‘Inc.’: How an Actor Spurred Innovation

Robert Redford’s Sundance Village, a nonprofit organization that operates an artist’s colony, a laboratory for independent filmmakers, and the Sundance Film Festival, is the nucleus of a sprawling international enterprise, writes Stephen H. Zades, in Inc. magazine (September).

Mr. Zades, who runs the Odyssey Project, which studies how leaders develop innovations, writes that Mr. Redford has blended numerous approaches “to promote original thinking and inventive solutions to problems.” Among them:

• Keep things rugged. “Veteran directors haul equipment; movie stars sleep in cabins; everyone moves tables and chairs,” writes Mr. Zades. “The primitive conditions force the artists to be resourceful, to improvise, to stretch, and experiment more fully.”
• Encourage contradiction. Sundance exposes artists to multiple perspectives, rather than connecting them “with a single mentor whose approach and opinions they might uncritically absorb,” Mr. Zades writes.
• Build a spirit of generosity. Unlike most organizations, Sundance seeks to perpetuate institutional memory and knowledge, Mr. Zades writes. Most evenings, artists and Sundance staff members gather to discuss “experiments that succeeded and failed, breakthroughs, breakouts, and the occasional breakdown.”

The article is available online at http://www.inc.com.