Everett Collection

BRUCE NOLOP: “Moneyball” and “Margin Call” are terrific movies that offer penetrating insights about corporate America.

Moneyball: Although set in Major League Baseball, this movie incisively portrays real-world facets of corporate life. For example:

– The continuous fights for higher budgets and the struggles to get by with fewer resources (“Billy likes to keep the money on the field”)

– The difficulty of implementing change in the face of passive aggressive resistance within an entrenched culture (“You’re never going to get another job after this catastrophic season”)

– The role of data-driven decision making in overcoming unconscious biases (“He looks funny”)

– The right way to fire people (“Just be straight with them; no fluff, just facts”)

It also depicts the stress of delivering tangible results for impatient owners and the challenges of balancing work and family life. We empathize with Billy Beane.

Margin Call: This movie is arguably the best depiction of the Wall Street culture at the time of the 2008 financial crisis.

Some of the dialogue is over the top (“Be first, be smarter, or cheat”) but it’s generally right on the money (literally!) in describing an obsessive preoccupation with making and spending money (“You learn to spend what’s in your pocket”) and the rationalization of inherent conflicts between what’s best for the bank versus what’s best for its clients (“We are selling to willing buyers at the current market price”).

It also memorably shows the overreliance on quantitative risk models–including the disastrous failure to focus on tail risk–and the limited understanding of the complex derivative products that were being sold to unwitting investors.

Admittedly, it exaggerates some character flaws for dramatic effect. Nevertheless, this movie succeeds in telling a cautionary tale about the potentially calamitous consequences when an aggressive, swashbuckling culture is taken to extremes. In other words, greed is not always good.

Bruce Nolop is the former chief financial officer of Pitney Bowes Inc. and E*Trade Financial Corp.

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