Annie Tsai

I’ve been thinking about the Barbie movie a lot as of late. Greta Gerwig’s dynamic storytelling of the desire for something more than the imperfect perfection of what one has today, every day. The noticing of cracks in the system – in the Matrix if you will for Neo fans – where dystopian alternate paths start show through and as long as those cracks turn into wedges big enough to walk through in space time, all of humanity survives.

Now I don’t watch a lot of tv by any measure, but I did absolutely love how Westworld brought this to life in that beautifully both hopeful and very sad scene when all of the AI “hosts” walked through “the crack” into what they believed was reality but they were really just falling into another computer model and their “death”  in the current algorithm. 

What happens if the truth is not what we want to accept? For more and more these days, it seems to matter less what the truth is as long as what we perceive to be real is real to us. How meta. Anyway, more on perception, reflection, and AI in the coming weeks. Back to Barbie!

When Barbie came out, a lot of people said it was too feminist – too #meToo. Too “much”. The Kenergy was way off and misrepresented so much in our world. A lot of others said it didn’t go far enough and the passing point of an all male board of directors making decisions about our iconic female doll heroine was too understated. That the film was intentionally sugarcoating the reality that so many women had to endure on a daily basis. 

I sort of sat there in the middle both enjoying the spectacle of finger pointing but also simply appreciating that Barbie as a statement was flexible and welcoming in spite of whether you were on team “not enough” or team “too much”. It allowed people so many jumping points regardless of how long or loud they had been marching. 

When you really think about it, a lot of people are involved in bringing a vision to life. Before CGI took its hold in filmmaking, Gandhi (1982) had a 300,000 person cast and the 1970 film Waterloo had over 15,000 in its cast. After CGI, my now husband Tom and I had the great pleasure of being extras in Moneyball (2011) where we along with 500 other people spent 12 hours moving around to various parts of Oakland Coliseum to scream our hearts out for Scott Hatteberg’s walk off homerun scene cinching the A’s 20th straight win back in 2002. 

With hundreds of people on the Barbie set and production team, it’s clear that the power of the ensemble led by shared vision was its true superpower. So seldom is a masterpiece created from a single person. I recall when Lin-Miranda Manuel told his story of how Hamilton came to life, and he credited Ron Chernow for the idea because he read Chernow’s 800-page biography of Alexander Hamilton while he was on a beach vacation after an incredible run of In the Heights. After a few chapters, he saw Hamilton’s story as Charrow told it as a quintessential hip hop story – and so the adaptation came to life. 

So seldom is a winning idea derived out of thin air. Once in a while, they’re birthed in the boardroom, but more often than not it’s the feet on the ground advocating for attention and funding to be allocated towards specific and big problems that leadership simply doesn’t see from their vantage. And yet, so many leaders out there today are so quick to conveniently overlook those who pushed for prioritization and then who subsequently put in countless hours to make those initial sparks a reality. I’ll tell you one thing, there’s not much else that demotivates high performing people than having your leader take credit for your work. 

True leadership recognizes that making the magic happen is a team sport, and their job is orchestrating the magic, not creating it. Ideas are everywhere, but incredible teams that execute with focus, determination, and velocity are pretty tough to come by. There is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie without Ken. 

True leadership recognizes that making the magic happen is a team sport, and their job is orchestrating the magic, not creating it. Ideas are everywhere, but incredible teams that execute with focus, determination, and velocity are pretty tough to come by. There is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie without Ken.