Being a producer means making sure twenty to a hundred people are all communicating properly and doing what you need them to do. This requires a real and rare insight into leadership and human behavior.
An insight I do not possess. This is why I am not a producer.
But I do offer the following tip of the cat-herding iceberg:
There are three cases in which a person might not call you back: if there’s bad news, if there’s good news, or if there’s no news.
When the news is bad, people want to delay facing the music. When the news is good, people know there’s nothing to worry about, so they don’t put a hurry on it. When there’s no news, people think there’s no reason to update.
This means sometimes people don’t call you back right off, or at all. You have to hump, hump, hump that leg.
When you take into account that, while maybe 10% of the population is flaky, even the most on-the-ball person can be flaky 10% of the time. Multiply that across twenty to a hundred people, and that’s a lot of legs to hump.
I don’t know why producers produce, but I shore am glad they do.
