Lessons I Learned from NetFlix Money Heist (La Casa De Papel)

I recently watched all 5 seasons of Money Heist (La Casa De Papel) and I must say I can surely relate to the buzz why the hell this series is so so popular across the world.

But apart from the heists which are fascinating to watch and keep you intact with each and every episode in all 5 seasons, I learned a lot of lessons from each and every character from the show which all of us can learn and implement in our life. To ensure I don't ruin your experience if you have not watched the season yet or planning to watch in the future, I will try my level best to avoid giving you any spoilers (not a promise though) throughout this write-up.

1. The Leader (Servant Leader)

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. — John C. Maxwell

With good leadership, you can create a vision and can motivate people to make it a reality,” Taillard says. “A good leader can inspire everyone in an organization to achieve their very best. So, leadership needs to attract, inspire, and ultimately retain as much talent as possible.

We do have a leader in Money Heist and we call him Professor. He is the one who finds/recruits the talent from different locations with the right skills and attitude, trains them or coaches them for months, ensures the team members trust each other during the heist and also during survival. He helped his team to see the bigger picture not only the heist but the reason behind it which motivated the team to work together until the last moment. He leads by example by being the servant leader for his team and staying outside all alone and fights with all the impediments to ensure his team does not have any roadblocks and get diverted from the overall vision. He always ensured he protects his team no matter what the situation was. At the same time, he kept on giving feedback to his team members i.e. both positive and negative so that they continue to learn and improve their skills and become leaders.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.

2. The Team

Mother Teresa once said, “None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.”

Team Name: (Top) Bogotá, Denver, Palermo, Professor, Tokyo, Lisbon, Helsinki. (Bottom) Marsella, Stockholm, Berlin, Rio, Nairobi. The other two are Moscow and Oslo.

The Professor may be the lead character or the man behind the entire planning but each and every member of the team played a key role towards the success. This team trusts each other, they are free to agree or disagree with each other, they don't fear speaking their heart out, they contribute to the plan, and empathize with each other and most importantly they are willing to die for each other. That's what makes this team ultra special. They had each other's back which made them fearless.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.

3. The Vision (Goal)

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others

If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you. So make your vision so clear that your fears become irrelevant.

If you don’t have a vision, you’re going to be stuck in what you know. And the only thing you know is what you’ve already seen.

Let it be the first heist i.e. Royal Mint of Spain or the second heist in the Bank of Spain the Professor always ensures his team sees the bigger picture and understands the vision in detail. Each and every one of them. That was the reason behind the success they had achieved even though there were a lot of challenges that kept coming in front of them.

The vision kept the entire team going on even though they kept losing a few of their teammates in between. Same way in our life, let it be somebody is there or not, somebody leaves the team or not,

The show must go on and on…

4. Research and Development (R&D)

Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now.

When you are a leader you are expected to know the details more than anybody else in the team. You should be the one who should be knowing the team’s strengths, areas of improvement and helping them jaw down the plan or show the path which they have to be on to achieve the overall goal. And to do all these, you need to do Research and Research. Ensure you go in-depth to understand the problem statement before creating the overall execution plan. This will help you not to miss any minor details which might become a blocker or a critical path in the future.

In Money Heist, the Professor did the same. He invested years to research about the banks, security, operations, people, design/architecture, decision-makers, and document every possible detail — major to minor, literally everything to ensure he does not miss out on anything before he starts coaching his team on the execution. Because he had all these details it helped him to understand how much time the entire heist will take for the team as well.

Research teaches a man to admit he is wrong and to be proud of the fact that he does so, rather than try with all his energy to defend an unsound plan because he is afraid that admission of error is a confession of weakness when rather it is a sign of strength.

5. Plan: Fail Fast and Fail Often

Fail fast, fail often, has been around for years. Thomas Edison, by example, “failed” 9,000 times before he was successful with his light bulb invention.

Whatever we do in life we always should have a plan and we can come up with a plan only when we have all the required details with us. We can anticipate bottlenecks or critical paths to ensure they are also part of the plan. We can take an example of a Project Plan which we build to plan our product development or any work that relates to that. It has everything in terms of the order of the work, priority, assignee, timeline, and most importantly the blockers with the mitigation plan.

Until here it's all good, but how often do we think about having a plan for the failure, or if Plan A does not work do we have a Plan B, C, and go on.

Well, Money Heist teaches us that. The Professor definitely planned for the heist but at the same time, he planned for every minor failure that the team might encounter during execution. That's what makes this series so so good where while watching the season you might feel we are losing but actually it's not.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

6. Strategic Thinking — (Negotiation, Influence, Open to change and Delegation)

You do not get what you want, you only get what you negotiate. The most difficult thing in any negotiation, almost, is making sure that you strip it of the emotion and deal with the facts.

You have to persuade yourself that you absolutely don’t care what happens. If you don’t care, you’ve won. I absolutely promise you, in every serious negotiation, the man or woman who doesn’t care is going to win.

We witnessed the same in Money Heist. Most of the negotiations happened between the Govt. and the Professor. Even though the situation outside was extremely scary where people were dying, a heist is taking place, the hostages were making a mess, Professor kept his calm to negotiate with the Govt. officials to ensure they send help to his team inside with the required food, doctors, medicines and the list goes on and on.

The other aspect of Strategic thinking would be Influencing others. The Professor had a strict rule of not getting into a relationship among the team members and also not bringing in love into the heist. But he broke his own rule. He fell in love with the Inspector who he got married to later on by convincing her that his love was not part of the game. Later she became part of his team. That proves he was open to change.

In the same way, his team inside was able to convince or influence many of the hostages to join them in the heist to get a reward which they might not be able to earn even after working entirely their life. That's how this team became stronger and stronger. And the hostages started helping with the work the team needed to do as part of the delegation.

Know what you want to achieve prior to starting to negotiate. It’s the golden rule but the one most people fail to heed. Without a plan, you allow the opposing party to define your goals instead of the other way around.

7. Emotional Decision Making

“Your life is a result of the choices you have made. If you don’t like your life, start making better choices.”

One thing I learned very early in my career was taking a decision when you are sad, angry or when you are happy will make you regret your whole life. You should never be emotional when you are taking a tough decision and let us take it this way — any decision.

When Professor started becoming emotional about Lisbon’s death he took a decision to take revenge against the armed forces which impacted the reputation or the trust they had built over time on the people around the world. Everyone started re-thinking if they are supporting the right group.

That's when Professor realizes he has to take a step back and rethink his approach without getting emotional instead of thinking about the vision or the goal they are working for. And then things started moving in the right direction again.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion. Revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than saltwater has on thirst.

8. Networking

Networking is an investment in your business. It takes time and when done correctly can yield great results for years to come. It is a lot like nutrition and fitness: we know what to do, the hard part is making it a top priority.

Networking is a very important aspect of our lives. We are humans for a reason. We don't like to stay in a cage. That reminds me of a story I read long back about a Frog. Kupa manduka is a Sanskrit phrase for the frog in the well that imagines the well, its home, to be the whole world and, therefore, becomes pompous. It is a term of derision for the intellectually complacent, for someone who thinks he knows everything there is to know.

We must know people around us, that makes a big difference in our lives. When we seek help with something which we don't get within family or known people we get it from others but it needs to be built on trust and honesty.

The Professor did the same. He not only had a team inside the bank, but he also had a lot of people outside as well whom he contacted whenever he or his team got into trouble and need immediate help. And those people were happy to help him only because they believed in his vision, they had trust and they knew Professor as a person. And Professor had helped many of them during they were in need.

Your network is your net worth. You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

9. Leaders create leaders, not followers

Leadership is the action of leading people in an organization towards achieving goals. Leaders do this by influencing employee behaviors in several ways. A leader sets a clear vision for the organization, motivates employees, guides employees through the work process, and builds morale.

The greatest leaders are those who don’t look for followers. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela. They were trying to create more leaders in order to help many others to find and create their own destinies. A team leader is someone who provides direction, instructions, and guidance to a group of individuals, who can also be known as a team, for the purpose of achieving a certain goal. Team leaders serve various roles in an organization. They: Develop strategies.

The Professor did ensure he develops people in his team in a way so that they can lead the team during the heist and also take the right decisions when he is not around. He did set goals for each and every member of his team, organized them with the right role and responsibilities, helped or motivated them to take the initiative, and kept on giving feedback both positive and negative so that they become better day by day and start taking the right decision. If we follow the season carefully, he actually broke the team into smaller pieces where each and every area had a team lead. That was one of the reasons why they succeed and why this series is so fascinating to watch for someone like me who is into Project/Program Management.

Leadership is an action, not a position.

10. The Symbol

Symbols are powerful because they are the visible signs of invisible realities.

Money Heist features iconic red jumpsuits and Salvador Dalí masks — a disguise design with symbolic connotations.

The red jumpsuits in Money Heist support the show’s core theme of revolution. Red is a bold color, often associated with resistance. It’s the color of blood, which is likely why it has symbolic connotations with violence, as well as passion. Red flags are commonly associated with revolutionary movements in real life as well as in fiction — for example, in Les Misérables. The professor, the mastermind calling the shots behind the scenes, even states in season 1 that the group isn’t just targeting the Royal Mint in order to obtain money — it was an act of “resistance” against “the system.” From the show’s very beginning, the robbers’ ethos has always contained an element of revolution.

There is a national quality to the color red as well. One of the most compelling aspects of Money Heist is its strong Spanish identity, which is part of why the series is so appealing to international audiences. Red is associated with Spain for a myriad of reasons, the most obvious being that it’s one of the country’s two national colors (the other being yellow/gold). Folklore suggests that the red in Spain’s flag relates to its national sport of bullfighting; red is also the color of Spain’s signature spices, saffron, and paprika. The red jumpsuits are then a metafictional wink to the audience, celebrating the global success of the unapologetically Spanish crime series.

The Salvador Dalí masks similarly serve as a symbol of resistance and national pride on Money Heist. Dalí is arguably the most important figure of the surrealist movement in the early 20th century; although the movement is typically associated with France, Dalí’ was Spanish, and spent a significant portion of his life living in Spain. Like all surrealist art, Dalí’s work was inherently rebellious — the surrealist movement sought to disrupt the norm. Like the robbers (and their red jumpsuits) in Money Heist, Dalí has become a symbol for revolution.

Symbols are nothing but the sign of unity and revolution.

Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful)

When you have to choose between life and death, life is more important, it's a precious gift given to us by God and we are here to make a difference. Professor ensured his team understand the meaning of life, understand each other's pain, be each other constant support, be empathetic, and letting go of the things which does not make sense anymore. Every relationship goes through ups and downs that does not mean we have to end it there, the beautiful thing of life is you get an opportunity to correct those and move on. But there will be times when you have to say goodbye to someone or something in your life but as I said life does not end there.

And yes, I love this song.

If you are into leadership or management and a Money Heist fan I am sure your will like my story. Looking forward to the feedback.

Thank you!