My wife and I love zombie movies and Netflix has one our favourites. Resident Evil is based on a zombie-hunting video game by Capcom. In the film, the Umbrella Corporation – a company of profound political and economic power – operates a secret research facility (aka the Hive) deep underneath Raccoon City. Due to some tomfoolery, a dangerous T-Virus is unleashed, turning the entire scientific community into angry zombies. The movie stars Milla Jovovich as Alice, a one-time security operative who journeys deep into the Hive with an elite security team to investigate and shut down the Hive’s renegade AI mind, the Red Queen. The Red Queen, personified by a little girl, tries to contain the viral outbreak by locking down the entire facility and killing anyone left alive. Resident Evil has plenty of horror, action and is even sprinkled with a few professional lessons. Here are four career building tips from Resident Evil.
Dress the role
Whether you’re inspired by a video-game zombie ass-kicking heroine or are actually the leader of a commando unit sent in to right Raccoon City wrongs, how you show up will speak a lot to your own character, video-game or no video game. It also plays a big role in your personal brand. For Alice, that personal brand appears to be attractive ass-kicker. Don’t have a chic red dress like Alice? That’s ok. Consider spiffy socks, a fedora or a unique blazer. Ultimately, feeling good in what you’re wearing makes you feel both more confident and more powerful.
Disruption > rule following
Sometimes following established protocol is just a terrible idea. It’s these protocols that drive Alice and the rest of the commando team onto the train to the Umbrella Corporation facility and then lead them to go deeper and deeper into the facility. Instead of opening up a dialogue with the Red Queen and trying to figure out why she’s done what she has, the team goes hog-wild, cutting the power of the facility and unleashing the zombie hordes. While the Red Queen’s decision to try to trap them (and hence contain the T-Virus) is terrifying, it’s also pretty logical, especially in light of the horrific snapshot of the world of later Resident Evil movies. For your career this means, sometimes you need to think a bit harder about how to disrupt, as opposed to going along to get along.
Monster corporations are (often) bad
This one’s pretty simple. When corporations grow too big, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to maintain any semblance of a soul (even though, thanks to US law, they are legal persons). The Umbrella Corporation as we learn later in the movie as well as future Resident Evil movies is a good example of this. I’m not saying you need to be as suspicious of Google, Facebook or Blackrock as you would be of the Umbrella Corporation. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out this bang-you-over-the -head social message that the film clearly wants to hammer home. The take-away for all of us is to make sure your personal style and career vision are aligned with your job if possible. If you are a big company person who has patience for thick layers of bureaucracy than choose wisely and consider your values. Do they align with your employer. Don’t work for a real-world Umbrella Corporation.
Move past disasters quickly
From the mid-point of the movie onwards, a steady beat of disasters keeps afflicting the team. The first episode is maybe the most awful. Caught in a narrow corridor, half the commando team is sliced to pieces by a super dangerous laser beam (how that thing was approved by WorkSafe and ever got installed by the engineers and architects of the Hive is beyond me). Their computer programming crew member manages to deactivate the laser dicer just after it turns their leader into a pile of crosswise cut flesh. It’s a pretty epic fail. But the computer guy (at the urging of Alice) just keeps going on their mission. Few of us will see something like this happen to our team, but guaranteed our team will be hit with a setback now and then. When that happens, no matter how upsetting you may feel, don’t stand around blaming and complaining – move forward.
Bonus Lesson: Drum-solos make everything better
Even if you drop the T-virus test tube on the lab floor turning EVERYONE into zombies, at least you’ll die rocking to a really addictive Nine Inch Nails beat.