"I kind of stumbled into business," Redford said, sitting comfortably in an armchair on stage and speaking on the topic "Cultivating a Creative Workforce."
Redford's willingness to talk about his struggles resonated with Mae O'Brien, executive director of the HealthLink Medical Center, and it made her more receptive to Redford's main message - the importance of art and creativity in the workplace.
"I've done the same thing," she said, recalling her earliest hiring decisions. "You learn."
Mulling it over as she headed back to the nonprofit center in Southampton, she said she wanted to do more to bring creativity into the office. "I have a young staff, and they are all overworked and underpaid. I have to find a new way to liven things up."
O'Brien's staff numbers a dozen. In an interview after the seminar, Redford said he had no idea how many people his various enterprises employed. But a staff member later estimated that more than 800 work for him.
Besides the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Film Institute, Redford's ventures now include a small chain of movie theaters, a ski resort, and an apparel catalog.
For many of these initiatives, Redford needed financing, but found he could not communicate with bankers.
"It seemed like there was another language that businesspeople spoke. There was another language I needed to learn," he said. "I had to learn the value of the bottom line in thinking."
He had ideas, but found he was not very good at hiring people to carry them out.
"When I first started hiring, I didn't imagine that I'd be hiring anyone in my life," he said. "I made the wrong choices. I chose people by whether I liked them," he said, "and that didn't work."
