The atmosphere around the large conference table was tense.
At one end sat a team of lawyers, dressed in three-piece suits and aggressively staring down the table.
At the other end sat a bunch of sloppy-looking beatnik types, trying to keep calm but obviously nervous.
The time was the late 1930s. The place was Hollywood. The lawyers were studio lawyers. The beatnik types were studio animators, trying to form a union. Among them was Chuck Jones, the famous director of all those Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons.
Jones really didn’t want to be there. He certainly didn’t want to start trouble.
And then one of the lawyers stood up. He stalked down to where the animators were huddled together. And he slammed his hand down on the table.
“One thing I want to make eminently clear,” he said. “Mr. Schlesinger is NOT running an eleemosynary institution.”
Leon Schesinger was the head of the studio. That much was clear. But what about that eleemosynary? What the hell did that mean?
“I loved words always,” Jones said later. “And I knew what he was doing.”
Jones felt like he was being played, manipulated, made to feel small and dumb. Like his vocabulary was small. Which it wasn’t!
In a flash, this sense of injustice boiled up and over. And Jones, very unlike himself, stood up, slammed his own hand down on the table, and started to yell.
“What do you mean by that word!”
The lawyer took a step back. “It… it means a charitable organization.”
Jones kept yelling. “Well why in the damn hell didn’t you just say that? How dare you use a word like that? We’re supposed to be working together here to try to solve a problem!”
The other animators suddenly took courage also. A team spirit was forming, thanks to Chuck Jones’s unexpected outburst.
The meeting didn’t go anywhere. After it was over, Jones expected he would be fired for his combativeness and troublemaking. And sure enough, he was called down immediately to Leon Schlesinger’s office.
But it wasn’t what Jones expected.
“I want to apologize,” said Schlesinger. “The lawyer didn’t understand we were trying to work this thing out together.”
The negotiations continued for some time after that. The animators kept together, with Jones at their head, all starting with that fight that Jones decided to pick. And eventually, Schesinger signed the contract allowing his workers to unionize.
My point for tonight is enlightenment. In other words, I don’t want to push a one-sided but misleading conclusion from the story above.
Instead, I want to throw out the idea that in complex situations, like in dealing with people, there is no single best way to proceed in all situations.
So in the interest of enlightenment, since we’ve already heard from Chuck Jones, let me leave you with some words to the other extreme. They come from that great philosopher of human nature, Dale Carnegie:
“You cannot win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. […] Distrust your first instinctive impression. Our first natural reaction in a disagreeable situation is to be defensive. Be careful. Keep calm and watch out for your first reaction. It may be you at your worst, not your best.”
And one final thought for tonight:
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