Living Outside the Box

Sony's Mickey Steinberg is helping revolutionize the entertainment industry

"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"
--Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

"He said, 'I want you to connect those dots with four connecting lines, and you can't backtrack,"' Steinberg recalls. Recreating the scene, he draws the dots on a sheet of paper in front of him. "Can you do it? Let me show you." He draws an arrow of sorts, extending the edges of the tip beyond the implied box created by the dots, and connects all nine with four lines.

"Going outside of the box," as he calls it, is what Stanley P. "Mickey" Steinberg, BS '54, Arch '58, has been doing for nearly 40 years. And today, as chairman of Sony Retail Entertainment in New York, he is working to carry that imaginative spirit into a realm no one has ever seen.

That's Entertainment

"We do such a good job at in-home entertainment that you buy the systems we're selling, and you say, 'Why should I go outside the home?"' Steinberg says. "Except for theme parks, the entertainment companies have not worked hard on the out-of-home experience; it's been led by retailers and restaurateurs who are not the best at it."

Sony already is operating hints of what its creation will look like. Its Sony Lincoln Square Theater in New York features 15 screens with the latest in sound and projection technology, along with an IMAX screen. Steinberg says 2.5 million to 3 million people a year pass through it, and the neighboring businesses have flourished as a result.

Also, basketball star Magic Johnson's budding theater chain is part of a partnership with Sony/Loews Theatres, a division of Sony Retail Entertainment. These high-tech movie houses incorporate stadium seating and other advances in trying to revitalize minority neighborhoods around the country, which Steinberg believes are large, underserved market segments. One Magic Johnson Theater opened in Atlanta's Greenbriar Mall in November.

With a theater as the main draw, Sony will operate, joint-venture or lease space in the centers to entertainment- oriented retailers. While admitting the concept of these stores is somewhat amorphous--"Normal retail people don't get it," he says--Steinberg uses as examples operations like Warner Brothers and Disney stores, restaurants like Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe, and the company's own Sony Style electronics store in Manhattan.

Occupying a street-level and basement space on Madison Avenue, Sony Style boasts employee uniforms by Donna Karan, a Ralph Lauren-designed screening room, Deco furniture, a cappucino bar and a staff trained to make the shopper feel at home.

"We're showing people how to sell electronics differently than they have in the past," Steinberg says. "It's geared toward people who don't normally buy them; it's very friendly for women. You come in, and we've got all the latest Sony equipment displayed, so it's accessible to the customer to operate. We have a well-trained, friendly staff to explain it.

"It's high-touch, not high-tech. We sit you down in a sofa, wheel up a complete system mounted on a movable cart and show you how to use it while we serve you an espresso. If you like it, we'll install it anywhere you want."

This approach to retail--the soft-sell, entertainment-while-you-shop philosophy--is the kind of business Steinberg wants in his urban centers. "We are not trying to do everything ourselves, but we only want companies willing to look outside the box to create unique, entertaining businesses," he says. "Some will be our partners; some will be our tenants."

And with 350,000 square feet to play with, there will be quite a bit of space to accommodate them. The first urban center, set to open in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Garden in 1998, will rest on top of the city's underground convention center.

Coming from the company of a more famous Mickey at Disney, Steinberg knows that familiar characters and motifs are important, especially to children, to create the kind of atmosphere he envisions. That's why he's enlisted the help of Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and other children's stories, to use the books' imaginative protagonist and his monster pals to add some color to Sony's project.

Also, David Macaulay, whose 1988 book, The Way Things Work, uses creative drawings, easy-to- understand explanations and a herd of animated woolly mammoths to detail the inner workings of even the most intricate machines, will lend his expertise.

"Everybody under the age of 35 knows Where the Wild Things Are, and David Macaulay's book is sold by the millions," Steinberg says. "It's going to be very clever. Working with renowned authors and illustrators to create attractions is some of the expertise we brought from the theme parks."

A Career of Innovation

"He was the first architect to become a developer, Steinberg says. "We had a vision of what we wanted--we wanted to develop urban centers. We wanted to stay in the cities at a time when everybody else was leaving the cities. And we developed unique projects--projects that had an impact."

Steinberg worked for Portman for 27 years, contributing to projects around the country and the world. Among his major achievements were Peachtree Center in Atlanta, Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, Marina Centre in Singapore, the Renaissance Center in Detroit, the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles and the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, to name just a few.

Disney tapped him in 1988 to head up Imagineering, and the next six years saw him personally oversee completion of new parks or major additions at Disney locations in Orlando, Fla.; Anaheim, Calif.; Tokyo and Paris. Euro Disneyland in France, the first phase of which was completed in 1992, was one of the largest construction projects in the continent's history, with a main park roughly one-fifth the size of Paris itself.

"In the years I was there, we took the Walt Disney Co. and multiplied it six or eight times in size, and we built $4 billion worth of theme parks and attractions in existing parks," Steinberg says. "I mean, you talk about exciting."

But all along, he continues, it was about looking outside of that box for solutions, going beyond the accepted ways of thinking. And he stresses that Georgia Tech is where he learned to loosen his mind from the tethers of convention.

"That's what everybody was doing all through Georgia Tech, whether you realized it or not--teaching you to look outside of the box," he says, "especially in architecture."

Once he began study at MIT, Steinberg found Tech had done a superlative job of teaching him the trade of architecture, as well. Surrounded by 41 other master's students, he realized those who hailed from the "more workmanlike schools," such as Tech, Michigan, North Carolina State, were drawing circles around their counterparts.

"Many students from Northeastern schools couldn't keep up with us because they couldn't draw as fast as we could," Steinberg recalls. "They could talk it; they could philosophize about design, but they didn't understand how buildings really worked as well as we did. And they didn't have the work ethic we did. I was very proud of what Tech did.

"When I was hiring people, when I was working with John Portman, I knew one thing: The people coming from Georgia Tech would be of use to us immediately, whereas people from some of the other schools had a much longer learning curve."

Making a Difference

"It's a terrible legacy people my age have left," he says. "There is no clear definition of the process of building; we spend an inordinate amount of time creating a new process tailored for each individual project. We need to go back and readdress it. What is the process for building buildings, and why can't we develop some sort of process that all the job disciplines understand, and then display the proper respect for each other's work and abilities?"

To find solutions for these problems, Steinberg helped found Georgia Tech's Construction Research Center, operated out of the College of Architecture. The CRC's mission is to improve the productivity and competitiveness of the American construction industry through sponsored research. Steinberg served on the alumni committee that recommended the CRC's creation back in 1986; in 1988, he was a founding member of the organization's advisory board.

"Mickey knows the construction industry inside-out, and he doesn't pull any punches," says Dr. Lou Circeo, CRC director. "He's very highly motivated, and these things really disturb him, when he sees inefficiencies happening."

One of the major problems in the industry is a difficulty in introducing new technology. With no one willing to assume responsibility should the technology fail, everyone is all too willing to fall back on the tried and true. And with no central organization testing and approving technological advances, the only people advocating them are the vendors themselves.

"You may have a good test result on a new technology, but it's not accepted by the local building official because we've got too many building officials, and they don't have the wherewithal to properly evaluate them," Steinberg says. "Everybody would rather stick with what they know, and consequently the construction industry in the United States is not as innovative as those in other countries."

CRC plans to fulfill a role Steinberg says is sorely lacking in the construction industry--that of a national technology clearinghouse. It currently does not have the budget to do so, but as Circeo says, "Who knows what we may get out of the Capital Campaign?"

Until then, Steinberg serves on the board of another organization that tries to perform such a function, the Washington-based Civil Engineering Research Foundation. For instance, in the field of highway materials, with which Steinberg says the organization has been especially helpful, CERF will sift through available test data on a product or method. Then it will issue a report, not recommending or condemning the subject, but rather summarizing the information available from other sources.

"If they think it's something that should be tested more, they'd recommend four or five labs that do the testing to the sponsor," Steinberg says. "Or if it needs basic research or proof, they may advise the designer to go to some university. In other words, CERF does not go into competition with institutions and labs performing the research that's already being done; they just become more of an evaluator and facilitator, and one that everybody recognizes is not on anybody's payroll."

"Mickey gave a very dynamic, thought-provoking keynote speech at a major workshop," says Harvey M. Bernstein, president of CERF. "He's so down-to-earth and practical; he's dealt with many of the things we face now and has done it in innovative ways."

Ultimately, all this work filters down to students at places like Georgia Tech. Once problems are identified, at least, schools can better prepare future engineers, contractors and architects to resolve them. "Everybody is trying to figure out how to solve the problems in the construction industry," Steinberg says. "With the industry in disarray, how do you train people to go out into it?"

An Appreciation for the Finer Things

"Georgia Tech, like every other school, is struggling with what the curriculum should be," Steinberg says. "I would say the biggest shortcoming I experienced there was the lack of humanities, and this problem still needs to be addressed. No one taught me philosophy, art, history, great literature or music at the proper level.

"Some of these other schools that taught you the philosophy of architecture, but not really how to do a building, they did a better job of giving you a background in the humanities," he says.

The finer things are important to Steinberg, who sits on the board of the New York Council for the Humanities and is active in the arts community in Manhattan.

He admits Tech has made strides in broadening the liberal arts side of its curriculum, but he maintains there is more to be done. Many engineers and technical people believe it is enough to master the elements of their "trade" in order to succeed, but Steinberg thinks they're missing the broader picture.

"If you're going to reach certain levels with any company, you have to have an appreciation of these things," he says. "I have worked very hard since graduation to overcome my lack of knowledge in the humanities, but I will never catch up. Anything I've gotten I've had to pick up on my own, and I hold Georgia Tech partially responsible for my shortcomings. We must correct that situation."

Seems that even in the arts, Mickey Steinberg has looked outside of the box.