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e10fde2
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Frequently, the people in charge of the Beast are the most organized people in the company--people wired to make things happen on track and on budget, as their bosses expect them to do. When those people and their interests become too powerful--when there is not sufficient push-back to protect new ideas--things go wrong. The Beast takes over.
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Ed Catmull |
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41ecf6c
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In 1995, when Steve Jobs was trying to convince us that we should go public, one of his key arguments was that we would eventually make a film that failed at the box office, and we needed to be prepared, financially, for that day. Going public would give us the capital to fund our own projects and, thus, to have more say about where we were headed, but it would also give us a buffer that could sustain us through failure. Steve's feeling was..
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Ed Catmull |
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a659673
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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.
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Ed Catmull |
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95c92d7
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The goal, then, is to uncouple fear and failure--to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn't strike terror into your employees' hearts.
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fear
managment
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Ed Catmull |
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0718eba
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We had done the impossible. We had done the thing that everyone told us we couldn't do. And we had done it spectacularly well.
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Ed Catmull |
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f572cf1
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People talking directly to one another, then letting the manager find out later, was more efficient than trying to make sure that everything happened in the "right" order and through the "proper" channels."
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Ed Catmull |
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3128ad2
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To Whom it May Inspire," Austin wrote. "I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, 'in the zone' seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time. The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-c..
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Ed Catmull |
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38446a7
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There is an alternative approach to being wrong as fast as you can. It is the notion that if you carefully think everything through, if you are meticulous and plan well and consider all possible outcomes, you are more likely to create a lasting product. But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them--if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the li..
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Ed Catmull |
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57ee5ed
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As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization-be it an animation studio or a record label-is an ecosystem. 'You need all the seasons,' he says. 'You need storms. It's like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There's no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn't rain, things don't grow. And if i..
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Ed Catmull |
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8ed7c5d
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failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren't experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy--trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it--dooms you to fail. As Andrew puts it, "Moving things forward allows the team you are leading to feel like, 'Oh, I'm on a boat that is actually going towards land.' As opposed ..
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Ed Catmull |
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2bc32b9
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People who act without an approved plan should not be punished for "going rogue." A culture that allows everyone, no matter their position, to stop the assembly line, both figuratively and literally, maximizes the creative engagement of people who want to help. In other words, we must meet unexpected problems with unexpected responses."
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Ed Catmull |
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69644c4
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a mentoring program that pairs new managers with experienced ones. A key facet of this program is that mentors and mentees work together for an extended period of time--eight months. They meet about all aspects of leadership, from career development and confidence building to managing personnel challenges and building healthy team environments.
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Ed Catmull |
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d7680d1
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I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear.
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Ed Catmull |
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63ff2d6
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We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody's fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about te..
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Ed Catmull |
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ef15e7c
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one of my core management beliefs: 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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0310366
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Where, along the way, do we turn from the wide-eyed child into the adult who fears surprises and has all the answers and seeks to control all outcomes?
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Ed Catmull |
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f0584d7
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The roller coaster came to a stop and a good friend got off, but what a ride we'd taken together. It had been one hell of a trip.
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friendship
love
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Ed Catmull |
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c429a7d
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I know that a lot of our successes came because we had pure intentions and great talent, and we did a lot of things right, but I also believe that attributing our successes solely to our own intelligence, without acknowledging the role of accidental events, diminishes us.
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success
randomness
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Ed Catmull |
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0bed9fc
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In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that's been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen. How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear? Part of the answer is simple: If we as leaders can talk a..
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Ed Catmull |
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1b27db8
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Yet randomness remains stubbornly difficult to understand. The problem is that our brains aren't wired to think about it. Instead, we are built to look for patterns in sights, sounds, interactions, and events in the world. This mechanism is so ingrained that we see patterns even when they aren't there. There is a subtle reason for this: We can store patterns and conclusions in our heads, but we cannot store randomness itself. Randomness is ..
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Ed Catmull |
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ebc5ea8
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To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command--/bin/rm -r -f *--that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what's coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 file..
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Ed Catmull |
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caf90c0
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We are meaning-making creatures
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Ed Catmull |
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8864213
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A lively debate in a Braintrust meeting is not being waged in the hopes of any one person winning the day. To the extent there is "argument," it seeks only to excavate the truth."
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Ed Catmull |
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791913f
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Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our people's intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason--our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management's job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover. CHAPTER 7 THE HUNGRY BEAST AND THE UGLY ..
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Ed Catmull |
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a9cde61
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Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won't necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn't the goal; excellence is.
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Ed Catmull |
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f111424
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Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won't have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
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Ed Catmull |
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1eeca10
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Similarly, it is not the manager's job to prevent risks. It is the manager's job to make it safe to take them. * Failure isn't a necessary evil. In fact, it isn't evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new. * Trust doesn't mean that you trust that someone won't screw up--it means you trust them even when they do screw up.
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Ed Catmull |
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84703e9
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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 ..."
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Ed Catmull |
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54861f8
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That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information.
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Ed Catmull |
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92313bc
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One of the first people I interviewed was Alvy Ray Smith, a charismatic Texan with a Ph.D. in computer science and a sparkling resume that included teaching stints at New York University and UC Berkeley and a gig at Xerox PARC, the distinguished R&D lab in Palo Alto. I had conflicting feelings when I met Alvy because, frankly, he seemed more qualified to lead the lab than I was. I can still remember the uneasiness in my gut, that instinctua..
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Ed Catmull |
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396d272
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Trusting others doesn't mean that they won't make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it.
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Ed Catmull |
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173b757
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Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason--our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management's job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
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Ed Catmull |
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0f49e8f
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But the truth is, I have no way of accounting for all of the factors involved in any given success, and whenever I learn more, I have to revise what I think. That's not a weakness or a flaw. That's reality.
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Ed Catmull |
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f6e9312
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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 takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.
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Ed Catmull |
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80d4754
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You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation--you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.
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Ed Catmull |
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ab1a2b6
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Lo que creo es que la creatividad consiste precisamente en saber trabajar con el cambio.
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Ed Catmull |
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231573a
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That they liked so much of what they were doing allowed them to put up with the parts of the job they came to resent. This was a revelation to me: The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realized that this was something I needed to look out for: When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what's bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers. I also realized that this kind of thing, if left..
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Ed Catmull |
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59a6d27
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Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.
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Ed Catmull |
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883ebc2
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Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply.
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Ed Catmull |
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2ecc0d3
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But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.
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Ed Catmull |
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1e4d665
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In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that's been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.
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Ed Catmull |
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02f44af
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Everyone says they want to hire excellent people, but in truth we don't really know, at first, who will rise up to make a difference.
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Ed Catmull |
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237ebb2
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Unlike some theoretical ideas, Occam's Razor accords easily with human nature. In general, we seek what we think are simple explanations for events in our lives because we believe the simpler something is, the more fundamental--the more true--it is.
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Ed Catmull |
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d44f932
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Because your rational mind knows that tunnels have two ends, your emotional mind can be kept in check when pitch blackness descends in the confusing middle. Instead of collapsing into a nervous mess, the director who has a clear internal model of what creativity is--and the discomfort it requires--finds it easier to trust that light will shine again. The key is to never stop moving forward.
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Ed Catmull |