The Hero Figure in Business and Cinema

Textbooks and manuals on management suggest that managers are heroes who deal with difficult problems of collective adaptation and change. American films are similarly built on the premise of a hero confronted with extremely difficult situations. What if this hero figure promoted for so long in both management literature and the American film industry was the same at the structural level? This paper will attempt to clearly define the performance of heroes that is perhaps shared by the imagination industry (Hollywood) and the image of human relations in the western industrial world. We shall follow this picture of the Manager as Hollywood Hero–or the Managerial–Hollywood Hero(MHH) –through multiple examples in both writings on management and American movies.