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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8704fc1 | I could see something that Bill couldn't: Steve had responded to Bill's passion about the issue. The fact that Bill was willing to stand up so forcefully and articulately for what he believed showed Steve that Bill's ideas were worthy of respect. Steve never raised the format issue with us again. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 5c192eb | Managers of creative companies must never forget to ask themselves: "How do we tap the brainpower of our people?" | Ed Catmull | ||
| dee871b | I've known many managers who hate to be surprised in meetings, for example, by which I mean they make it clear that they want to be briefed about any unexpected news in advance and in private. In many workplaces, it is a sign of disrespect if someone surprises a manager with new information in front of other people. But what does this mean in practice? It means that there are pre-meetings before meetings, and the meetings begin to take on a.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 08e95a9 | Two days a month, he allowed his engineers to work on anything they wanted, using Pixar's resources to engage with whatever problem or question they found interesting. It didn't have to be directly applicable to any particular film or address any of production's needs. | Ed Catmull | ||
| b283ffc | 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--over the years, we have offered free classes in all of th.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 5f99054 | those of you in management positions, be aware that some of this is going to feel like it's directed at you personally. I'm not kidding. It's going to happen. But put your tough skin on, and for the sake of Pixar, speak up, and don't stop the honesty. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 74c3fdb | Most people have heard of the Eastern teaching that it is important to exist in the moment. It can be hard to train yourself to observe what is right now (and not to bog down in thoughts of what was and what will be), but the philosophical teaching that underlies that idea--the reason that staying in the moment is so vital--is equally important: Everything is changing. All the time. And you can't stop it. And your attempts to stop it actual.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| ba15c3b | it seemed like every issue, big or small, that arose around this time was chalked up to the merger: "You said things wouldn't change! You're breaking your word! We don't want to lose the old Pixar!" I should say that this outcry came despite the fact that the measures we had put in place to protect Pixar's culture were working--and, in my view, were a model for how to maintain cultural integrity after a merger." | Ed Catmull | ||
| 51471d4 | From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 8743146 | I began to see my role as a leader more clearly. I would devote myself to learning how to build not just a successful company but a sustainable creative culture. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 59adc27 | There is another, different meaning of reality distortion for me. It stems from my belief that our decisions and actions have consequences and that those consequences shape our future. Our actions change our reality. Our intentions matter. Most people believe that their actions have consequences but don't think through the implications of that belief. But Steve did. He believed, as I do, that it is precisely by acting on our intentions and .. | Ed Catmull | ||
| e70d0e8 | The animators who work here are free to--no, encouraged to--decorate their work spaces in whatever style they wish. They spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung with miniature chandeliers, tiki huts made of real bamboo, and castles whose meticulously painted, fifteen-foot-high styrofoam turrets appear to be carved from stone. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 42185fe | I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know--not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 51435a9 | We tend to think of emotion and logic as two distinct, mutually exclusive domains. Not Steve. From the beginning, when making decisions, passion was a key part of his calculus. | Ed Catmull | ||
| a690f90 | If we can constantly change and improve our models by using technology in the pursuit of art, we keep ourselves fresh. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 18dbf61 | Steve had a remarkable knack for letting go of things that didn't work. If you were in an argument with him, and you convinced him that you were right, he would instantly change his mind. He didn't hold on to an idea because he had once believed it to be brilliant. His ego didn't attach to the suggestions he made, even as he threw his full weight behind them. | Ed Catmull | ||
| f4812aa | I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively. What stands in our way are these hidden barriers--the misconceptions and assumptions that impede us without our knowing it. The issue of what is hidden, then, is not just an abstraction to be bandied about as an intellectual exercise. The Hidden--and our acknowledgement of it--is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress:.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 951c7e4 | When people who run bureaucracies balk at change, they are usually acting in the service of what they think is right. 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. T.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 0e45f58 | My conclusion at the time was that finalizing the story before production began was still a worthy goal--we just hadn't achieved it yet. As we continued to make films, however, I came to believe that my goal was not just impractical but naive. By insisting on the importance of getting our ducks in a row early, we had come perilously close to embracing a fallacy. Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, some.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 9869b45 | Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can't be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can't completely grasp it, so it has less impact on our consciousness than things we can see, measure, and categorize. Here's a simple example: You leave late for work but still arrive in time for your 9 A.M. meeting. Congratulating yourself, you are oblivious to the f.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 6ca8c35 | 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. In other words, we can't see the alternatives that might well have happened if not for some small chance event. When a bad thing happens, people will draw conclusions that might include conspiracy or forces acting against them or, conversely, if a good thin.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| a78d2da | So what if we oversimplify in order to get through our days? So what if we hold tight to familiar ideas that give us the answers we crave? What does it matter? In my view, it matters a lot. In creative endeavors, we must face the unknown. But if we do so with blinders on--if we shut out reality in the interest of keeping things simple--we will not excel. The mechanisms that keep us safe from unknown threats have been hardwired into us since.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 51348c8 | The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up? That approach never encourages a creative response. My rule of thumb is that any time we impose limits or procedures, we should ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If the answer is that they won't, then the propos.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| f07cb1b | Sometimes a big event happens that changes everything. When it does, it tends to affirm the human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones. That's a problem, inside companies. When we put setbacks into two buckets--the "business as usual" bucket and the "holy cow" bucket--and use a different mindset for each, we are signing up for trouble. We become so caught up in our big problems that we ignore the little .. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 695d03b | pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions. When we give notes on Pixar movies and isolate a scene, say, that isn't working, we have learned that fixing that scene usually requires making changes somewhere else in the film, and that is where our attention should go. Our filmmakers have become skilled at not getting caught up in a problem but instead looking .. | Ed Catmull | ||
| c803a00 | Given that we all agree, in principle, that postmortems are good for us, I'm always struck by how much people dread them. Most feel that they've learned what they could during the execution of the project, so they'd just as soon move on. Problems that arose are frequently personal, so most are eager to avoid revisiting them. Who looks forward to a forum for being second-guessed? People, in general, would rather talk about what went right th.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 2a8bdde | 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. Even if you come up with a format that w.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| b43cdf9 | when you begin to grasp that big and little problems are structured similarly, then that helps you maintain a calmer perspective. Moreover, it helps you remain open to an important reality: If all our careful planning cannot prevent problems, then our best method of response is to enable employees at every level to own the problems and have the confidence to fix them. We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| ba51fc5 | I'm particularly struck by Byron's focus on speed--on "zipping through" complex problems of logic and storytelling--because it reminds me of what Andrew Stanton says about being a director. I've told you about Andrew's belief that we will all be happier and more productive if we hurry up and fail. For him, moving quickly is a plus because it prevents him from getting stuck worrying about whether his chosen course of action is the wrong one... | Ed Catmull | ||
| 5e0e0f8 | This is key to an idea I introduced earlier in the book: The director, or leader, can never lose the confidence of his or her crew. As long as you have been candid and had good reasons for making your (now-flawed-in-retrospect) decisions, your crew will keep rowing. But if you find that the ship is just spinning around--and if you assert that such meaningless activity is, in fact, forward motion--then the crew will balk. They know better th.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 1635c65 | The phenomenon I'm describing, rooted so firmly in that primal human drive for self-preservation, probably doesn't sound surprising: We all know that people bring their best selves to interactions with their bosses and save their lesser moments for their peers, spouses, or therapists. And yet, so many managers aren't aware of it when it's happening (perhaps because they enjoy being deferred to). It simply doesn't occur to them that after th.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 0b8afe6 | If you think, you stink. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 98001e0 | People want to hang on to things that work--stories that work, methods that work, strategies that work. You figure something out, it works, so you keep doing it--this is what an organization that is committed to learning does. And as we become successful, our approaches are reinforced, and we become even more resistant to change. Moreover, it is precisely because of the inevitability of change that people fight to hold on to what they know... | Ed Catmull | ||
| 730cbe5 | 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.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 29553da | We need to think about failure differently. I'm not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren't a necessary evil. They aren't evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we'd have no originality). And yet, eve.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| e08420d | no matter how intensely we desire certainty, we should understand that whether because of our limits or randomness or future unknowable confluences of events, something will inevitably come, unbidden, through that door. Some of it will be uplifting and inspiring, and some of it will be disastrous. We all know people who eagerly face the unknown; they engage with the seemingly intractable problems of science, engineering, and society; they e.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 48c2faa | Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 080e5eb | It's extremely difficult to create something out of nothing, especially when you consider that much of what you're trying to realize is hidden, at least at first. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 9eaa47f | They want to please, impress, and show their worth. They really don't want to embarrass themselves by showing incomplete work or ill-conceived ideas, and they don't want to say something dumb in front of the director. The first step is to teach them that everyone at Pixar shows incomplete work, and everyone is free to make suggestions. When they realize this, the embarrassment goes away--and when the embarrassment goes away, people become m.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 44dfd8b | If fear hinders us even in grade school, no wonder it takes such discipline--some people even call it a practice--to turn off that inner critic in adulthood and return to a place of openness. In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, "not know mind." To have a "not know mind" is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as child.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 4c3ab0c | 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 unaddressed, could fester and destroy Pixar. | Ed Catmull | ||
| ec2b6b0 | As much as I admire the efficiency of the caterpillar in its cocoon, I do not believe that creative products should be developed in a vacuum (arguably, that was one of the mistakes we made on the film about blue-footed newts). I know some people who like to keep their gem completely to themselves while they polish it. But allowing this kind of behavior isn't protection. In fact, it can be the opposite: a failure to protect your employees fr.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| d6d95d5 | Completamos o inventamos mucho mas de lo que pensamos. De lo que estoy tratando de hablar aqui es de los modelos mentales, que desempenan un importante papel en la percepcion del mundo. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 179347d | Instead, he favors being decisive, then forgiving yourself if your initial decision proves misguided. | Ed Catmull |