Chapter 18

It’s Better to Be Respected Than Loved

I’m not the most popular person in Los Angeles.

When you’re unreasonable, even for a good cause, you inevitably rub people the wrong way. People also tend to mistake focus for brusqueness. When you really believe that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, it’s hard to zigzag for the sort of small talk or conventional gestures that soothe egos. As you’ll recall from earlier chapters, I’ve always thought that was a waste of time. I’m never uninterested in other people’s ideas or contributions, but frankly I am relatively indifferent to their opinion of me.

Not caring what people think of you is a difficult quality to cultivate, but if you do, there is much you can accomplish. You just have to understand that being respected is more important than being loved. Respect is also easier to obtain. You only have to hold yourself to high standards, treat people fairly, and get things done.

And trust me, nothing patches over bruised egos and imagined slights like success. When your unreasonable focus accomplishes something, suddenly everyone is glad to be around you and eager for a share of the credit. Be as generous with credit as you are tight-fisted with your time. It doesn’t cost you anything and leaves people eager for future collaborations.

Disagreement Is Healthy—Learn How to Distinguish It from Dissent

Whether you’re running a business or leading a community initiative, it’s important that you and your employees or collaborators have the same goal. There will, and there should be, many different ways to get there. Disagreeing over the “how” is the only way to find the right path. You should encourage disagreement when it’s expressed in respectful, commonsense debate and doesn’t become personal or heated. Once you’ve heard everyone out and reached a logical decision on the correct way to go, though, you can’t have dissent.

Debate always has to end, and someone has to decide a way forward. Very often that someone has been me, and it’s the main reason why I ruffle feathers. But if you’re in charge, that someone is you, whatever others may think of you and your conclusions.

Good Principles Are Portable—Stick to Them

Believe it or not, I used to ruffle more feathers than I do now.

Earlier in my career, I had an even greater distaste for the conventions of social glad-handing and making nice than I do now. I was focused on the mission, and that was that. I simply assumed people would appreciate me for the results I got, and because that was the standard by which I judged myself, I was content to let them do the same.

In the business world, this was largely acceptable. Although there are entrepreneurs who succeed by charm, the rest of us do it by hard work, innovation, and sticking to the mission we’ve set for ourselves. Steve Jobs, the phenomenally creative late CEO of Apple, was famous for his caustic dismissal of ideas that didn’t measure up in his eyes. Look, however, at his record of success. William Randolph Hearst, who built one of America’s great publishing empires, famously told the reporters in his first newspaper’s city room not to remove their hats when at their desks. That way they wouldn’t have to stop to retrieve them if they were fired. I’m neither as imperious as Jobs nor as cavalier about other people’s fates as Hearst, but focus on a mission and a keen attention to time and the bottom line always have defined my relations with other people.

If that has made me less than loved, I simply point to my business and philanthropic accomplishments and keep on moving.

When I began to participate on the boards of nonprofits, where the rules were a little different, it’s fair to say I rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. My first board appointment was to Pitzer College, which I joined in 1970. Not long after, my goal was to help make the place financially sound. The school was only 7 years old, but the faculty and my fellow board members behaved as if they were stewards of a long-established institution with an overflowing endowment. Obviously, we were no stewards, and the endowment was nowhere near overflowing.

The first thing I wanted to do was to instill some financial discipline from top to bottom. My point seemed, to me anyway, perfectly unobjectionable. I argued that a college couldn’t keep hiking tuition to pay for higher salaries. It had to raise funds from other sources, not just from students, who were already paying an arm and a leg. And it was hard to raise new money when people were uncertain about how wisely the college was spending what it had. But instead of agreeing, everyone was annoyed with me, from my colleagues on the board to the college president to the faculty. People balked at my blunt criticism. But I didn’t back down, and over time Pitzer achieved sounder financial footing.

As much as my candor may have initially angered those with a stake in the school’s status quo, I eventually was named chairman of the board for my work. That was an expression of respect for what I had been able to do for a terrific college. I’ll take that over first place in a popularity contest any day. If you stop and think about it, I’ll bet you would too.

Let Go of Power Before You Let Go of Principles

My candor also ruffled feathers back in the 1980s on the board of MOCA, which I chaired in the early years after the museum was founded. My fellow board members felt I was autocratic because I wanted our meetings to have an agenda and to start and end on time. I also wanted to keep tabs on our budget and endowment, and I wanted people to give me clear and timely information to help do that. I didn’t think it was a lot to ask, but apparently some of my colleagues did.

Unfortunately, the boards of art institutions tend to be populated with well-meaning supporters of the arts who often lack any business background or appetite for imposing appropriate discipline. My style didn’t seem like a good fit for the board. When it became clear that our clashing methods were getting in the way of our shared goal, I bowed out.

Even so, I kept up my support for MOCA and my interest in a world-class contemporary art institution for our city. I simply decided that the best way for me to contribute to that goal was from a different position than head of the board. People came and went from that board, but the culture of lax oversight deepened until 2008, when wastefulness and inattention brought the museum to the brink of insolvency.

Sometimes, circumstances dictate that you get up and walk away, but they should never compel you to wholly abandon something in which you believe. That’s why Edye and I stepped in with an offer to provide a $30 million challenge grant, an approach a lot of philanthropies use to leverage their funds. We promised $15 million to match whatever MOCA could raise from other sources to replenish the endowment and another $3 million a year for five years to support major exhibitions. The grants came with the condition that the museum would agree to put itself on a sustainable footing and not to sell any of its art to meet expenses. Ultimately, our offer was accepted and MOCA—with its collection intact—remains one of the city’s great cultural assets.

Don’t Become Ensnared by Egos—Not Even Your Own

If you’re as unreasonable as I am, you have to try to factor into the equation how people will react to your style. I learned that the hard way while fund-raising for the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

As I described earlier, I worked with Andrea Van de Kamp and Dick Riordan to get fund-raising back on track. Once the ball was rolling, I knew we had to move fast. The price of materials was due to spike, and we had promised all our donors that we would be done building within a few years.

But people had begun to grumble that the building’s architect, Frank Gehry, had produced a design that just was too complicated and expensive to build. Frank is a Pritzker Prize winner and one of international architecture’s true superstars. The museum he designed for the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, was a global sensation and put the city on the world’s cultural map. It was pretty clear, though, that constructing the concert hall he had designed for Los Angeles was going to be expensive and hellishly complex.

I had some experience with Frank, and it was not an entirely happy history. Edye and I had commissioned him to design our home in Los Angeles. Frank’s office didn’t do construction documents at the time he was designing our house. After two years and seven designs—all of which I approved—I pushed Frank to finish. We hired the firm he recommended to do the construction documents, but he just wasn’t happy with my urging him to hurry, and we parted ways.

We had a similar situation with Disney Hall. Frank’s office had hired another firm, Dworsky Architecture, to do the construction documents, but after several million dollars was spent on the documents, Frank decided they were not usable. Dick and Andrea both agreed with me that, because Frank was done with his design, we should go ahead and hire someone else to put together the construction documents—and fast. But then Frank claimed only he could do construction documents. I didn’t back down and insisted that we needed to bring someone else in to get us moving. That’s when Frank submitted his resignation.

I have to say I was surprised. The press rushed to write stories that I had gotten into “another fight” with Frank. But within a week of his resignation, we all met and agreed that no one wanted Frank off the project. We reaffirmed that our goal was to get a Gehry-designed hall built on time. We agreed to disagree about whether “on time” would happen if Frank continued working on the project.

In this instance, I wasn’t the decision maker. Diane Disney Miller stepped in to make sure Frank stayed on and that his fees would be covered. I was not about to fight with the woman whose family’s generosity made the hall possible in the first place. I wasn’t going to let my ego get in the way of realizing a magnificent new asset for the city. You have to know when you’re the one whose feathers are ruffling and when not to insist you’re right just for the sake of winning.

From then on, I stayed focused on fund-raising, and Frank stuck to the project. The timeline, as I had suspected, stretched out quite a lot. But keeping Diane and Frank on board and building the hall was the most important thing. When the hall was finished, Frank gave a celebratory dinner on the stage to thank Dick, Andrea, and me. Today Disney Hall is Los Angeles’s brightest cultural jewel—admired everywhere as a superb-sounding concert hall and a brilliantly imagined building.

A few years later, I urged the Related Companies, which was developing the Grand Avenue Project, to hire Frank to design the first phase. Even though Frank and I don’t always see eye to eye, I have a tremendous amount of respect for his talent, and he has been generous with his advice and wise counsel on our new museum and many other projects. Today, I consider Frank a good friend.

If You’re in the Way, Move

From earlier chapters, you know something of my vision for turning downtown Los Angeles’s Grand Avenue into the central civic and cultural district of the region.

As part of that vision, I pushed for an architecturally significant design for the school district’s new Central Los Angeles High School No. 9. Despite the bureaucratic label, the school is a public arts campus situated at the northernmost end of Grand Avenue. It’s hard to imagine a better symbolic entry point to a grand boulevard alive with arts and culture than a free public school dedicated to educating young people of every background in the visual and performing arts.

Not long after Disney Hall opened, I had visited LaGuardia High School in New York City, the arts school depicted in the movie Fame. I was impressed by the activity within those halls—ballet, sculpture, painting, music—and the determination of the students to master their disciplines. I came to believe that Los Angeles, a city with so many working artists and a visual and performing arts mecca, needed a similar state-of-the-art school for its talented students, particularly those from working- and middle-class families.

I encouraged the school board to drop its plan for an ordinary public school at the site in favor of something that—although more expensive because of its world-class design and its arts curriculum—would capture the spirit, excitement, and talent surging through our city. I wanted a building that would inspire students before they ever walked through its doors. Eventually, the school board came around to the idea. They held an architectural competition, and the jury selected a design by Viennese architect Wolf Prix. The final design required some compromise, but it would still be a magnificent building that would hold its own across the freeway from Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo’s monumental Roman Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Once building started, though, I took some stiff hits in the local press. Some district officials believed I was exerting undue influence over the new school. You would be surprised how derisive the word billionaire can sound when thrown with the right spin. But I brushed it off and stuck to my idea: That the district needed a great flagship school for the arts, not just another run-of-the-mill campus for our students.

Then I was criticized for wanting the school to draw student talent from across the city, rather than solely from among nearby residents. We ended up compromising on that point, devoting most of the seats to local students until overcrowding in neighborhood schools eased. I got some heat for the price of the school, although much of the cost overrun came from clearing the site, the failure to lock in materials prices at a low rate, and the district’s mismanagement. (Somehow they miscalculated the square footage of the building.)

For a while, I tried to do what I did at MOCA and Disney Hall—compromise and revise my role. To support the school and its fundraising, I created a committee that included arts giants such as Plácido Domingo, Quincy Jones, and Tony Bennett. I promised to donate up to $5 million through our foundation—as long as the school showed headway in developing a curriculum, appointed an executive director for fund-raising, and recruited a talented principal. But nothing happened. I even tried to convince the mayor to make it a charter school. That didn’t work either.

With criticism continuing at a high pitch, I knew I could no longer be an effective advocate for the school. I bowed out—something I rarely do. I don’t recommend it, unless you’re becoming an obstacle to the very cause you want to support.

The school district never was able to recruit a well-regarded arts principal. Several of the country’s leading arts educators came to town, considered the position, and then said they wanted no part of a stifling school district bureaucracy and rigid collective bargaining agreement.

Nothing Wins People Over Like Success

The overall Grand Avenue Project, although slowed because of the poor economy, is still moving along. The high school has been built and casts a striking profile at the street’s northern end. Thanks to my convincing the Grand Avenue Project developer, Related Companies, to pay the city a $50 million down payment—which you’ll recall from an earlier chapter—a civic park is nearly complete, linking City Hall and the Music Center. And we’re building The Broad across the street from Disney Hall and MOCA.

Although it’s all taken longer than I wanted—but then, nearly everything does—I’m confident that the redevelopment of Grand Avenue will get done. People want to live downtown again. Population in the district keeps growing. Crowds flock to L.A. Live, the sports and entertainment complex just off Grand Avenue’s southern end. New businesses and restaurants are opening across the area. Millions of people who never set foot in downtown now consider it a destination—for sports, music, the visual arts, a great dinner, and spiritual reflection. Nobody thought it could be done. But it happened, thanks to the effort of a lot of persistent people and despite a lot of criticism.

Ruffled feathers should never get in the way of anything you really believe in and want to do. If you’re starting a business or, frankly, doing anything that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, you’re going to get some push back and sometimes even abuse. But if you stay the course, you’ll be surprised at how quickly success wins people over, no matter what they think of you.