To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History

by Lawrence Levy

If I learned anything at Pixar, it is that story comes first. Pixar’s creative leader, John Lasseter, used to say, “Great graphics will keep us entertained for a couple of minutes; it is story that holds us in our seats.”

I asked each member of Pixar’s senior team if I could follow them around for a while, literally shadow them, sit in meetings without participating, and ask them questions about what they did. I also asked for their permission to talk to the various individuals on their teams. Managers generally don’t like other managers snooping around their domains; my newness absolved me from that, at least temporarily. They all went along.

Early in my career I had learned the wisdom of not griping over the hand I was dealt. I had a mentor who taught me lessons about business and life that served me for many years. He looked at business the way a grand master might look at a chessboard. “There’s nothing you can do about where the pieces are,” he’d say. “It’s only your next move that matters.”

I learned that there was a reason the film was specifically about toys, and not about animals or people. Toys are made of plastic. They have uniform surfaces. No variation. No skin. No clothing that needs to wrinkle with every movement. Toys

Culture is the invisible force on which innovation depends. We like to pin the mantle of invention on individuals, not

Corporations are a lot like living creatures. They have personalities, emotions, and habits. The person at the top might seem to be calling all the shots but is often imprisoned in a culture he or she can do little to change. As corporations succeed, they generally become more conservative. The flames of creativity on which a company is built can easily cool as pressures to perform mount. Success brings something to defend, something to lose. Fear can easily trump courage.

had expected to see the creative, trend-setting, glamorous veneer that defined the image of Hollywood. Instead, I found that Hollywood could be even more defensive and fearful over changing the status quo than the huge tech companies with which I was familiar. Fear and power politics seemed to have a strong grip on Hollywood. The studios wanted to own things: artists, movies, TV, music, whatever it may be.

QUADRUPLE OUR SHARE OF THE PROFITS RAISE AT LEAST $75 MILLION TO PAY FOR OUR PRODUCTION COSTS MAKE FILMS FAR MORE OFTEN THAN WE KNEW HOW BUILD PIXAR INTO A WORLDWIDE BRAND

For example, how would the potential buyer of stock in the Dutch East India Company know if the fleet of ships returning in several months would have a cargo laden with exotic spices or whether its trove had been plundered by pirates? Worse, what if someone in the Dutch East India Company did know that the fleet’s cargo had been stolen by pirates and kept that information quiet in order to sell stock in the company at a high price to buyers who did not have that information? This problem, today infamously known as insider trading, is as old as the spice trade.

The idea behind modern securities laws is that investors should be left to make their own investment decisions, so long as they are given equal and accurate information with which to make those decisions.

When we first met Skip, I asked him, “What makes stars rise to the top in Hollywood?” “People think there’s a lot of luck involved,” he said. “But I don’t think so. You’d be amazed how savvy the top stars are, not just in their art, but in business. It’s no accident that they got where they did. They are very, very

In business relationships, or virtually in any relationships for that matter, there are two factors that determine one’s capacity to effect change: leverage and negotiation.

The natural tendency in negotiations is to engage in positional bargaining. This means taking a position knowing that it is not a final position, and holding in reserve a backup position. The danger of positional bargaining is that it forces you to think about backup positions, which weakens your conviction in your original position. It’s like negotiating against yourself. Plan A may be your optimal outcome, but inwardly you have already convinced yourself to settle on Plan B.