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The Educator in Residence
Why a different type of EIR could be your firm’s new secret weapon
In 1989, the Hollywood talent agency CAA moved into its new $25m offices designed by star architect I.M Pei.
In a little over a decade the company had grown from a $21,000 bank loan and no employees to brokering billion-dollar corporate deals and representing stars including Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, and Robert de Niro. How?
They’d gone beyond and beneath what looked to be their core business. As CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz describes in his memoir ‘ Who is Michael Ovitz?’:
“We were ultra-competitive and we were in a service business but my thesis was that we weren’t selling a product. We were selling and putting together people’s dreams .”
Michael Ovitz, CAA
To become the dream partners of choice, CAA began providing a growing suite of additional services to create and deliver more value and more abundance for the people they served.
