Filmmaker Ken Burns on Lessons in Innovation and Collaboration

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the acclaimed documentarian releases a new two-part PBS series about Ben Franklin, he describes how the U.S. founding father transformed himself from teen runaway to newspaperman, then inventor, then political elder. He explains what current leaders can learn from how Franklin approached business, scientific discovery, and his fellow nation-builders. Ken Burns, whose films have covered everything from the Civil War to baseball, also shares insights on how he and his teammates get their own groundbreaking work done.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New
0:08.1	Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for
0:13.8	free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. We get most of our
0:50.1	business and career advice today from forward-looking contemporaries, the latest innovator in business
0:55.2	or academic with interesting research. But we also know that we can find lessons in leadership
1:00.3	and even innovation from people who lived long ago.
1:03.1	Histories of lives are seldom entertaining, unless they contain something either admirable or
1:09.6	exemplar. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon. Since I cannot have the happiness of
1:16.9	knowing what will be known 100 years hence, whether I have been doing good or mischief is for
1:24.6	time to discover. Those are the words of Ben Franklin, voiced by Mandy Patinkin. They book
1:30.5	and a new two-part PBS series on the 18th century American leader. It's from our guest today. The
1:36.3	acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. Burns is directed or produced more than 40 films,
1:42.4	and his latest out this week chronicles the life of Franklin, a businessman, inventor, and US
1:48.1	founding father. We're going to talk about Franklin's push for continuous improvement, whether it
1:52.9	was making himself or the tools and technologies of the time or his young country better.
1:58.2	I'm also going to ask Burns how he applies some of the same strategies in his own award-winning
2:03.0	work and career. Ken Burns, welcome. Thank you, Alison. I'm so happy to be with you.
2:16.6	So why Franklin? Because he was good or made mischief for a little bit of both.
2:21.2	Well, you know, we make films not about stuff we already know about, but stuff we want to know about.
2:26.7	And Franklin is undoubtedly the greatest American writer of the 18th century, and he is undoubtedly
2:33.8	the greatest American personality of that century. And he is so much more than what comes down to us.
	...

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