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The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.
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Ed Catmull |
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To ensure quality, I believed, any person on any team needed to be able to identify a problem and, in effect, pull the cord to stop the line. To create a culture in which this was possible, you needed more than a cord within easy reach. You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. More and more, I saw that by putting people first--not just saying that we did, but prov..
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Ed Catmull |
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In many ways, the work of a critic is easy," Ego says. "We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. 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. But there are times when a critic tru..
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Ed Catmull |
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Here's what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing. This problem is ..
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Ed Catmull |
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What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems,
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Ed Catmull |
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Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they'll get the ideas right.
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Ed Catmull |
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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."
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Ed Catmull |
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The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed).
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Ed Catmull |
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The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes you believe it is a thinking being. Whether it's a T-Rex or a slinky dog or a desk lamp, if viewers sense not just movement but intention--or, put another way, emotion--then the animator has done his or her job. It's not just lines on paper anymore; it's a living, feeling entity. This is what I experienced that night, for the first time, as I watched Donald leap o..
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Ed Catmull |
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If you're sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?
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Ed Catmull |
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I often say that managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions. What does that mean? It means that we must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by things we thought we knew but didn't. As long as our intentions--our values--remain constant, our goals can shift as needed.
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Ed Catmull |
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Since making movies is such a messy process, we need to be able to talk candidly, among ourselves, about the mess without having it shared outside the company. By sharing problems and sensitive issues with employees, we make them partners and partowners in our culture, and they do not want to let each other down.
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Ed Catmull |
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ARPA had been created in response to Sputnik, and one of its key organizing principles was that collaboration could lead to excellence.
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Ed Catmull |
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personally supervised by Walt himself to ensure that as many rooms as possible had windows to let in natural light.
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Ed Catmull |
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A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces,
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Ed Catmull |
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The Z-buffer accomplished that by assigning a depth to every object in three-dimensional space, then telling the computer to match each of the screen's pixels to whatever object was the closest.
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Ed Catmull |
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Alex Schure
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Ed Catmull |
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prescient
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Ed Catmull |
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The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
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Ed Catmull |
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I've made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am.
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Ed Catmull |
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After talking about it, however, Alvy and I decided to do the opposite--to share our work with the outside world. My view was that we were all so far from achieving our goal that to hoard ideas only impeded our ability to get to the finish line.
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Ed Catmull |
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In the intervening years, George has said that he hired me because of my honesty, my "clarity of vision," and my steadfast belief in what computers could do. Not long after we met, he offered me the job."
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Ed Catmull |
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Clearly, it wasn't enough for managers to have good ideas--they had to be able to engender support for those ideas among the people who'd be charged with employing them.
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Ed Catmull |
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The Art of Animation
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Ed Catmull |
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The antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world. Fear and trust are powerful forces, and while they are not opposites, exactly, trust is the best tool for driving out fear.
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Ed Catmull |
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I remember his assertiveness. There was no small talk. Instead, there were questions. Lots of questions. What do you want? Steve asked. Where are you heading? What are your long-term goals?
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Ed Catmull |
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a conversation with him took you places you didn't expect. It forced you not just to defend but also to engage. And that in itself, I came to believe, had value.
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Ed Catmull |
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When you instantly resort to secrecy, you are telling people they can't be trusted.
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Ed Catmull |
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Dick Levin's Buy Low, Sell High, Collect Early, and Pay Late: The Manager's Guide to Financial Survival,
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Ed Catmull |
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When you are candid, you are telling people that you trust them and that there is nothing to fear. To confide in employees is to give them a sense of ownership over the information.
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Ed Catmull |
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We are striving to tell you something impactful and true. When attempting to make good on that promise, no detail is too small.
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Ed Catmull |
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Not for George, though. He skipped the raise altogether and asked instead to retain ownership of licensing and merchandising rights to Star Wars. The studio that was distributing the film, 20th Century Fox, readily agreed to his request, thinking it was not giving up much. George would prove them wrong, setting the stage for major changes in the industry he loved. He bet on himself--and won.
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Ed Catmull |
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We had learned long ago that while everyone appreciates cash bonuses, they value something else almost as much: being looked in the eye by someone they respect and told, "Thank you."
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Ed Catmull |
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obligated to be honest somehow
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Ed Catmull |
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As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn't.
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Ed Catmull |
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When a bad thing happens, people will draw conclusions that might include conspiracy or forces acting against them or, conversely, if a good thing happens, that they are brilliant and deserving.
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Ed Catmull |
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When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today.
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Ed Catmull |
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My view was that we were all so far from achieving our goal that to hoard ideas only impeded our ability to get to the finish line.
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Ed Catmull |
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Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on--but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal. I
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Ed Catmull |
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Pete Docter compares directing to running through a long tunnel having no idea how long it will last but trusting that he will eventually come out, intact, at the other end. "There's a really scary point in the middle where it's just dark," he says. "There's no light from where you came in and there's no light at the other end; all you can do is keep going."
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Ed Catmull |
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But when it comes to creativity, the unknown is not our enemy. If we make room for it instead of shunning it, the unknown can bring inspiration and originality.
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Ed Catmull |
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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.
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Ed Catmull |
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But in 1947, an American working in Japan turned that thinking on its head. His name was W. Edwards Deming, and he was a statistician who was known for his expertise in quality control. At the request of the U.S. Army, he had traveled to Asia to assist with planning the 1951 Japanese census. Once he arrived, he became deeply involved with the country's reconstruction effort and ended up teaching hundreds of Japanese engineers, managers, and..
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Ed Catmull |
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In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The overplanners just take longer to be wrong
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Ed Catmull |