Internationally known as an Academy Award-winning director and less known as an entrepreneur, actor-filmmaker Ron Howard offered lessons in leadership and teamwork at the 18th Annual Finance Conference hosted by the Seidner Department of Finance at the Boston College Carroll School of Management.
The conference also highlighted sobering assessments of financial markets and the economy, with leading experts advising the audience to buckle up for a rough ride in the near term. Referring to business and political leaders around the world and how they’re reacting to tariffs and other abrupt policy changes in the United States, self-described conservative Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff said: “All they’re talking about is pulling out of the United States. They just don’t trust us anymore.”
John and Linda Powers Family Dean Andy Boynton and Ron Howard
More than 200 people, mostly alumni working in finance-related fields, turned out for the daylong gathering held on May 8 in the Robert J. Murray ’62 and Family Function Room of Yawkey Athletics Center. Among those assessing market trends was Marc Seidner, MCAS ’88, P ’24, a leader in the asset management industry who has helped guide the Finance Conference over the past decade. This past academic year, Seidner made a gift to the Carroll School—the largest in the school’s history—which led to the renaming of the Finance Department in his honor.
Arriving for his conversational-style keynote address, Howard took a seat on an elevated platform with a maroon curtain behind him, greeted there by John and Linda Powers Family Dean Andy Boynton. Wearing a blue blazer and open-collar shirt, topped off with a baseball cap, Howard explored the entrepreneurial and managerial aspects of his creative work at the prompting of the dean.
He explained that his father was a struggling character actor who never quite made it. Howard himself was a child actor who first achieved fame when he was six years old in his role as “Opie” on the iconic Andy Griffith Show from 1960 to 1968. Like many child actors, his work dried up during his teen years, and he enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California, where he said his favorite class was “Film, Finance, and Distribution.”
He told the conference goers, “I began to dream of this idea—of taking control of my own projects and not waiting for the phone to ring.” The phone did ring, leading to his role as high-schooler Richie Cunningham on another iconic television series, Happy Days. But as Howard tells it, even more propitious was the emergence of independent filmmaking around that time. His breakthrough venture came with Night Shift in 1982, followed by the romantic comedy Splash that made Tom Hanks a Hollywood star. Those successes led Howard to cofound his own production company, Imagine Entertainment.
Ron Howard
Boynton asked a question about leadership and teamwork: “To get the best story, how do you extract the best and most creative work from talented people?”
“Working with different people, I had to consciously come to the understanding that I didn’t have all the answers,” Howard replied, noting that it took him a little while to form this outlook. “I had to create an environment where people know that I’m wide open” to ideas other than his own.
The director and producer said he goes by what he calls the “six of one” rule, as in the saying, “six of one, half dozen of another”—meaning that if a team member believes in an idea that's different from yours, you should let them run with that choice, as long as it achieves an objective of the project. The different idea has the same effect, in other words.
Such an approach serves two purposes, Howard said: It makes those talented people more invested in the project, and it builds trust. He added that when he lets actors on the set do something their way rather than his, “They always give me something I’m glad to have in the cutting room.”
““Working with different people, I had to consciously come to the understanding that I didn’t have all the answers. I had to create an environment where people know that I’m wide open [to ideas other than my own]. ”
During another session, Seidner and Marvin Loh, managing director and senior strategist at State Street Global Markets, commented on today’s investment environment in a discussion moderated by Ronnie Sadka, Haub Family Professor, senior associate dean for faculty, and chairperson of the Seidner Department of Finance. Referring to the turbulence in financial markets, Seidner, who is chief investment officer of non-traditional strategies and a managing director at PIMCO, set the tone by saying, “A lot of money is being lost.”
PIMCO sees a 50-50 chance of a recession this year, Seidner said, adding that now would be a good time to buy short-term bonds with maturities of less than five years. When Sadka asked about stocks, he replied, “It just doesn’t feel like a very conducive environment for equities to do well in the near term. Be cautious.” Both Seidner and Loh (who struck a slightly more upbeat note on equities) underscored the value of global diversification for those seeking to navigate uncertainty and reduce portfolio volatility.
Marc Seidner, MCAS ’88, P ’24 and Marvin Loh
In a separate presentation moderated by Daniel E. Holland III, MCAS ’79, P ’07, ’08, Rogoff warned that long-lasting and adverse changes in the global trade system could result from what he described as “incompetent” tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. The Mauritas C. Boas Professor at Harvard and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, he also questioned the assumption that these heavy taxes on goods entering the country would create jobs domestically.
Rogoff pointed out that manufacturing in the United States has actually been rising, and that the US remains a global superpower in agricultural production. And yet, there are still fewer jobs in those sectors on account of automation. “Even if we close the borders, it won’t increase jobs,” he said, owing to the downstream effects of automation driven by AI and other technologies.
The conference ended with entertainment and insights from Apollo Robbins, who has been dubbed “the gentleman thief” and first made news when he picked the pockets of Secret Service agents while entertaining at an event where former president Jimmy Carter spoke. After demonstrating his craft by mysteriously separating a couple of audience members from personal items including a wristwatch, Robbins, sporting a gray bowler hat, gave a quick tutorial on perception, deception, and attention management.
Apollo Robins
He said that educational institutions rightly stress the importance of critical thinking but need to develop a sharper idea of what that means, at a time when reality is often grossly and surreptitiously distorted. Making a subtle distinction, he said that maybe the future of critical thinking is less about identifying what is false or unfactual than about “determining what is real.” That involves, among other things, questioning one’s own perception and past beliefs.
“You can deceive with facts,” Robbins said, alluding to situations in which a factual statement or body language is used to instill a false belief about what is happening or not happening. He urged people to not think of truth as “a light switch” that illuminates the picture all at once, but rather as a “dimmer switch” in reverse, gradually bringing reality into focus by taking in more and more views and perspectives.
