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.

This is trickier than you might think. As a group, Pixar’s people take pride in their work.
They’re ambitious high achievers who want to do their best and then some. On the management side, we want the next product to be better than the last, while at the same time we need to meet budget and schedule requirements. Inspiring managers push their people to excel. That’s what we expect them to do. But when the powerful forces that create this positive dynamic turn negative, they are hard to counteract. It’s a fine line. On any film, there are inevitable periods of extreme crunch and stress, some of which can be healthy if they don’t go on too long. But the ambitions of both managers and their teams can exacerbate each other and become unhealthy. It is a leader’s responsibility to see this, and guide it, not exploit it.

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.

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.

Our shorts also create a deeper value in two key areas. Externally, they help us forge a bond with moviegoers, who have come to regard them as a kind of bonus - something added solely for their enjoyment. Internally, because everyone knows the shorts have no commercial value, the fact that we continue to make them sends a message that we care about artistry at Pixar; it reinforces and affirms our values. And that creates a feeling of goodwill that we draw on, consciously and unconsciously, all the time.

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.