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

by Lawrence Levy

Culture is the invisible force on which innovation depends. We like to pin the mantle of invention on individuals, not circumstances. We anoint heroes and tell their stories. Yet innovation is a collective undertaking. It is as much the product of circumstance as of genius.

we talked about how this brilliant method for refining human experience had become imprisoned in a cultural wrapper that made it hard to access.

I think this is a difficult analogy. The methodology is encased more like an embryonic bird in an egg or a pupal butterfly in a cocoon. The Tibetan cultural wrapper was a safe place for development. It's only trapped if it failed to emerge. And that's the mission of Juniper.

When I joined Pixar in 1994, it was full of artistic and creative wizardry. That is what mesmerized me when I sat in Pixar’s ramshackle screening room watching scenes from Toy Story for the first time. But I quickly learned that Pixar was stuck. For all its genius, it had no momentum. It was like a starving artist. Just as the Middle Way holds that if we are too ungrounded, we can be frustrated by lack of momentum, Pixar too was ungrounded and frustrated by lack of profitability, cash, stock options, and a business road map. Pixar’s entire success depended on developing enough strategy, order, and bureaucracy to give it momentum without killing the creative spirit. This is the entreaty of the Middle Way: to inspire us to give expression to our spirit, creativity, and humanity and still take care of day-to-day needs and responsibilities. The Middle Way is a dance between order and freedom, bureaucracy and spirit, efficiency and artistry. Every film that Pixar made struggled with this tension and ended up better for it.

This is the thesis of the book.