139: Disruptive Technology and the War of the Currents (Part 1)

And welcome to our occasional movie episode.

This is an episode, the kind of an episode that we like to do where we take a movie, which could be a documentary, a popular film, Hollywood film, whatever, and run it through an organizational lens.

This time we have decided to choose a rather lesser known film called The Current War, which which was a 2017 film that basically tells the story, a somewhat historical fictional story about the War of the Currents that was fought between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse back in the late 19th century.

So the movie and the real story behind it is that Edison and Westinghouse found themselves as competitors and opponents on the institution of electricity or the availability of electricity countrywide.

Edison was favoring the direct current model.

George Westinghouse was favoring the alternating current model.

And in the course of the episode, the real life episode and the movie itself, it sort of chronicles how those two perspectives turned into a fierce and rather nasty competition between the two individuals and then ultimately led to Westinghouse winning out.

alternating current becoming the de facto standard.

Now, the movie kind of tells a story of the two human beings, but the War of the Currents was a no kidding, knock down, drag out kind of a war where one was accusing the other of all sorts of things.

There was backhanded deals, a lot of illicit stuff going on, some pretty nasty things such as actually electrocuting animals, which we'll certainly get into in the course of the discussion.

But the reason why we wanted to look at it from an organizational lens is because While the movie concentrates on pitting the two individuals against each other, it also represented their respective companies against each other.

And the story includes a lot of organizational activity about how the leader relationship with the members of the organization and recruiting, going behind people's backs, all that sort of thing.

It was two organizations fighting and competing against each other as well.

Yes, so as we've picked up on some of our other episodes before, you might remember another summer film on A League of Their Own, which we did on the National Women's Baseball League.

Organizations, no matter how different they are, have some of the same problems.

So this film is talking about funding, and there's an outsized role played by their funder in J.P. Morgan.

and a small role played by a famous future funder in Charles Schwab.

You might know these names among some household products that you have.

And so there's funding, there's patenting, there's strategy.

What kind of company do we want to be? What do we want to be known for? What's our legacy? There's human resources, unionization, legacy jobs, family jobs, certainly corporate towns.

I think that's less mentioned, but it's easily understood about the sizes of these organizations and the number of employees and families that work there.

There's a discussion about work-life balance.

So I think there are a number of interesting issues that come up no matter what organizations and institutions that we talk about in the series that were unexpectedly in this film as well, or at least I didn't realize that some basic script elements would get into these while we were talking about the major arc of the story that Tom's already mentioned.