What can we learn about leadership from the Marvel Cinematic Universe? An awful lot, if our guides are Dr. Gordon B Schmidt and Dr. Sy Islam. In this episode, I talk to Gordon and Sy about how they first got interested in Marvel, why the MCU is such a great setting for exploring leadership practices, and how they worked together to create Leaders Assemble! Leadership in the MCU.
Guest Bios
Gordon B. Schmidt, PhD, has a doctorate in Organizational Psychology from Michigan State University. He researches the Future of Work and how technology is changing the nature of company–employee relations today, which has been published in a number of academic journals. He co-edited a book with Richard Landers on how social media is used in selection and recruitment. He does research related to virtual leadership and how technology impacts the leadership process. He has done research related to the gig economy and the communities of gig workers who have sprung up around crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk. He has written about the future of the field of I-O Psychology related to outreach of the field to those in practice. He also researches leadership and/or motivation in varied contexts including lean production, corporate social responsibility initiatives, job apathy, and popular culture. He teaches courses in organizational behavior, training methods, employee relations, organizational development, organizational theory, leadership, and human resources. His work related to teaching has been presented at conferences and published in a number of journals. He won a teaching excellence award from his college in 2015. He acted as the program chair for the 2020 virtual Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society Conference. He is the incoming co-editor for the journal Management Teaching Review. He consults with organizations, primarily related to leadership, motivation, and social media-related areas.
Sy Islam, PhD, has over 10 years of experience in a variety of corporate, academic, and applied settings. He is an Associate Professor of Industrial Organizational Psychology at Farmingdale State College where he teaches courses related to training and leadership development. He has conducted research on team
adaptation, social media in hiring, and consumer feedback via social media. In addition to his role as a professor, he is a co-founder and vice president of Consulting with Talent Metrics. In his role at Talent Metrics, he develops solutions for organizations in training and development, selection, survey design,
performance management, and team building. He has served as the president of the Long Island Chapter of the Association for Talent Development and co-chair of the People Analytics Special Interest Group at ATD NYC. He is the winner of the SIOP Presidential Recognition Award and a Faculty Mentorship award from Farmingdale State College’s Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology.
Transcript
This transcript is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies. Please do not quote myself or any of my guests based on this transcript.
[00:00:00] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: Hello, and welcome to Department 12, where we talk about everything. IO, psych, I’m your host, Dr. Ben Butina. And about a year ago, I talked to Dr. Mike Urick about a book series he’s editing called Exploring Effective Leadership Practices Through Popular Culture. In that interview, we talked about the first book in the series written by Mike himself on leadership practices and Star Wars. We also talked about why using popular culture to illustrate leadership practices is a good idea, so I won’t be re-covering that ground again here . Today, we’re going to focus on a new book in this series, this one focused on the Marvel cinematic universe. And I’m speaking with the books co-authors and returning guests here on the show, Dr. Gordon Schmidt and Dr. Sy Islam. Welcome back, guys.
[00:00:46] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: Great to be here.
[00:00:47] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: Glad to be back.
[00:00:48] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: Let’s start with you Gordon. You’re an associate professor of organizational leadership at Purdue, Fort Wayne, as well as a consultant. Can you tell me about your first memory of Marvel?
[00:01:01] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: My first memory of comics and I really, I got into comics through my dad and started with a lot of the series is I liked as a kid, so shows like GI Joe and transformers.
Through my dad liked to buy things and sell them for profit to the garage sale. And he bought a big box of comic books that had a bunch of Marvel superheroes, a Spider-Man and, , Avengers were two things that really resonated for me of that box. And that got me out of the toy licensed books into this huge world of superhero.
Through Marvel you know, with Avengers and Spiderman, which are all in this book that we’ve written now. So that was kind of the big intro. Like I’ve seen some of those things, but that was really where I read them in comic form and said, I like Spider-Man. I liked the Avengers when I was just kind of aware of.
[00:01:54] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: Say Islam is an associate professor of IO psychology at Farmingdale state college, as well as the co-founder and vice-president of consulting with talent metrics. So same question as Gordon. What are you going with Marvel?
[00:02:07] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: So I remember when I was a kid, my parents were trying to get me to read.
And at the time, my older brother, he really loved comic books and he had a huge box of comics. And I think my parents and my brother thought, well, you know, maybe, maybe he’ll like comics and. I remember the first comic book that I actually read was a, the mighty Thor. I think I want to say number 1 38, where he fights the gray gargoyle.
And I thought, I thought it was okay. And I started looking through some of the other comics that my brother had, and they were mostly seventies, era, Avengers comics, and captain America, specifically captain America and the Falcon. My brother for some reason had a ton of Jack Kirby issues. And those really got me hooked and I, you know, the also had a lot of fantastic four.
And so you know, we talk about captain America and the book and the other, the other interesting thing about the book and, and comics in general is my dad, I think only had, or only knew one piece of psychology. When I was when I was younger and that was positive reinforcement. So if I got good grades, my dad would take me to the comic book store, or, you know, when, when I was really young that there wasn’t really a comic book store in the area, you would have to go to a spinner rack at a local convenience store.
And he was just like, all right, you did. Pick something from the rack. And I just started picking up comic books and it sort of became a habit and I really fell in love with the art form and it’s, it’s become an art form that I’ve been reading over the last, like my God, 30, over 30 years now, my goodness.
[00:03:44] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: Let’s jump back to Gordon IO. Psychology is notorious for having. Dozens, I don’t know, maybe hundreds of definitions and theories about leadership. And given that you’re writing a book about leadership, how did you incite conceptualize leadership for the purposes of this book?
[00:04:03] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: So you know, I, in teaching in a leadership program sort of have a well-developed concept of leadership, but I also think it makes sense to keep it simple.
But to me, leadership is a process. So we’re not just looking at somebody, who’s got a fancy title and it’s a process. Influencing other people to either think or behave in a way differently than they would on their own. So for leaders to matter, they’re really influencing really what people do and how they think.
And it’s not just getting somebody to do something they would have done already. It’s having sort of a tangible impact on that, on that person. And it’s not just. This person’s my, my official boss. So they’re influencing me. We all have influence on other people have an impact on things. And even if you’re technically the boss, you should be influenced by your followers often.
So that’s kind of the perspective we bring, which I think to some degree is, is empowering because it’s not just when I’m the CEO, I’ll be a leader. It’s all of us can have impact now and have influence on others. So, thank
[00:05:12] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: you back to you say, I know that you and Gordon are both Marvel fans and the MCU movies are among the most popular movies in the world.
Is that why you chose to write this book about Marvel or is there something about the MCU that makes it well-suited to discuss leadership practices?
[00:05:30] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: Well, I think part of it is that it is really a big part of the culture. And, and, and to be honest, I, I, Gordon and I talked about this a little bit as we were writing the book that when we were kids, if you would never imagine that Marvel comics would be such a big part of in fact, You know, film style of the current century, which is kind of nuts because when I was a kid, it wasn’t, it wasn’t that cool to like comic books.
And now, you know, people are wearing, I mean, I could buy almost any type of Marvel comics merchandise just to the local store. So it’s kind of shocking that it’s been such a big part of you know, a big part of the culture now. But I would say that one of the really. Great things about comics is when you’re a kid.
And you talk about any of the comic book characters, we always talk about who’s the strongest, who’s the fastest, who’s the smartest. And you know, for, you know, when as Gordon and I were talking about the Marvel cinematic universe, we could see so many connections and so many different types of leaders.
That were popping up in these movies in some cases intentionally, you know you know, when you look at the difference between somebody like captain America and iron man, and sometimes, you know, much more subtly when you look at you know, Spiderman and the variety of different ways in which he both accepts leadership and provides leadership.
So we really saw those connections. And it seemed like such a natural fit for a discussion around leadership, both from the perspective of, well, people actually will want to kind of, you know, think about their, their movie experiences and these stories a little bit more deeply, but also because there’s a lot of great examples in the movies that are very relatable, I think, to to the fans.
[00:07:16] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: And it seems like relative to other comic series or comic companies that. Interaction between the protagonists, either formally as part of a team or as part of crossover episodes or process over issues, I should say has been kind of part of the Marvel DNA from the start. Is that
[00:07:36] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: accurate? Yeah, I would say that’s pretty accurate.
One of the big differences between DC and Marvel at least in the beginning in the early sixties, was that Marvel characters were seen as much more human you know, Peter Parker Spider-Man he has, he has money problems, right? Like, you know, Bruce Wayne Batman does not really have any money problems.
We don’t really get to see that part of it. And so there’s an element to Marvel where. Those characters a little bit more down to earth. That’s changed a little bit as the characters from DC have changed as well, but definitely that’s something that we see very much in the in the Marvel cinematic universe is that they’re, you know, they’re very character focused, they’re focused on decisions and the consequences of those decisions.
And that’ll also. Makes it a great way to think about leadership because leaders make choices and those choices have consequences. And, you know, this gives us a great way to kind of think about leadership in a, in a safe space where we can have these debates about what should somebody have done, you know, to avoid the civil war between you know, Marvel, cinematic heroes, or how should they have handled.
That just natural and especially if you spent an inordinate amount of time on the internet, arguing about comic books as I might have in college you know, that that’s definitely par for the course for what comic book fans tend to do. And now I think MCU fans tend to do this.
[00:09:02] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: Yeah, to jump back to what you said that you and Gordon were discussing before the show started was, you know, the surprise of Marvel being just such a massive part of popular culture.
I am in my early forties now. So for me, childhood was the eighties and the nineties. And especially as you go back to the eighties, there was more of a, a sense of mainstream culture when you had, you know, three basic broadcast channels. Everybody knew who Johnny Carson was. For example everyone, you know, knew what was the same basic daily news we were watching.
And that seems to have faded out as things have become more and more specialized, but The closest we have to a mass popular culture that maybe like globally, everyone can relate to is, you know, one maybe hating COVID-19, but who is probably the Marvel cinematic universe, just because of its enormous popularity.
And there’s a great alignment here between the popularity of this work and the fact. To your point that the content and the themes within that work really lend themselves well to, to illustrating and discussing leadership practices. So we’ve talked about where this came from. Let’s talk about the reader Gordon.
So a book like this has multiple audiences, of course, but when you imagine like the perfect reader for this book, the person that it’s really going to hit home for, who do you mean.
[00:10:23] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: You know, I am I, to me, I imagine sort of the student who has seen some of these movies. And is interested in leadership and maybe is taking a class or trying to develop themselves.
One thing that I do a lot in my teaching is I really draw on people’s experiences and their interests. So, you know, they may not think of their job as something where leadership is important or where they have influence. But when we talk about topics, they start to see, oh, this is why this happened.
Or this is how I can influence this in the future. To me, kind of the flip side of that is popular culture. Which is popular culture is this thing we all kind of understand and, and like, and so it’s just frivolous entertainment. But this frivolous entertainment is something that we can learn from as well, and kind of think through topics and learn and get better.
And so both Sinai, you know, use clips from various movies and various things in our class. And so these things that maybe weren’t thought of for you’re going to learn a valuable lesson, like the PSA’s we saw in the eighties and nine. Rather it’s that, that fun content is actually something you can learn from.
So I think this is definitely a great book for even people that just want to be a better leader and want to learn it in a fun way, engaging way. To me, this book is, is great, is great for that type of audience. And so it fits really closely to me in the outreach type of ideas, Saya, and I have written about, and try to engage in on our own this thing where you already like mark.
It being a leader in your workplace or in your life would help your life. This book will sort of hit both of those things at the same time. So that’s kind of my feeling at least to audience wise.
[00:12:06] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: Yeah. And I’ll add that, you know, for listeners of this show, if you’re an undergraduate or even a graduate student in IO, psych, or a related field, and you’re interested in learning more about leadership practices, this is also a fun way for you to learn that as well.
You know, obviously you’re going to spend more of your time. You know, doing research on primary sources, but as a way to present almost like a, a specialized boutique kind of literature review, that’s the, that’s the weird model I have in my mind of this is that it’s not about new research or developing a new theory.
It’s about taking what we already know and putting it into a context that the audience can relate to understand, and hopefully finds a little more fun and engaging. Then, you know, the 12th time they’ve heard. Southwest airlines or Zappos or, you know, the small handful of companies that tend to, we tend to rely on for these kinds of things.
[00:13:03] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: I would say too, is it’s empirically supported work. It’s good theory because especially for an area like leadership, there’s a lot of opinions. There’s a lot of individual case study. With many of those being. Frankly, not very helpful or not very applicable in other circumstances. Right? So we’ve got, we’ve got stories of a leader that was successful and we should all do the same thing.
And so in this, we are using that empirical work. We’re translating it, we’re putting in sort of a fun frame, but you are learning stuff that is fact has been supported and is, you know, we have the research to back it up, which I think is one of the pieces that gets lost when people try to become a better leader or learning.
There’s a lot of stuff out there. It’s very anecdotal and doesn’t necessarily apply across
[00:13:50] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: situations. Yeah, that’s a great point. And I actually talked about this a little bit with Mike when I interviewed him about the star wars book book last year was, you know, usually when it comes to business books, you have a choice of something that is kind of fun to read, but really lacks that empirical support.
Most books that you can get at an airport as the way I call, I described them as airport books, or you get something that is more empirically supported, but usually pretty dry written by academics for other academics. What I love about the books in this series is that you don’t have to compromise.
You get. You know, the fun of reading about something really engaging, but you don’t have to compromise on the empirical validity of what you’re reading. It’s not just, you know, some consultant’s idea or someone randomly going through and exploring some data. This is all based on. You know, the existing body of research.
So with that, I want to turn back to site and ask you this. You know, I mentioned earlier, I have this sort of naive model in my mind of these books as being kind of like boutique literature reviews, where, you know, you and Gordon sit down and there’s all this stuff that, you know, and you figure out how you’re going to fit it into these examples.
But can you think of something that you learned new about leadership in the course of writing this book? Just anything memorable that stands out for you?
[00:15:11] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: So that’s an interesting question because, you know, I don’t know if I, if I necessarily learned something new. I think the most interesting part about writing the book is thinking about the application of this theory in a, in a new way.
You know, so for example Gordon has a great chapter about authenticity and an Ironman, right? And you know how Tony star. You know, he’s just always himself and he kind of learns how to rein himself in a little bit in terms of being becoming a better leader. But I, you know, but that’s something that we see very often where, you know, leaders end up developing and changing and becoming more authentic, more true to themselves, and that can become an asset for them.
I think one of the things that I was also surprised by as I was thinking about and as we were writing the book I, I wrote a chapter about a succession and that was mostly based around the movie black Panther and partly based around the film of Thor and Thor, the dark world and those books are about kind of succession planning and what it, you know, the chapters about succession planning and those movies are sort of about succession planning.
But when you think about a battle for the throne, In a movie you don’t always think about, well, who’s, who’s necessarily the best the best leader in this situation. And one of the interesting things of. Well, one of the interesting things that happens when you’re extremely online, like I am, and you kind of follow a little bit of the discussion is that there’s a lot of people that, that like Killmonger from black Panther.
Even though he’s the villain of the movie, he’s very compelling. He’s a very compelling person. We kind of talk about, well, why is he not a good leader? Well, partly it is because he doesn’t really care about. Country. Waconda, he’s really all about himself, even though his ideas are very compelling and in many ways he’s he’s right.
That doesn’t necessarily make him the best leader. Whereas, you know to challah the black Panther is a better leader because he does care about the people. He really puts himself second and puts everybody else first in front of him. And he’s able to. Forgive in ways that his enemy Killmonger is not able to to do that.
He’s able to make enemies into friends and even offers Killmonger the opportunity to, to live, which Killmonger refuses. And I think that was something that I really was surprised by. As we were watching the movies again, was like, wow, there’s, there’s succession planning in this, because if you, if you’d asked me when we started this project, how many succession planning, examples are beginning.
In in this movie series, I would have said zero. So I think the thing that was really, really interesting about about this whole experience, it’s kind of reframing and taking what we know and really actively applying it to to the films and, you know, my experience of doing that. Yeah, I think hope helpful for many fans of the Marvel cinematic universe who happened to be iOS.
And hopefully it gives them a chance to like really think through you know, the experience of other people. You know, they’re kind of coming to terms with what these leadership theories mean in real life. You know, in terms of leadership, And,
[00:18:28] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: you know, it’s interesting to me because I did watch black Panther and I had the same kind of reaction to some of the other folks you talk to about Killmonger his character and like, oh yeah.
You know, I found myself nodding along a couple of times, like, yeah. You know, he’s right about that. And that was. More complex than I expected from a superhero movie. You know, the, the old stereotype is that it they’re very one dimensional and the good guy is always like a hundred percent good. And the villains a hundred percent of super villain.
But in reality, that’s about as dumb as the stereotype about country music being about losing your dog and your truck, even though there’s no songs about that. There aren’t really comics, at least that I’ve read or comic book movies that are, that you know, black and white about the good versus evil thing.
There’s actually some complexity there. And it does to your. Really does relate. Well, I think to things like succession planning and talent calibration, because it’s not as if you’re in those meetings and like one person is, well, this is clearly the best. And this other person is clearly the worst. You know, there are you know, it’s a comparative kind of thing.
So the complexity of the story told in the movie lends itself really well. Examples of succession planning, which costs, you know, I’m sure the filmmakers weren’t thinking that. And obviously we weren’t thinking that when we first watched it, but it’s there. Right. You know, and it, it does also, I think raise.
Raise my general opinion of the quality of the movies, because it reflects the complexities of reality in a way that I didn’t expect them to Gordon. There’s a lot of content in this book about shared leadership, conflict and collaboration. And it seems to me that co-writing a book with someone else is a situation where a lot of those ideas or practices are relevant.
Can you think of a time while writing this book with. Where life reflected art, so to speak. And you had to apply some of these practices to collaborate successfully?
[00:20:23] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: Well, I won one great thing with the book and working with PSI is, you know, we’ve worked together before on projects. And so I think it definitely helped us to put us in a space where you know, we.
Talk about these things and work together. You know, this is size first book. It’s his first, I don’t think he’s in a book chapter if I remember correctly before even. And so the idea of what, what is a book? Not, I think size read a book before. I’m pretty sure, but you know, what is the writing process for a book is something where we can go back and forth and talk about it and figure out what we’re doing.
And so I think that’s one of the shared leadership parts. Yeah. It’s not just one person driving the bus the whole time. And that’s something we tried to make sure we talked through is okay, what’s the structure we want. How is this going to play out? How are we dividing work on this? Was something I think was really important in making sure we were on the same page.
That we agreed and that this was, this was sort of the book that we wanted to do. And there’s so much translation to this, right? As we submit a relatively short proposal, and then they say, get it done, you know, and 10 months or whatever. And then from that really small seed, we we’ve got to make that tree grow up all that way and figure out how we can do that together.
And so I think it, it, you know, I think that was, that was definitely a great experience in the book is just figuring out how do we work together and what are the different strengths or weaknesses? How do we want to create a process that works? It’s a very unique thing. It’s a law, it’s a law. It’s not a long book.
You know, it’s a hundred something pages, but it’s a lot longer than anything. We’ve written individually before that we’ve collaborated on
[00:22:15] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: and it’s really well-structured as well. So I’ll share this for the benefit of the readers. One thing that kind of drives me crazy about non-fiction books generally is that.
You know, I’ll read, I’ll highlight, I’ll take notes, but it’s really on me as the reader to figure out, okay, what’s the most important stuff that I want to try to retain. And of course you’re free to do that here, but what, what Gordon and Sai have done. And I think it’s going to be repeated throughout this series is.
Th th th the first chapter really does lay out. Okay. Here’s, here’s what this book is about. Here’s what it’s going to contain. So you know what to expect. And then at the end, the very last chapter is kind of a quick summary of everything that you just learned if you learned it. And so, you know, I’ve read the book, I really enjoyed it.
And. I now know that I can go to that last chapter and see a summary of what I’ve read and that sort of brings it up in long-term memory. So some of that work was done for me as a reader. So I greatly appreciate that. So
[00:23:14] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: I’ll say that. And you know, Mike Yurik with his star wars book and his Lord of the rings book in the series, I read those books.
They were a lot of fun. And I loved how he organized that. So when we were writing our book, we both agreed to follow a pretty similar format to him in terms. Here’s the intro that sets it up here as the end of chapter lessons. And I think it’s a great way yeah. To be that, you know, you read a chapter and at the end you’re like, well, hopefully I remember it with this format.
I think it’s a, it’s a genius format that Mike came up with and we’re very happy to say, this is the right, you know, we’ve got our own particular elements and we do it. But that model, that model is what we want to do to make sure people under.
[00:23:56] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: very good site. What was the last MCU movie TV show or comic that you experience?
Like what’s the most recent for you? Most
[00:24:09] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: recent is a moon night. So I’ve been watching moon night you know, during you know, since it’s, as it’s been coming out. Though I did recently rewatch the first Thor movie because my wife was interested in, in watching the Thor movies. She never, she never seen the first one.
And so, you know, those, those are the two things that I think I’ve seen. And I, I do pretty I do pretty regular rewatch is of Marvel cinematic universe stuff. Just trying to get the most out of that Disney plus membership.
[00:24:37] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: I’m shocked, shocked to hear that your wife would be interested in watching the Thor movie series.
You know, for the same reason, I might be interested in watching black widow. But my question for you is when you watch moon night now, are you able to just enjoy it as an entertainment or as your brain permanently in like, oh yeah, I’m looking for those themes and patterns. Now.
[00:25:00] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: It’s funny you asked that because when, when I was watching the MCU movies before you know, before we started writing the book and maybe this is partly because, you know, I’m a, I’m a professor, but The connections would kind of happen on their own.
And I think that maybe being a teacher you know, and, and teaching multiple classes, you’re looking for, you know, maybe subconsciously looking for. Things that are good illustrations of concepts that are in you know, that are in your, in your textbooks and that can help you relate to that audience.
I, I know that I also. Use some of these MCU movies and TV shows as reference points in, in coaching clients. So, you know, an executive coaching or leadership coaching. Sometimes if I need an example and I know a client has seen a movie I’ll, you know, let them know like, oh, Hey, you remember this one?
This is what happened. Here’s how it relates to your particular situation. So I can kind of turn my brain off and enjoy moon night of, you know, for what it is. But I can also, you know, I think. Ingest enough, Marvel cinematic universe stuff. Eventually I start to draw those connections and it’s a very natural process.
Partly because of that, that teaching experience.
[00:26:22] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: I can imagine you as the Leonardo DiCaprio meme from once upon a time in Hollywood, where he’s pointing at the television screen. Oh, that is succession planning. There’s leader member exchange. So it sounds like. Yeah. So it sounds like the receptors were, were live and active even before this book was a germ of an idea.
Gordon, what’s next for you inside? I know you have a long-term sort of working relationship. Are you working on any other books in this series or anything else we should know about?
[00:26:52] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: Yes, we do have a second book in this series we’re working on, which is a leadership and avatar the last air. Which is just a fantastic series.
It’s not something we’re too old to have grown up with it. But it is one of our series is, and coming out and in the mid two thousands that a lot of people grew up with this. And now they’re starting to be in leadership roles. They’re working. And so it’s a very exciting area to be to be writing on.
And just in, in watching that series, it’s, it’s a great fit with the different leadership concepts. You’ve got these sort of a very interesting cross-cultural aspect of that between the various tribes in avatar, the last Airbender you’ve got kind of some non-traditional type of leader. And sort of a need to work together that I think is, is really interesting.
So it’s kind of very different to some degree then Marvel cinematic universe, which allows us to focus on some different elements of leadership that didn’t, that don’t necessarily connect as much. And so that’s a book that we’re in the process of writing right now. It also is one that I think actually is, would be great for a class.
You know, for talking to a client, because we’re thinking about the chapters, a lot of what’s an episode that illustrates. And so the idea that you could pop in a 28 minute episode and say, we’re watching this, and then we’re talking about shared leadership is, is really exciting from a, how do you get people to learn these concepts?
Because the Marvel movies still are long, right? There’s well over two hours and stuff, it takes time. That was one thing, even with the book and reviewing, you’re like, well, I got to do. Two and a half hours to the next Marvel movie. Cause I’m writing a chapter on it. I have a is just very easy. Yeah. I’m working on a chapter right now and I just popped in the episode, watched it while feeding my infants on at 5:00 AM.
So as that germinating my head, it was very easy to do. Couldn’t have watched an Ironman movie in that time, but you know, one episode of avatar was very easy to. So that’s a group project that we’re working on right now. Sinai are always working on a number of things. We’ve been working on some stuff related to gig workers and the gig economy.
We’ve got a number of different projects going currently, as, you know, as academics, we keep busy. A lot of things all happening at once. At least how we do it. I don’t know. Maybe some people are sequential, but my sequences about, you know, 30 things going at the same time at different spots. And hopefully they all don’t converge in one point where they all have to be done.
[00:29:25] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: So let’s jump back to this book then. Thank you for sharing that. So I went, what is the release date for this book for leaders?
[00:29:33] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: So leaders assembled leadership in the Marvel cinematic universe comes out June 7th. And it is available for pre-order right now, wherever you can get a book.
[00:29:44] Ben Butina, Ph.D.: Yeah. And I will include a pre-order link to a pre-order page for this book and listeners.
I want to thank you for listening as always and hope you’ll buy a copy of this book and that you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. And here’s a little secret. I enjoyed this book very much, despite the fact that I am one of the few people left on planet earth. Really that much of a Marvel fan. So I think you will like it.
Gordon and sigh, thank you both for being on the show again, I really enjoyed this conversation and I can’t wait to see what the world does with your book.
[00:30:13] Gordon Schmidt, Ph.D.: Thanks so much. Great to be here.
[00:30:15] Sy Islam, Ph.D.: Thank you very much, Ben.
