Jerry Maguire Mission Statement (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Jerry Maguire Mission Statement (2016)

theuncool.com

33 pointsmothsonasloth19 comments

Seems a little bit like the author is having something of an existential crisis at the time they wrote it. I do think success can really make you question a lot. Growth and success in a business very often brings with it a gnawing feeling that you are losing touch with what made you good. You can’t know everyone at your company when it gets beyond a certain size and you have to become a leader and its very different than being able to brute force problems at a 20 person company. To me this was a very long winded way for the author to recognize there was a flaw in their leadership and how to fix it. It is painful and can often take a lot of hard searching inside of oneself.

edit: We organically grew our information security consultancy from 3->21 people and recently completed a successful acquisition. It is important to acknowledge that being a good business leader is not the same as being really good at a thing. The business side was always hard and we learned a lot over the 7+ years we grew the business. Staying sharp in your field and learning to scale a business is just not easy. As hackers we severely underrated the amount of business skills we would need. We learned and leveled up, but it was the hard part about the business. Building a culture. Maintaining values. Learning how to operate, contract, recruit, etc. you have to be pretty good at all of it. To me this post is like many of those soul searching meetings we had as we grew. Always asking why hire us? Why are we better? What really matters? How do we always serve our customers best. It gets deep and it is hard snd you are competing in a market where other people are doing the same thing and asking those same questions.

Since this appeared in a work of fiction, there are two ways of thinking about the author. The first is the fictional character "Jerry Maguire" who, as a character, was going through such a crisis in the movie.

The actual author though was Cameron Crowe, who was writing a screenplay.

FWIW the character was fired after sending this memo to the rest of the office, and lost all but one of his clients.

I get it, but it is a good analogy for business I think. I was just playing along and identified with a lot of the screenplay.

The key takeway from the "mission statement" scene in Jerry Maguire is that he put one in everyone's mailbox and the people who read it smiled at him and said they loved it but they were all thinking "this guy is done."

Which is weird. Watching the movie I thought this would be much more transgressive, or say deeply negative things about the company. Instead it seems like a generic piece of corporate PR: something you'd actually want to "leak" to the newspapers so they could write stories about how much your agents secretly care. Maybe things were different in the 90s.

> Seems a little bit like the author is having something of an existential crisis at the time they wrote it.

Writers are writers and aren't always projecting when they write.

I thought it was gonna be these guys who are building a Jerry Maguire VHS tape pyramid in the desert[0]

[0]https://www.vice.com/en/article/78dzz9/these-guys-are-buildi...

is it just me or is 'neutral' misspelled through the entire memo?

Not just you.

Did Cameron Crowe really misspell "neutral" in the screenplay? Wow. He's a writer.

Do you think Mark Twain actually spoke or wrote or used spelling like Huck Finn?

I doubt the fictional mission statement of Jerry Maguire was written to include the spelling errors that would develop the character so the analogy does not hold, also I think Jerry would have used a spellchecker - although why Crowe doesn't is open to question.

On the contrary, Maguire likely would NOT have used a spellchecker - this was mid-90s, when checkers were not automatically running in background and had to be explicitly (and painstakingly) invoked, Jerry is writing in a fevered state in the middle of the night, and he's a high-powered sports agent with a personal secretary. Low editing quality would be expected by such a guy in such a state, it's already good that he does not WRITE IN ALL CAPS AND WHAT IS PUNCTUATION RHONDA.

But yeah, the typo are likely unintentional by Crowe - in the end this is just a prop, and as I mentioned automated spellcheckers were annoying back then.

he went and got it all done up at the all night printer real fancy, it was his baby, but no he's not going to go through the pain of running a spellchecker, he's still a man dangit!

on edit: the hippy night guy at the printer place seems literate, he read it, but guess what - he has the same silly spelling errors as Jerry!

It's also likely he was using something like Final Draft to write the script (which really focuses on formatting first). In all honesty, I wonder if it even had a Spell Check feature back in 1996, assuming he was even using the latest version then.

Heck, Microsoft Word didn't have automatic spell checking (always working in the background) until 2003. If I recall correctly, even MS Word's spell checker wasn't developed in house, but the tech was originally licensed from Houghton-Mifflin in the early-to-mid-90s. I believe Word 7.0 had it, and possibly earlier versions, but it was still a "fairly new thing" in the early-to-mid-90s in the desktop space.

Just out of curiosity, how many scripts have you actually read?

all the way through, not counting plays? Only 4. Parts of scripts, probably about 20. But at any rate the reason why someone uses misspellings such as Twain in Huck Finn is to delineate character for the readers in an entertaining fashion - I don't think misspelling neutral is a real character insight and as a general rule when you are first writing the script you are writing it to be read by a very limited audience for whom the purpose of reading is not to be entertained.

The better takeaway here isn’t “omg a writer of great stories isn’t a good speller?” but rather “Crowe was still writing screenplays in 1996 in a medium that didn’t have spell check”

You'd be amazed at how heavily many skilled professional writers, especially of fiction, rely on their publishers' staff to remedy basic failings in their writing. Their primary skill is not necessarily spelling, punctuation, and other mechanical matters.

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