In the difficult year after Toy Story’s debut, 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.

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.

Still, people felt vulnerable - and that bred suspicion. More and more, I began to think that many of our employees viewed any change as a threat to the Pixar way (and, as such, to our ability to be successful going forward).

The implication, for me, was that we would inevitably be subject to those same delusions at Pixar unless we came to terms with our own limited ability to see. We had to address what I’ve come to call the Hidden.

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.