Anyone wanting to succeed in business should spend more time watching Hollywood classics than attending management courses. That, at least, is the advice of four Italian management consultants who have issued a handbook called Cinema for Managers.

The 50 recommended films range from Stephen Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004) and Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate (2004) to Volver by the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.

“All good films teach us lessons about human behaviour,” said Francesco Bogliari, a lecturer in management and economics in Rome, who edited the handbook. “Movies are not just after-hours entertainment.”

He cited the American economist Edmund Phelps who, after receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics last year, said that cinema had been one of his sources of inspiration.

The chosen films had been “interpreted for what they can teach rising executives about management techniques such as problem solving and teamwork, as well as issues such as globalisation and diversity”, said Professor Bogliari. Classic Westerns starring John Wayne are not just frontier tales of cowboys and Indians but lessons in “leadership, mission and loneliness at the top”.

In The Terminal Tom Hanks plays an East European refugee who becomes stateless when trapped in the limbo of an airport, but who “devises a ground-breaking strategy for survival” and turns himself into a “creative entrepreneur”.

Similarly Penélope Cruz, as Raimunda in Volver (2006), “fulfils her dreams” by acquiring a restaurant against the odds and using her femininity “to handle working relationships and motivate her team” as well as to attract customers (though keeping a body — that of her abusive husband, murdered by her daughter whom he tried to assault — in a freezer is not good business practice).

The authors also recommend Murder on the Orient Express (1974), directed by Sidney Lumet, as a “perfect example of teamwork” and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), which offers “lessons about seduction and betrayal” that will come in useful when playing the stock market.

“Many executives will be heading for their summer holidays about now, and thinking what books to pack,” Professor Bogliari said. “They would better off packing a few movies.”

However, vision and drivemust not turn into “obsession”, as in Werner Herzog’s 1982 Fitzcarraldo, in which the eponymous lead character strives to fulfil his dream of opening an opera house in the Amazon, a goal that involves hauling a steamship over a mountain.

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