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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7b70e8b | Steve understood the value of science and law, but he also understood that complex systems respond in nonlinear, unpredictable ways. And that creativity, at its best, surprises us all. | Ed Catmull | ||
| d28546a | 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 | Ed Catmull | ||
| 1f6dba7 | Your employees are smart; that's why you hired them. So treat them that way. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 032716b | People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 545a0ad | When filmmakers, industrial designers, software designers, or people in any other creative profession merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it gives the illusion of creativity, but it is craft without art. Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 9372fa9 | I believe that no creative company should ever stop evolving, and this would be our latest attempt to avoid stagnation. | Ed Catmull | ||
| be88edc | 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.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 055cd4d | Keep on going, even when things look bleak. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 856d69e | One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well. | Ed Catmull | ||
| c9c64e0 | real | Ed Catmull | ||
| f2ffd40 | If you aren't experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: | Ed Catmull | ||
| 50fc540 | A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. | Ed Catmull | ||
| e9f0256 | Who better to teach than the most capable among us? And I'm not just talking about seminars or formal settings. Our actions and behaviors, for better or worse, teach those who admire and look up to us how to govern their own lives. Are we thoughtful about how people learn and grow? As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the wh.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 0471b77 | DISCUSSING FAILURE AND all its ripple effects is not merely an academic exercise. We face it because by seeking better understanding, we remove barriers to full creative engagement. One of the biggest barriers is fear, and while failure comes with the territory, fear shouldn't have to. 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. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 51a2afe | Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can't be avoided, and "vision" is often an illusion." | Ed Catmull | ||
| b29c777 | Athletes and musicians often refer to being in "the zone"--that mystical place where their inner critic is silenced and they completely inhabit the moment, where the thinking is clear and the motions are precise. Often, mental models help get them there. Just as George Lucas liked to imagine his company as a wagon train headed west--its passengers full of purpose, part of a team, unwavering in their pursuit of their destination--the coping .. | Ed Catmull | ||
| f8843a4 | In big organizations there are advantages to consistency, but I strongly believe that smaller groups within the larger whole should be allowed to differentiate themselves and operate according to their own rules, so long as those rules work. This fosters a sense of personal ownership and pride in the company that, to my mind, benefits the larger enterprise. | Ed Catmull | ||
| ed64ed1 | one of the pioneers of interactive computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 5e4197c | The Sword of Damocles, after the Greek myth, | Ed Catmull | ||
| 5cd7812 | This tension between the individual's personal creative contribution and the leverage of the group is a dynamic that exists in all creative environments, but this would be my first taste of it. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 41cd1a0 | taking a risk necessitated a willingness to deal with the mess created by the risk. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 160837e | Our mental models aren't reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 40c642e | 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 it's sunny all the time--if, in fact, we don't ever even have night--all kinds of things don't happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that's how we know th.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| ec2f705 | During the Lucasfilm years, I definitely had my periods of feeling overwhelmed as a manager, periods when I wondered about my own abilities and asked myself if I should try to adopt a more forceful, alpha male management style. I'd put my version of hierarchy in place by delegating to other managers, but I was also part of a chain of command in the greater Lucasfilm empire. I remember going home at night, exhausted, feeling like I was balan.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 5ce2c59 | The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 87e443d | It's folly to think you can avoid change, no matter how much you might want to. But also, to my mind, you shouldn't want to. There is no growth or success without change. | Ed Catmull | ||
| eb186bc | A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 477dfd9 | Which meant that the people working on Up had to be able to roll with that evolution without panicking, shutting down, or growing discouraged. | Ed Catmull | ||
| a209904 | when our younger employees--those without families--work longer hours than those who are parents, we must be mindful not to compare the output of these two groups without being mindful of the context. I'm not talking just about the health of our employees | Ed Catmull | ||
| 042fc54 | So I tell myself that I have time, even when I don't. As in, 'Okay, I'm going to proceed as if I have time--I'm going to sit back and muse rather than looking at the clock--because if I sit back and muse, I'm more likely to solve the problem.' | Ed Catmull | ||
| 3338c85 | Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren't exceptional. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 7c5c35f | When I advocate for protecting the new, then, I am using the word somewhat differently. I am saying that when someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched--and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to let it evolve, it could be dest.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 6097661 | Did you arrive early to work because you left on time, planned ahead, and drove carefully? Or were you just in the right place at the right time? Most people would choose the former answer without a second thought--without even acknowledging the latter was an option. | Ed Catmull | ||
| c3bd77b | Communication would no longer have to go through hierarchical channels. The exchange of information was key to our business, of course, but I believed that it could--and frequently should--happen out of order, without people getting bent out of shape. 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 "prop.. | Ed Catmull | ||
| eba7e58 | Believe me, you don't want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 530b546 | 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. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 8471446 | ARPA had been created in response to Sputnik, and one of its key organizing principles was that collaboration could lead to excellence. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 7132d88 | personally supervised by Walt himself to ensure that as many rooms as possible had windows to let in natural light. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 863164f | A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces, | Ed Catmull | ||
| 4f0c7c0 | 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. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 3c27e28 | Alex Schure | Ed Catmull | ||
| c35d887 | prescient | Ed Catmull | ||
| 37e11af | The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter. | Ed Catmull | ||
| 8a0c56c | I've made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am. | Ed Catmull |