In short, Pixar had the kind of diverse problems that any successful company has. But chief among them, to my mind, was that more and more people had begun to feel that it was either not safe or not welcome to offer differing ideas. This hesitancy was difficult to see at first, but when we paid attention, we saw many clues that people were holding back. To me, that meant one thing: We, as leaders, were allowing some faulty ideas to take hold, and that was bad for our culture.

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.

Some organizations fight back with strategic subtraction. Like the monthlong Meeting Doomsday pilot program that Rebecca Hinds at Asana ran with that small group of marketing employees. As we explained above under “Good Riddance Reviews,” the first stage was a meeting audit, where employees studied their calendars and identified recurring meetings that lacked value. The second stage was the Meeting Doomsday part, in which employees removed all of the standing meetings with less than five people from their calendars for forty-eight hours. Then, as Rebecca put it, after people lived “with their newly cleansed calendars” for a couple days, they repopulated them “only with those meetings that are valuable—according to their own meeting audit.” Employees eliminated some meetings, reduced the frequency of others, and made many shorter—cutting thirty-minute meetings to fifteen minutes, and sixty-minute meetings to forty-five minutes. Meeting Doomsday packed a wallop. Rebecca reports participants saved an average of eleven hours per month. One Asana employee, Francesca, in the marketing group, believed her calendar was already in “top shape” before participating in the pilot. But she turned out to be the Doomsday “all-star,” saving thirty-two hours a month.

As the damage caused by excessive speed ripples throughout an organization, it can turn into a vicious downward spiral that, once it gains momentum, is hard for leaders to reverse. As harried leaders make bad decisions and errors that create more pressing problems that are left unsolved, and one overwhelmed member after another burns out, turns selfish and nasty, makes more flawed decisions, and becomes less creative, everyone tangled up with the organization suffers.

In most cases, the culprit is good people behaving badly, not bad people behaving badly. If it's the latter, no cultural shift is going to help, by the way. Toxic or ineffective people simply need to be extracted, in part because of the cultural damage they will do. Keeping them around is an implicit endorsement of their behavior. But if you've got a team of good people and you know what kind of culture they need to deliver your version of excellence, now the fun starts: how exactly are you going to build it?

In most cases, the culprit is good people behaving badly, not bad people behaving badly. If it's the latter, no cultural shift is going to help, by the way. Toxic or ineffective people simply need to be extracted, in part because of the cultural damage they will do. Keeping them around is an implicit endorsement of their behavior. But if you've got a team of good people and you know what kind of culture they need to deliver your version of excellence, now the fun starts: how exactly are you going to build it?