Creativity, Inc.

What they miss is that the unifying idea for this building isn’t luxury but community. Steve wanted the building to support our work by enhancing our ability to collaborate.

The point is, we value self-expression here. This tends to make a big impression on visitors, who often tell me that the experience of walking into Pixar leaves them feeling a little wistful, like something is missing in their work lives - a palpable energy, a feeling of collaboration and unfettered creativity, a sense, not to be corny, of possibility. I respond by telling them that the feeling they are picking up on - call it exuberance or irreverence, even whimsy - is integral to our success.
But it’s not what makes Pixar special.
What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. This, more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning. It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission.

While there was much innovation that enabled our work, we had not let the technology overwhelm our real purpose: making a great film.

I’d spent two decades building a train and laying its track. Now, the thought of merely driving it struck me as a far less interesting task. Was making one film after another enough to engage me? I wondered. What would be my organizing principle now?

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.

We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

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.

This is the nature of management. Decisions are made, usually for good reasons, which in turn prompt other decisions. So when problems arise - and they always do - disentangling them is not as simple as correcting the original error. Often, finding a solution is a multi-step endeavor. There is the problem you know you are trying to solve - think of that as an oak tree - and then there are all the other problems - think of these as saplings - that sprouted from the acorns that fell around it. And these problems remain after you cut the oak tree down.

After receiving my Ph.D. in 1974, I left Utah with a nice little list of innovations under my belt, but I was keenly aware that I’d only done all this in the service of a larger mutual goal. Like my classmates, the work I’d championed had taken hold largely because of the protective, eclectic, intensely challenging environment I’d been in. The leaders of my department understood that to create a fertile laboratory, they had to assemble different kinds of thinkers and then encourage their autonomy. They had to offer feedback when needed but also had to be willing to stand back and give us room.

To ensure that it succeeded, I needed to attract the sharpest minds; to attract the sharpest minds, I needed to put my own insecurities away. The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.

By hiring Alvy, I had taken a risk, and that risk yielded the highest reward—a brilliant, committed teammate. I had wondered in graduate school how I could ever replicate the singular environment of the U of U. Now, suddenly, I saw the way. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

The benefit of this transparency was not immediately felt (and, notably, when we decided upon it, we weren’t even counting on a payoff; it just seemed like the right thing to do). But the relationships and connections we formed, over time, proved far more valuable than we could have imagined, fueling our technical innovation and our understanding of creativity in general.

Within Lucasfilm, the special effects experts were relatively indifferent to our computer graphics technology. Their film editor colleagues, however, were outright opposed. This was driven home when, at George’s request, we developed a video-editing system that would enable editors to do their work on the computer. George envisioned a program that would allow shots to be banked and filed easily and cuts to be made far more quickly than they were on film. Ralph Guggenheim, a computer programmer (with a degree in filmmaking from Carnegie Mellon as well) I’d lured away from NYIT, took the lead on this project, which was so ahead of its time that the hardware needed to support it didn’t even exist yet. (In order to approximate it, Ralph had to mock up an elaborate makeshift system using laser disks). But as challenging as that problem proved to be, it paled in comparison to the bigger, and eternal, impediment to our progress: the human resistance to change.

If left up to the editors, no new tool would ever be designed and no improvements would be possible. They saw no advantage to change and couldn’t imagine how using a computer would make their work easier or better. But if we designed the new system in a vacuum, moving ahead without the editors’ input, we would end up with a tool that didn’t address their needs. Being confident about the value of our innovation was not enough. We needed buy-in from the community we were trying to serve. Without it, we were forced to abandon our plans.

I’d put my version of hierarchy in place by delegating to other managers, but I was also part of a chain of command in the greater Lucasfilm empire. I remember going home at night, exhausted, feeling like I was balancing on the backs of a herd of horses—only some of the horses were thoroughbreds, some were completely wild, and some were ponies who were struggling to keep up. I found it hard enough to hold on, let alone steer.

Like me, John remembers discovering that there were people who made animation for a living and thinking he’d found his place in the world. For him, as for me, that realization was Disney-related; it came when he stumbled upon a well-worn copy of The Art of Animation, Bob Thomas’s history of the Disney Studios, in his high school library. By the time I met John, he was as connected to Walt Disney as any twenty-six-year-old on earth. He had graduated from CalArts, the legendary art school founded by Walt, where he’d learned from some of the greatest artists of Disney’s Golden Age; he’d worked as a river guide on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland; and he’d won a Student Academy Award in 1979 for his short film The Lady and the Lamp - an homage to Disney’s Lady and the Tramp - whose main character, a white desk lamp, would later evolve into our Pixar logo.

Adding to the stress was the fact that we’d left ourselves so little time to get it all done. We had a self- imposed deadline of July 1984 - just eight months after John came aboard - because that was when the annual SIGGRAPH Conference would be held in Minneapolis. This week-long computer graphics summit was a great place to find out what everyone in the field was up to, the one time every year that academics, educators, artists, hardware salesmen, graduate students, and programmers all came together under one roof.

This was my first encounter with a phenomenon I would notice again and again, throughout my career: For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.

Steve was hard-charging - relentless, even - but a conversation with him took you places you didn’t expect. It forced you not just to defend but also to engage. And that in itself, I came to believe, had value.

These slogans were offered as conclusions - as wisdom - and they may have been, I suppose. But none of them gave me any clue as to what to do or what I should focus on.

His method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageous - “These charts are bullshit!” or “This deal is crap!” - and watching people react. If you were brave enough to come back at him, he often respected it - poking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it. Watching him reminded me of a principle of engineering: Sending out a sharp impulse - like a dolphin uses echolocation to determine the location of a school of fish - can teach you crucial things about your environment. Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.

In retrospect, when I sought the counsel of these more experienced men, I had been seeking simple answers to complex questions - do this, not that - because I was unsure of myself and stressed by the demands of my new job. But simple answers like the “start high” pricing advice - so seductive in its rationality - had distracted me and kept me from asking more fundamental questions.

The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line. Japanese companies that implemented Deming’s ideas made it easy for workers to do so: They installed a cord that anyone could pull in order to bring production to a halt. Before long, Japanese companies were enjoying unheard-of levels of quality, productivity, and market share.

While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

Starting in 1990, around the same time we moved into a concrete box of a building in the warehouse district of Point Richmond, north of Berkeley, we began to focus our energies on the creative side. We started making animated commercials for Trident gum and Tropicana orange juice and almost immediately won awards for the creative content while continuing to hone our technical and storytelling skills. The problem was, we still were taking in significantly less money than we spent. In 1991, we laid off more than a third of our employees.

He’d hired Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter, who would go on to become two of our most inspired directors, back when we were making commercials. Forceful to the point of red-faced when asserting something he held dear, Andrew was a writer-director with a deep insight into story structure; he loved nothing more than stripping a plot down to its emotional load-bearing sequences and then rebuilding it from the ground up. Pete was a supremely talented draftsman with a knack for capturing emotion on screen.

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.

But one thing could not have been more plain: Figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture - one that didn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence, communication, originality, and self-assessment but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became - wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. And one that I wanted to do.

The first principle was “Story Is King,” by which we meant that we would let nothing - not
the technology, not the merchandising possibilities - get in the way of our story. We took
pride in the fact that reviewers talked mainly about the way Toy Story made them feel and not about the computer wizardry that enabled us to get it up on the screen. We believed that this was the direct result of our always keeping story as our guiding light.

The other principle we depended on was “Trust the Process.” We liked this one because it was so reassuring: While there are inevitably difficulties and missteps in any complex creative endeavor, you can trust that “the process” will carry you through. In some ways, this was no different than any optimistic aphorism (“Hang in there, baby!”), except that because our process was so different from other movie studios, we felt that it had real power. Pixar was a place that gave artists running room, that gave directors control, that trusted its people to solve problems. I have always been wary of maxims or rules because, all too often, they turn out to be empty platitudes that impede thoughtfulness, but these two principles actually seemed to help our people.

As John and his creative team went to work, I considered the stark reality we faced. We were asking our people to pull off the cinematic equivalent of a heart transplant. We had less than a year before Toy Story 2 was due in theaters. Getting it there in time would drive our workforce to the breaking point, and there would surely be a price to pay for that. But I also believed that the alternative - acceptance of mediocrity - would have consequences that were far more destructive.

The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet - in my experience - is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

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.

To this day, we keep adjusting and fiddling with this model, but the underlying goals remain the same: Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.

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.

But to me, the key is not to let this trust, our faith, lull us into the abdication of personal responsibility. When that happens, we fall into dull repetition, producing empty versions of what was made before.

There is some dispute about when, exactly, the Braintrust came into being. That’s because it developed organically, growing out of the rare working relationship among the five men who led and edited the production of Toy Story - John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft. From Pixar’s earliest days, this quintet gave us a solid example of what a highly functional working group should be. They were funny, focused, smart, and relentlessly candid with each other. Most crucially, they never allowed themselves to be thwarted by the kinds of structural or personal issues that can render meaningful communication in a group setting impossible. It was only when we rallied to fix Toy Story 2, coming together to solve a crisis, that the “Braintrust” entered the Pixar lexicon as an official term.

And yet, candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.” This idea—that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp. But think about how easy it would be for a movie about talking toys to feel derivative, sappy, or overtly merchandise-driven. Think about how off-putting a movie about rats preparing food could be, or how risky it must’ve seemed to start WALL-E with 39 dialogue-free minutes. We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass. And this is as it should be. Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.

People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things - in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.

No matter what, the process of coming to clarity takes patience and candor.

Which is why we don’t give notes this way at Pixar. We have developed our own model, based on our determination to be a filmmaker-led studio. That does not mean there is no hierarchy here. It means that we try to create an environment where people want to hear each other’s notes, even when those notes are challenging, and where everyone has a vested interest in one another’s success. We give our filmmakers both freedom and responsibility. For example, we believe that the most promising stories are not assigned to filmmakers but emerge from within them. With few exceptions, our directors make movies that they have conceived of and are burning to make. Then, because we know that this passion will at some point blind them to their movie’s inevitable problems, we offer them the counsel of the Braintrust.

While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often
extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle, underlying issues elsewhere in the story. Think of it like a patient complaining of knee pain that stems from his fallen arches. If you operated on the knee, it wouldn’t just fail to alleviate the pain, it could easily compound it. To alleviate the pain, you have to identify and deal with the root of the problem. The Braintrust’s notes, then, are intended to bring the true causes of problems to the surface - not to demand a specific remedy.

Here’s how it works: On an appointed morning, the Braintrust gathers for a screening of the film-in-progress. After the screening, we head for a conference room, have some lunch, gather our thoughts, and sit down to talk. The director and producer of the film give a summary of where they think they are. “We’ve locked down the first act, but we know the second act is still gelling,” they’ll say. Or “The ending still isn’t connecting like we want it to.” Then, the feedback usually begins with John. While everyone has an equal voice in a Braintrust meeting, John sets the tone, calling out the sequences he liked best, identifying some themes and ideas he thinks need to be improved. That’s all it takes to launch the back-and-forth. Everybody jumps in with observations about the film’s strengths and weaknesses.

Once this Braintrust meeting wrapped up, this is exactly what he did for Pete, ticking off the areas that seemed the most problematic, reminding him of the scenes that resonated most. “So what do we blow up?” Jonas asked. “What do we go backwards on? And what do you love? Is what you loved about the film different now than it was when we started?

Frank talk, spirited debate, laughter, and love. If I could distill a Braintrust meeting down to
its most essential ingredients, those four things would surely be among them. But newcomers often notice something else first: the volume. Routinely, Braintrust attendees become so energized and excited that they talk over each other, and voices tend to rise. I’ll admit that there have been times when outsiders think they’ve witnessed a heated argument or even some kind of intervention. They haven’t - though I understand their confusion, which stems from their inability (after such a brief visit) to grasp the Braintrust’s intent. A lively debate in a Braintrust meeting is not being waged in the hopes of any one person winning the day. To the extent there is “argument,” it seeks only to excavate the truth.

At Apple, he had the reputation for being deeply involved in the most minute detail of every product, but at Pixar, he didn’t believe that his instincts were better than the people here, so he stayed out. That’s how much candor matters at Pixar: It overrides hierarchy.

The Braintrust is valuable because it broadens your perspective, allowing you to peer - at least briefly - through others’ eyes.

Candor isn’t cruel. It does not destroy. On the contrary, any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves. The need to stroke one’s own ego, to get the credit we feel we deserve - we strive to check those impulses at the door. The Braintrust is fueled by the idea that every note we give is in the service of a common goal: supporting and helping each other as we try to make better movies.

The Toy Story team knew and trusted each other - over the years, they’d made stupid mistakes together and solved seemingly insurmountable problems together. The key was to focus less on the end goal and more on what still intrigued them about the characters who, by this point, felt like people we actually knew.

I came to think of our meltdowns as a necessary part of doing our business, like investments in R&D, and I urged everyone at Pixar to see them the same way.

The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy - trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it - dooms you to fail. As Andrew puts it, “Moving things forward allows the team you are leading to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m on a boat that is actually going towards land.’ As opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of you stop rowing until I figure this out.’ And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.

There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat.

In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.

The process of developing a story is one of discovery,” Pete says. “However, there’s always a guiding principle that leads you as you go down the various roads. In Monsters, Inc., all of our very different plots shared a common feeling - the bittersweet goodbye you feel once a problem” - in this case, Sulley’s quest to return Boo to her own world - “has been solved. You suffer through it as you struggle to solve it, but by the end you’ve developed a sort of fondness for it, and you miss it when it is gone. I knew I wanted to express that, and I was eventually able to get it in the film.”

While the process was difficult and time consuming, Pete and his crew never believed that a failed approach meant that they had failed. Instead, they saw that each idea led them a bit closer to finding the better option. And that allowed them to come to work each day engaged and excited, even while in the midst of confusion. This is key: When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work - even when it is confounding them.

So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. Moreover, you cannot plan your way out of problems. While planning is very important, and we do a lot of it, there is only so much you can control in a creative environment. In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly.

But just because “failure free” is crucial in some industries does not mean that it should be a goal in all of them. When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive.

We are a filmmaker-driven studio, which means that our goal is to let the creative people guide our projects. But when a movie gets stuck and it becomes clear that not only is it broken but its directors are at a loss as to how to fix it, we must replace them or shut the project down. You may ask: If it is true that all the movies suck at first, and if Pixar’s way is to give filmmakers - not the Braintrust - the ultimate authority to fix what’s broken, then how do you know when to step in?
The criteria we use is that we step in if a director loses the confidence of his or her crew. About three hundred people work on each Pixar movie, and they are used to endless adjustments and changes being made while the story is finding its feet. In general, movie crews are an understanding bunch. They recognize that there are always problems, so while they can be judgmental, they don’t tend to rush to judgment.

If the crew is confused, then their leader is, too.
When this happens, we must act. To know when to act, we much watch carefully for signs that a movie is stuck. Here is one: A Braintrust meeting will occur, notes will be given, and
three months later, the movie will come back essentially unchanged. That is not okay. You
may say, “Wait a minute - I thought you just said the directors didn’t have to obey the notes!”
They don’t. But directors must find ways to address problems that are raised by the group
because the Braintrust represents the audience; when they are confused or otherwise
dissatisfied, there’s a good chance moviegoers will be too. The implication of being director-
led is that the director must lead.

There are two parts to any failure: There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. It is this second part that we control. Do we become introspective, or do we bury our heads in the sand? Do we make it safe for others to acknowledge and learn from problems, or do we shut down discussion by looking for people to blame? We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.

And yet, as we made those unconventional choices, everyone agreed, we needed to outline
better, more explicit steps to train and prepare those we felt had the necessary skills to make
movies. Instead of hoping that our director candidates would absorb our shared wisdom through osmosis, we resolved to create a formal mentoring program that would, in a sense,
give to others what Pete and Andrew and Lee had experienced working so closely with John
in the early days. Going forward, every established director would check in weekly with his
mentees - giving them both practical and motivational advice as they developed ideas they
hoped would become feature films.

Who better to teach than the most capable among us? And I’m not just talking about
seminars or formal settings. Our actions and behaviors, for better or worse, teach those who
admire and look up to us how to govern their own lives. Are we thoughtful about how people
learn and grow? As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create
companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the
whole. Do we think of most activities as teaching opportunities and experiences as ways of
learning? One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that
rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.

Getting middle managers to tolerate (and not feel threatened by) problems and surprises is
one of our most important jobs; they already feel the weight of believing that if they screw
up, there will be hell to pay. How do we get people to reframe the way they think about the
process and the risks?

There will always be plenty to be afraid of, especially when you are doing something new. Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it. Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must demonstrate their trustworthiness, over time, through their actions - and the best way to do that is by responding well to failure. The Braintrust and various groups within Pixar have gone through difficult times together, solved problems together, and that is how they’ve built up trust in each other. Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.

If there is fear, there is a reason - our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.

In fact, the intentions and values of the high-caliber people working in production were surely admirable. But the Beast is powerful and can overwhelm even the most dedicated individuals. As Disney expanded its release schedule, its need for output increased to the point that it opened animation studios in Burbank, Florida, France, and Australia just to keep up with its appetites. The pressure to create - and quickly! - became the order of the day. To be clear, this happens at many companies, not just in Hollywood, and its unintended effect is always the same: It lessens quality across the board.

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call
early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.” They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the
adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and
incomplete. They need nurturing - in the form of time and patience - in order to grow. What
this means is that they have a hard time coexisting with the Beast.
The Ugly Baby idea is not easy to accept. Having seen and enjoyed Pixar movies, many
people assume that they popped into the world already striking, resonant, and meaningful -
fully grown, if you will. In fact, getting them to that point involved months, if not years, of
work. If you sat down and watched the early reels of any of our films, the ugliness would be
painfully clear. But the natural impulse is to compare the early reels of our films to finished
films - by which I mean to hold the new to standards only the mature can meet. Our job is to
protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.

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 don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Think of a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly – 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.

The Beast is a glutton but also a valuable motivator. The Baby is so pure and unsullied, so full of potential, but it’s also needy and unpredictable and can keep you up at night. The key is for your Beast and your Babies to coexist peacefully, and that requires that you keep various forces in balance.

How do we balance these forces that seem so at odds, especially when it always appears to be such an unfair fight? The needs of the Beast seem to trump the needs of the Baby every time, given that the Baby’s true worth is often unknown or in doubt and can remain so for months on end. How do we hold off the Beast, curbing its appetites, without putting our companies in jeopardy? Because every company needs its Beast. The Beast’s hunger translates into deadlines and urgency. That’s a good thing, as long as the Beast is kept in its place. And that’s the tough part.

If inefficiencies result in anyone waiting for too long, if the majority of your people aren’t engaged in the work that drives your revenue most of the time, you risk being devoured from the inside out.

The Beast thrives not only within animation or movie companies, of course. No creative business is immune, from technology to publishing to manufacturing. But all Beasts have one thing in common. Frequently, the people in charge of the Beast are the most organized people in the company - people wired to make things happen on track and on budget, as their bosses expect them to do. When those people and their interests become too powerful - when there is not sufficient push-back to protect new ideas - things go wrong. The Beast takes over.

Each group is focused on its own needs, which means that no one has a clear view of how their decisions impact other groups; each group is under pressure to perform well, which means achieving stated goals.

In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize
the importance of balancing competing desires - they want to be heard, but they don’t have
to win. Their interaction with one another - the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals - yields the balance we seek. But that only happens if they understand that achieving balance is a central goal of the company.

Our mental image of balance is somewhat distorted because we tend to equate it with stillness - the calm repose of a yogi balancing on one leg, a state without apparent motion. To my mind, the more accurate examples of balance come from sports, such as when a basketball player spins around a defender, a running back bursts through the line of scrimmage, or a surfer catches a wave. All of these are extremely dynamic responses to rapidly changing environments. In the context of animation, directors have told me that they see their engagement when making a film as extremely active.

For example, as we expand our animation staff at Pixar, which has the positive impact of allowing us to do more quality work, there is also a negative impact that we must deal with: Meetings have become larger and less intimate, with each participant having a proportionally smaller ownership in the final film (which can mean feeling less valued). In response, we created smaller subgroups in which departments and individuals are encouraged to feel they have a voice. In order to make corrections like this - to reestablish balance - managers must be diligent about paying attention.

I often say that managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions. What does that mean? It means that we must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by things we thought we knew but didn’t. As long as our intentions - our values - remain constant, our goals can shift as needed. At Pixar, we try never to waver in our ethics, our values, and our intention to create original, quality products. We are willing to adjust our goals as we learn, striving to get it right - not necessarily to get it right the first time. Because that, to my mind, is the only way to establish something else that is essential to creativity: a culture that protects the new.

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 we’ve 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 don’t let it invert our values, its presence can be an impetus for progress.

But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” - Anton Ego

However, if we only made sequels, Pixar would wither and die. I thought of sequels as a sort of creative bankruptcy. We needed a constant churn of new ideas, even though we knew that original films are riskier. We recognized that making sequels, which were likely to do well at the box office, gave us more leeway to take those risks. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that a blend - one original film each year and a sequel every other year, or three films every two years - seemed a reasonable way to keep us both financially and creatively healthy.

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).

”… One trick I’ve learned is to force myself to make a list of what’s actually wrong. Usually, soon into making the list, I find I can group most of the issues into two or three larger all-encompassing problems. So it’s really not all that bad. Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.” – Pete Doctor

Self-interest guides opposition to change, but lack of self-awareness fuels it even more.
Once you master any system, you typically become blind to its flaws; even if you can see them, they appear far too complex and intertwined to consider changing. But to remain blind is to risk becoming the music industry, in which self-interest (trying to protect short-term gains) trumped self-awareness (few people realized that the old system was about to be overtaken altogether). Industry executives clung to their outdated business model - selling albums - until it was too late and file sharing and iTunes had turned everything upside down.

The danger is that your company becomes overwhelmed by well-intended rules that only accomplish one thing: draining the creative impulse.

This is the puzzle of trying to understand randomness: Real patterns are mixed in with random events, so it is extraordinarily difficult for us to differentiate between chance and skill. Did you arrive early to work because you left on time, planned ahead, and drove carefully? Or were you just in the right place at the right time? Most people would choose the former answer without a second thought - without even acknowledging the latter was an option. As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn’t.

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.

So how do we develop ways of understanding randomness? By which I mean: How can we think clearly about unexpected events that are lurking out there that don’t fit any of our existing models?

There is a crucial yet hard-to-understand concept here. Most people grasp the need to set priorities; they put the biggest problems at the top, with smaller problems beneath them. There are simply too many small problems to consider them all. So they draw a horizontal line beneath which they will not tread, directing all their energies to those above the line. I believe there is another approach: If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, waiting for approval. Mistakes will still be made, but in my experience, they are fewer and farther between and are caught at an earlier stage.

I’ve known some geniuses who were such a pain to work with that we had to let them go; then again, some of our most brilliant, delightful, and effective people were let go by previous employers for being none of those things. It would be nice if there were some magic bullet that turned difficult people into success stories, but there isn’t. There are just too many unknowns and immeasurable personal characteristics involved for us to pretend that we have figured out how to do that. Everyone says they want to hire excellent people, but in truth we don’t really know, at first, who will rise up to make a difference. I believe in putting in place a framework for finding potential, then nurturing talent and excellence, believing that many will rise, while knowing that not all will.

When I look back on Pixar’s history, I have to recognize that so many of the good things that happened could easily have gone a different way. Steve could have sold us - he tried more than once. Toy Story 2 could have been deleted for good, bringing the company down. For years, Disney was trying to steal John back, and they could have succeeded. I am distinctly aware that Disney Animation’s success in the 1990s gave Pixar its chance with Toy Story and also that their later struggles enabled us to join together and ultimately merge.

The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

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.

Which brings us to one of my core management beliefs: If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

I don’t think that my actions changed in a way that prompted this; my position did. And what this meant was that things I’d once been privy to became increasingly unavailable to me. Gradually, snarky behavior, grousing, and rudeness disappeared from view - from my view, anyway. I rarely saw bad behavior because people wouldn’t exhibit it in front of me. I was out of a certain loop, and it was essential that I never lose sight of that fact. If I wasn’t careful to be vigilant and self-aware, I might well draw the wrong conclusions.

While we are all aware of these kinds of behaviors because we see them in others, most of us do not realize that we distort our own view of the world, largely because we think we see more than we actually do.

Complex environments are, by definition, too complicated for any one person to grasp fully. Yet many managers, afraid of appearing to not be in control, believe that they have to know everything - or at least act like they do.

Each of us, then, draws conclusions based on incomplete pictures. It would be wrong for me to assume that my limited view is necessarily better.

If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse. In a healthy, creative culture, the people in the trenches feel free to speak up and bring to light differing views that can help give us clarity.

But we are usually not aware that when we look back in time, our penchant for pattern-making leads us to be selective about which memories have meaning. And we do not always make the right selections. We build our story - our model of the past - as best we can. We may seek out other people’s memories and examine our own limited records to come up with a better model. Even then, it is still only a model - not reality.

When we are making a movie, the movie doesn’t exist yet. We are not uncovering it or discovering it; it’s not as if it resides somewhere and is just waiting to be found. There is no movie. We are making decisions, one by one, to create it. In a fundamental way, the movie is hidden from us.

The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.

But no matter how intensely we desire certainty, we should understand that whether because of our limits or randomness or future unknowable confluences of events, something will inevitably come, unbidden, through that door. Some of it will be uplifting and inspiring, and some of it will be disastrous.

In this chapter I discuss several of the mechanisms we use to put our collective heads into a different frame of mind.

1. Dailies, or Solving Problems Together

1. Research Trips

1. The Power of Limits

1. Integrating Technology and Art

1. Short Experiments

1. Learning to See

1. Postmortems

1. Continuing to Learn

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.

Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.

Ultimately, what we’re after is authenticity. What feels daunting to the filmmakers when John sends them out on such trips is that they don’t yet know what they are looking for, so they’re not sure what they will gain. But think about it: You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar. In my experience, when people go out on research trips, they always come back changed.

Does this kind of microdetail matter? I believe it does. There’s something about knowing your subject and your setting inside and out - a confidence - that seeps into every frame of your film. It’s a hidden engine, an unspoken contract with the viewer that says: We are striving to tell you something impactful and true. When attempting to make good on that promise, no detail is too small.

1. THE POWER OF LIMITS

There is a phenomenon that producers at Pixar call “the beautifully shaded penny.” It refers to the fact that artists who work on our films care so much about every detail that they will sometimes spend days or weeks crafting what Katherine Sarafian, a Pixar producer, calls “the equivalent of a penny on a nightstand that you’ll never see.” Katherine, who was the production manager on Monsters, Inc., remembers one scene that perfectly illustrates the beautifully shaded penny idea. It occurs when a bewildered Boo first arrives in Mike and Sulley’s apartment and begins, as toddlers do, to explore. As the monsters try to contain her, she wanders up to two towering piles of compact discs - more than ninety in all. “Don’t touch those!” Mike screams as she grabs a CD case from the bottom, sending the piles crashing to the floor. “Aw, those were alphabetized,” Mike complains as she waddles away. The moment is over in three seconds, and during it, only a few of the CD cases are at all visible. But for every one of those CDs, Pixar artists created not just a CD cover but a shader - a program that calculates how an object’s rendering changes as it moves.

Many of our limits are imposed not by our internal processes but by external realities - finite resources, deadlines, a shifting economy or business climate. Those things, we can’t control. But the limits we impose internally, if deployed correctly, can be a tool to force people to amend the way they are working and, sometimes, to invent another way. The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want - so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.

We believed that the production people were conscientious managers who were trying to bring a complex project in on time and on budget. In our view, the oversight group added nothing to the process but tension. The micromanagement they imposed was of no value, since the production people already had a set of limits that determined their every move - the overall budget and the deadline. Within that, they needed all the flexibility they could get. As soon as we made the change, the war ended and production began running much more smoothly.

The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up? That approach never encourages a creative response. My rule of thumb is that any time we impose limits or procedures, we should ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If the answer is that they won’t, then the proposals are ill suited to the task at hand.

1. SHORT EXPERIMENTS

In most companies, you have to justify so much of what you do - to prepare for quarterly
earnings statements if the company is publicly traded or, if it is not, to build support for your decisions. I believe, however, that you should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected. Scientific research operates in this way - when you embark on an experiment, you don’t know if you will achieve a breakthrough. Chances are, you won’t. But nevertheless, you may stumble on a piece of the puzzle along the way - a glimpse, if you will, into the unknown.
Our short films are Pixar’s way of experimenting, and we produce them in the hopes of
getting exactly these kinds of glimpses. Over the years, Pixar has become known for including short films at the beginning of our feature films. These three- to six-minute films, each of which might cost as much as two million dollars to make, certainly don’t yield any profits for the company; in the immediate term, then, they’re hard to justify. What sustains them is a kind of gut feeling that making shorts is a good thing to do.

And yet, for all our faulty assumptions, the shorts accomplished other things for Pixar.
People who work on them, for example, get a broader range of experience than they would on a feature, where the sheer scale and complexity of the project demands more specialization among the crew. Because shorts are staffed with fewer people, each employee has to do more things, developing a variety of skills that come in handy down the line. Moreover, working in small groups forges deeper relationships that can carry forward and, in the long term, benefit the company’s future projects.

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.

Some might have lost sleep over the two million dollars we expended on this experiment. But we consider it money well spent. As Joe Ranft said at the time, “Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.

1. LEARNING TO SEE

In the year after Toy Story’s release, we introduced a ten-week program to teach every new hire how to use our proprietary software. We called this program Pixar University, and I hired a first-rate technical trainer to run it. At that point, the moniker university was a little misleading, though, as this was more of a training seminar than anything resembling an institution of higher learning. It is easy to justify a training program, but I had another agenda, and in trying to accomplish it, we would find surprising bonuses.

This is why it is so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see.

Just as looking at what is not the chair helps bring it into relief, pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions. When we give notes on Pixar movies and isolate a scene, say, that isn’t working, we have learned that fixing that scene usually requires making changes somewhere else in the film, and that is where our attention should go. Our filmmakers have become skilled at not getting caught up in a problem but instead looking elsewhere in the story for solutions. Likewise at Disney, the conflict between production and the oversight group could have been addressed by insisting that everyone behave better, when in fact, the real solution came from questioning the premise on which the oversight group was formed. It was the setup - the preconceptions that preceded the problem - that needed to be faced.

1. POSTMORTEMS

The phases we go through while making a movie - conception, protection, developmental planning, and production - unfold over a period of years. When the release date finally rolls around, everyone is ready to move on to something new. But we are not done yet. At Pixar, there is one more essential phase of the process: the postmortem. A postmortem is a meeting held shortly after the completion of every movie in which we explore what did and didn’t work and attempt to consolidate lessons learned. Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional. Postmortems are one route into that understanding.

There are five reasons, I believe, to do postmortems. The first two are fairly obvious, the next three less so.
Consolidate What’s Been Learned
While it is true that you learn the most in the midst of a project, the lessons are not generally coherent. Any individual can have a great insight but may not have the time to pass it on. A process might be flawed, but you don’t have time to fix it under the current schedule. Sitting down afterward is a way of consolidating all that you’ve learned - before you forget it. Postmortems are a rare opportunity to do analysis that simply wasn’t possible in the heat of the project.
Teach Others Who Weren’t There
Even if everyone involved in a production understands what it taught them, the postmortem is a great way of passing on the positive and negative lessons to other people who were not on the project. So much of what we do is not obvious - the result of hard-won experience. Then again, some of what we do doesn’t really make sense. The postmortem provides a forum for others to learn or challenge the logic behind certain decisions.
Don’t Let Resentments Fester
Many things that go wrong are caused by misunderstandings or screw-ups. These lead to resentments that, if left unaddressed, can fester for years. But if people are given a forum in which to express their frustrations about the screw-ups in a respectful manner, then they are better able to let them go and move on. I have seen many cases where hurt feelings lingered far after the project, feelings that would have been worked through much more easily if they had been expressed in a postmortem.
Use the Schedule to Force Reflection
I favor principles that lead you to think. Postmortems - but also other activities such as Braintrust meetings and dailies - are all about getting people to think and evaluate. The time we spend getting ready for a postmortem meeting is as valuable as the meeting itself. In other words, the scheduling of a postmortem forces self-reflection. If a postmortem is a chance to struggle openly with our problems, the “pre-postmortem” sets the stage for a successful struggle. I would even say that 90 percent of the value is derived from the preparation leading up to the postmortem.
Pay It Forward
In a postmortem, you can raise questions that should be asked on the next project. A good postmortem arms people with the right questions to ask going forward. We shouldn’t expect to find the right answers, but if we can get people to frame the right questions, then we’ll be ahead of the game.

One technique I’ve used to soften the process is to ask everyone in the room to make two lists: the top five things that they would do again and the top five things that they wouldn’t do again. People find it easier to be candid if they balance the negative with the positive, and a good facilitator can make it easier for that balance to be struck.

There are limits to data, however, and some people rely on it too heavily. Analyzing it correctly is difficult, and it is dangerous to assume that you always know what it means. It is very easy to find false patterns in data. Instead, I prefer to think of data as one way of seeing, one of many tools we can use to look for what’s hidden. If we think data alone provides answers, then we have misapplied the tool. It is important to get this right. Some people swing to the extremes of either having no interest in the data or believing that the facts of measurement alone should drive our management. Either extreme can lead to false conclusions.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors. But in fact, the phrase is ridiculous - something said by people who are unaware of how much is hidden. A large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. The problem comes when people think that data paints a full picture, leading them to ignore what they can’t see. Here’s my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of what you do. And at least every once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.

Those first classes were such a success - of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled - that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live- action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet - over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes.

And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them - and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but ... getting rid of the damn thing.

Many of us have a romantic idea about how creativity happens: A lone visionary conceives of a film or a product in a flash of insight. Then that visionary leads a team of people through hardship to finally deliver on that great promise. The truth is, this isn’t my experience at all. I’ve known many people I consider to be creative geniuses, and not just at Pixar and Disney, yet I can’t remember a single one who could articulate exactly what this vision was that they were striving for when they started.

In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself.

Other people have so much to recommend them: They will help you see outside yourself; they will rally when you are flagging; they will offer ideas that push you to be better. But they will also require constant interaction and communication. Other people are your allies, in other words, but that alliance takes sustained effort to build. And you should be prepared for that, not irritated by it. As Andrew says, continuing his nautical metaphor, “If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?” he says. “You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it because your goal is to eventually get to the other side. You will not be able to control exactly how you get across. That’s the game you’ve decided to be in. If your goal is to make it easier and simpler, then don’t get in the boat.

Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, and I have had an ongoing dialectic about the way he envisions his job. He compares writing a screenplay to climbing a mountain blindfolded. “The first trick,” he likes to say, “is to find the mountain.” In other words, you must feel your way, letting the mountain reveal itself to you. And notably, he says, climbing a mountain doesn’t necessarily mean ascending. Sometimes you hike up for a while, feeling good, only to be forced back down into a crevasse before clawing your way out again. And there is no way of knowing where the crevasses will be.

I like a lot about this metaphor - except for its implication that the mountain exists. Like Andrew’s archeological dig, it suggests that the artist must simply “find” the piece of art, or the idea, that is hidden from sight. It seems to me to contradict one of my central beliefs: that the future is unmade, and we must create it. If writing a screenplay is like climbing a mountain blindfolded, that implies that the goal is to see an existing mountain - while I believe it should be the goal of creative people to build their own mountain from scratch.

Good producers - and good managers - don’t dictate from on high. They reach out, they listen, they wrangle, coax, and cajole. And their mental models of their jobs reflect that.

One thing that struck me about Bob was that he preferred asking questions to holding forth - and his queries were incisive and straightforward. Something unusual had been built at Pixar, he said, and he wanted to understand it. For the first time in all the years that Pixar and Disney had worked together, someone from Disney was asking what we were doing that made our company different.

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.)

In those first months, we also moved to bolster trust within the studio in another way: Just as we had refused to sign employment contracts, we now moved to eliminate contracts for everyone. At first, many people thought the move was an attempt to wrest power away from the employees and give them less security. In fact, my feeling about employment contracts is that they hurt the employee and the employer. The contracts in question were one-sided in favor of the studio, resulting in unexpected negative consequences. First and foremost, there was no longer any effective feedback between bosses and employees. If someone had a problem with the company, there wasn’t much point in complaining because they were under contract. If someone didn’t perform well, on the other hand, there was no point in confronting them about it; their contract simply wouldn’t be renewed, which might be the first time they heard about their need to improve. The whole system discouraged and devalued day-to-day communication and was culturally dysfunctional. But since everybody was used to it, they were blind to the problem.
I wanted to break that cycle. I believed that it was our responsibility to make sure that Disney Animation was a place that people would want to work; if our most talented people could leave, then we would have to be on our toes to keep them happy. When someone had a problem, we wanted it to be brought quickly to the surface, not to fester. Most people know that they don’t get their way on everything, but it is very important that they know they are being dealt with straightforwardly and that they, too, will be heard.

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.

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.

Managers of creative companies must never forget to ask themselves: “How do we tap the brainpower of our people?” From its genesis to its execution, from the goodwill it engendered to the company-wide changes it set in motion, Notes Day was a success in part because it was based on the idea that fixing things is an ongoing, incremental process. Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and “vision” is often an illusion. But they must also feel safe – always - to speak their minds. Notes Day was a reminder that collaboration, determination, and candor never fail to lift us up.

These two issues were interconnected. When costs are low, it’s easier to justify taking a risk. Thus, unless we lowered our costs, we would effectively limit the kinds of films that we would be able to make. Moreover, there was another benefit of lowering costs. Cheaper films are made with smaller crews, and everyone agrees that the smaller the crew, the better the working experience. It’s not just that a leaner crew is closer and more collegial; it’s that on a smaller production it’s easier for people to feel that they’ve made an impact.

I think you’re getting a sense of how hard our team worked to make sure Notes Day took us where we needed to go. As Tom put it, “We didn’t just want to make lists of cool things we could do. The goal was to identify passionate people who would take ideas forward. We wanted to put people with clever insights in front of Pixar’s executive team.

The specific procedural changes will sound mundane to anyone who doesn’t work in animation - we implemented a faster, more secure way, to cite a tiny example, of delivering the latest cuts of films to directors - but when you add them all up, they mattered. In the weeks after Notes Day, we implemented four good ideas, committed to five more, and earmarked still a dozen more for continued development. All of them stood to improve either our processes, our culture, or the way Pixar is managed.

What made Notes Day work? To me, it boils down to three factors. First, there was a clear and focused goal. This wasn’t a free-for-all but a wide-ranging discussion (organized around topics suggested not by Human Resources or by Pixar’s executives, but by the company’s employees) aimed at addressing a specific reality: the need to cut our costs by 10 percent. While the discussion topics were allowed - even encouraged - to stray into areas that might seem only vaguely related to this goal, the fact that it was there was key. It provided a framework - and it kept us from falling into confusion.

Second, this was an idea championed by those at the highest levels of the company. Had the enormous task of making Notes Day a reality been shunted off on someone who didn’t have the clout to throw muscle behind it - and not entrusted to Tom, who in turn recruited the most organized people in the company to help him - it would have been an entirely different experience. Employees wouldn’t have bought into the idea because they’d sense that management hadn’t, either. And that would have rendered Notes Day moot.

Third, and relatedly, Notes Day was led from within. Many companies hire outside consulting firms to organize their all-staff retreats, and I understand why: Doing them well is a monumental, enormously time-consuming undertaking. But that our own people made Notes Day happen was, I believe, key to its success. Not only did they drive the discussion in meaningful ways, but their involvement also paid its own dividends. Seeing themselves engage and cooperate, steering the agenda toward something that could make a real difference, they remembered why they worked at Pixar. Their commitment was contagious. Notes Day wasn’t an end point but a beginning - a way of making room for our employees to step forward and think about their role in our company’s future. I said before that problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult. Notes brought problems to the surface - but we still had the hard work in front of us. Notes Day didn’t solve anything all by itself. But it shifted our culture - repaired it, even - in ways that will make us better as we go forward.

I’m reminded here of a letter written by one of our animators, Austin Madison, which I found particularly uplifting.
“To Whom it May Inspire,” Austin wrote. “I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, ‘in the zone’ seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time. The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-corner-full-of- crumpled-up-paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems. In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision....

It is our job, then, to work each day to chart the right course and make corrections when, inevitably, we stray. I already can sense the next crisis coming around the corner. To keep a creative culture vibrant, we must not be afraid of constant uncertainty. We must accept it, just as we accept the weather. Uncertainty and change are life’s constants. And that’s the fun part.
The truth is, as challenges emerge, mistakes will always be made, and our work is never done. We will always have problems, many of which are hidden from our view; we must work to uncover them and assess our own role in them, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; when we then come across a problem, we must marshal all our energies to solve it. If those assertions sound familiar, that’s because I used them to kick off this book. There’s something else that bears repeating here: Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.

But while in the early days his opinions would swing wildly and his delivery could be abrupt, he became more articulate and observant of people’s feelings as time went on. He learned to read the room, demonstrating skills that, years earlier, I didn’t think he had. Some people have said that he got mellower with age, but I don’t think that’s an adequate description of what happened; it sounds too passive, as if he just was letting more go. Steve’s transformation was an active one. He continued to engage; he just changed the way he went about it.

A characteristic of creative people is that they imagine making the impossible possible. That imagining - dreaming, noodling, audaciously rejecting what is (for the moment) true - is the way we discover what is new or important. Steve understood the value of science and law, but he also understood that complex systems respond in nonlinear, unpredictable ways. And that creativity, at its best, surprises us all.

I also benefitted from particularly deep conversations with Phillip Moffitt, president of the Life Balance Institute.

Michael Rubin (Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution), and James B. Stewart (Disney War).