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If you don't try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
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Ed Catmull |
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Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.
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Ed Catmull |
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gathered for a two-day off-site in a rustic cabin, 50 miles north of San Francisco, that often functions as our unofficial retreat center. The place, called the Poet's Loft, is all redwood and glass--perched on stilts over Tomales Bay, a perfect place to think.
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Ed Catmull |
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Here are the qualifications required: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time.
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Ed Catmull |
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When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what's bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers.
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Ed Catmull |
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At the U of U, we were inventing a new language. One of us would contribute a verb, another a noun, then a third person would figure out ways to string the elements together to actually say something.
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teamwork
invention
creation
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Ed Catmull |
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If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. The
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Ed Catmull |
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candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That's a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I'm not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so--to go..
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Ed Catmull |
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Andrew Stanton spoke next. Andrew is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can.
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Ed Catmull |
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IN THINKING ABOUT this chapter and about the limits of our perception, a familiar, oft-repeated phrase kept popping into my head: "Hindsight is 20-20." When we hear it, we normally just nod in agreement--yes, of course--accepting that we can look back on what happened, see it with total clarity, learn from it, and draw the right conclusions. The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the pa..
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Ed Catmull |
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Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don't always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
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Ed Catmull |
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Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.
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Ed Catmull |
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Countless times, I remember watching him toss ideas--pretty far-out ideas--into the air, just to see how they played. And if they didn't play well, he would move on.
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Ed Catmull |
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While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.
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Ed Catmull |
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Left to their own devices, most people don't want to fail. But Andrew Stanton isn't most people. As I've mentioned, he's known around Pixar for repeating the phrases "fail early and fail fast" and "be wrong as fast as you can." He thinks of failure like learning to ride a bike; it isn't conceivable that you would learn to do this without making mistakes--without toppling over a few times. "Get a bike that's as low to the ground as you can f..
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Ed Catmull |
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FOR MOST OF us, failure comes with baggage--a lot of baggage--that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn't study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or--worse!--aren't smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned..
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Ed Catmull |
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Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.
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Ed Catmull |
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The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly--hindsight being 20-20 and all--we often aren't open to knowing more. "We should be careful to ge..
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Ed Catmull |
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Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them--and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which pay..
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Ed Catmull |
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Likewise, we "trusted the process," but the process didn't save Toy Story 2 either. "Trust the Process" had morphed into "Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us." It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy. Once this became clear to me, I began telling people that the phrase was meaningless. I told our staff that it had..
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Ed Catmull |
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if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
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Ed Catmull |
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I was a computer guy with an expensive dream.
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Ed Catmull |
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Every morning, as I walk into Pixar Animation Studios--past the twenty-foot-high sculpture of Luxo Jr., our friendly desk lamp mascot, through the double doors and into a spectacular glass-ceilinged atrium where a man-sized Buzz Lightyear and Woody, made entirely of Lego bricks, stand at attention, up the stairs past sketches and paintings of the characters that have populated our fourteen films--I am struck by the unique culture that defin..
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Ed Catmull |
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Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.
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Ed Catmull |
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Many of the rules that people find onerous and bureaucratic were put in place to deal with real abuses, problems, or inconsistencies or as a way of managing complex environments. But while each rule may have been instituted for good reason, after a while a thicket of rules develops that may not make sense in the aggregate. The danger is that your company becomes overwhelmed by well-intended rules that only accomplish one thing: draining the..
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Ed Catmull |
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Here's what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren't true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised.
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Ed Catmull |
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Driving the train doesn't set its course. The real job is laying the track.
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Ed Catmull |
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But ease isn't the goal; excellence is.
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Ed Catmull |
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How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up?
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Ed Catmull |
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If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse.
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Ed Catmull |
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Fear of change--innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason--is a powerful force.
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Ed Catmull |
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While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don't have to ask permission to take responsibility.
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Ed Catmull |
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People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you've effed up,
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Ed Catmull |
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Only when we admit what we don't know can we ever hope to learn it.
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Ed Catmull |
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When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work--even when it is confounding them.
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Ed Catmull |
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Candor isn't cruel. It does not destroy. On the contrary, any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we've experienced it ourselves. The need to stroke one's own ego, to get the credit we feel we deserve--we strive to check those impulses at the door. The Braintrust is fueled by the idea that every note we give is in the service of a common goal: sup..
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Ed Catmull |
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WHILE I THINK the reasons for postmortems are compelling, I know that most people still resist them. So I want to share some techniques that can help managers get the most out of them. First of all, vary the way you conduct them. By definition, postmortems are supposed to be about lessons learned, so if you repeat the same format, you tend to uncover the same lessons, which isn't much help to anyone.
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Ed Catmull |
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WHAT IS IT, exactly, that people are really afraid of when they say they don't like change? There is the discomfort of being confused or the extra work or stress the change may require. For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don't know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre--personally, I think the person who can't change his or her mind is dangerous. Steve Jobs was..
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Ed Catmull |
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The key to preventing this is balance. I see the give and take between different constituencies in a business as central to its success. So when I talk about taming the Beast, what I really mean is that keeping its needs balanced with the needs of other, more creative facets of your company will make you stronger. Let me give you an example of what I mean, drawn from the business I know best. In animation, we have many constituencies: story..
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Ed Catmull |
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What's needed, in my view, is to approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they are, in fact, self-similar.
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Ed Catmull |
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Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like high-minded goals, but they are fundamentally misguided. Take something like the Golden Fleece Awards, which were established in 1975 to call attention to government-funded projects that were particularly egregious wastes of money. (Among the winners were things like an $84,000 study on love commissioned by the National Science Foundation, and a $3,000 Department of Defense study that examin..
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Ed Catmull |
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I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman's mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success--of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled--that we gradually began expanding P.U.'s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet--ov..
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Ed Catmull |
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Pete has a few methods he uses to help manage people through the fears brought on by pre-production chaos. "Sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes," he says. "So I try to trick them. I'll say, 'This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but just as a thought exercise, what if ...' Or, 'I'm not actually suggesting this, but go with me for a minute ...' If people anticipate t..
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Ed Catmull |
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When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality--a beginner's mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back upon wistfully.) But when that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don't want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but..
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Ed Catmull |