Inspired Execution

Narrator: Inspired Execution, hosted by Datastax Chairman and CEO Chet Kapoor, follows the journeys of leaders from the world's largest enterprises and fastest-growing startups.

Narrator: Alana Mayo is the President of Orion Pictures, a division of MGM that's dedicated to underrepresented voices and authentic storytelling in film. For as long as she can remember, Alana has always loved engaging with narrative storytelling. Even as a child, she came up with plays based on the American Girl dolls for her friends to perform. Now, Alana has overseen award-winning films like The Big Short, Selma, and many others. In today's episode, she discusses the importance of active listening and vulnerability, how taking a break helped her find clarity on her career journey, advice for recognizing our unconscious biases, and how the film industry is evolving.

Chet Kapoor: Alana, welcome to Inspired Execution.

Alana Mayo: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Chet Kapoor: It is so awesome to have you on the podcast. You are the first non-tech executive accomplished leader that we have on this. I know you are very technically aligned and inclined, but it is so interesting to have this conversation.

Alana Mayo: I have to say, I was looking back through older episodes and feeling very unimpressed with myself compared to the other people that you've had on this podcast. The only edge that I have is that I'm coming from an industry that you have not spoken to as much. That's the only thing that's keeping me from being completely insecure in this conversation.

Chet Kapoor: So humble. You've worked on award-winning films, like The Big Short, Selma, and so many others. Tell us a little bit about your journey.

Alana Mayo: I am, essentially, more than anything—and this is what's really the most present thing for me right now—is I'm just a story nerd. I just was a person who, for the entirety of my life, loved engaging with narrative storytelling. I loved reading books when I was growing up, I watched a lot of television and a lot of films. I was very fortunate to have parents who worked in the entertainment industry, and so I knew that you could professionally have a job that revolves around or interacts in some way with entertainment. My whole story is around story. It's around loving it and wanting to try to find a way to connect that to a professional life and a career. It's about spending a lot of time ... my parents, my mom, especially, is also kind of a big nerd. And thankfully was very encouraging for me to go to school and allowed me to be an English major, which is one of the least practical majors you can have, and really engage with my love of story there. Really, I've just been kind of chasing that my whole entire life.

Chet Kapoor: Favorite book growing up?

Alana Mayo: Oh man, it's so hard. This is such a good question and such a hard one to answer in any form because ...

Chet Kapoor: I would be stumped if somebody asked me the question because I would be like going through like, which 40, which ... can I say 40, please? Because that's the number that comes to mind.

Alana Mayo: There's some British podcast ... and this is so terrible that I'm referring to it this way. It's very famous. You probably know it and the interviewer, but they have that kind of iconic question where it's like, you're stranded on a desert island, one person, one book, one record that you can bring. At least with that, there's less pressure. But favorite book, I'm going to just go with what comes to the top of my head. It would probably have to be maybe The Bluest Eye.

Chet Kapoor: Wow. That's awesome. That's great. What about your favorite movie? Could you go back and say, because of this movie I said, and my love for reading, I wanted to be in the business.

Alana Mayo: Can I tell you something that's probably a little embarrassing? I don't have a movie that made me want to be in the business. I genuinely cannot remember being at an age where I didn't think that I wanted to be in film, television, or theater. I can't remember a time where I wasn't thinking that I wanted to do some sort of visual narrative storytelling. But what I actually used to do is those American Girl doll things with the books that accompanied them, the incredibly well-written narratives loosely based on American history. I used to make my friends perform plays that I would come up with in my mind based on these doll characters. I remember less so myself thinking, "Oh, this will be a future career path," and more so my mom commenting to me that I was really excited about giving direction.

Alana Mayo: Once she said ... for a while, I thought I might want to be a performer … and she said, "You're way too bossy to take direction." Then soon thereafter, she said, "I really feel like you really enjoy writing, you enjoy crafting your own stories, you enjoy telling other people how to translate your stories." That really honestly is what set me on the path. But I watched my dad's laser-disc collection. He had really good taste, so I was watching, you know, All About Eve and Apocalypse Now and all of Spike Lee's catalogs. Then going to see, my parents would take us to see everything from ... Godzilla is one of my mom's favorite films. We'd go to the museum and watch Godzilla, or we'd go watch Daughters of the Dust. I was seeing all of this really great cinema at a very, very, very young age and then again, really just being nurtured by them to pursue that.

Chet Kapoor: So clearly ... I was going to ask two questions, but you answered one. What comes easy? You already answered that by saying that being bossy. That's great

Alana Mayo: I would like to reclaim the word bossy. What comes easy to me is leadership. Some people interpret it as bossy.

Chet Kapoor: What is hard? What is something that is not natural, but very important that you've had to work on?

Alana Mayo: Not surprisingly, listening.

Chet Kapoor: How do you get into this, I call it active listening, where you're not just listening but you're making sure the other person understands that you're listening. Is there something that you keep working on or it's now become an incorporated part of how you lead?

Alana Mayo: It's the thing that I would say I've tried to most actively work on for the past three or four years of my life, in my personal life and my professional life. Also, it's been really hard. I have to actively work to actively listen.

Alana Mayo: One of the things that I try to do in meetings ... all of the kind of tricks that you're given, right? Like, don't speak first, however much you want to be the first person to say something in the room. Allow three other people to say something first. Or just note if you were talking more than the other people in the meeting. But I think the biggest thing that I've realized is that the listening thing for me is actually connected to vulnerability. I had somebody who does this for a living point out to me that he felt like it really came from wanting to project this, you know, "I'm smart and I know what I'm talking about." He said, “It feels as if you're not listening to the other person, you're waiting for them to finish so that you can say something smart.” Once I start to really explore and examine that part of myself and that it was a little bit of a defense mechanism, it's helped me a lot to be able to think about my interactions with people differently.

Chet Kapoor: Extremely well put. I think something that nearly every listener, including myself, can think about and incorporate into the way they listen. Right? Because I think it's such an important skill for leadership. What was the biggest turning point in your career?

Alana Mayo: I was working at Paramount Pictures and I was on a bit of a really great run. I was one of the younger executives there. They had promoted me a lot, I was working on movies that I was both really proud of creatively and felt very privileged to work on, and also that had been getting kind of consistently critical and commercial success.

Alana Mayo: I was not only unhappy in the job because the company was going through a lot of transition and it was a tough place to work at the time, but also I was very acutely aware that I was working in a part of the business that felt to me like it was the past. And I was looking to my left and my right and seeing a lot of people that felt like they were engaging in the part of the industry that was present and going to be the future. I really just wanted to look ahead and not be in necessarily a legacy business.

Alana Mayo: So I ultimately quit my job to go work for an IAC company, Vimeo, which was seeing if they could convert from being really a service business to a content offering. Somewhere between three and six months into taking the job, IAC determined that they didn't want to pursue the content business. So I found myself having to quit a job that was pretty stable, in fact, that I was doing pretty well in to take a job that was a complete failure, which I wasn't comfortable describing it as such at the time, but I found myself ... everyone in my life thought I must piece so demoralized and so depressed and I was actually professionally happier on the other side of that than I had ever been.

Alana Mayo: Part of it was because I think I really needed a break. I think of myself still as being very young, but I had been going at this pace of just chasing this carrot for 10, 12 years and had not really sat down and taken a moment to just rest, and then also take a moment to think about what I really wanted to do with my life. So I took six months to do that. Then I also realized that that brief challenge, that three to six months that I was at Vimeo, where I was in a job that was much bigger than me and I was all of a sudden managing 10 people… I had never had more than one direct report, and I was all of a sudden sitting in rooms with a C-suite of people who were challenging me to answer questions that I had never been even asked before. Also, I dipped my toe in two of the most exciting, and again, future-leaning parts of the industry—television and digital—and I realized I'd learned more and grown more in that brief amount of time than I had in five years before at a legacy company. So it just shifted my entire perspective on things.

Chet Kapoor: Some of us that work in tech are hopeless romantics, right? Because we actually do it because we want to change the world, right? If I take a Steve Jobs phrase, “I want to make a dent in the universe,” right? That really drives a bunch of us to do the things we do. Some people would call that a disruption. Some people would call that exactly what you said, which is seeing the future and not looking at the past. During that time, that happened. Right? I mean, for you, it's really interesting. I keep talking about these phrases across, which is “believe, inspire, execute.” It seems like this, I want to represent voices that have not been heard. It came through during that time. Is there insight into why or how? Just give us your perspective.

Alana Mayo: Two things happened in that six months of not working, of being between jobs. One is I had more clarity than I'd ever had before. One of the things that I was pitching for Vimeo, that I was pitching out of a true belief, but also was pitching trying to find some sort of edge in what was even then a crowded streaming landscape, was nobody's speaking to younger people and no one's speaking to the culture of the world as folks under 35 experience it. That culture is incredibly multicultural. I had all of these comparisons of brands like Urban Outfitters and I was like, "Look at their ads and look at the people they feature in it. Why television, even streaming at the time, isn't really reflecting that?"

Alana Mayo: I realized that one of the things that was really frustrating to me about being in the traditional studio system is that I could not get movies greenlit. Or I should say it was much harder to get movies greenlit that had people of color, but very specifically black people at the center of it—either in who the cast was or what the storytelling was and what the focus of the story was.

Alana Mayo: I would have these conversations that were — I'm using air quotes — business conversations around why those movies could not be greenlit. I was like, okay, well then, then we should really examine our thinking around the business here because this audience exists, these filmmakers exist. Maybe this is an interesting challenge for us to think about how we might view these movies that I innately know are incredibly valuable as perhaps more commercially viable. I couldn't get anybody excited about that conversation.

Alana Mayo: So when I got to Vimeo and all of a sudden it was, the business conversation was around doing, to me, the right thing. I started to think that if you can if you chase opportunities where you can align the business case with what some people will claim is altruism, but I just think is the thing that makes the most sense, which is these people or these communities and creators and audiences are underrepresented because of choices that we are making, conscious or unconscious. They are underrepresented because of choices that we're making, and that's it. So let's just make different choices.

Alana Mayo: Also, in a world where we're a hundred-plus years into films entertainment, perhaps this is actually a really exciting new evolution of our industry, to reflect the world as it exists. What a cool, exciting ... you say challenge, I say opportunity, to seize. Everything that I've done since then, working for Michael B. Jordan and being a part of his thought leadership in trying to think about policies around hiring in Hollywood and more equitable hiring, to what I'm doing now with Orion. It all completely was shaped by that thinking.

Chet Kapoor: It's really interesting. You think about diversity, and inclusion, I should just put both of them together, but if I can just start with diversity. You are thinking about diversity in what you want to bring to the world, to the audiences. You want to take folks that are not being represented and have them show up. But there's also a part of diversity and inclusion in our work culture. How are we, you know what I call, how's the sausage made? A lot of people like eating sausage, but the factory works very differently, right? In your case, in your world, does it work differently? And if so, what are some tips and tricks for people who want to create a diverse and inclusionary world?

Alana Mayo: Yeah, it's a great question. We have the problem… I would argue it's the same problem internally as it is externally. I spent a lot of time working on more inclusive hiring in terms of the people that we work with to create stories, so everybody from who's the writer, who's the director, what's the cast. But when we're actually producing a film, who's on set, who's being hired to do all of the crew jobs. But I think sometimes I'm a little neglectful of thinking about those systems in place within the companies in which I work. I think the reason I'm neglectful about that is because my own personal hiring is always inclusive of a lot of different identities. I just, I actively think to do that, but even if I didn't, I think that my unconscious bias is towards hiring more women and hiring more people of color, and hiring people from different backgrounds.

Alana Mayo: But then I also then have to look at the ways in which I'm clearly biased towards people like myself, right? Like I usually hire people who have a certain educational background or people that I feel I can per to, and oftentimes those people grew up in the same way that I did. Right? That's a problem. So I don't know that I have any tips, but what I'm actively working on right now is in the same way that we focused on policy like inclusion writers or working with apprentice programs, or pushing the guilds and the union to change the rules to allow for more inclusive hiring.

Alana Mayo: I think the only tip that I can offer is internally at the workplace too, there have to be very thoughtful systems put in place to counteract the personal bias of hiring managers. Because if you look at my team, you will probably say like, "Wow, Alana's done a really great job of having all of this diversity." Then there are plenty of ways in which we are all similar. So we're actually in real-time working internally at the company and also bringing in people that are smarter than us in this to try to put those systems in place.

Chet Kapoor: It is a personal passion for me to focus on diversity and the unconscious biases we bring. But I find that inclusion is even harder just because with diversity, you can actually see different thoughts and there are so many different ways that you can be diverse. Inclusion becomes just how do you give people the opportunity ... because they're different personalities right? It is just so hard, and a lot in the tech industry, right? Just because engineers are the smartest people in the room, but they're also some of the quietest, right? So you have to make sure that they represent, that their point of view is represented. Do you see glimpses of that in your world?

Alana Mayo: I'll tell you Chet because I think you know that I follow you on Twitter. One of your tweets that really resonated with me, and I was going to ask you this about tech and your company specifically, is one of the things that I struggle with in my industry is it's incredibly hierarchical. I hate that. I've always ... I hated it when I was at the bottom of the hierarchy, I don't particularly like it at the top. I think that's really the thing that I'm trying to combat, is creating an environment where things are flatter. The listening piece of it and working on that actually plays, goes hand in hand with this, of to your point, really encouraging and pulling out ... however they do it, however, their personal working style is, people that feel as if they don't or shouldn't have as loud of a voice in the room because of their title or their level of experience or just their level of comfort being in that room. Making them feel and know that on an emotional level, that they're welcome and that they're valued and that ...

Alana Mayo: In fact, I say this a lot to my team. It is your job. It's a requisite that you speak up. There's no, you know, this kind of defensive way of showing up. Of not wanting to say the wrong thing or not wanting to look stupid or not wanting to be embarrassed in a meeting. This makes you worse at your job and actually has greater consequences than if you spoke up and said something that you later regret or have to apologize for or feel like makes you look stupid.

Alana Mayo: That's something that I really had to myself work on… and it goes back to just trying to create a culture where there's really good communication and where everybody feels comfortable enough to have that level of vulnerability. Because for us, if you're an assistant, if you're a young executive and you're in a room with a president or a chair or a big director or a movie star, it's the nature of our business for the younger people, the less experienced people to feed intimidated by them. These are people that we put on these pedestals, we give big awards to, we put on the covers of magazines. I don't know that it will ever change or even that it's a worthwhile endeavor to change that about Hollywood, but I'm certainly trying to create a different culture in my team.

Chet Kapoor: That's awesome. I tell folks that I'm interviewing, I said, I have two blind spots. I'm going to do nothing to change them. One is I don't like titles. The second thing is I don't like org charts. It kind of works. My perspective to everybody who tells me they're nervous is to breathe because you are breathing. The second one is just be yourself because you don't have a choice.

Alana Mayo: Yes. Yeah, I love that.

Chet Kapoor: Those two things just kind of get you through almost any big thing that you have to do. I'm going to shift gears here, get a little bit more personal. Who inspires you?

Alana Mayo: I think ... this is, at the risk of sounding a little corny, I think I'm most inspired by the people in my personal life. The family that I come from and watching a group of people that have ... my mom has 12 siblings and so I have a pretty large family on her side. I've seen everyone go through what seems to be insurmountable odds. They are a tenacious, graceful, kind of classy, wonderful, wonderful group of people. I think that frankly, anytime I have any sort of obstacle, professional or personal, that's the thing that I draw on the most.

Alana Mayo: Then I will tell you ... this also might sound a little bit disingenuous, but I'm truly most inspired by the younger people that I work with. I've literally changed one of my meetings so that they can just tell me what they're excited about. It's easily my favorite meeting I have all week. It's Friday morning, and I end up learning about things that I otherwise would know nothing about. I also really appreciate ... I took my cousin who’s a freshman at USC and I took her and four of her friends to dinner last night. I just was thinking like, this is such a positive, optimistic group of people. I realized I don't get to be around that a lot. I don't know if it's a generalization or an oversimplification to say the older you get, the more cynical the people are around you. I'm sure that's not true across the board. But I do not, myself, in my personal and professional life, get to be around that kind of optimism and excitement often. So I really love spending time with people younger than me.

Chet Kapoor: I noticed Barrack Obama follows you on Twitter. What's the story there?

Alana Mayo: He does? I didn't know that. Well, President Obama and I ... no, that's really, wow. Now I'm going to, I have to go Tweet him. I didn't know that. But I imagine, one, he probably follows everyone. Two, I did, I will say my one actual connection to President Obama, other than generally, I grew up in Chicago and my parents have definitely, there's one degree of separation and they've spent some time with him and Michelle ... I hope it's okay to call them by their first names ... but we did a program with, when I worked with Michael B. Jordan, he wanted to start a fellowship — speaking of young people — to create some sort of pipeline for younger aspiring creatives to get a foot in. We partnered with My Brother's Keeper to design the program and we were able to go to this wonderful event and announce it in Oakland. That is my one actual connection to the president.

Chet Kapoor: What advice would you share with a younger version of yourself?

Alana Mayo: I do this actually a lot. I say this to actual younger people today because I think this has only become exacerbated the more time has gone and the more everyone has phones and access to things. But I would really try to encourage myself to either be less anxious, which is bad advice because you can't give people advice to feel differently, but certainly to work on the anxiety that I had about things that was just proper and true anxiety versus actually having a problem to solve. I think I was kind of crippled by that for a good amount of my late teens and early twenties.

Alana Mayo: The most honest advice I could give someone is there are going to be really ... well, I would say the most honest advice I could have given myself, there will be really great things that happen to you that are not of your doing, and there will be really terrible things that happen to you that are not of your doing. That is just life. Trying to control to have more good things happen than bad is a fool's errand and a waste of your energy. In some ways, again, cheesy as it sounds, kind of go with the flow and ride the good and the bad. They're both incredibly valuable.

Chet Kapoor: That is so well said. I have a different way of saying what you just said, which is, if I can take a sailing analogy, we can be great sailors, but the wind has to show up. Sometimes the wind direction changes and it's not good for us. Sometimes it changes and it's good for us. All we can do is tend to be the best sailors in any circumstances that show up.

Chet Kapoor: Rapid-fire, quick responses. What's one TV show everyone needs to watch this fall?

Alana Mayo: Succession Season 3.

Chet Kapoor: If you can have a dinner party with only three people, who would be on your list?

Alana Mayo: I would have my younger brother, Alex; I would have Toni Morrison; and I would have maybe Miles Davis, which is kind of problematic because he did many things in his personal life that I didn't agree with. But I'm just so fascinated by a brain that thinks that way.

Chet Kapoor: Yeah. No, that's an awesome list. I think you mentioned this, but let me ask you again. What's your favorite film of all time?

Alana Mayo: It shifts. So controversial to say this, but it would probably be Knife in the Water, which is a Roman Polanski movie. I love the film. Sorry. 

Chet Kapoor: One word or phrase that describes a great leader.

Alana Mayo: Regulated and open.

Chet Kapoor: What's the one word that best describes you?

Alana Mayo: Stubborn.

Chet Kapoor: What's the one word that people who work with you would use to describe you?

Alana Mayo: Intense. I've actually heard this a lot.

Chet Kapoor: Last question. What do you believe you are world-class at?

Alana Mayo: I would say I think I'm world-class in empathizing with other people.

Chet Kapoor: That is awesome. Alana, I am truly inspired. I've taken more notes than I usually do in our Inspired Execution podcast. This is phenomenal. I think our listeners are going to have a blast listening to this.

Alana Mayo: Thank you so much for having me. I have like an hour more at least worth things that I want to talk about based on our conversation and I have so many questions for you.

Chet Kapoor: I look forward to many, many further discussions. Truly, truly appreciate it, and very inspired.

Alana Mayo: Thank you. Likewise.

Narrator: To build an inclusive work culture…be aware of your unconscious biases, practice active listening, and show vulnerability. Sometimes, taking a break is the best way to find clarity and motivation on your path forward. Storytelling is a powerful tool and it's important to make sure we're telling stories that represent the world as it really is. In life, change is inevitable and it's often out of our control. Try to take the good and bad times in stride, staying grounded in what you can control: your energy and your mindset.

Narrator: Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of the Inspired Execution podcast. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show and drop us any questions or feedback at inspiredexecution@datastax.com.