Tarang's Book Highlights

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

Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

Introduction: Lost and Found

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 thesis of this book is that there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process.

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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.

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Chapter 1: Animated

Professor Sutherland used to say that he loved his graduate students at Utah because we didn’t know what was impossible.

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Chapter 2: Pixar is Born

I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am. The obvious payoffs of exceptional people are that they innovate, excel, and generally make your company—and, by extension, you—look good. But there is another, less obvious, payoff that only occurred to me in retrospect. The act of hiring Alvy changed me as a manager: 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 had wondered in graduate school how I could ever replicate the singular environment of the U of U. Now, suddenly, I saw the way. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

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Being confident about the value of our innovation was not enough. We needed buy-in from the community we were trying to serve. Without it, we were forced to abandon our plans. Clearly, it wasn’t enough for managers to have good ideas—they had to be able to engender support for those ideas among the people who’d be charged with employing them. I took that lesson to heart.

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enough to hold on, let alone steer. Simply put, managing was hard. No one took me aside to give me tips. The books I read that promised insight on the topic were mostly devoid of content. So I looked to George to see how he did it. I saw that his way seemed to reflect some of the philosophy he had put into Yoda. 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!”

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Another of his favorite analogies was that building a company was like being on a wagon train headed west. On the long journey to the land of plenty, the pioneers would be full of purpose and united by the goal of reaching their destination. Once they arrived, he’d say, people would come and go, and that was as it should be. But the process of moving toward something—of having not yet arrived—was what he idealized.

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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. It put me in the mind of an ad campaign that the Maxell cassette tape company released around this time, featuring what would become an iconic image: a guy sitting low in a leather-and-chrome Le Corbusier chair, his long hair being literally blown back by the sound from the stereophonic speaker in front of him. That’s what it was like to be with Steve. He was the speaker. Everyone else was the guy.

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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.

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At precisely 10 A.M., Steve looked around and, finding the CFO missing, started the meeting without him! In one swift move, Steve had not only foiled the CFO’s attempt to place himself atop the pecking order, but he had grabbed control of the meeting. This would be the kind of strategic, aggressive play that would define Steve’s stewardship of Pixar for years to come—once we joined forces, he became our protector, as fierce on our behalf as he was on his own. In the end, Steve paid $5 million to spin Pixar off of Lucasfilm—and then, after the sale, he agreed to pay another $5 million to fund the company, with 70 percent of the stock going to Steve and 30 percent to the employees.

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Chapter 3: A Defining Goal

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

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was told by the presidents of Sun and Silicon Graphics to start with a high number. If you start high, they said, you can always reduce the price; if you lowball it and then need to raise the price later, you will only upset your customers. So based on the profit margins we wanted, we decided on a price of $122,000 per unit. Big mistake. The Pixar Image Computer quickly gained a reputation for being powerful but too expensive. When we lowered the price later, we discovered that our reputation for being overpriced was all anyone remembered. Regardless of our attempts to correct it, the first impression stuck.

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The pricing advice I was given—by people who were smart and experienced and well-meaning—was not merely wrong, it kept us from asking the right questions. Instead of talking about whether it’s easier to lower a price than raise it, we should have been addressing more substantive issues such as how to meet the expectations of customers and how to keep investing in software development so that the customers who did buy our product could put it to better use. In retrospect, when I sought the counsel of these more experienced men, I had been seeking simple answers to complex questions—do this, not that—because I was unsure of myself and stressed by the demands of my new job. But simple answers like the “start high” pricing advice—so seductive in its rationality—had distracted me and kept me from asking more fundamental questions.

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Several phrases would later be coined to describe these revolutionary approaches—phrases like “just-in-time manufacturing” or “total quality control”—but 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. Japanese companies that implemented Deming’s ideas made it easy for workers to do so: They installed a cord that anyone could pull in order to bring production to a halt. Before long, Japanese companies were enjoying unheard-of levels of quality, productivity, and market share.

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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. In other words, the Japanese assembly line became a place where workers’ engagement strengthened the resulting product. And that would eventually transform manufacturing around the world.

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You’ll recall the question I asked Steve just before he bought Pixar: How would we resolve conflicts? And his answer, which I found comically egotistical at the time, was that he simply would continue to explain why he was right until I understood. The irony was that this soon became the technique I used with Steve. When we disagreed, I would state my case, but since Steve could think much faster than I could, he would often shoot down my arguments. So I’d wait a week, marshal my thoughts, and then come back and explain it again. He might dismiss my points again, but I would keep coming back until one of three things happened: (1) He would say “Oh, okay, I get it” and give me what I needed; (2) I’d see that he was right and stop lobbying; or (3) our debate would be inconclusive, in which case I’d just go ahead and do what I had proposed in the first place. Each outcome was equally likely, but when this third option occurred, Steve never questioned me. For all his insistence, he respected passion. If I believed in something that strongly, he seemed to feel, it couldn’t be all wrong.

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For me, this moment was the culmination of such a lengthy series of pursuits, it was almost impossible to take in. I had spent twenty years inventing new technological tools, helping to found a company, and working hard to make all the facets of this company communicate and work well together. All of this had been in the service of a single goal: making a computer-animated feature film. And now, we’d not only done it; thanks to Steve, we were on steadier financial ground than we’d ever been before. For the first time since our founding, our jobs were safe.

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we’d brought in experienced production managers from Los Angeles to help us get organized. They felt that their jobs were temporary and thus that their complaints would not be welcome. In their world—conventional Hollywood productions—freelancers came together to make a film, worked side by side for several months, and then scattered to the winds. Complaining tended to cost you future work opportunities, so they kept their mouths shut. It was only when asked to stay on at Pixar that they voiced their objections.

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Second, despite their frustrations, these production managers felt that they were making history and that John was an inspired leader. Toy Story was a meaningful project to work on. That they liked so much of what they were doing allowed them to put up with the parts of the job they came to resent. 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.

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If an animator wanted to talk to a modeler, for example, they were required to go through “proper channels.” The artists and technical people experienced this everything-goes-through-me mentality as irritating and obstructionist. I think of it as well-intentioned micromanaging. Because making a movie involves hundreds of people, a chain of command is essential. But in this case, we had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure. Of course an animator should be able to talk to a modeler directly, without first talking with his or her manager. So we gathered the company together and said: Going forward, anyone should be able to talk to anyone else, at any level, at any time, without fear of reprimand. Communication would no longer have to go through hierarchical channels. The exchange of information was key to our business, of course, but I believed that it could—and frequently should—happen out of order, without people getting bent out of shape.

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Chapter 4: Establishing Pixar’s Identity

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. We took pride in the fact that reviewers talked mainly about the way Toy Story made them feel and not about the computer wizardry that enabled us to get it up on the screen. We believed that this was the direct result of our always keeping story as our guiding light.

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Suddenly, we were making two ambitious feature films at once—doubling our theatrical output overnight. This was a little scary, but it also felt like an affirmation of our core values. As we staffed up, I felt proud that we had insisted on quality. Decisions like that, I believed, would ensure future success.

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At Pixar, our directors gather every few months to screen “reels” of their film—spliced-together drawings, paired with what’s called “temp” music and voices. First reels are a very rough approximation of what the final product will be; they’re flawed and messy, no matter how good the team is that’s making them.

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Steve Jobs added his endorsement. “Disney doesn’t think we can do this,” he said. “So let’s prove them wrong.”

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The gestation of Toy Story 2 offers a number of lessons that were vital to Pixar’s evolution. Remember that the spine of the story—Woody’s dilemma, to stay or to go—was the same before and after the Braintrust worked it over. One version didn’t work at all, and the other was deeply affecting. Why? Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the evolution of this storyline made it abundantly clear to me: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up.

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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. A good team is made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet—in my experience—is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

Notes:

The Right team

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finding good people; it was finding good ideas. I remember being stunned when he said that—it seemed patently false to me, in part because I’d found the exact opposite to be true on Toy Story 2. I resolved to test whether what seemed a given to me was, in fact, a common belief. So for the next couple of years I made a habit, when giving talks, of posing the question to my audience: Which is more valuable, good ideas or good people? No matter whether I was talking to retired business executives or students, to high school principals or artists, when I asked for a show of hands, the audiences would be split 50-50. (Statisticians will tell you that when you get a perfect split like this, it doesn’t mean that half know the right answer—it means that they are all guessing, picking at random, as if flipping a coin.)

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People think so little about this that, in all these years, only one person in an audience has ever pointed out the false dichotomy. To me, the answer should be obvious: Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

Notes:

What is more important? Good people or Good ideas?

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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. In any given Pixar film, every line of dialogue, every beam of light or patch of shade, every sound effect is there because it contributes to the greater whole. In the end, if you do it right, people come out of the theater and say, “A movie about talking toys—what a clever idea!” But a movie is not one idea, it’s a multitude of them. And behind these ideas are people. This is true of products in general; the iPhone, for example, is not a singular idea—there is a mind-boggling depth to the hardware and software that supports it. Yet too often, we see a single object and think of it as an island that exists apart and unto itself.

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it is the focus on people—their work habits, their talents, their values—that is absolutely central to any creative venture. And in the wake of Toy Story 2, I saw that more clearly than I ever had.

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Supporting your employees means encouraging them to strike a balance not merely by saying, “Be balanced!” but also by making it easier for them to achieve balance. (Having a swimming pool, a volleyball court, and a soccer field on-site tells our workers that we value exercise and a life beyond the desk.) 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.

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This was a reminder of something that sounds obvious but isn’t: Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act—and think—accordingly.

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Brad Bird, who joined Pixar as a director in 2000, likes to say, “The process either makes you or unmakes you.” I like Brad’s way of looking at it because while it gives the process power, it implies that we have an active role to play in it as well.

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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. When our people asserted that they only wanted to make films of the highest quality and when we pushed ourselves to the limit in order to prove our commitment to that ideal, Pixar’s identity was cemented. We would be a company that would never settle. That didn’t mean that we wouldn’t make mistakes. Mistakes are part of creativity. But when we did, we would strive to face them without defensiveness and with a willingness to change.

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Chapter 5: Honesty and Candor

But as valuable as the information is that comes from honesty and as loudly as we proclaim its importance, our own fears and instincts for self-preservation often cause us to hold back. To address this reality, we need to free ourselves of honesty’s baggage. One way to do that is to replace the word honesty with another word that has a similar meaning but fewer moral connotations: candor. Candor is forthrightness or frankness—not so different from honesty, really. And yet, in common usage, the word communicates not just truth-telling but a lack of reserve. Everyone knows that sometimes, being reserved is healthy, even necessary for survival. Nobody thinks that being less than candid makes you a bad person (while no one wants to be called dishonest). People have an easier time talking about their level of candor because they don’t think they will be punished for admitting that they sometimes hold their tongues. This is essential.

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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. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.

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We believe that ideas—and thus, films—only become great when they are challenged and tested. In academia, peer review is the process by which professors are evaluated by others in their field. I like to think of the Braintrust as Pixar’s version of peer review, a forum that ensures we raise our game—not by being prescriptive but by offering candor and deep analysis.

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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.

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Telling the truth is difficult, but inside a creative company, it is the only way to ensure excellence. It is the job of the manager to watch the dynamics in the room, although sometimes a director will come in after a meeting to say that some people were holding back. In these cases, the solution is often to convene a smaller group—a sort of mini-Braintrust—to encourage more direct communication by limiting the number of participants.

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Candor isn’t cruel. It does not destroy. On the contrary, any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves. The need to stroke one’s own ego, to get the credit we feel we deserve—we strive to check those impulses at the door. The Braintrust is fueled by the idea that every note we give is in the service of a common goal: supporting and helping each other as we try to make better movies. 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.

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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. Creating a Braintrust is not something you do once and then check off your to-do list. Even when populated with talented and generous people, there is plenty that can go wrong. Dynamics change—between people, between departments—and so the only way to ensure that your Braintrust is doing its job is to watch and protect it continually, making adaptations as needed.

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Chapter 6: Fear and Failure

For most of us, failure comes with baggage—a lot of baggage—that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or—worse!—aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft-repeated arguments about the upside of failure. How many articles have you read on that topic alone? And yet, even as they nod their heads in agreement, many readers of those articles still have the emotional reaction that they had as children. They just can’t help it: That early experience of shame is too deep-seated to erase. All the time in my work, I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: It hurts.

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We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, 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.

Notes:

Golden!

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Andrew Stanton isn’t most people. As I’ve mentioned, he’s known around Pixar for repeating the phrases “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” He thinks of failure like learning to ride a bike; it isn’t conceivable that you would learn to do this without making mistakes—without toppling over a few times. “Get a bike that’s as low to the ground as you can 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. Says Andrew: “You wouldn’t say to somebody who is first learning to play the guitar, ‘You better think really hard about where you put your fingers on the guitar neck before you strum, because you only get to strum once, and that’s it. And if you get that wrong, we’re going to move on.’ That’s no way to learn, is it?”

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To be wrong as fast as you can is to sign up for aggressive, rapid learning.

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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.

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Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.

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Chapter 7: The Hungry Beast and the Ugly Baby

It is management’s job to figure out how to help others see conflict as healthy—as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run. I’m here to say that it can be done—but it is an unending job. A good manager must always be on the lookout for areas in which balance has been lost.

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At some point, the new idea has to move from the cocoon of protection into the hands of other people. This engagement process is typically very messy and can be painful.

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Chapter 8: Change and Randomness

Here’s what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren’t true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. 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.

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“If I start on a film and right away know the structure—where it’s going, the plot—I don’t trust it,” Pete says. “I feel like the only reason we’re able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And, by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start. This could just be my Lutheran, Scandinavian upbringing, but I believe life should not be easy. We’re meant to push ourselves and try new things—which will definitely make us feel uncomfortable. Living through a few big catastrophes helps. After people survived A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2, they realized the pressure led to some pretty cool ideas.” Pete has a few methods he uses to help manage people through the fears brought on by pre-production chaos. “Sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes,” he says. “So I try to trick them. I’ll say, ‘This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but just as a thought exercise, what if…’ Or, ‘I’m not actually suggesting this, but go with me for a minute…’ If people anticipate the production pressures, they’ll close the door to new ideas—so you have to pretend you’re not actually going to do anything, we’re just talking, just playing around. Then if you hit upon some new idea that clearly works, people are excited about it and are happier to act on the change.”

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“Some of the best ideas come out of joking around, which only comes when you (or the boss) give yourself permission to do it,” Pete says. “It can feel like a waste of time to watch YouTube videos or to tell stories of what happened last weekend, but it can actually be very productive in the long run. I’ve heard some people describe creativity as ‘unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.’ If that’s at all true, you have to be in a certain mindset to make those connections. So when I sense we’re getting nowhere, I just shut things down. We all go off to something else. Later, once the mood has shifted, I’ll attack the problem again.”

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This idea—that change is our friend because only from struggle does clarity emerge—makes many people uncomfortable, and I understand why. Whether you’re coming up with a fashion line or an ad campaign or a car design, the creative process is an expensive undertaking, and blind alleys and unforeseen snafus inevitably drive up your costs. The stakes are so high, and the crises that pop up can be so unpredictable, that we try to exert control. The potential cost of failure appears far more damaging than that of micromanaging. But if we shun such necessary investment—tightening up controls because we fear the risk of being exposed for having made a bad bet—we become the kind of rigid thinkers and managers who impede creativity.

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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. Managers often see change as a threat to their existing business model—and, of course, it is. In the course of my life, the computer industry has moved from mainframes to minicomputers to workstations to desktop computers and now to iPads. Each machine had a sales, marketing, and engineering organization built around it, and thus the shift from one to the next required radical changes to the organization.

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When companies are successful, it is natural to assume that this is a result of leaders making shrewd decisions. Those leaders go forward believing that they have figured out the key to building a thriving company. In fact, randomness and luck played a key role in that success. If you run a business that is covered with any frequency by the media, you may face another challenge. Journalists tend to look for patterns that can be explained in a relatively small number of words. If you haven’t done the work of teasing apart what is random and what you have intentionally set in motion, you will be overly influenced by the analysis of outside observers, which is often oversimplified. When managing a company that is often in the news, as Pixar is, we must be careful not to believe our own hype. I say this knowing that it is difficult to resist, especially when we are flying high and tempted to think we have done everything right. But the truth is, I have no way of accounting for all of the factors involved in any given success, and whenever I learn more, I have to revise what I think. That’s not a weakness or a flaw. That’s reality.

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There is a third concept, also from the world of mathematics, that can help: stochastic self-similarity. Stochastic simply means random or chance; self-similarity describes the phenomenon—found in everything from stock market fluctuations to seismic activity to rainfall—of patterns that look the same when viewed at different degrees of magnification. If you break off a branch of a tree and hold that branch upright, for example, it looks a lot like a little tree. A stretch of coastline has that craggy coastline shape whether it is glimpsed from a hang glider or from outer space. Look at a tiny section of a snowflake under a microscope, and it will resemble a miniature version of the whole. This phenomenon occurs all the time in nature—in cloud formations, in the human circulatory system, in mountain ranges, in the way fern fronds are shaped.

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Chapter 10: Broadening Our View

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. Mark Andrews did this at the Brave meeting by being irrepressible: singing ’80s songs, reveling in people’s nicknames (Wu-dog! Dr. K!), and mocking his own drawing ability as he hurriedly sketched out suggested tweaks. “Is that all the energy you got for me today?” he teased one sleepy colleague. To another, whose work he deemed flawless, he shouted the words all animators yearn to hear: “Final that! Bang!” Whether or not all the animators would get that same go-ahead, everyone could count on this: When each finished his or her presentation, the room would burst into applause. This wasn’t a pep rally, though. The critiques that were offered were specific and meticulous. Every scene was prosecuted relentlessly, and each animator seemed to welcome the feedback.

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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,” Mark told me. “The dailies keep everyone in top form. It’s an intimidating room to be in because the goal is to create the best animation possible. We go through every single frame with a fine-toothed comb, over and over and over again. Sometimes there are full-on debates because, truly, I don’t have all the answers. We work it out together.”

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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.

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“Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.”

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At Pixar, there is one more essential phase of the process: the postmortem. 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.

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While it is true that you learn the most in the midst of a project, the lessons are not generally coherent. Any individual can have a great insight but may not have the time to pass it on. A process might be flawed, but you don’t have time to fix it under the current schedule. Sitting down afterward is a way of consolidating all that you’ve learned—before you forget it. Postmortems are a rare opportunity to do analysis that simply wasn’t possible in

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Teach Others Who Weren’t There Even if everyone involved in a production understands what it taught them, the postmortem is a great way of passing on the positive and negative lessons to other people who were not on the project.

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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.

Notes:

Similar to retrospectives

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Having introduced the subject of data, however, I want to be clear about both its power and its limits. The power lies in the analysis of what we know about the production process—we have data, for example, on the time spent building models and sets, animating and lighting them. This data, of course, only gives a narrow glimpse into what happened while the models and sets were being built and lit. But it gives us something to work with to reveal potential patterns, which can be used to feed discussions that help us improve.

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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. It is important to get this right. Some people swing to the extremes of either having no interest in the data or believing that the facts of measurement alone should drive our management. Either extreme can lead to false conclusions.

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“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors. But in fact, 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 while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.

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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 may 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.”

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Chapter 11: The Unmade Future

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.

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

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Athletes and musicians often refer to being in “the zone”—that mystical place where their inner critic is silenced and they completely inhabit the moment, where the thinking is clear and the motions are precise. Often, mental models help get them there. Just as George Lucas liked to imagine his company as a wagon train headed west—its passengers full of purpose, part of a team, unwavering in their pursuit of their destination—the coping mechanisms used by Pixar and Disney Animation’s directors, producers, and writers draw heavily on visualization. By imagining their problems as familiar pictures, they are able to keep their wits about them when the pressures of not knowing shake their confidence.

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I’m particularly struck by Byron’s focus on speed—on “zipping through” complex problems of logic and storytelling—because it reminds me of what Andrew Stanton says about being a director. I’ve told you about Andrew’s belief that we will all be happier and more productive if we hurry up and fail. For him, moving quickly is a plus because it prevents him from getting stuck worrying about whether his chosen course of action is the wrong one. Instead, he favors being decisive, then forgiving yourself if your initial decision proves misguided. 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.

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“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.”

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The director, or leader, can never lose the confidence of his or her crew. As long as you have been candid and had good reasons for making your (now-flawed-in-retrospect) decisions, your crew will keep rowing. But if you find that the ship is just spinning around—and if you assert that such meaningless activity is, in fact, forward motion—then the crew will balk. They know better than anyone when they are working hard but not going anywhere. People want their leaders to be confident. Andrew doesn’t advise being confident merely for confident’s sake. He believes that leadership is about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.

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In talking to directors and writers, I’m constantly inspired by the models they keep in their heads—each a unique mechanism they use to keep moving forward, through adversity, in pursuit of their goals. Pete Docter compares directing to running through a long tunnel having no idea how long it will last but trusting that he will eventually come out, intact, at the other end. “There’s a really scary point in the middle where it’s just dark,” he says. “There’s no light from where you came in and there’s no light at the other end; all you can do is keep going. And then you start to see a little light and then a little more light and then, suddenly, you’re out in the bright sun.” 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.

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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.

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Chapter 12: A New Challenge

One top executive at Disney got my attention right away by telling me that he didn’t know why Disney had bought Pixar in the first place. Apparently a lover of sports analogies, he told me that Disney Animation was on the one-yard line, ready to score. He felt Disney was on the verge of fixing its own problems—and finally ending its sixteen-year fallow period without a single number one film. I liked this guy’s moxie and his willingness to push back, but I told him that if he were to continue at Disney, he needed to figure out why, in fact, Disney was not on the one-yard line, not about to score, and not about to fix its own problems. This executive was smart, but over time I realized that to ask him to help dismantle a culture he had built was too much, so I had to let him go. He was so fixated on existing processes and the notion of being “right” that he couldn’t see how flawed his thinking was.

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Chapter 13: Notes Day

There is nothing like a crisis, though, to bring what ails a company to the surface. And now, we had three crises brewing at once: (1) Our production costs were rising and we needed to rein them in; (2) External economic forces were putting pressure on our business; and (3) One of the central tenets of our culture—good ideas can come from anywhere, so everyone must feel empowered to speak up—was faltering. Too many of our people—and to my mind, “too many” is the same as “any”—were self-censoring. That needed to change. These three challenges—and our belief that there was no single big idea that would solve them—led us to try something that we hoped would break the logjam and reinvigorate the studio. We called it Notes Day, and I see it as a stellar example of how to set the table for creativity. Managers of creative companies must never forget to ask themselves: “How do we tap the brainpower of our people?” From its genesis to its execution, from the goodwill it engendered to the company-wide changes it set in motion, Notes Day was a success in part because it was based on the idea that fixing things is an ongoing, incremental process. Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and “vision” is often an illusion. But they must also feel safe—always—to speak their minds. Notes Day was a reminder that collaboration, determination, and candor never fail to lift us up.

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When Guido had the floor, he told a story about something he’d instituted in his department called “personal project days.” Two days a month, he allowed his engineers to work on anything they wanted, using Pixar’s resources to engage with whatever problem or question they found interesting. It didn’t have to be directly applicable to any particular film or address any of production’s needs. If an engineer wanted to see what it was like to light a shot in Brave, for example, he or she could. If a group of engineers wanted to build a prototype using Kinect, Microsoft’s motion-sensing input device, to help animators capture characters’ movements, they could do that, too. Any idea that sparked their curiosity, they were free to pursue. “You just give people the time, and they come up with the ideas,” Guido told us. “That’s the beauty of it: It comes from them.” Guido had already told me about how, in just four months, personal project days had reenergized his staff.

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At one point, he’d suggested shutting down Pixar for a week at the end of a movie’s production cycle to talk about what went right, what went wrong, and how to reboot for the next project—a sort of super-postmortem. The idea wasn’t practical, in the end, but it was thought-provoking. Now, as we contemplated how to achieve our goal of cutting costs by 10 percent, Guido had a simple suggestion. “Let’s ask Pixar’s people—all of them—for ideas about how to do it,” he said.

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“What if we closed Pixar for the day? Everybody will come to work but all we’ll talk about is how to solve this problem. We dedicate an entire day to it.” The room was instantly abuzz. “This is so Pixar,” Andrew said. “Totally unexpected. Yes! You want people to get excited? That’s going to do it.” When I asked who in the room would be willing to help organize it, everyone’s hands shot up.

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We wanted to explore issues big and small—to give candid notes to ourselves about the workings of the company, much like we would give notes on a movie in a Braintrust meeting. So it made sense, as we began to make Guido’s idea a reality, to invoke our shorthand term for candid feedback: notes. At some point, we decided that Monday, March 11, 2013, would be called “Notes Day.”

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“So, today, please be honest,” John continued. “And those of you in management positions, be aware that some of this is going to feel like it’s directed at you personally. I’m not kidding. It’s going to happen. But put your tough skin on, and for the sake of Pixar, speak up, and don’t stop the honesty. Trust me. That’s what today is about. It’s about making Pixar better forever, for all of you and for the next generations of Pixarians. This is going to fundamentally change the company for the better. But it starts with you.” It was time to go to class.

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In times of change, we need support—from our families and from our colleagues. I’m reminded here of a letter written by one of our animators, 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.…

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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.

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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. If those assertions sound familiar, that’s because I used them to kick off this book. There’s something else that bears repeating here: 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.

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Afterword: The Steve We Knew

But if the idea doesn’t fly, they are extremely adept at dropping it and moving on. This is a rare skill, one that Steve had too. 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 Steve saw Pixar’s directors do the same, he recognized them as kindred spirits.

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One of the dangers of this approach can be that if you are pitching intently, your very exuberance can make others reluctant to respond candidly. 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. People often place too much significance on the source of an idea, accepting it (or not criticizing it) because it comes from Steve or a respected director.

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Some people, after listening to Steve, would feel that they had reached a new level of insight, only to find afterward that they could not reconstruct the steps in his reasoning; then the insight would evaporate, leaving them scratching their heads, feeling they had been led down the garden path. Thus, reality distortion. I disliked the phrase because it carried a whiff of negativity—implying that Steve would try to will a fantasy world into being on a whim, without regard to how his refusal to face facts meant that everybody around him had to pull all-nighters and upend their lives in the hopes of meeting his unmeetable expectations. Much has been made of Steve’s refusal to follow rules—realities—that applied to others; famously, for example, he did not put a license plate on his car. But to focus too much on this is to miss something important. He recognized that many rules were in fact arbitrary. Yes, he tested boundaries and crossed the line at times. As a behavioral trait, that can be seen as antisocial—or if it happens to change the world, it can earn you the label “visionary.” We frequently support the idea of pushing boundaries in theory, ignoring the trouble it can cause in practice.

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Starting Points: Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture

THOUGHTS FOR MANAGING A CREATIVE CULTURE

Notes:

Book Summary chapter

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Here are some of the principles we’ve developed over the years to enable and protect a healthy creative culture. I know that when you distill a complex idea into a T-shirt slogan, you risk giving the illusion of understanding—and, in the process, of sapping the idea of its power. An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior. But while I have been dismissive of reductive truths throughout this book, I do have a point of view, and I thought it might be helpful to share some of the principles that I hold most dear here with you. The trick is to think of each statement as a starting point, as a prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.

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• Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.

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• When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

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• 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.

Notes:

Trust based management

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• Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.

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• 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.

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