Recruiter ‘Kwan’—The Wisdom and Warts of the ‘Jerry McGuire’ Business Model

THE 'KWAN' AS 'COINCERN'

“Jerry McGuire”, the Tom Cruise/Cuba Gooding, Jr. now-classic 1996 movie in the recruiter/agent genre of films, in which Cruise portrays an idealistic sports agent battling “the system”, is, apart from the charm of its “feel-good” message, worth seeing (again) as a training film for recruiters.

Actually, to really understand the message and lessons of most movies, including “Jerry McGuire”, carefully and closely read the script, without the distractions and manipulations of perfectly mood-matched music, great legs, police sirens and crafty camera angles.

Wondering about how (often) recruiters and agents are portrayed by Hollywood movie makers, my online search lead me to read the “Jerry McGuire” script online (as a free PDF). I immediately understood, in a way that merely watching makes difficult, why it was such a hit and what it had to say about recruiting and talent agencies—as a cautionary tale, as well as an inspirational one.

(Reading the script allows organic and active highlighting, registering, reviewing, synthesizing, comparison and annotation of what the characters say and do that is impossible in passive real-time linear viewing of any movie.)

The Paradox of the Personal Impersonal

Reduced to its basics, the message of “Jerry McGuire” is this: Recruiting, the job of sports agent, indeed, any other businesses—including mom-and-pop businesses and capitalism itself— are most likely to succeed financially, morally and emotionally it they do one thing. Make the impersonal personalby adopting a warm-and-fuzzy “family model” that is also a cold-cash-cow money machine.

What made “Jerry McGuire” at least entertaining, if not enlightening, was its special way of applying a time-tested Hollywood formula: blend opposites in a way that appears to reconcile them—in this case, by melding the personal and the impersonal in a way that entertains and forces one to (not) think about the contradictions, much as every movie does.

Movies skillfully accomplish and specialize in this paradoxical feat—viz., successful packaging of contradictions. They do it by making the unreal illusions of special effects or film itself seem real (through “the willing suspension of disbelief”), or through the main characters, including the “Dracula” and “Twilight” vampire genre,  which blends dead-not dead to create the blood-sucking “undead”. The Disney empire was built the same way—on the dollars generated by the animated cartoon blend mouse-not mouse character, in the form of money-making paradoxical Mickey Mouse.

“Jerry McGuire” does the same thing by fusing cold-cash concerns with warm family feelings and loving concern into a hybrid concept I’ll call “coincern”.

“The Kwan” and “Coincern”

“Jerry McGuire” tells us that the way to blend the personal with the impersonal is to respect and go for “the kwan”—a corruption of “coin” coined by Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s football-star and sole McGuire-client character), who, intoning “the kwan”, somehow makes blatantly material money-making sound like and fuse with something sublimely spiritual, like “the Tao”.

As Tidwell puts it, “Yeah, man, it means love, respect, community… and the dollars too. The package.  The kwan.”

That spiritual and elevating element turns out to be “family” as the primal and ultimate community, in the form of businesses run like families and families run like businesses (Tidwell’s and McGuire’s). This fusion of coin and family values— “’coincern’ for others”—is pithily summed up in “Jerry McGuire”’s tacit equation: “Show me the love!” = “Show me the money!” (the right half of the formula being chief among the film’s engrammyish-winning phrases).

The Jerry and Rod exchange that lays out this paradoxical melding of love/money, personal/impersonal, community/commerce, feeling/unfeeling and—above all—recruiting/family is the scene with this dialogue (italics mine, for emphasis):

Tidwell:  “It’s a very personal, very important thing.  It’s a familymotto.  So I want to share it with  you.  You ready?”

Jerry: “Yes.”

Tidwell: “Here it is.  ‘Show me the money.’”

Jerry: “Show. Me. The. Money.”

(The latter intoned in a paradoxically impersonally robotic, yet personally bonding way, reinforces the film’s central harmonizing, yet somehow conflicted theme of  “the personal impersonal” recruiter/agent.)

Accomplishing this—making the impersonal personal—means, for Jerry McGuire (Tom Cruise), running after and a business as though it’s all about family. It means personalizing services and relationships otherwise focused on the accumulation of that impersonal medium of exchange—money.

Chief among the dimensions of personalization is loyalty, which figures very prominently in the film (which never really explains or justifies the priority loyalty is given, instead treating it as a moral and emotional given that every viewer and recruiter is expected to instinctively understand and accept).

Like most things in movies, unswerving and blind loyalty is portrayed far more than examined, in keeping with the rather un-Socratic axiom, “Only the unexamined movie is worth viewing.”

Easing Community-Commerce Tension

Key to this tricky juggling and balancing act is the attempt to reconcile a fundamental contradiction by living and exalting it: the contradiction between “community” and “commerce” (roughly corresponding to the tensions between what sociologists call “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft”, or the “personal” vs. the “impersonal”).

Although everybody has feel-good-feelings about family and equally feel-good-feelings about making money, in real life the profit and money-making motive somehow always seems to (d)evolve into a profits-before-people and assembly-line impersonality.

This is usually encapsulated in the “this isn’t personal; it’s business” mantra, and—at worst—a Wall Street Gordon Gecko ruthlessness in the pursuit of money of the kind Jerry McGuire’s steel-legs-steely-hearted corporate-predator ex-fiancée “Avery” (Kelly Preston) displays in the film.

The purpose of “Jerry McGuire” was to make everybody feel good about both money and family, without sacrificing either.

That’s smart marketing, especially since most people end up trying to make money and babies (usually the former, to pay for the latter), and wanting to feel good about both. In crossing the line by marrying the loyal colleague, “Dorothy” (Renée Zellweger) who initially joins him as his assistant, Jerry McGuire endearingly blurs it.

Triumph of the Little Underdog

Another “Jerry McGuire” theme and subliminal massage of recruiter and other biz-type egos was the “little guy”, underdog David vs. dog-eat-dog corporate Goliath motif.

Because average people fill average theater seats, it was no accident that much of recruiter Jerry McGuire’s warmth was directed to the little guys—literally little in the case of the endearingly vulnerable tyke whose mom Jerry, himself a corporate little-guy David, eventually marries and of the tiny helpless goldfish he lovingly takes with him when he leaves the callous Goliath sports agency that fired him for espousing “caring” for clients in a mission statement.

Although hardly puny, the Rod Tidwell character is nonetheless depicted as an empathy-worthy underdog in the cold calculations of big-league bidding.

Fundamentally, what “Jerry McGuire” pitched was the idea that far from being mutually exclusive, the personal and the impersonal (love and money,  kwan as coin and concern, family and business, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, big-bucks business built by and for little people) can and must be blended when striving for complete and perfect (im)personal success.

Putting Real Heart into Emotional Labor

In employment-psychology terms, the film attempts to transform (or at least repackage) whatever  “emotional labor” corporations allow or require (in the form of using positive employee feelings and caring concern—fake or real—as sales tools) into a more authentic and emotionally satisfying labor of love. Nice aspiration. Nice try.

That’s about as easy to pull off as a wart.

If you are willing to believe that is as easy as “Jerry McGuire” makes it look, you’re ready for a heart-warming script that I’d title (if I were to write it) “Smile!”, based on the McDonald’s catchphrase “Have a nice day!”

It would be an inspiring family-friendly story about a fast-food counter-clerk who, like Jerry McGuire, quits his impersonal McJob in order to start his own much smaller burger chain and bond with each and every kid screaming for the toy that comes with the over-priced fries.

On second thought, I’ve got a better title for this “Jerry McGuire” spinoff.

“The Kwan-Artist”.