Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

By Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace 

Key Takeaways:

• Acknowledge that you and your company have problems that are hidden from your view and work relentlessly to uncover them. 
• Unhindered communication is key no matter what your position is. 
• The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee.
• We had succeeded by holding true to our ideals; nothing could be better than that.
• Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.
• If we are in this for the long haul, we have to take care of ourselves, support healthy habits, and encourage our employees to have fulfilling lives outside of work.
• Everyone at Pixar thought that they were part owners of the company’s greatest asset—its quality. To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. 
• A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms.Telling the truth is difficult, but inside a creative company, it is the only way to ensure excellence.
• We believe that ideas—and thus, films—only become great when they are challenged and tested.
• 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.
• 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
• I think the person who can’t change his or her mind is dangerous.
• To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. When it comes to creativity, the unknown is not our enemy. 
• Self-reflection is crucial. 

 

Introduction 

• Sometimes visitors misunderstand the place, thinking it’s fancy for fancy’s sake. What they miss is that the unifying idea for this building isn’t luxury but community. Steve wanted the building to support our work by enhancing our ability to collaborate.
• The point is, we value self-expression here.
• walking into Pixar leaves them feeling a little wistful, like something is missing in their work lives—a palpable energy, a feeling of collaboration and unfettered creativity, a sense, not to be corny, of possibility. I respond by telling them that the feeling they are picking up on—call it exuberance or irreverence, even whimsy—is integral to our success.
  • Does your environment feel like this? If not can you and your people do their best work if it doesn’t? 

• But it’s not what makes Pixar special. 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, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. This, more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning. It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission.
• We had put our faith in a simple idea: If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it, too.
• In fulfilling a goal, I had lost some essential framework. Is this really what I want to do? Is this all there is? I wondered. Is it time for a new challenge?
• There was, in short, plenty to occupy my working hours. But my internal sense of purpose—the thing that had led me to sleep on the floor of the computer lab in graduate school just to get more hours on the mainframe, that kept me awake at night, as a kid, solving puzzles in my head, that fueled my every workday—had gone missing.
• Gradually, a pattern began to emerge: Someone had a creative idea, obtained funding, brought on a lot of smart people, and developed and sold a product that got a boatload of attention. That initial success begat more success, luring the best engineers and attracting customers who had interesting and high-profile problems to solve.
• What interested me was not that companies rose and fell or that the landscape continually shifted as technology changed but that the leaders of these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work.

Great Leadership 

• • I came to realize that trying to solve this mystery would be my next challenge. My desire to protect Pixar from the forces that ruin so many businesses gave me renewed focus. 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. As I turned my attention from solving technical problems to engaging with the philosophy of sound management, I was excited once again—and sure that our second act could be as exhilarating as our first.
  • My belief is that good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.

• We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

• I’ve spent nearly forty years thinking about how to help smart, ambitious people work effectively with one another. The way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it. I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be creative—whatever form that creativity takes—and that to encourage such development is a noble thing. More interesting to me, though, are the blocks that get in the way, often without us noticing, and hinder the creativity that resides within any thriving company.
• The most compelling mechanisms to me are those that deal with uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot see. 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. 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. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

PART I GETTING STARTED

CHAPTER 1 ANIMATED

• When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless. That’s what I believe.
• A fundamental Pixar belief: Unhindered communication was key, no matter what your position.
• There is the problem you know you are trying to solve—think of that as an oak tree—and then there are all the other problems—think of these as saplings—that sprouted from the acorns that fell around it. And these problems remain after you cut the oak tree down.
• Even after all these years, I’m often surprised to find problems that have existed right in front of me, in plain sight. For me, the key to solving these problems is finding ways to see what’s working and what isn’t, which sounds a lot simpler than it is.
• (Walt Disney) He always went out of his way to give credit to his forebears, the men—and, at this point, they were all men—who’d done the pioneering work upon which he was building his empire.
• 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.
• The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes you believe it is a thinking being.
• I was a quiet, focused student in high school. An art teacher once told my parents I would often become so lost in my work that I wouldn’t hear the bell ring at the end of class; I’d be sitting there, at my desk, staring at an object—a vase, say, or a chair. Something about the act of committing that object to paper was completely engrossing—the way it necessitated seeing only what was there and shutting out the distraction of my ideas about chairs or vases and what they were supposed to look like.
• Professor Sutherland used to say that he loved his graduate students at Utah because we didn’t know what was impossible.
• When one of my colleagues at the U of U invented something, the rest of us would immediately piggyback on it, pushing that new idea forward. There were setbacks, too, of course. But the overriding feeling was one of progress, of moving steadily toward a distant goal.
• The leaders of my department understood that to create a fertile laboratory, they had to assemble different kinds of thinkers and then encourage their autonomy. They had to offer feedback when needed but also had to be willing to stand back and give us room. I felt instinctively that this kind of environment was rare and worth reaching for. 

The question for me, then, was how to get myself into another environment like this—or how to build one of my own.

CHAPTER 2 PIXAR IS BORN

• I gained experience, I was asking questions that intrigued me even as they confused me. Even now, forty years later, I’ve never stopped questioning.
• To ensure that it succeeded, I needed to attract the sharpest minds; to attract the sharpest minds, I needed to put my own insecurities away. The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
• By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. 
• Over the years, I have met people who took what seemed the safer path and were the lesser for it. 
• By hiring Alvy, I had taken a risk, and that risk yielded the highest reward—a brilliant, committed teammate.
• I created a flat organizational structure, much like I’d experienced in academia, largely because I naïvely thought that if I put together a hierarchical structure—assigning a bunch of managers to report to me—I would have to spend too much time managing and not enough time on my own work. This structure—in which I entrusted everybody to drive their own projects forward, at their own pace—had its limits, but the fact is, giving a ton of freedom to highly self-motivated people enabled us to make some significant technological leaps in a short time.

George Lucas

• In the intervening years, George Lucas has said that he hired me because of my honesty, my “clarity of vision,” and my steadfast belief in what computers could do.
• But as challenging as that problem proved to be, it paled in comparison to the bigger, and eternal, impediment to our progress: the human resistance to change.
• Just as Yoda said things like, “Do, or do not. There is no try,” George had a fondness for folksy analogies that sought to describe, neatly, the mess of life. He would compare the often arduous process of developing his 4,700-acre Skywalker Ranch compound (a minicity of residences and production facilities) to a ship going down river … that had been cut in half … and whose captain had been thrown overboard. “We’re still going to get there,” he would say. “Grab the paddles and let’s keep going!”
• But the process of moving toward something—of having not yet arrived—was what he idealized. Whether evoking wagons or ships, George thought in terms of a long view; he believed in the future and his ability to shape it.
• The story has been told and retold about how, as a young filmmaker, in the wake of American Graffiti’s success, he was advised to demand a higher salary on his next movie, Star Wars. That would be the expected move in Hollywood: Bump up your quote. 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.

 

• This was my first encounter with a phenomenon I would notice again and again, throughout my career: For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.
• So, when our two like-minded overlords demanded a list of names of people to lay off, Alvy and I gave them two: his and mine.
  • This was when their project wasn’t going to plan and it shows how selfless Ed is. In the best of times the leader gives away all the credit and in the worst of times the leader takes all the credit. 

Steve Jobs

• I first met Steve in February of 1985, when he was the director of Apple Computer, Inc.
• 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? He used the phrase “insanely great products” to explain what he believed in. Clearly, he was the sort of person who didn’t let presentations happen to him, and it wasn’t long before he was talking about making a deal.
• To be honest, I was uneasy about Steve. He had a forceful personality, whereas I do not, and I felt threatened by him. For all of my talk about the importance of surrounding myself with people smarter than myself, his intensity was at such a different level, I didn’t know how to interpret it.
• Steve’s domineering nature could take one’s breath away. At one point he turned to me and calmly explained that he wanted my job. Once he took my place at the helm, he said, I would learn so much from him that in just two years I would be able to run the enterprise all by myself. I was, of course, already running the enterprise by myself, but I marveled at his chutzpah. He not only planned to displace me in the day-to-day management of the company, he expected me to think it was a great idea!
• Steve was hard-charging—relentless, even—but 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.
• I was amused by the fact that each man could see ego in the other but not in himself.
• He said, “When I don’t see eye to eye with somebody, I just take the time to explain it better, so they understand the way it should be.” haha

CHAPTER 3 A DEFINING GOAL 

There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.

• In 1986, I became the president of a new hardware company whose main business was selling the Pixar Image Computer. The only problem was, I had no idea what I was doing.
• Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.
• The essence was this: The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line.
• Deming’s approach—and Toyota’s, too—gave ownership of and responsibility for a product’s quality to the people who were most involved in its creation. Instead of merely repeating an action, workers could suggest changes, call out problems, and—this next element seemed particularly important to me—feel the pride that came when they helped fix what was broken. This resulted in continuous improvement, driving out flaws and improving quality.
• At Pixar’s lowest point, as we floundered and failed to make a profit, Steve had sunk $54 million of his own money into the company—a significant chunk of his net worth,
• The only thing that made this leap easier was that we had decided to go all in on what we’d yearned to do from the outset: computer animation. This was where our true passion resided, and the only option left was to go after it with everything we had.
• Pixar could not have survived without Steve, but more than once in those years, I wasn’t sure if we’d survive with him. Steve could be brilliant and inspirational, capable of diving deeply and intelligently into any problem we faced. But he could also be impossible: dismissive, condescending, threatening, even bullying. Perhaps of most concern, from a management standpoint, was the fact that he exhibited so little empathy. At that point in his life, he was simply unable to put himself in other people’s shoes, and his sense of humor was nonexistent.
• A funny thing happened, though, as we went through these trials. Steve and I gradually found a way to work together. And as we did so, we began to understand each other.
• When the stakes were highest, Steve could go to what seemed another level of play.
• You’ve probably heard the maxim that it’s best to assemble your parachute before you jump out of a plane. Well, in our case we were already in free fall—and not one of us had ever made a parachute before.
• They also learned an important lesson—to trust their own storytelling instincts.
• I will simply assert that failure made him better, wiser, and kinder. We’d all been affected and humbled by the failures and challenges of our first nine years, but we’d also gained something important along the way. Backing each other through difficulties increased our trust and deepened our bond.
• His logic, as it often did, won the day. Steve turned out to be right. As our first movie broke records at the box office and as all our dreams seemed to be coming true, our initial public offering raised nearly $140 million for the company—the biggest IPO of 1995. And a few months later, as if on cue, Eisner called, saying that he wanted to renegotiate the deal and keep us as a partner. He accepted Steve’s offer of a 50/50 split. I was amazed; Steve had called this exactly right. His clarity and execution were stunning.
• We had succeeded by holding true to our ideals; nothing could be better than that.

Unsatisfied Accomplishing a Dream 

• But while I could feel that euphoria, I was oddly unable to participate in it. For twenty years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer graphics movie. Now that that goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose. Now what? The thing that had replaced it seemed to be the act of running a company, which was more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn’t special. Pixar was now public and successful, yet there was something unsatisfying about the prospect of merely keeping it running.
• 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 unaddressed, could fester and destroy Pixar.
• Being on the lookout for problems, I realized, was not the same as seeing problems. This would be the idea—the challenge—around which I would build my new sense of purpose.
• 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.

Fostering a Creative Culture 

• We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions. Questions like: If we had done some things right to achieve success, how could we ensure that we understood what those things were?
  • Could we replicate them on our next projects? Perhaps as important, was replication of success even the right thing to do? How many serious, potentially disastrous problems were lurking just out of sight and threatening to undo us? What, if anything, could we do to bring them to light? How much of our success was luck? What would happen to our egos if we continued to succeed? Would they grow so large they could hurt us, and if so, what could we do to address that overconfidence? What dynamics would arise now that we were bringing new people into a successful enterprise as opposed to a struggling startup?

• Human interaction is far more complex than relativity or string theory, of course, but that only made it more interesting and important; it constantly challenged my presumptions.
• But one thing could not have been more plain: Figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture—one that didn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence, communication, originality, and self-assessment but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became—wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. And one that I wanted to do.
• How could we enable the talents of these people, keep them happy, and not let the inevitable complexities that come with any collaborative endeavor undo us along the way? That was the job I assigned myself—and the one that still animates me to this day.

CHAPTER 4 ESTABLISHING PIXAR’S IDENTITY

• Two defining creative principles emerged in the wake of Toy Story.
  • The first principle was “Story Is King,” by which we meant that we would let nothing—not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities—get in the way of our story.
  • The other principle we depended on was “Trust the Process.” We liked this one because it was so reassuring: While there are inevitably difficulties and missteps in any complex creative endeavor, you can trust that “the process” will carry you through.

• Our role in that failure required some soul searching on my part. What was it that we missed? What led us to make such flawed assumptions, and to fail to intervene when the evidence was mounting that the film was in trouble?
• It was unthinkable that we not do our best.
• We had less than a year before Toy Story 2 was due in theaters. Getting it there in time would drive our workforce to the breaking point, and there would surely be a price to pay for that. But I also believed that the alternative—acceptance of mediocrity—would have consequences that were far more destructive.

“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. It was the fuel that has continued to burn in all of us.”

• 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. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. 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.
• Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.
• Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.
  • Why are we confused about this? Because too many of us think of ideas as being singular, as if they float in the ether, fully formed and independent of the people who wrestle with them. Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.

• To reiterate, it is the focus on people—their work habits, their talents, their values—that is absolutely central to any creative venture.
• Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.
• More and more, I saw that by putting people first—not just saying that we did, but proving that we did by the actions we took—we were protecting that culture.

Two Story 2

• 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. Though I was immensely proud of what we had accomplished, I vowed that we would never make a film that way again. It was management’s job to take the long view, to intervene and protect our people from their willingness to pursue excellence at all costs. Not to do so would be irresponsible.
• If we are in this for the long haul, we have to take care of ourselves, support healthy habits, and encourage our employees to have fulfilling lives outside of work. Moreover, everyone’s home lives change as they—and their children, if they have them—age. This means creating a culture in which taking maternity or paternity leave is not seen as an impediment to career advancement. That may not sound revolutionary, but at many companies, parents know that taking that leave comes at a cost; a truly committed employee, they are wordlessly told, wants to be at work. That’s not true at Pixar.
• But leadership also means paying close attention to ever-changing dynamics in the workplace. For example, 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 here; I’m talking about their long-term productivity and happiness. Investing in this stuff pays dividends down the line.
• To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.

Quality 

• it was a signal to everyone at Pixar that they were part owners of the company’s greatest asset—its quality.
• Around this time, John coined a new phrase: “Quality is the best business plan.” What he meant was that quality is not a consequence of following some set of behaviors. Rather, it is a prerequisite and a mindset you must have before you decide what you are setting out to do. Everyone says quality is important, but they must do more than say it. They must live, think, and breathe it.

PART II PROTECTING THE NEW CHAPTER 5 HONESTY AND CANDOR

• 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.
• So how can a manager ensure that his or her working group, department, or company is embracing candor? I look for ways to institutionalize it by putting mechanisms in place that explicitly say it is valuable.

The Braintrust 

• In this chapter, we will look into the workings of one of Pixar’s key mechanisms: the Braintrust, which we rely upon to push us toward excellence and to root out mediocrity. The Braintrust, which meets every few months or so to assess each movie we’re making, is our primary delivery system for straight talk. 
• Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.
• Compounding matters is the fact that you aren’t the only one who’s struggling with these doubts. Everyone is; societal conditioning discourages telling the truth to those perceived to be in higher positions. Then there’s human nature. The more people there are in the room, the more pressure there is to perform well.
• When the stakes are high and there is a sense that people in the room don’t understand a director’s project, it can feel to that director like everything they’ve worked so hard on is in jeopardy, under attack. Their brains go into overdrive, reading all of the subtexts and fighting off the perceived threats to what they’ve built. When so much is on the line, the barriers to truly candid discussions are formidable.
• And yet, candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck.
• I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.” This idea—that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp.
• Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.

The Process 

• To understand what the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process.
• Which is why we don’t give notes this way at Pixar. We have developed our own model, based on our determination to be a filmmaker-led studio. That does not mean there is no hierarchy here. It means that we try to create an environment where people want to hear each other’s notes, even when those notes are challenging, and where everyone has a vested interest in one another’s success. We give our filmmakers both freedom and responsibility.
• You may be thinking, How is the Braintrust different from any other feedback mechanism? There are two key differences, as I see it. The first is that the Braintrust is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling and, usually, people who have been through the process themselves.
• The second difference is that the Braintrust has no authority. This is crucial: The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. After a Braintrust meeting, it is up to him or her to figure out how to address the feedback. Braintrust meetings are not top-down, do-this-or-else affairs. By removing from the Braintrust the power to mandate solutions, we affect the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential.
• We believe that ideas—and thus, films—only become great when they are challenged and tested.
• The film itself—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: 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.
• But the Braintrust is benevolent. It wants to help. And it has no selfish agenda.
• Andrew is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can. In a battle, if you’re faced with two hills and you’re unsure which one to attack, he says, the right course of action is to hurry up and choose. If you find out it’s the wrong hill, turn around and attack the other one.

 

Frank talk, spirited debate, laughter, and love. If I could distill a Braintrust meeting down to its most essential ingredients, those four things would surely be among them.

• 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.
• The key is to look at the viewpoints being offered, in any successful feedback group, as additive, not competitive. A competitive approach measures other ideas against your own, turning the discussion into a debate to be won or lost. An additive approach, on the other hand, starts with the understanding that each participant contributes something (even if it’s only an idea that fuels the discussion—and ultimately doesn’t work). 
• The Braintrust is valuable because it broadens your perspective, allowing you to peer—at least briefly—through others’ eyes.
• 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. “I’m writhing with boredom,” is not a good note.
• Telling the truth is difficult, but inside a creative company, it is the only way to ensure excellence.
• It would be a mistake to think that merely gathering a bunch of people in a room for a candid discussion every couple of months will automatically cure your company’s ills. First, it takes a while for any group to develop the level of trust necessary to be truly candid, to express reservations and criticisms without fear of reprisal, and to learn the language of good notes.
• Second, even the most experienced Braintrust can’t help people who don’t understand its philosophies, who refuse to hear criticism without getting defensive, or who don’t have the talent to digest feedback, reset, and start again.
• Third, as I’ll discuss in later chapters, the Braintrust is something that evolves over time.

CHAPTER 6 FEAR AND FAILURE

• • 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, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.
  • 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 find, put on elbow and knee pads so you’re not afraid of falling, and go,” he says. If you apply this mindset to everything new you attempt, you can begin to subvert the negative connotation associated with making mistakes.
  • 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.
  • There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure.
  • 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 about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. That is why I make a point of being open about our meltdowns inside Pixar, because I believe they teach us something important: Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them.
  • My goal is not to drive fear out completely, because fear is inevitable in high-stakes situations. What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.
  • The principle I’m describing here—iterative trial and error—has long-recognized value in science. When scientists have a question, they construct hypotheses, test them, analyze them, and draw conclusions—and then they do it all over again. The reasoning behind this is simple:
  • Experiments are fact-finding missions that, over time, inch scientists toward greater understanding. That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information. If your experiment proved your initial theory wrong, better to know it sooner rather than later. Armed with new facts, you can then reframe whatever question you’re asking.
  • 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 (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). There’s a corollary to this, as well: The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it. The nonworking idea gets worn into your brain, like a rut in the mud. It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction. Which, more often than not, is exactly what you must do.
  • As a team, we analyzed our assumptions, why we’d made such flawed choices. Were there essential qualities we needed to look for in our director candidates, going forward, that we’d overlooked in the past? More significantly, how had we failed to prepare new directors adequately for the daunting job they faced? How many times had we said, “We won’t let him or her fail”—only to let them fail?
  • Then we turned to the future. We identified individuals who we thought had the potential to become directors, listing their strengths and weaknesses and being specific about what we would do to teach them, give them experience, and support them. In the wake of our failures, we still didn’t want to make only “safe” choices going forward; we understood that taking creative and leadership risks is essential to who we are and that sometimes this means handing the keys to someone who may not fit the traditional conception of a movie director.
  • And yet, as we made those unconventional choices, everyone agreed, we needed to outline better, more explicit steps to train and prepare those we felt had the necessary skills to make movies. Instead of hoping that our director candidates would absorb our shared wisdom through osmosis, we resolved to create a formal mentoring program.
  • He told me that he thinks he and the other proven directors have a responsibility to be teachers—that this should be a central part of their jobs, even as they continue to make their own films. “The Holy Grail is to find a way that we can teach others how to make the best movie possible with whoever they’ve got on their crew, because it’s just logic that someday we won’t be here,”
  • 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.

• 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.

Trust

• 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. There will always be plenty to be afraid of, especially when you are.
• 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.
• Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must demonstrate their trustworthiness, over time, through their actions—and the best way to do that is by responding well to failure.
• Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.
• A manager’s default mode should not be secrecy. What is needed is a thoughtful consideration of the cost of secrecy weighed against the risks. When you instantly resort to secrecy, you are telling people they can’t be trusted. 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.
• Pixar’s head of management development, Jamie Woolf, put together 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. The purposes are to cultivate deep connections and to have a place to share fears and challenges, exploring the skills of managing others by wrestling together with real problems, whether they be external (a volatile supervisor) or internal (an overly active inner critic). In other words, to develop a sense of trust.

CHAPTER 7 THE HUNGRY BEAST AND THE UGLY BABY

• Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.” They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing—in the form of time and patience—in order to grow. What this means is that they have a hard time coexisting with the Beast.
• Jonny Ive speech at Steve Job’s memorial service does an awesome job touching on this – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnGI76__sSA
• Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.
• Part of our job is to protect the new from people who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Think of a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly—it only survives because it is encased in a cocoon. It survives, in other words, because it is protected from that which would damage it. It is protected from the Beast.
• 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.
• The Beast is a glutton but also a valuable motivator. The Baby is so pure and unsullied, so full of potential, but it’s also needy and unpredictable and can keep you up at night. The key is for your Beast and your Babies to coexist peacefully, and that requires that you keep various forces in balance.
• But all Beasts have one thing in common. 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.
• “It’s like someone saying, ‘Here, take care of this tiger, but watch your butt, they’re tricky.’ I feel like my butt is safer when I expect the tiger to be tricky.”

 

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 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 the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.”

• I could never fully explain how to achieve balance. That you learn only by doing—by allowing your conscious and subconscious mind to figure it out while in motion. With certain jobs, there isn’t any other way to learn than by doing—by putting yourself in the unstable place and then feeling your way.
• 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 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.
• 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 from themselves.
• At Pixar, protection means populating story meetings with idea protectors, people who understand the difficult, ephemeral process of developing the new. It means supporting our people, because we know that the best ideas emerge when we’ve made it safe to work through problems. (Remember: People are more important than ideas.) Finally, it does not mean protecting the new forever.
• “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 truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

CHAPTER 8 CHANGE AND RANDOMNESS

• There’s nothing quite like the feeling you get, deep in your gut, when you’re about to stand up in front of your entire company and say something you know has the potential to be upsetting. The day Steve, John, and I called an all-employee meeting to announce our decision to sell Pixar to Disney in 2006 was definitely one of those moments.
• To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised. Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach. Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.
• “I tend to flood and freeze up if I’m feeling overwhelmed. When this happens, it’s usually because I feel like the world is crashing down and all is lost. One trick I’ve learned is to force myself to make a list of what’s actually wrong. Usually, soon into making the list, I find I can group most of the issues into two or three larger all-encompassing problems. So it’s really not all that bad. Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.”
• 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 …’

What is it, exactly, that people are really afraid of when they say they don’t like change?

• For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre—personally, I think the person who can’t change his or her mind is dangerous. Steve Jobs was known for changing his mind instantly in the light of new facts, and I don’t know anyone who thought he was weak.
• Self-interest guides opposition to change, but lack of self-awareness fuels it even more. Once you master any system, you typically become blind to its flaws; even if you can see them, they appear far too complex and intertwined to consider changing.
• But to remain blind is to risk becoming the music industry, in which self-interest (trying to protect short-term gains) trumped self-awareness (few people realized that the old system was about to be overtaken altogether). Industry executives clung to their outdated business model—selling albums—until it was too late and file sharing and iTunes had turned everything upside down.
• 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 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.
• Because it is our nature to attach great significance to the patterns we witness, we ignore the things we cannot see and make deductions and predictions accordingly.
• This is the puzzle of trying to understand randomness: Real patterns are mixed in with random events, so it is extraordinarily difficult for us to differentiate between chance and skill.
• 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.
• I believe that the inappropriate application of simple rules and models onto complex mechanisms causes damage—to whatever project is at hand and even to the company as a whole.
• 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.

How to Approach Problems 

• 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 ones, failing to realize that some of our small problems will have long-term consequences—and are, therefore, big problems in the making.
• What’s needed, in my view, is to approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they are, in fact, self-similar.
• In short, 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 asking permission.
• We must meet unexpected problems with unexpected responses.
• If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, waiting for approval. Mistakes will still be made, but in my experience, they are fewer and farther between and are caught at an earlier stage.]
• But if you push the ownership of problems down into the ranks of an organization, then everyone feels free (and motivated) to attempt to solve whatever problem they face, big or small. I can’t predict everything that our employees will do or how they will respond to problems, and that is a good thing. The key is to create a response structure that matches the problem structure.

I believe in putting in place a framework for finding potential, then nurturing talent and excellence, believing that many will rise, while knowing that not all will.

• 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. We must acknowledge the random events that went our way, because acknowledging our good fortune—and not telling ourselves that everything we did was some stroke of genius—lets us make more realistic assessments and decisions.
• The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

CHAPTER 9 THE HIDDEN

• I spend a lot of time thinking about the limits of perception. In the management context, particularly, it behooves us to ask ourselves constantly: How much are we able to see? And how much is obscured from view?
• We had to address what I’ve come to call The Hidden.
• We were going to screw up, it was inevitable. And we didn’t know when or how. We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem—a hidden problem. 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.
• But I believe the deeper issue is that the leaders of these companies were not attuned to the fact that there were problems they could not see. And because they weren’t aware of these blind spots, they assumed that the problems didn’t exist.

Which brings us to 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.

• One of the ways to do that is to try to understand the many reasons why something may be difficult or impossible to see. To gain this understanding requires identifying multiple levels of the unknown, from the trivial to the fundamental.
• As my position changed, people became more careful how they spoke and acted in my presence. I don’t think that my actions changed in a way that prompted this; my position did. And what this meant was that things I’d once been privy to became increasingly unavailable to me.
• 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 they get promoted to a leadership position, no one is going to come out and say, “Now that you are a manager, I can no longer be as candid with you.” Instead, many new leaders assume, wrongly, that their access to information is unchanged.
• a manager who is having someone manage up to them. I’m not talking about brownnosing per se but more subtle forms of flattery. What does that leader see? He or she sees a person who wants to do a good job and who wants to please him or her. What’s not to like about that? How does a manager differentiate between a team player and a person who is merely skilled at telling the boss what he or she wants to hear?
• A manager might rely on other people to alert him or her to a particular employee’s lack of authenticity, but many are loath to tattle or to sound envious. The leader’s view, then, is obstructed by these people who are skilled at figuring out what the leader wants. When viewed from a single vantage point, a full picture of the dynamics of any group is elusive. While we are all aware of these kinds of behaviors because we see them in others, most of us do not realize that we distort our own view of the world, largely because we think we see more than we actually do.
• I am probably capable of understanding each of these issues individually if and when they are brought to my attention and explained to me. But the people who are directly involved have the firmest grasp of the problems because they are in the middle of the action and see things that I don’t see. If a crisis is brewing, they will know about it before I do. This would not be a problem if you could always count on people to send up a flare the instant they suspect trouble, but you can’t. Even employees with the purest intentions may be too timid to speak up when they sense trouble. They may feel that it’s too early to involve upper-level managers, or they may assume that we are aware of the breakdowns already.
• Complex environments are, by definition, too complicated for any one person to grasp fully. Yet many managers, afraid of appearing to not be in control, believe that they have to know everything—or at least act like they do.
• So my colleagues know more than I do about what’s going on in any given department at any given moment.
• If we can agree that it’s hard, if not impossible, to get a complete picture of what is going on at any given time in any given company, it becomes even harder when you are successful.
• When faced with complexity, it is reassuring to tell ourselves that we can uncover and understand every facet of every problem if we just try hard enough. But that’s a fallacy. The better approach, I believe, is to accept that we can’t understand every facet of a complex environment and to focus, instead, on techniques to deal with combining different viewpoints.
• If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse. In a healthy, creative culture, the people in the trenches feel free to speak up and bring to light differing views that can help give us clarity.

I have heard people say that Pixar’s success was inevitable because of the character of the people who formed it. While character is crucial, I am also certain there were an infinite number of “two-inch” events aside from my own that went our way—events that I have no way of knowing about because they occurred in the lives of other people who were critical to forming Pixar.

• The full set of possible outcomes at any time is so astonishingly vast that we can’t begin to fathom them, so our brains have to simplify in order for us to function.
• When I say that the fate of any group enterprise, and the individuals within it, are interconnected and interdependent, it may sound trite. But it’s not. What’s more, seeing all of the interdependencies that shape our lives is impossible, no matter how hard or long we look.
• If we don’t acknowledge how much is hidden, we hurt ourselves in the long run. Acknowledging what you can’t see—getting comfortable with the fact that there are a large number of two-inch events occurring right now, out of our sight, that will affect us for better or worse, in myriad ways—helps promote flexibility. 
• You might say I’m an advocate for humility in leaders. But to be truly humble, those leaders must first understand how many of the factors that shape their lives and businesses are—and will always be—out of sight.

The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. 

• Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20-20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more.
  • “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

• I was surprised to hear from a neuroscientist that only about 40 percent of what we think we “see” comes in through our eyes. “The rest is made up from memory or patterns that we recognize from past experience,”
  • In Toy Story 2, for example, when Jessie talks about her fears, she twists one of her braids around her finger. Seeing this little motion, you sense her state of mind, perhaps without even knowing why. The meaning in that simple action is supplied by the audience, though—by their own experiences and emotional intelligence. Most think of animation as the characters just moving around in funny ways while they deliver their lines, but great animators carefully craft the movements that elicit an emotional response, convincing us that these characters have feelings, emotions, intentions.

• The models in our head operate at awesome speed, allowing us to function in real time, picking out what is good or what is threatening in any given scenario. This process is so fast and automatic, in fact, that we don’t notice that it is happening.
• All we need is a tiny bit of information to make huge leaps of inference based on our models—as I say, we fill it in. We are meaning-making creatures who read other people’s subtle clues just as they read ours.

 

The 40-percent rule: We aren’t aware that the majority of what we think we see is actually our brain filling in the gaps. The illusion that we have a complete picture is extraordinarily persuasive. However, the magician doesn’t create the illusion—we do. We firmly believe that we are perceiving reality in its totality rather than a sliver of it. In other words, we are aware of the results of our brain’s processing but not the processing itself.

• We have to learn, over and over again, that the perceptions and experiences of others are vastly different than our own. In a creative environment, those differences can be assets. But when we don’t acknowledge and honor them, they can erode, rather than enrich, our creative work.
• This sounds simple enough—honor the viewpoints of others!—but it can be enormously difficult to put into practice throughout your company. That’s because when humans see things that challenge our mental models, we tend not just to resist them but to ignore them. This has been scientifically proven. The concept of “confirmation bias”—the tendency of people to favor information, true or not, that confirms their preexisting beliefs.
• If our mental models are mere approximations of reality, then, the conclusions we draw cannot help but be prone to error. A few words uttered by someone close to us can carry enormous weight, for example, whereas the same words uttered by a stranger won’t resonate at all.
• At our jobs, we may interpret not being invited to a meeting as a threat to us or to our projects, even when no threat is intended. But because we often don’t see the flaws in our reasoning—or our biases—it’s easy to be deluded while being quite convinced that we are the only sane ones around.

Unmade Future 

• When we are making a movie, the movie doesn’t exist yet. We are not uncovering it or discovering it; it’s not as if it resides somewhere and is just waiting to be found. There is no movie. We are making decisions, one by one, to create it. In a fundamental way, the movie is hidden from us. (I refer to this concept as the “Unmade Future,”
• I am urging you to attempt a similar balancing act when navigating between the known and the unknown. While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.
  • Abraham Maslow touches on this in self-actualized people, an enjoyment of the unknown. 

• The goal is to place one foot on either side of the door—one grounded in what we know, what we are confident about, our areas of expertise, the people and processes we can count on—and the other in the unknown, where things are murky, unseen, or uncreated.
• But 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.
• 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: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success.

Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown and to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. These concepts don’t necessarily make anything easier, but they can help us uncover hidden problems and, thus, enable us to address them. It is to this we now turn in earnest.

PART III BUILDING AND SUSTAINING CHAPTER 10 BROADENING OUR VIEW

Four ideas that inform the way I think about managing. 

• The first, which I discussed in chapter 9, is that our models of the world so distort what we perceive that they can make it hard to see what is right in front of us. (I’m using model somewhat generally here to mean the preconceptions we have built up over time that we use to evaluate what we see and hear as well as to reason and anticipate.)
• The second is that we don’t typically see the boundary between new information coming in from the outside and our old, established mental models—we perceive both together, as a unified experience.
• The third is that when we unknowingly get caught up in our own interpretations, we become inflexible, less able to deal with the problems at hand.
• And the fourth idea is that people who work or live together—people like Dick and Anne, for example—have, by virtue of proximity and shared history, models of the world that are deeply (sometimes hopelessly) intertwined with one another. If my wife and I had been traveling with just Dick or just Anne, he or she almost certainly would have responded appropriately, but because they were together, their combined model was more complex—and more limiting—than either of their models would have been on its own.

 

• In business, where dozens if not hundreds of people may work in close proximity, that effect multiplies quickly, and before you know it, these competing and often at-odds models lead to a kind of inertia that makes it difficult to change or respond well to challenges.

This third section of the book is devoted to some of the specific methods we have employed at Pixar to prevent our disparate views from hindering our collaboration. In each case, we are trying to force ourselves—individually and as a company—to challenge our preconceptions.

1. Dailies, or Solving Problems Together 2. Research Trips 3. The Power of Limits 4. Integrating Technology and Art 5. Short Experiments 6. Learning to See 7. Postmortems 8. Continuing to Learn
2. DAILIES, OR SOLVING PROBLEMS TOGETHER

• The goal of this meeting, as with all dailies meetings, was to see the shots, together, as they really were. Dailies are a key part of Pixar culture, not just because of what they accomplish—constructive midstream feedback—but because of how they accomplish it. Participants have learned to check their egos at the door—they are about to show incomplete work to their director and colleagues. This requires engagement at all levels, and it’s our directors’ job to foster and create a safe place for that.
• The critiques that were offered were specific and meticulous. Every scene was prosecuted relentlessly, and each animator seemed to welcome the feedback. “Is that stick big enough for everybody?” Mark asked at one point, referring to a flimsy-looking branch that was supposed to keep a heavy door propped open in one scene. Several people didn’t think so, and as Mark scribbled with a stylus on a tablet in front of him, a sturdier log appeared on the screen on the front of the room. “Better?” he asked.
• For all the barking and levity, you could feel the focused concentration in the room. What these people were engaged in was the kind of detailed analysis—and openness to constructive criticism—that would determine whether merely good animation would become great.
• Dailies are master classes in how to see and think more expansively, and their impact can be felt throughout the building. “Some people show their scenes to get critique from others, others come to watch and see what kind of notes are being given—to learn from their peers and from me—my style, what I like and dislike,”
  • How many things do you have in your company that people from other departments want to sit in on? Good barometer for what ads extreme value to participants. 

• 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 more creative. By making the struggles to solve the problems safe to discuss, then everyone learns from—and inspires—one another. The whole activity becomes socially rewarding and productive. To participate fully each morning requires empathy, clarity, generosity, and the ability to listen.

2. RESEARCH TRIPS

• Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.
• Whenever filmmakers make a derivative presentation to John, he will often stop them, urging them to slow down, and look beyond what they think they already know. “You must,” he tells them, “go out and do research.”
• These experiences are more than field trips or diversions. Because they take place early in the filmmaking process, they fuel the film’s development.

Example of the detail on a research trip from the movie Monsters Inc where they traveled to the most prestigious universities in the US.

• They visited dorm rooms, lecture halls, research labs, and frat houses; they hung out on the campus lawns, ate pizza at dives that students frequented, and took a lot of pictures and notes—“documenting everything, right down to the details of how pathways integrated into the quads,” Nick says, “and what the graffiti scratches looked like on the wooden desks.” The finished film was loaded with these kinds of details—what letter jackets look like up close or those “Roommate Wanted” fliers (complete with rip-off tags) that students post on campus bulletin boards—all of which gave audiences a feeling of reality.
• Ultimately, what we’re after is authenticity. What feels daunting to the filmmakers when John sends them out on such trips is that they don’t yet know what they are looking for, so they’re not sure what they will gain. But think about it: You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar. In my experience, when people go out on research trips, they always come back changed.
• In any business, it’s important to do your homework, but the point I’m making goes beyond merely getting the facts straight. Research trips challenge our preconceived notions and keep clichés at bay. They fuel inspiration. They are, I believe, what keeps us creating rather than copying.
• Does this kind of microdetail matter? I believe it does. There’s something about knowing your subject and your setting inside and out—a confidence—that seeps into every frame of your film. It’s a hidden engine, an unspoken contract with the viewer that says: We are striving to tell you something impactful and true. When attempting to make good on that promise, no detail is too small.

3. THE POWER OF LIMITS 

• There is a phenomenon that producers at Pixar call “the beautifully shaded penny.” It refers to the fact that artists who work on our films care so much about every detail that they will sometimes spend days or weeks crafting what Katherine Sarafian, a Pixar producer, calls “the equivalent of a penny on a nightstand that you’ll never see.”
• But because of the way production unfolded, our people had to work on scenes without knowing the context for them—so they overbuilt them just to be safe. To make things worse, our standards of excellence are extremely high, leading them to conclude that more is always more. How, then, do you fix the “beautifully shaded penny” problem without telling people, in effect, to care less or to be less excellent?
• The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work.
• Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.
• Another area where limits are invaluable is what we call “appetite control.” In Pixar’s case, when we are making a movie the demand for resources is literally bottomless. Unless you impose limits,

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 proposals are ill suited to the task at hand.

4. INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY AND ART

• “Art challenges technology, technology inspires art.” This is not meant to be some clever catchphrase—it articulates our philosophy of integration. When everything is functioning as it should be, art and technology play off each other and spur each other to new heights. Given how different the two mindsets can be, it can be tough to keep them aligned and engaged with each other.
•  Our specialized skills and mental models are challenged when we integrate with people who are different. If we can constantly change and improve our models by using technology in the pursuit of art, we keep ourselves fresh. The whole history of Pixar is a testament to this dynamic interplay.

5. SHORT EXPERIMENTS

• I believe, however, that you should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected. Scientific research operates in this way—when you embark on an experiment, you don’t know if you will achieve a breakthrough. Chances are, you won’t. But nevertheless, you may stumble on a piece of the puzzle along the way—a glimpse, if you will, into the unknown.
• Some might have lost sleep over the two million dollars we expended on this experiment. But we consider it money well spent. As Joe Ranft said at the time, “Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.”

6. LEARNING TO SEE

• In the year after Toy Story’s release, we introduced a ten-week program to teach every new hire how to use our proprietary software. We called this program Pixar University, and I hired a first-rate technical trainer to run it.
• I hired Elyse Klaidman, who had taught drawing workshops inspired by the 1979 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards,
• Art teachers use a few different tricks to train new artists. They place an object upside down, for example, so that each student can look at it as a pure shape and not as a familiar, recognizable thing (a shoe, say). The brain does not distort this upside-down object because it doesn’t automatically impose its model of a shoe upon it.
• Another trick is to ask students to focus on negative spaces—the areas of space around an object that are not the object itself. For instance, in drawing a chair, the new artist might draw it poorly, because she knows what a chair is supposed to look like (and that chair in her head—her mental model—keeps her from reproducing precisely what she sees in front of her). However, if she is asked to draw what is not the chair—the spaces between the chair legs, for example—then the proportions are easier to get right, and the chair itself will look more realistic.
• The lesson is intended to help students to see shapes as they are—to ignore that part of the brain that wants to turn what is seen into a general notion: a model of the chair. A trained artist who sees a chair, then, is able to capture what the eye perceives (shape, color) before their “recognizer” function tells them what it is supposed to be.
• The goal is to learn to suspend, if only temporarily, the habits and impulses that obscure your vision.
• Drawing the “un-chair” can be a sort of metaphor for increasing perceptivity. Just as looking at what is not the chair helps bring it into relief, pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions.

7. POSTMORTEMS

• A postmortem is a meeting held shortly after the completion of every movie in which we explore what did and didn’t work and attempt to consolidate lessons learned. Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional. Postmortems are one route into that understanding.
• This postmortem, which took an entire day, delved into all aspects of the production. There was no “Aha!” moment, no epiphany that would turn our processes inside out. Instead, it’s the spirit of the meeting that I remember most. Everyone was so engaged in rethinking the way we did things, so open to challenging longheld ideas and learning from the errors we’d made. No one was defensive. Everyone was proud, not only of the film but of how committed we were to the culture from which the film had sprung. Afterward, we decided we should do this kind of deep analysis after every movie.
• In truth, to most people postmortems seem a bit like having to swallow some kind of bad-tasting medicine. They know it’s necessary, but they don’t like it one bit. This was another puzzle for us: What was it that made some postmortems so bad, while others had a great outcome?

Consolidate What’s Been Learned

Teach Others Who Weren’t There

Don’t Let Resentments Fester

• I have seen many cases where hurt feelings lingered far after the project, feelings that would have been worked through much more easily if they had been expressed in a postmortem.

Use the Schedule to Force Reflection 

• I favor principles that lead you to think. Postmortems—but also other activities such as Braintrust meetings and dailies—are all about getting people to think and evaluate. The time we spend getting ready for a postmortem meeting is as valuable as the meeting itself. In other words, the scheduling of a postmortem forces self-reflection.
• If a postmortem is a chance to struggle openly with our problems, the “pre-postmortem” sets the stage for a successful struggle. I would even say that 90 percent of the value is derived from the preparation leading up to the postmortem.

 

Pay It Forward 

• In a postmortem, you can raise questions that should be asked on the next project. A good postmortem arms people with the right questions to ask going forward. We shouldn’t expect to find the right answers, but if we can get people to frame the right questions, then we’ll be ahead of the game.
• 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.
• So try “mid-mortems” or narrow the focus of your postmortem to special topics. At Pixar, we have had groups give courses to others on their approaches. We have occasionally formed task forces to address problems that span several films.
• Next, remain aware that, no matter how much you urge them otherwise, your people will be afraid to be critical in such an overt manner. 
  • One technique I’ve used to soften the process is to ask everyone in the room to make two lists: the top five things that they would do again and the top five things that they wouldn’t do again. People find it easier to be candid if they balance the negative with the positive, and a good facilitator can make it easier for that balance to be struck.

Use Data

• Finally, make use of data. Because we’re a creative organization, people tend to assume that much of what we do can’t be measured or analyzed. That’s wrong. Many of our processes involve activities and deliverables that can be quantified.
• I like data because it is neutral—there are no value judgments, only facts. That allows people to discuss the issues raised by data less emotionally than they might an anecdotal experience.
• There are limits to data, however, and some people rely on it too heavily. Analyzing it correctly is difficult, and it is dangerous to assume that you always know what it means. It is very easy to find false patterns in data. Instead, I prefer to think of data as one way of seeing, one of many tools we can use to look for what’s hidden. If we think data alone provides answers, then we have misapplied the tool.
• “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”- the phrase is ridiculous—something said by people who are unaware of how much is hidden. A large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. 
• The problem comes when people think that data paints a full picture, leading them to ignore what they can’t see. Here’s my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of what you do. And at least every once in a, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing. 

8. CONTINUING TO LEARN

Pixar University 

• I want to end this list by talking a little more about 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 them. 
• So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security- that proved immensely valuable. 
• In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code… changed culture for the better. 
• It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. 
• But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. 
• It puts me in mind of a night, many years ago, when I found myself at an art exhibit at my daughter’s elementary school in Marin. As I walked up and down the hallways, looking at the paintings and sketches made by kids in grades K through 5, I noticed that the first- and second-graders’ drawings looked better and fresher than those of the fifth-graders. Somewhere along the line, the fifth-graders had realized that their drawings did not look realistic, and they had become self-conscious and tentative. The result? Their drawings became more stilted and staid, less inventive, because they probably thought that others would recognize this “fault”. The fear of judgment was hindering creativity. 
• 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 children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind”. 
• By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure,  in other words, makes failure more likely. 
• Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them—and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that might fail. 
• It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but … getting rid of the damn thing.”

 

CHAPTER 11 THE UNMADE FUTURE

• Many of us have a romantic idea about how creativity happens: A lone visionary conceives of a film or a product in a flash of insight. Then that visionary leads a team of people through hardship to finally deliver on that great promise. The truth is, this isn’t my experience at all. I’ve known many people I consider to be creative geniuses, and not just at Pixar and Disney, yet I can’t remember a single one who could articulate exactly what this vision was that they were striving for when they started.
• In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself.
• I can’t envision how our technical future will unfold because it doesn’t exist yet. As we forge ahead, while we imagine what might be, we must rely on our guiding principles, our intentions, and our goals—not on being able to see and react to what’s coming before it happens.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

• Invention, after all, is an active process that results from decisions we make; to change the world, we must bring new things into being.
• This is where real confidence comes in. Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it out. That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.
• That requires us to step up to the boundary of what we know and what we don’t know.
• 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.
• mental models I believe are essential to fortify and sustain anyone engaged in the hard work of inventing something new.

mental model: skiing. 

• Brad has told me that he thinks of directing the way he thinks about skiing. In either pursuit, he says, if he tightens up or thinks too much, he crashes. There are moments, as a director, where there is so much work to do and so little time to do it that he can’t help but feel fear. But he also knows that if he lingers too long in that frightened place, he will freak out.
• “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.’ ” This is where directing is a lot like skiing.
• And at some point, I realized that I was crashing because I was trying so hard not to crash. So I relaxed and told myself, ‘It’s going to be scary when I make the turns really fast, but I’m going to push that mountain away and enjoy it.’ When I adopted this positive attitude, I stopped crashing. In some ways, it’s probably like an Olympic athlete who’s spent years training for one moment when they can’t make a mistake. If they start thinking too much about that, they’ll be unable to do what they know how to do.”
• moving quickly is a plus because it prevents him from getting stuck worrying about whether his chosen course of action is the wrong one. Instead, he favors being decisive, then forgiving yourself if your initial decision proves misguided.

Captaining a Ship Mental Model 

• Andrew likens the director’s job to that of a ship captain, out in the middle of the ocean, with a crew that’s depending on him to make land. The director’s job is to say, “Land is that way.” Maybe land actually is that way and maybe it isn’t, but Andrew says that if you don’t have somebody choosing a course—pointing their finger toward that spot there, on the horizon—then the ship goes nowhere. It’s not a tragedy if the leader changes her mind later and says, “Okay, it’s actually not that way, it’s this way. I was wrong.” As long as you commit to a destination and drive toward it with all your might, people will accept when you correct course.
• “People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you’ve effed up,” as Andrew says. “It’s a huge lesson: Include people in your problems, not just your solutions.”
• 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.
• “If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?” he says. “You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it because your goal is to eventually get to the other side. You will not be able to control exactly how you get across. That’s the game you’ve decided to be in. If your goal is to make it easier and simpler, then don’t get in the boat.”

Tunnel Mental Model

• 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,”
• For Pete, this metaphor is a way of making that moment—the one in which you can’t see your own hand in front of your face and you aren’t sure you’ll ever find your way out—a bit less frightening. 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.

I’ve come to respect that the most important thing about a mental model is that it enables whoever relies on it to get their job—whatever it is—done.

• What’s important, I think, as you construct the mental model that works best for you, is to be thoughtful about the problems it is helping you to solve.
• What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position—that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.
• I am constantly rethinking my own models for how to deal with uncertainty and change and how to enable people. At Lucasfilm, I had the image of riding bareback on a herd of wild
• No matter what image I come up with, questions remain: How do we keep from veering too far to one side or another? How do we follow our carefully laid plans yet remain open to ideas that are not our own? Over time, with new experiences, my model has continued to evolve—and is still evolving, even as I write this book.

Mindfulness 

• The search for a clear mind is one of the fundamental goals of creative people, but the route each one of us travels to get there is unmarked. For me, a man who has always valued introspection, silence was a path I hadn’t tried before. I’ve gone on a silent retreat every year since, and in addition to benefiting personally, I have done a lot of thinking about the management implications of mindfulness.
• If you are mindful, you are able to focus on the problem at hand without getting caught up in plans or processes. Mindfulness helps us accept the fleeting and subjective nature of our thoughts, to make peace with what we cannot control. Most important, it allows us to remain open to new ideas and to deal with our problems squarely. Some people make the mistake of thinking that they are being mindful because they are focusing diligently on problems. But if they are doing so while subconsciously bound up with their worries and expectations, with no awareness that they can’t see clearly or that others may know more, they aren’t open at all.
• Similarly, within organizations groups often hold so tightly to plans and past practices that they are not open to seeing what is changing in front of them.

PART IV TESTING WHAT WE KNOW CHAPTER 12 A NEW CHALLENGE

• One thing that struck me about Bob was that he preferred asking questions to holding forth—and his queries were incisive and straightforward. Something unusual had been built at Pixar, he said, and he wanted to understand it. For the first time in all the years that Pixar and Disney had worked together, someone from Disney was asking what we were doing that made our company different.
• Austin Madison, which I found particularly uplifting. “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-corner-full-of-crumpled-up-paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems. In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision.… ”

• My goal has never been to tell people how Pixar and Disney figured it all out but rather to show how we continue to figure it out, every hour of every day. How we persist. The future is not a destination—it is a direction.
• It is our job, then, to work each day to chart the right course and make corrections when, inevitably, we stray. I already can sense the next crisis coming around the corner. To keep a creative culture vibrant, we must not be afraid of constant uncertainty. We must accept it, just as we accept the weather. Uncertainty and change are life’s constants. And that’s the fun part.
• The truth is, as challenges emerge, mistakes will always be made, and our work is never done. We will always have problems, many of which are hidden from our view; we must work to uncover them and assess our own role in them, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; when we then come across a problem, we must marshal all our energies to solve it.
• 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.

 

AFTERWORD THE STEVE WE KNEW

• • The word genius is used a lot these days—too much, I think—but with Steve, I actually think it was warranted.
  • In the time I worked with Steve, he didn’t just gain the kind of practical experience you would expect to acquire while running two dynamic, successful businesses; he also got smarter about when to stop pushing people and how to keep pushing them, if necessary, without breaking them. He became fairer and wiser, and his understanding of partnership deepened—in large part because of his marriage to Laurene and his relationships with the children he loved so much. This shift didn’t lead him to abandon his famous commitment to innovation; it solidified it. At the same time, he developed into a kinder, more self-aware leader. And I think Pixar played a role in that development.
  • 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.
  • Even when we were unsure how to reach our goal, our passion was something Steve recognized and valued. That’s what Steve, John, and I ultimately bonded over: passion for excellence—a passion so ardent we were willing to argue and struggle and stay together, even when things got extremely uncomfortable.
  • It wasn’t that passion trumped logic in Steve’s mind. He was well aware that decisions must never be based on emotions alone. But he also saw that creativity wasn’t linear, that art was not commerce, and that to insist upon applying dollars-and-cents logic was to risk disrupting the thing that set us apart. Steve put a premium on both sides of this equation, logic and emotion, and the way he maintained that balance was key to understanding him.

• Steve had thought all this through with the metalogic of a philosopher and the meticulousness of a craftsman. He believed in simple materials, masterfully constructed.

• 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.

• When someone has a strong personality, others can wilt in the face of their intensity. How do you prevent this from happening? The trick is to shift the emphasis in any meeting away from the source of an idea and onto the idea itself.
• Steve is not commonly described as a storyteller, and he was always careful to say he didn’t know the first thing about filmmaking. Yet part of his bond with our directors stemmed from the fact that he knew how important it was to construct a story that connected with people. This was a skill he used in his presentations at Apple. When he got up in front of an audience to introduce a new product, he understood that he would communicate more effectively if he put forward a narrative, and anyone who ever saw him do it could tell you that he gave extraordinary and carefully crafted performances.

As we walked out of the vault, Steve stopped in the hallway and said he had been working on a list of three things he wanted to do—and I remember the words precisely—“before I sail away.” One goal that mattered enormously to him was to roll out the product he’d just shown us, along with a few others that he believed would ensure Apple’s future. The second was to safeguard Pixar’s continued success. And the third and most important was to set his three youngest children on a good path. I remember him saying that he hoped he would be around to watch his son Reed, then in 8th grade, graduate from high school. To hear this once-unstoppable man scaling back his hopes and ambitions to a handful of last wishes was heartbreaking, of course, but I remember thinking that when Steve said it, it sounded natural. It felt like he had come to terms with the inevitability of not being here. In the end, he would achieve all three of his goals.

• He used to say regularly that as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually they all ended up in landfills. Pixar movies, on the other hand, would live forever. He believed, as I do, that because they dig for deeper truths, our movies will endure, and he found beauty in that idea.
• A characteristic of creative people is that they imagine making the impossible possible. That imagining—dreaming, noodling, audaciously rejecting what is (for the moment) true—is the way we discover what is new or important. 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.

Reality Distortion Field 

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 staying true to our values that we change the world.

THOUGHTS FOR MANAGING A CREATIVE CULTURE

• The trick is to think of each statement as a starting point, as a prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.
• 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.
• 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. 
• Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat. 
• If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can and does come from anywhere. 
• It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute. 
• There are many valid reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them. 
• Likewise, if someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Our first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions. 
• Further, if there is fear in an organization, there is a reason for it—our job is (a) to find what’s causing it, (b) to understand it, and (c) to try to root it out. 
• There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right. 
• In general, people are hesitant to say things that might rock the boat. Braintrust meetings, dailies, postmortems, and Notes Day are all efforts to reinforce the idea that it is okay to express yourself. All are mechanisms of self-assessment that seek to uncover what’s real. 
• If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem. 
• Many managers feel that if they are not notified about problems before others are or if they are surprised in a meeting, then that is a sign of disrespect. Get over it.
• 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. 
• The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving. 
• 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. 
• Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead. 
• 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. 
• The people ultimately responsible for implementing a plan must be empowered to make decisions when things go wrong, even before getting approval. Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line. 
• The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal—it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems. 
• Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be. 
• A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. 
• Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent—address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier. 
• Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances. 
• An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it. Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board. 
• The healthiest organizations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose. 
• Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past. 
• New crises are not always lamentable—they test and demonstrate a company’s values. The process of problem-solving often bonds people together and keeps the culture in the present. 
• Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.
• Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability. 
• Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on -but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.