cheap products at the expense of long-term growth by developing innovative and high-quality products. His speech wins the day. Quality wins out over bean-counting.

That strikes me as rather prescient for a movie that came out in 1964. Though the business press has never been at the center or my attention, I’ve been checking in every now at then for the last forty years or so. I don't know exactly when, but somewhere near the beginning of that period that issue – quarterly profits vs. long-term growth – became a standard issue.

It would be interesting to place this film in two contexts: 1) the evolution of business practices from, say, mid-century to the present, and 2) Hollywood depictions of business. I’m in no position to do either, but some films to look at:

• Citizen Kane (1941): Perhaps the best-known film about business, though it’s not so much about business as it is about a charismatic businessman.
• Wall Street (1987): Michael Douglas plays Gorden Gekko, a Wall Street player, who divers the famous “greed is good” speech.
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005): This is a documentary about betting on oil markets.
• The Wolf of Wall Street (2013): Leonardo DiCaprio gets rich running a “pump and dump” shop and eventually gets caught.
• The Big Short (2015): I’ve not seen this one, but Wikipedia says its based on the financial crisis of 2008.