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 weâve made it safe to work through problems. (Remember: People are more important than ideas.) Finally, it does not mean protecting the new forever. At some point, the new has to engage with the needs of the company - with its many constituencies and, yes, with the Beast. As long as the Beast is not allowed to run roughshod over everyone else, as long as we donât let it invert our values, its presence can be an impetus for progress.
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This is trickier than you might think. As a group, Pixarâs people take pride in their work.
Theyâre 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. Thatâs what we expect them to do. But when the powerful forces that create this positive dynamic turn negative, they are hard to counteract. Itâs a fine line. On any film, there are inevitable periods of extreme crunch and stress, some of which can be healthy if they donât go on too long. But the ambitions of both managers and their teams can exacerbate each other and become unhealthy. It is a leaderâs 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, everyoneâs
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. Thatâs not true at Pixar.
When I advocate for protecting the new, then, I am using the word somewhat differently. I
am saying that when someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched - and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to let it evolve, it could be destroyed. Part of our job is to protect the new from people who donât understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Think of a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly â 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.
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).
This corporate deĚtente, if you will, wouldnât have been possible, I think, without the Five Year Compact.
The document, while providing great comfort to Pixar employees, prompted several complaints from the Disney Studios human resources department. The complaints boiled down to the fact that they didnât care for the exceptionalism that our carefully guarded policies implied. My response to this stemmed less from a loyalty to Pixar than from my commitment to a larger idea: In big organizations there are advantages to consistency, but I strongly believe that smaller groups within the larger whole should be allowed to differentiate themselves and operate according to their own rules, so long as those rules work. This fosters a sense of personal ownership and pride in the company that, to my mind, benefits the larger enterprise.
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, âtoo manyâ is the same as âanyâ - were self-censoring. That needed to change.