Are you more Vito Corleone or Ted Lasso? Jiří Vávra on business therapy, film archetypes and the ego that holds growth back

Have you ever taken a personality test, been given a four-letter code and then promptly forgotten what it meant? You’re not alone. Leadership isn’t about filling in templates. It’s about understanding how people actually behave in real-world situations and under the pressures of corporate life.

Jiří Vávra, strategist, founder of consultancy boutique CoMojo, former head of Deloitte NEXT’s innovation team and programme leader of the MBA in Strategy and Business Innovation at NEWTON University, takes a different approach. He explores business case studies and corporate leadership through film characters and helps companies tackle the issues that conventional management wisdom often fails to solve.

Why can’t you remember your personality type, but you can remember Gordon Gekko?

Most people love personality tests and personality typologies. We want to know what kind of leaders we are, how we react under pressure and where we have room to grow. The problem is that abstract categories from textbooks quickly fade from memory.

That’s why Jiří Vávra created the podcast Leadership through Film Characters, where he explores real business and management situations through well-known characters from the big screen.

Film gives us crystal-clear archetypes. Whether it’s cold calculation, the Godfather’s approach to loyalty or empathy in crisis management, pop culture works as a mirror that lets you recognise your own strengths and weaknesses almost instantly.

Instead of theorising about team dynamics, you can simply watch what happens when a leader stops paying attention to the reality around them.

Why do most corporate transformations hit a wall?

According to global research by Gallup, a manager’s leadership style can account for up to 70% of the variation in employee engagement and motivation. At the same time, only 13% of employees in Europe are actively engaged at work.

Add to that a long-standing finding from McKinsey & Company, which suggests that up to 70% of corporate transformation and innovation initiatives fail. Not because companies lack money, but because employees resist change and management fails to communicate effectively.

This is where Jiří Vávra and his COMOJO team come in.

“In the film analogy, we act as a consiliere – a trusted partner to CEOs and leaders. We help identify and remove obstacles, broaden the range of possibilities and deliver results. Our goal is to build the client’s capabilities to the point where they no longer need us,” he explains.

When a company hits a crisis, the problem is rarely a missing Excel spreadsheet. The real obstacle is often the founder’s ego or a corporate culture that has become stuck in place.

Vávra is open about the fact that their work often resembles therapy. They bring skeletons out of the closet and confront the issues management has been sweeping under the rug.

“If internal employee surveys show that job security is what employees value most about the company, we know there is a serious problem with efficiency and adaptability.”

Once stability becomes the dominant value, the company stops evolving, innovation gets stifled and resistance to change takes over.

Vávra is equally sceptical of complex, hundred-page strategies. If a strategy needs 100 pages, nobody understands it and nobody follows it. A functional strategy should be simple, clear enough for an intern to understand and flexible enough to respond to the market quickly.

And what should you do if you feel your team is losing momentum and your strategy is starting to unravel?

“Go and spend some time with your people tomorrow morning. Ask them honestly what they think is going on. Only then call in the consultants and strategists.”

Resources: 

•  https://usehorizon.ai/resources/why-digital-transformations-fail