When I arrived at Campbell on January 8, 2001, the company had lost half its market value in the prior year. They had to cut costs to the point where they were literally taking the chicken out of chicken noodle soup and the product was no longer comp...
Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product, the bottom line. Westerners appear to have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there's more need for affiliation.
I've come to learn that my initial investment is more about the person versus the product that I am buying into. I've also learned that I really do enjoy giving worthy people an opportunity of a lifetime.
Getting a traditional pharmaceutical to the market can cost a billion dollars or more. Newer, more tailored and targeted drugs called biologics are even more complex and expensive. Simple economics dictates that companies and venture funds will inves...
Recession-resistant development produces things people need. Unsustainable growth churns out tinsel products that consumers have to be seduced into buying - until times get tough, when they quickly give them up.
I don't concern myself with thinking ahead to the finished product. I focus more specifically on what the character is experiencing. Once you relieve yourself of the very arbitrary and always punishing pressure of what an audience is expecting you to...
A creative mindset is in increasingly high demand: employers are vying for workers who are able to dream big and deliver big with the next must-have product. Creative thinking fuels innovation, it leads to new goods and services, creates jobs and del...
I'd been a housewife and mother to our son Thomas Jefferson, and I was looking for a new career. So when my agent called and said a producer named Paul Elliott from E&B productions, the biggest panto company in the country at the time, wanted to meet...
Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they're as uncomfortable as I am.
Despite recent speculation in the media, and after difficult but sincere consideration, I have decided not to direct 'Catching Fire.' As a writer and a director, I simply don't have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to m...
In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. Then 40 years later if you performed the same exercise, less than 10% of the public believed it was true. ...
I had three weeks of prep on 'Wolfman,' a ridiculously inadequate amount of time to try to bring together the fractured and scattered pieces of the production. I had taken the job mostly because I had a cash flow problem, the only time in my career I...
When you multitask, you believe you're being exceptionally productive, but really, you're fooling yourself. Each time you switch tasks, you have to backtrack a little and remind yourself where you are in the process and what's next. Invariably. you a...
France has not only built a bureaucratic barrier against American culture, it has constructed a notorious intellectual case against it as well. The French spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing film production, extend interest-free loans t...
If we as a nation are to break the cycle of poverty, crime and the growing underclass of young people ill equipped to be productive citizens, we need to not only implement effective programs to prevent teen pregnancy, but we must also help those who ...
Spectator I: I think it was "Blessed are the cheesemakers". Mrs. Gregory: Aha, what's so special about the cheesemakers? Gregory: Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
Emmet: President Business is going to end the world? But he's such a good guy! And Octan, they make good stuff: music, dairy products, coffee, TV shows, surveillance systems, all history books, voting machines... wait a minute!
Mr. Hirsch's Lawyer: As your lawyer, I advise you to get control of it fast. A character from one of your productions on the loose? Who knows what he's capable of? Robbery? Murder? I see lawsuits.
Officer Lewis: I asked him his name. He didn't know. Bob Morton: Oh, great. Let me make it real clear to you. He doesn't have a name. He's got a program. He's product. Is that clear?
When you have a lot of money, there's so many places you can go to manage your money. But when you don't have money, mathematically you actually need a financial plan more. You can't really afford to make mistakes. So why is this such a luxury produc...
We package everything as a product so we can derive income from it. Then we can occupy ourselves with higher-order psychological lifestyle things. This is a very new issue. Money still matters, but other factors have joined the status game - like how...
