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We called it Notes Day, and I see it as a stellar example of how to set the table for creativity. Managers of creative companies must never forget to ask themselves: "How do we tap the brainpower of our people?" From its genesis to its execution, from the goodwill it engendered to the company-wide changes it set in motion, Notes Day was a success in part because it was based on the idea that fixing things is an ongoing, incremental process...
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Ed Catmull |
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It'll be a day in which you tell us how to make Pixar better," John said. "We'll do no work that day. No visitors will be allowed. Everyone must attend."
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Ed Catmull |
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First, it created an electronic suggestion box where Pixar people could submit discussion topics they thought would help us become more innovative and more efficient. Immediately, topic ideas began flooding in, along with suggestions about how to run Notes Day itself.
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Ed Catmull |
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Tom nudged them along, sending this hypothetical prompt to anyone who asked: "The year is 2017. Both of this year's films were completed in well under 18,500 person-weeks .... What innovations helped these productions meet their budget goals? What are some specific things that we did differently?" In the end, four thousand emails poured into the Notes Day suggestion box--containing one thousand separate ideas in all. As"
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Ed Catmull |
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Tom's team distilled the thousand ideas down to 293 discussion topics. That was still way too many for a single day's agenda, so a group of senior managers then met and whittled those down to 120 topics, organized into several broad categories such as Training, Environment and Culture; Cross-Show Resource Pooling (we often call our movies "shows"); Tools and Technology; and Workflow."
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Ed Catmull |
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Once the whittling process was complete, Tom needed to find out roughly how many people were interested in each discussion topic so that he could plan the day accordingly. To that end, the Notes Day Working Group circulated a survey, and what he learned was striking: The number one topic--the one that the most people wanted to talk about--was how to achieve a 12,000 person-week movie. In the end, Tom and his team would arrange seven separat..
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Ed Catmull |
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It's all well and good to gather people to discuss workplace challenges, but it was extremely important that we find a way to turn all that talk into something tangible, usable, valuable. How the day was designed, we felt, would be the deciding factor in accomplishing that.
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Ed Catmull |
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f5899fe
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John often plays the role of inspirer-in-chief, and the people at Disney and Pixar alike rely on his energy and optimism. But this was no rah-rah call to action. Ambling to the front of the stage, John proceeded to deliver the most heartfelt and emotional speech I had ever heard him give. He started by talking about candor, and how we spend a lot of time at Pixar talking about its importance. But
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Ed Catmull |
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A fair amount of feedback had focused on John himself, and not all of it was positive. In
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Ed Catmull |
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Among the ideas this group put on their exit forms: fostering more empathy between departments through a job-swapping program, establishing a lunch lottery that would match people at random to encourage new connections and friendships, and holding cross-departmental mixers designed to let far-flung colleagues get to know each other over a few beers.
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Ed Catmull |
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YOU'LL REMEMBER THAT the exit forms filled out by Notes Day participants weren't shy about asking, "Who should pitch this proposal?" That was by design--we wanted the best ideas to be pushed forward, not to languish. So"
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Ed Catmull |
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all those who'd volunteered to be "idea advocates" were called in to work with Tom and his team to hone their pitches. Then, they began making them to me, John, and our general manager, Jim Morris--and together, we immediately began moving to implement the ones that made sense."
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Ed Catmull |
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The ideas that emerged on Notes Day, in other words, were not gathering dust in a drawer. They were changing Pixar--meaningfully and for the better. The
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Ed Catmull |
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In the weeks after Notes Day, we implemented four good ideas, committed to five more, and earmarked still a dozen more for continued development. All of them stood to improve either our processes, our culture, or the way Pixar is managed.
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Ed Catmull |
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What made Notes Day work? To me, it boils down to three factors. First, there was a clear and focused goal. This wasn't a free-for-all but a wide-ranging discussion (organized around topics suggested not by Human Resources or by Pixar's executives, but by the company's employees) aimed at addressing a specific reality: the need to cut our costs by 10 percent. While
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Ed Catmull |
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Second, this was an idea championed by those at the highest levels of the company. Had the enormous task of making Notes Day a reality been shunted off on someone who didn't have the clout to throw muscle behind it--and not entrusted to Tom, who in turn recruited the most organized people in the company to help him--it would have been an entirely different experience. Employees wouldn't have bought into the idea because they'd sense that ma..
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Ed Catmull |
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Third, and relatedly, Notes Day was led from within. Many companies hire outside consulting firms to organize their all-staff retreats, and I understand why: Doing them well is a monumental, enormously time-consuming undertaking. But that our own people made Notes Day happen was, I believe, key to its success. Not only did they drive the discussion in meaningful ways, but their involvement also paid its own dividends. Seeing
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Ed Catmull |
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Notes Day wasn't an end point but a beginning--a way of making room for our employees to step forward and think about their role in our company's future. I said before that problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult. Notes brought problems to the surface--but we still had the hard work in front of us. Notes Day didn't solve anything all by itself. But it shifted our culture--repaired..
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Ed Catmull |
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Walt Disney was one of my two boyhood idols. The other was Albert Einstein. To me, even at a young age, they represented the two poles of creativity. Disney was all about inventing the new. He brought things into being--both artistically and technologically--that did not exist before. Einstein, by contrast, was a master of explaining that which already was.
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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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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,
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Ed Catmull |
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To reiterate, it is the focus on people--their work habits, their talents, their values--that is absolutely central to any creative venture.
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Ed Catmull |
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Toy Story 2 was a case study in how something that is usually considered a plus--a motivated, workaholic workforce pulling together to make a deadline--could destroy itself if left unchecked.
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Ed Catmull |
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We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we'd made was forgetting that "the process" has no agenda and doesn't have taste. It is just a tool--a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals."
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Ed Catmull |
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In Monsters, Inc., all of our very different plots shared a common feeling--the bittersweet goodbye you feel once a problem"--in this case, Sulley's quest to return Boo to her own world--"has been solved. You suffer through it as you struggle to solve it, but by the end you've developed a sort of fondness for it, and you miss it when it is gone."
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Ed Catmull |
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This is why it is so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see.) Whether
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Ed Catmull |
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38fd329
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A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn't clear, what makes no sense. A good note is offered at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem. A good note doesn't make demands; it doesn't even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer. Most of all, though, a good note is specific.
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Ed Catmull |
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Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it's often far from pretty.
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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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529f6db
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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.
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Ed Catmull |
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Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.
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Ed Catmull |
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Among the things he learned: John was so tightly scheduled, and meetings with him were so precious, that people tended to overprepare to see him, which served no one. In fact, John said, "there were a lot of notes about my time management, and how I carry the emotion of one meeting into the next, making some people ask, 'Why is he upset at us?' I didn't know I was doing any of this, and those two-and-a-half pages were really tough to read. ..
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Ed Catmull |
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Careful "messaging" to downplay problems makes you appear to be lying, deluded, ignorant, or uncaring. Sharing problems is an act of inclusion that makes employees feel invested in the larger enterprise. *"
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Ed Catmull |
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Once, after one of our special effects software guys resigned, he wrote me an email containing two complaints. First, he said, he didn't like that his job involved cleaning up so many little problems caused by the new software. Second, he wrote, he was disappointed that we weren't taking more technical risks in our movies. The irony was that his job was to help solve problems that arose precisely because we were taking a major technical ris..
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Ed Catmull |
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There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.
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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 |
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Confia en el proceso>>. Este nos gustaba porque era muy tranquilizador: aunque es inevitable que surjan dificultades y pasos en falso durante una iniciativa creativa, puedes apostar
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Ed Catmull |
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Mistakes aren't a necessary evil. They aren't evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new
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Ed Catmull |
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The uncreated is a vast, empty space. This emptiness is so scary that most hold on to what they know, making minor adjustments to what they understand, unable to move on to something unknown.
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Ed Catmull |
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They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable.
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Ed Catmull |
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In graduate school, I'd quietly set a goal of making the first computer-animated feature film, and I'd worked tirelessly for twenty years to accomplish it.
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Ed Catmull |
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Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it.
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Ed Catmull |
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puede quedarse con alguien a quien ama, sabiendo que finalmente sera descartado, o puede volar a un mundo donde se vera protegido para siempre, pero sin el amor para el que fue hecho. Esta es una autentica eleccion, una cuestion real.
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Ed Catmull |