Every company has a strategy. Every company has data. And yet some ideas spread like wildfire while equally good ones die quietly. Some leaders command a room and some lose it in the first 30 seconds. Some products build devoted followings and some, despite every rational advantage, just never catch on.

Adam Leipzig has spent four decades figuring out why.

He had to: It was his job. As a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios, he shepherded films like Dead Poets Society and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. As president of National Geographic Films, he helped turn March of the Penguins into one of the most successful documentaries ever made. Across a career spanning studios, streaming and the classroom, his projects have generated more than $2 billion in global revenue and collected Academy Awards, BAFTAs, Emmys and Sundance honors along the way.

Today he produces films and teaches at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, where his students include MBA candidates, global tech executives and senior leaders navigating some of the most complex communication challenges in business.

His new book, Fearless Persistence: Creative Life, Creative Work and the 10 Laws of Culturenomics, is framed around the creative world—and should absolutely be on the graduation gift list for anyone getting out of school with a BFA this spring—but its argument lands squarely in the C-Suite.

Throughout the book, Leipzig reminds that effort and skill are rarely the limiting factors in whether an idea succeeds. What determines traction is whether the work aligns with the systems and narratives that allow it to travel. In an era when prior distribution models are eroding and new ones are forming in real time, that’s not a creative problem. It’s a leadership problem.

I talked with Leipzig about what CEOs and CFOs can learn from the way films get made, how the best companies build fans instead of customers (think: Apple) and why the most data-driven organizations—and people—in the world are still making decisions on pure emotion. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

You wrote the book for creatives—writers, artists, filmmakers. But it felt really applicable to business people. What’s the crossover?

The distinction between business and creative is artificial. Every great businessperson I’ve ever met is highly creative, and creatives who have sustainable lives are business people—that’s why they have sustainable lives. Great business people have highly creative lives.

Every movie you make is essentially a startup. What can other business people learn from that process?

When I work with businesses—whether startups or big companies with startup units—the process is exactly the same one I’ve gone through 40 times on movies. You have an idea, you assemble the right team, you pressure-test the idea, you put out beta versions and successively approximate toward the result, and then you go through the whole process of bringing it to market.

The key elements are what I call the 10 Laws of Culturenomics, in the last third of the book. Those apply to every business and every creative action that is both successful within its own ecosystem and financially successful. I think it’s actually really hard to do all 10, but Apple did all 10. Taylor Swift does all 10. And at least when we know what they are, we can start to construct our work in those directions.

Talk about building a following. Business people often think in terms of creating a product and supplying a demand. But there’s no demand built for art ahead of time. Apple didn’t just find customers—they created fans.

Apple is such a perceptive example, because Apple created fans, not customers. Steve Jobs held [a product] up, and the next day everybody had to have one. We saw similar instant adoption with ChatGPT—how fast did a million people start using it?

The way fans work is that it starts with a very small group of people. That group is like the white-hot core of a nuclear reactor. That white-hot core radiates enthusiasm—they tell people, and they tell people, and they tell people. If that center is super radioactive, it spreads really fast.

It’s not because they spent a billion dollars in marketing. It’s because people were telling people. The strongest marketing is always word of mouth—human to human contact.

One of the 10 Laws is the fifth law: incite evangelists. There must be a gospel, and the gospel is not the facts. It is what people can actually pass along and share. The gospel always has an emotional truth. And it allows you to recognize others who are also part of that tribe—also converts to that product or service. I apologize for using religious language, but it is the closest analogy I can think of for people who believe in something so strongly that they want to spread the word.

How do you build that nuclear core—those first thousand people? What do companies get wrong?

Just because somebody knows about something doesn’t mean they want it. Everybody knew about the new Disney Snow White movie. Nobody wanted to see it. It’s about desire. It’s about wanting something so much you’ve really got to have it—especially now, with so much noise. Desire cuts through.

How do you get to those first—I’m not even saying a thousand people—those first 10 people who then become the hundred who then become the thousand? You build a deep, deep personal relationship with them in whatever way you do. I coach young entrepreneurs at UC Launch here at Berkeley. They’re doing it with nothing—rubbing two sticks together to make fire. And they’ve had to figure out how to find those first 10 people on the market side or supply side and bring them together. They’re just doing it by hand.

But it’s all about finding those first people who are genuinely excited and have the capacity to share. Then you have to give them the language to share. People will not intuitively have the words. Part of it is finding them, and part of it is giving them the mechanism—the words, the click, whatever allows sharing to actually take place. And then it just starts to happen.

You talk a lot about authentic storytelling being so essential to this process. Why is that so hard for so many business people?

I coach people to move out of their heads and into their hearts. It’s about emotional grounding. We get up on our feet, we breathe, we get into our bodies and we think deeply about who we want to talk to—and what is the emotional thing that person needs to feel in order to share and spread the word.

Then we just practice and practice and practice until it gets into their DNA, because this is not an intellectual exercise. Sometimes people say, “Is there a book I can read about this?” No. You have to go do it. If you’re launching a $500 million initiative and you’ve got to go to the board, you’re going to practice that 100 times.

When I go pitch a movie to a studio, I’m basically asking them to put $350 million on the roulette wheel on opening weekend. I practice that pitch a hundred times. We only get two minutes—they may know in 30 seconds.

What’s the secret to a great pitch?

There’s an unbreakable narrative structure—valid whether it’s a 15-second YouTube ad or a 20-episode Netflix series. Hook, challenge and solution, call to action.

The hook has to be completely unique and surprising. Its only purpose is to get attention and stand out from the noise—the first five words out of your mouth. Then you set up the issue and the solution. There’s always got to be a solution, always a promise of hope.

And there is a likability factor. It’s not only what you’re offering that has to be likable; you have to be likable. Likable in a business context has nothing to do with age, gender, ethnicity or what you’re wearing. It has to do with the brightness in your eyes, your transparency, your humbleness, your honor at being here to offer something amazing that you’re genuinely excited about.

Then you have to call the question. Otherwise, the best you get is, “Let’s take this up at next month’s meeting,” which is not what you want.

Any final thoughts for business people trying to develop followings rather than just sell products?

Pay great attention to your market—what I call your audience. Really know who they are, what they want and need, and how they will feel if they get it. Because it is that feeling that will make them excited enough to grab what you’re offering and share it with others.

So many business people work in companies that proudly describe themselves as data-driven. But decisions are not actually based on data. We make a decision on an emotional level first, and then in nanoseconds find data to justify it.

You want an example? A McLaren costs $300,000. They come in garish colors, they need special fuel and L.A. parking lots will scratch them constantly. There is no logical reason to own one. And yet I see a lot of McLarens on the road. Because someone said, I want it—and then found rational reasons: It’s a design-forward car, the valet will park it in front, people will know I’m an important person. They’re all rational reasons, but buying a $300,000 car is not a rational decision. I promise you McLarens are sold at an emotional level.

That emotional truth is what causes people to actually take action. And learning to work at that level—rather than hiding behind data—is really the heart of it.