by FilmInk Staff
Founder and CEO of tech behemoth Blackmagic Design, Petty delivered this message to a prestige online business conference WSJ Tech late last month.
Using plain language, Petty told delegates that they needed to “have faith in people.”
“If business wants to be more creative,” Petty said, “they have got to move outside their comfort zone.”
Petty, who was recently named on the Australian Financial Review’s Rich List for 2021, fearlessly scolded big companies for their concentrated effort in acquiring property (intellectual, actual, virtual, and otherwise) over developing innovation; and a business culture that puts data before customer need.
“Capitalism is very good at assigning resources where they are needed… Money is easy to measure in a spread sheet…. a lot of companies are run by administrators. When things change, they can’t adapt.”
Best estimates right now value Blackmagic, still based in Port Melbourne and founded by Petty in 2001, at $1.55 billion, with products such as the Ursa and Pocket Cinema cameras, Video Assist, and editing and grading program DaVinci Resolve used by film productions around the world.
Part of Blackmagic’s success was Petty’s feeling that twenty years ago, equipment costs were getting in the way of creativity. “When I started, the thing that really shocked me [about the industry] was [the cost of technology.]”
Blackmagic was about finding a way to shift the culture of [tech and film] away from what Petty characterised as ‘an equipment hire business.’
“I thought we could actually make creativity the business. People would have to compete with each other creatively.”
What big business can learn from Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Big Tech, says Petty is shifting their priorities. Namely, learning about the customer’s problems.
“I worked in post-production,” Petty remembered. “If a client walked out the door unhappy because of the work you just did, they are never coming back.”
The core to everything Blackmagic does, Petty said, is freedom. “The reason why we did these cams was to free people up so that they could be professional.”
He said practices that “entrap the customer” [licensing subscriptions, etc] and using predictive methodologies misdirect a company’s energies.
He cautioned: “Don’t use big data or metrics to get an understanding of the customer. Get to know them [we use trade shows]. Have conversations.
“You’ve got to get away from metrics and statistics.” Petty said. “They are destroying the world.”
We are bad at handling a crisis in business culture because of metrics, he said. No one feels free to make a decision because of the data.
“The problem is we are getting over-confident in the things we know,” Petty explained.
You don’t know what’s over the horizon he argued. Imaging what that is, sparks creativity. “You can’t tell whether a product is a failure if it is not successful… yet.”
Challenging the internal culture of a corporation may give rise to mini crises. But that’s a thing corporations can learn from. Petty says that the goal is renewal and everyone “gets a chance to learn and experiment and try things.”
Petty said, “some of the biggest innovations we have done have come from individual engineers working on things and we have realised how important they were… That has often meant senior managers walking out the door! But you have to allow that to happen.”
Blackmagic Design equipment has been a part of twenty of the thirty top grossing films of all time.
Petty thinks that big business needs to re-think their faith in hierarchies if they want to keep up with the culture that gave way to that kind of success.
“Reverse the hierarchy,” Petty said, “focus on giving people big goals and seeing whether people can pull it off.”
This is edited version of an interview conducted by Phillipa Leighton-Jones Global Ed. At Large and Anchor, the Trust WSJ / Barron’s Group
