Watch “Ronin”, Learn About Business

Ever think about this? You can learn such a wealth of things from this movie- project management, negotiation, business administration. It’s all there.

1. Tools

Your team needs the right tools to get the job done, and you must be receptive to their needs and provide what they ask for. When Robert DeNiro’s character says he’ll need a Colt M1911 pistol, Sean Bean’s character laughs at him and says, “that’s an old gun”. But DeNiro is the baddest dude they have, and that’s all he legitimately needs.

If I hired my Dad as an IT consultant and said, “we’ve got a computer set up for you, what do you need”? he’d say, “Notepad and a command pompt”. It’s true. Every time I tell him about a new IDE or text editor that has syntactical help for 50 different languages, he says, “I use Notepad”. And that’s all he really needs. You can’t scoff that that.

2. Team

Just as your team needs the right tools to get the job done, you need the right team to get the job done. These guys in Ronin have to steal a breifcase from a Russian mobster. You figure you’re going to need to drive, shoot, know the terrain, gather intelligence, and use pretty advanced communication technology to stay one step ahead of your adversary. A tricky job with a lot of incongruent specifications demands a team where all of those gaps are filled by each member’s unique abilities.

However, you don’t always need to hire ten guys to do the work that could be done by two. We see the virtue of DeNiro’s strength when he is forced to basically go it alone and adapt to limitations. When he can’t do something alone, he reaches out, but not until then. He gets shot in the abdomen, navigates his way to a friend of a friend (Drax from Moonraker, nonetheless) and patches himself up. Hell, he even tells them how to do the surgery while they do it.

3. Risk

A basic principle of negotiation: people who take risks generally will want to be proportionally compensated for doing so.

DeNiro: “If it’s gonna be amateur hour, the price has to go up. I want x dollars a week in my bank account here and then y dollars when we finish.”

This happens after Sean Bean’s character nearly gets them killed in an arms deal. When we came into this job, it was a hit and run. Now we’ve got this guy over here who I don’t trust and who almost gets us waxed. We’ve got to renegotiate the terms based on this new risk that has been introduced.

We can learn a lot from that- knowing your worth, being okay with walking away from the table every now and then, etc.

4. Know Your Opponent

This could be anybody- a prospective business partner, a competitor, anybody. DeNiro probes his adversaries with care and diligence to find out what makes them tick before he engages them. He goes to the hotel where this Russian guy is and decides to test his security by cleverly placing a sign on a luggage cart that he then has pulled away, the sudden noise causing the target’s bodyguards to react and enabling him to photograph their tactics.

McDonalds doesn’t know who you are if you go there every so often. Union Square Hospitality Group has reservation staff trained to log things you might say during the reservation process that could enhance your dining experience. They casually pick up on things like birthdays, professions, anniversaries, and log them into a database so that they can better serve you.

The airline Eos used to Google the entire passenger list of each flight to gather information for the flight crew. That way, they knew what you did, what nickname you liked, and a host of other information to improve your experience with them.

5. Shoot Randomly at Children to Show Your Resolve

This is just a good lesson, in general. Wait. What?