We are intellectually indebted to the work of P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham and their book Breakthroughs! as a rich source of background material on the development of the 3M Post-it Notes, the microwave oven, Tagamet, Federal Express, and the CT Scanner, which we use as examples in our chapter on innovation.

In any given Pixar film, every line of dialogue, every beam of light or patch of shade, every sound effect is there because it contributes to the greater whole. In the end, if you do it right, people come out of the theater and say, “A movie about talking toys - what a clever idea!” But a movie is not one idea, it’s a multitude of them. And behind these ideas are people. This is true of products in general; the iPhone, for example, is not a singular idea - there is a mind-boggling depth to the hardware and software that supports it. Yet too often, we see a single object and think of it as an island that exists apart and unto itself.

1. RESEARCH TRIPS

I was once in a conference room at Disney in which two directors were pitching the latest version of a film they were developing. The walls of the room were covered with large corkboards, which were filled with illustrations of what happens in each act, as well as drawings of characters and collages of inspirational artwork. To give a sense of the overall flavor of the film, the directors had posted dozens of images from well-known movies that they felt were in a similar visual and contextual vein: panoramic shots they hoped to mimic, landscapes they found inspiring, character studies that showed costumes like the ones they planned to use. While they had hoped to convey the sense of their movie idea by displaying examples from other films, every single board was based on these iconic references, with the unintended result that everything presented felt terribly derivative. In one way, this made sense - every director gets into this business because they love movies; it is inevitable that references to other movies often pop up when talking about filmmaking. (At Pixar, we joke that only one mention of Star Wars is allowed per meeting.) References to movies, both good and bad, are part of the vocabulary of talking about filmmaking. And yet if you rely too much on the references to what came before, you doom your film to being derivative.

The Thinking Machine - Stephen Witt

Introduction:

“This is the story of how a niche vendor of video game hardware became the most valuable company in the world. It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known. At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.

Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow.

THREE: New Venture

“Sun Microsystems had declined to pursue the consumer marketplace for PC video game hardware. So had Lori’s former employer Silicon Graphics, the industry leader in three-dimensional graphics. (Employees there were busy animating the CGI dinosaurs for Jurassic Park.) The failure of the major players to invest in PC gaming created a vacuum in the marketplace, which a brigade of start-up businesses was now scrambling to fill.

The concept was to take the hardware used to paint the wire-frame skeletons of model airplanes and dinosaurs and repurpose it to create controllable animated figures in three-dimensional games.