More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ed Catmull
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
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.
When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.
Sincerely believing that we were in an inclusive meeting, we saw nothing amiss because we didn’t feel excluded.
Clearly, it wasn’t enough for managers to have good ideas—they had to be able to engender support for those ideas among the people who’d be charged with employing them. I took that lesson to heart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.
Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.
Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.
Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.
while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. More and more, I saw that by putting people first—not
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.
...more
We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool—a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals.
Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face of it, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, we don’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase.
To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.
When we trust the process—or perhaps more accurately, when we trust the people who use the process—we are optimistic but also realistic.
John coined a new phrase: “Quality is the best business plan.” What he meant was that quality is not a consequence of following some set of behaviors. Rather, it is a prerequisite and a mindset you must have before you decide what you are setting out to do.
Strong and confident people can intimidate their colleagues, subconsciously signaling that they aren’t interested in negative feedback or criticism that challenges their thinking.
The second difference is that the Braintrust has no authority. This is crucial: The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given.
The key is to look at the viewpoints being offered, in any successful feedback group, as additive, not competitive. A competitive approach measures other ideas against your own, turning the discussion into a debate to be won or lost. An additive approach, on the other hand, starts with the understanding that each participant contributes something (even if it’s only an idea that fuels the discussion—and ultimately doesn’t work).
A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense. A good note is offered at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem. A good note doesn’t make demands; it doesn’t even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer. Most of all, though, a good note is specific.
If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.
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.
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.
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.
Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
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.
Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.
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.
It is management’s job to figure out how to help others see conflict as healthy—as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run.
A good manager must always be on the lookout for areas in which balance has been lost.
Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.
Managers do not need to work hard to protect established ideas or ways of doing business. The system is tilted to favor the incumbent. The challenger needs support to find its footing. And protection of the new—of the future, not the past—must be a conscious effort.
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.
The danger is that your company becomes overwhelmed by well-intended rules that only accomplish one thing: draining the creative impulse.
One truly influential idea in physics is the famous principle known as Occam’s Razor, attributed to William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century English logician. On the most basic level, it says that if there are competing explanations for why something occurs the way it does, you should pick the one that relies on the fewest assumptions and is thus the simplest.
When we put setbacks into two buckets—the “business as usual” bucket and the “holy cow” bucket—and use a different mindset for each, we are signing up for trouble. We become so caught up in our big problems that we ignore the little ones, failing to realize that some of our small problems will have long-term consequences—and are, therefore, big problems in the making.
about how we deal with randomness
If all our careful planning cannot prevent problems, then our best method of response is to enable employees at every level to own the problems and have the confidence to fix them. We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission.
power to the edge
In other words, we must meet unexpected problems with unexpected responses.
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.
if you push the ownership of problems down into the ranks of an organization, then everyone feels free (and motivated) to attempt to solve whatever problem they face, big or small.
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.
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.
If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
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.
Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited.
That’s because when humans see things that challenge our mental models, we tend not just to resist them but to ignore them.
