M+E Europe

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — The full-day program for the May 19 Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS), held at the Universal Hilton in Los Angeles, and online via MESA’s virtual platform, covered all the bells and whistles of today’s newest media and entertainment technologies, from NFTs to the metaverse, new workflows to the latest data and security solutions.

“I think this is going to be a little different,” Tutti Taygerly, leadership coach, author, and founder of consultancy firm Taygerly Labs, said to kick off her closing keynote of the day, “Make Space to Lead.” “All of the things we do [in business] are really important. But equally important is finding time for the white space, for the being, for surviving after these years of COVID.”

Both big names — Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Meta and more — along with start-ups have looked to Taygerly and her business for design help in the past, and after 22 years of doing it — and doing it well — Taygerly came to the realization that she wasn’t making enough space for her own self-fulfillment. “I felt like I had armor on, that I needed to perform and do things in a certain way to survive in the world,” she said.

Moving into her second career of consulting, Taygerly made it a mission herself and her clients that they should make more space for themselves, something that’s slowly taken away as we grow older, as grades, jobs and “the need to do things” takes over. “[Life becomes] ruthless prioritization, because it’s impossible to get everything done,” she said. “It’s gotta hurt to say ‘no’ to something. It’s a punishment, self-flagellating culture.”

Taygerly shared ideas with attendees on how they can establish structure for themselves, and their teams, to amplify creative flow, and avoid “firefighter mode,” moving from flare-up to flare-up, and continually context-switching between each urgent and evolving priority.

Instead of drowning in the quicksand of changing customer or leadership needs, Taygerly shared a model that takes a systemic approach to leading, one that changes limiting patterns and focuses on flow states. Make space to lead across these four different facets of your leadership (personal, projects and processes, people, and the organization as a whole), she said, and shift your mindset toward spaciousness. Build in permission to slow down in order to speed up.

“I help leaders find their north star, find the life they want to lead, and then … we find how you get from here to there with a series of experiments,” Taygerly said.

“We have to treat data with the same sort of care we treat our talent and our loved ones,” said Nadya Ichinomiya, chairwoman of the Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH) Foundation, who introduced Taygerly before the keynote. “When life is wake up, kick ass, repeat, it feels like life is on autopilot. Your work life can feel like it’s this endless to-do list. Then you’re starting your work week on the weekend to get ahead.

“These are patterns, and when we start repeating them, we start believing it’s just how we do things. The danger is when those patterns become your identity.”

That can lead to inner resentment, she said. And the way out is to recognize the difference between “being vs. doing.” “Most of the time we’re ‘go, go, go, to-do list, hit that next milestone,’” she said. “And we don’t take time to pause and be.”

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), presented by ICVR and sponsored by Genpact, MicroStrategy, Whip Media, Convergent Risks, Perforce, Richey May Technology Solutions, Signiant, Softtek, Bluescape, Databricks, KeyCode Media, Metal Toad, Shift, Zendesk, EIDR, Fortinet, Arch Platform Technologies and Amazon Studios.

Video presentations of each session will be made available here.