Commencement Speech Delivered by Robert Gottlieb at 155th Elmira College Commencement on Sunday, June 2, 2013 at the First Arena: "Innovation" Hello and thank you to President Dr. Ronald Champagne and Elmira College for welcoming me here today to speak. It is an honor to be here. I have to say that I never thought that when I was sitting in the audience as a student, graduating from Elmira College, that I would be here in this capacity. Today I am here to talk to you about the origin and importance of innovation. After graduation from Elmira, upon my father’s recommendation, I joined the William Morris talent agency in their Agent-in-Training program. This started in the mailroom of WMA, even if you graduated at the top of your class, or had a graduate degree or a law degree, and led to a secretary position, and then an assistant position, before an agent position. That is why it is surprising to me today to see employees who are eager to get promoted off of their desk quickly. While I was an assistant at WMA, I was an assistant for four years! Seeing many of my peers move on to other departments made me feel very eager, but I knew to wait for the right position to come along, while others rushed headlong into positions that would ultimately prove unfruitful for them. That is why the road to success is often less traveled. The poet Robert Frost mused about this in writing, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference.” After biding my time, I would go on to become the head of the literary department at William Morris, join the Board of Directors as the youngest member in the history of the company, and eventually start my own literary agency, which is now the leading literary agency in America, as well as the UK where we do not even have offices! My company now represents some of the biggest names in publishing, from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, to the Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert Estates, Catherine Coulter, Deepak Chopra, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Elizabeth George, and Sylvia Day. I did all of this through innovation… When attending book fairs and trade shows as a young rookie agent, I went to the area of small, independent presses, and that was where I picked up a copy of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, written by an author named Tom Clancy, who was then working as an insurance agent. He was enthralled by military history. Since I shared a passion for the subject, I asked the publisher who was at the book convention to let me borrow a copy of the book to take it home for the night and read it. It was a challenge to read a book in one night, but I was able to read the entire novel and speak to the author the next day, asking him to let me represent him for a print deal with a major trade publisher. At that time, this type of move for an author was unheard of, and even opposed. This was a result of intellectual snobbery and old gentlemanly attitudes pervading publishing, over the thought that a book could never move out of a paperback printing and into a hardcover printing. Before this point, books were mostly read in hardcover and were for a highbrow audience, but this move out of paperback into hardcover was done with THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, the book I represented by Tom Clancy. The book went on to become a mega bestseller and a movie was made, starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin. Many other commercially successful books and authors in major trade publishing would follow suit when publishers began to mine their paperback lists for soon-to-be successful authors as a common practice. History had it worse than this for those in publishing, though. An editor of genius by the name of Maxwell Perkins, who edited the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, had to combat much of this resistance by finding his own way to innovate. Perkins advocated for the authors he edited, demanding their freedom of speech to use profanity in literature—to prevent censorship—much to the chagrin of the irritably uptight old boy’s club that publishing was at that time. Or when an author was in need of having their bills of thousands of dollars for their therapist paid for by the publisher, Perkins was there to fight for his author by asking the owners of the company to front the money. Today that would be unheard of at a major corporation, but clearly, Perkins was not afraid of upsetting the apple cart, or being what was then considered a bit unreasonable, for the sake of artistic progress, as well as the change of traditional and narrow thought. Perhaps the playwright George Bernard Shaw said it best in encapsulating the spirit seen in Perkins: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Also during the time of Perkins, books were mostly read in literary hardcover, until other publishers started jumping on board, such as Ballantine Books or Simon & Schuster, in creating an imprint called Pocket Books. The groundbreaking idea was to create small, paperback books that the soldiers could carry in their pockets while away at war. Like any new idea that threatened the norm, it was met with resistance. The old boys of publishing thought these novels were trashy and uncouth for the public to read, as the publishers had named themselves as the literary tastemakers. Publishers thought that books were to be read by the wealthy and educated, and should be about the ideas the publishers believed were important, but who were they to decide? These “pocket books,” which went on to become the mass market paperbacks we know today, as seen in the grocery stores and airport kiosks, would change publishing and the way in which we read, forever. Today the landscape of publishing and reading has changed drastically with the advent of e-books and the Internet, which shares knowledge with us all. Publishers are no longer the gatekeepers or literary tastemakers—now we see the democratization of publishing taking place. We also see the monetizing of copyright in ways that were not seen only years ago. Authors now self-publish their works as e-books on sites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Whether the works of these self-published authors are successful, depends on how many readers choose to download their e-books. What can often result from enough downloads, is the justification for an agent to step in and create a print deal for the author with a publisher, and possibly film, TV, foreign, and audio deals for along the way. This is what I like to call the reengineering of publishing. Even more so in today’s digital age, innovation is necessary to change, and change is necessary to evolution. We live in a postmodern society where most everything that has been done or will be done, can be spun in new and different ways than before. The telephone is over 100-years-old. Could Alexander Graham Bell have foreseen the iphone and Apps? If you’re not first in innovation, you’re last. Former Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs understood this in creating the iPhone and iPad. Every tech company after him can be seen as imitators as opposed to innovators, leading the pack, or as Steve Jobs put it, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Since the other technology companies are not leading the way like Apple in innovating, they will continue to fight an uphill battle, just to keep pace. My company Trident Media Group innovates, in creating an e-book self-publishing service for our clients. Other literary agencies before in the industry went other ways, but made mistakes and created conflicts of interest between themselves and their clients. Innovation has to be smart. The mistakes of other agencies happened since some of them charge exorbitant commissions, rely on aggregators, and have become rights holders, while others make insistent demands on how the e-book should take shape, since the agency holds a vested interest. From learning about their mistakes, we went on to create a better system for our clients who want to try the route of self-publishing their e-books, before breaking into major trade publishing by innovating within our space. So with all of this in mind, I can’t stress enough the need for you all, in going out into the world outside this campus, to begin to innovate and therefore improve the way we all live on many levels. Take advantage of the great spirit of innovation that Elmira has instilled in you, for it has been here all along, from the days in which the school was founded. If you know your school history, Elmira was originally founded as an all-girls’ school at a time when it was difficult for women to get into college. The founders of this school never doubted that they knew what was good and right for the future of this school…so don’t doubt your ability to innovate, either, since you may one day find yourself on this stage.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 02:56:11 +0000