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).

As we were finalizing the merger, Disney’s board of directors didn’t like the fact that key Pixar talent was not under contract.
If Disney bought us and then John or I or certain other leaders left the company, they felt, it would be a disaster, so they asked that we all sign contracts before the deal went through. We declined. It is a tenet of the Pixar culture that people should work there because they want to, not because a contract requires them to, and as a result, no one at Pixar was under contract. But even though this rejection was based on a core belief, it made the deal feel questionable for Disney. On the Pixar side, meanwhile, there was considerable concern that the Disney bureaucracy would inadvertently destroy what we had built. Both sides, then, felt at considerable risk. The result, though, was that at the heart of this merger was an understanding that both companies had to trust each other. Each side felt a personal obligation to live up to the intent of the agreement - and I believe this was the ideal way to begin our relationship.

This concept, completely counter to what we believed and practiced at Pixar, could only result in an inferior product, so we made an announcement: From that day forward, there would be no more mandatory notes.
Disney Animation’s directors needed a feedback system that worked, so we immediately set about helping them create their own version of the Braintrust - a safe arena in which to solicit and interpret candid responses to developing projects. (This was made easier by the fact that they already liked and trusted each other. Even before our arrival, we were told, they’d formed their own under-the-radar group called the Story Trust, but the lack of management understanding for that concept had prevented it from evolving into a coherent forum.)

Why was a problem that took a few days to solve originally projected to take six months?
The answer, I think, lay in the fact that for too long, the leaders of Disney Animation placed a higher value on error prevention than anything else. Their employees knew there would be repercussions if mistakes were made, so the primary goal was never to make any. To my mind, that institutional fear was behind the Bolt rerigging snafu. With the best intentions, the film’s production managers had responded to the crisis with a timetable that would ensure a character that was fully functional with no errors. (The irony is that if a solution only takes a few days to find, then you don’t care so much if there are errors because you will have plenty of time to fix them.) But seeking to eliminate failure was in this instance - and, I would argue, most instances - precisely the wrong thing to do.

This corporate détente, if you will, wouldn’t 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 didn’t 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.