Leading People - Featuring Linda Hill

Client: Harvard Business School Publishing

The experienced production team at Harvard Business School Publishing makes hundreds of films for Harvard ManageMentor, a highly successful online training series used by businesses around the word. Many of their films are interviews with Harvard professors and well-known business experts.

For the upcoming version of Harvard MentorManager, the producers were tasked with creating something new.  Melissa Dailey (New Media Manager) approached us to create a series of short films that would help their clients understand why each subject in their program was important. They were looking for an editorial style and trying to get away from relying on “talking heads.”

Melissa and her producers selected the subject of each film and a prominent business professional to relate their personal experience with that topic.  Before we began shooting, we recorded each interview radio-style and finished an edit of the soundtrack without picture. Once approved, the soundtrack became the basis for developing the visual shot list and schedule. 

Linda Hill is an ethnographer whose special area of study is leadership. She studies leaders of corporations, organizations and countries. HBSP wanted our interview of Linda to appear in the film and so we broke our rule about recording sound only interviews for the series.   We flew to Washington for two days of shooting at the US headquarters of Audi of America’s US headquarters with CEO, Scott Keogh and Linda.