Creativity, Inc. | Book notes -1
Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration
Introduction
“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.”
“Despite being novice filmmakers at a fledgling studio in dire financial straits, we had put our faith in a simple idea: If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it, too…Now, we were suddenly being held up as an example of what could happen when artists trusted their guts.”
“In graduate school, I’d quietly set a goal of making the first computer-animated feature film, and I’d worked tirelessly for twenty years to accomplish it.”
“Everything was going our way, and yet I felt adrift. In fulfilling a goal, I had lost some essential framework. Is this really what I want to do? I began asking myself. The doubts surprised and confused me, and I kept them to myself. I had served as Pixar’s president for most of the company’s existence. I loved the place and everything that it stood for. Still, I couldn’t deny that achieving the goal that had defined my professional life had left me without one. Is this all there is? I wondered. Is it time for a new challenge?
Was making one film after another enough to engage me? I wondered. What would be my organizing principle now? It would take a full year for the answer to emerge.”
“What was causing smart people to make decisions that sent their companies off the rails? I didn’t doubt that they believed they were doing the right thing, but something was blinding them — and keeping them from seeing the problems that threatened to upend them. As a result, their companies expanded like bubbles, then burst. What interested me was not that companies rose and fell or that the landscape continually shifted as technology changed but that the leaders of these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work.
Over the years, as Pixar struggled to find its way — first selling hardware, then software, then making animated short films and advertisements — I asked myself: If Pixar is ever successful, will we do something stupid, too? Can paying careful attention to the missteps of others help us be more alert to our own? Or is there something about becoming a leader that makes you blind to the things that threaten the well-being of your enterprise? Clearly, something was causing a dangerous disconnect at many smart, creative companies. What, exactly, was a mystery — and one I was determined to figure out.
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.”
“I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.”
“I have much to say about enabling groups to create something meaningful together and then protecting them from the destructive forces that loom even in the strongest companies. My hope is that by relating my search for the sources of confusion and delusion within Pixar and Disney Animation, I can help others avoid the pitfalls that impede and sometimes ruin businesses of all kinds. The key for me — what has kept me motivated in the nineteen years since Toy Story debuted — has been the realization that identifying these destructive forces isn’t merely a philosophical exercise.
It is a crucial, central mission. In the wake of our earliest success, Pixar needed its leaders to sit up and pay attention. And that need for vigilance never goes away. This book, then, is about the ongoing work of paying attention — of leading by being self-aware, as managers and as companies. It is an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”
Part 1 | Getting Started
Chapter 1 — Animated
“When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless. That’s what I believe. But unwittingly, we were allowing this table — and the resulting place card ritual — to send a different message.”
“Over the course of a decade, we held countless meetings around this table in this way — completely unaware of how doing so undermined our own core principles. Why were we blind to this? Because the seating arrangements and place cards were designed for the convenience of the leaders, including me. Sincerely believing that we were in an inclusive meeting, we saw nothing amiss because we didn’t feel excluded. Those not sitting at the center of the table, meanwhile, saw quite clearly how it established a pecking order but presumed that we — the leaders — had intended that outcome. Who were they, then, to complain?
This was not only what we wanted, it was a fundamental Pixar belief: Unhindered communication was key, no matter what your position.”
“While we’d fixed the key problem that had made place cards seem necessary, the cards themselves had become a tradition that would continue until we specifically dismantled it.
This wasn’t as troubling an issue as the table itself, but it was something we had to address because cards implied hierarchy, and that was precisely what we were trying to avoid.
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 fromthe acorns that fell around it. And these problems remain after you cut the oak tree down.
Even after all these years, I’m often surprised to find problems that have existed right in front of me, in plain sight. For me, the key to solving these problems is finding ways to see what’s working and what isn’t, which sounds a lot simpler than it is. Pixar today is managed according to this principle, but in a way I’ve been searching all my life for better ways of seeing. It began decades before Pixar even existed.”
“The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes you believe it is a thinking being. Whether it’s a T-Rex or a slinky dog or a desk lamp, if viewers sense not just movement but intention — or, put another way, emotion — then the animator has done his or her job. It’s not just lines on paper anymore; it’s a living, feeling entity. This is what I experienced that night, for the first time, as I watched Donald leap off the page. The transformation from a static line drawing to a fully dimensional, animated image was sleight of hand, nothing more, but the mystery of how it was done — not just the technical process but the way the art was imbued with such emotion — was the most interesting problem I’d ever considered. I wanted to climb through the TV screen and be part of this world.”
“Looking back, I still admire that enlightened reaction to a serious threat: We’ll just have to get smarter.”
“This tension between the individual’s personal creative contribution and the leverage of the group is a dynamic that exists in all creative environments, but this would be my first taste of it. On one end of the spectrum, I noticed, we had the genius who seemed to do amazing work on his or her own; on the other end, we had the group that excelled precisely because of its multiplicity of views. How, then, should we balance these two extremes, I wondered. I didn’t yet have a good mental model that would help me answer that, but I was developing a fierce desire to find one.”
Chapter 2 — Pixar is Born
“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.”
“My first meeting there was with a man named Bob Gindy, who ran George’s personal construction projects — not exactly the qualifications you’d expect for a guy spearheading the search for a new computer executive. The first thing he asked me was, “Who else should Lucasfilm be considering for this job?” Meaning, the job I was there to interview for. Without hesitation, I rattled off the names of several people who were doing impressive work in a variety of technical areas. My willingness to do this reflected my world-view, forged in academia, that any hard problem should have many good minds simultaneously trying to solve it. Not to acknowledge that seemed silly. Only later would I learn that the guys at Lucasfilm had already interviewed all the people I listed and had asked them, in turn, to make similar recommendations — and not one of them had suggested any other names! To be sure, working for George Lucas was a plum job that you’d have to be crazy not to want. But to go mute, as my rivals did, when asked to evaluate the field signaled not just intense competitiveness but also lack of confidence. Soon I’d landed an interview with George himself.
and had a tendency to talk only when we had something to say. But what struck me immediately was George’s relentless practicality.
In the intervening years, George has said that he hired me because of my honesty, my “clarity of vision,” and my steadfast belief in what computers could do. Not long after we met, he offered me the job.”
“Lucasfilm was based in Marin County, one hour north of Silicon Valley by car and one hour from Hollywood by plane. This was no accident. George saw himself, first and foremost, as a filmmaker, so Silicon Valley wasn’t for him. But he also had no desire to be too close to Los Angeles, because he thought there was something a bit unseemly and inbred about it. Thus, he created his own island, a community that embraced films and computers but pledged allegiance to neither of the prevailing cultures that defined those businesses. The resulting environment felt as protected as an academic institution — an idea that would stay with me and help shape what I would later try to build at Pixar. Experimentation was highly valued, but the urgency of a for-profit enterprise was definitely in the air. In other words, we felt like we were solving problems for a reason.”
“Why “Pixar”? The name emerged from a back-and-forth between Alvy and another of our colleagues, Loren Carpenter. Alvy, who spent much of his childhood in Texas and New Mexico, had a fondness for the Spanish language, and he was intrigued by how certain nouns in English looked like Spanish verbs — words like “laser,” for example. So Alvy lobbied for “Pixer,” which he imagined to be a (fake) Spanish verb meaning “to make pictures.” Loren countered with “Radar,” which he thought sounded more high-tech. That’s when it hit them: Pixer + radar = Pixar! It stuck.”
“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.”
Chapter 3 — A Defining Goal
“In 1986, I became the president of a new hardware company whose main business was selling the Pixar Image Computer.
The only problem was, I had no idea what I was doing.
From the outside, Pixar probably looked like your typical Silicon Valley startup. On the inside, however, we were anything but. Steve Jobs had never manufactured or marketed a high-end machine before, so he had neither the experience nor the intuition about how to do so. We had no sales people and no marketing people and no idea where to find them. Steve, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, me — none of us knew the first thing about how to run the kind of business we had just started. We were drowning.”
“I read many such books as I set about trying to become a better, more effective manager. Most, I found, trafficked in a kind of simplicity that seemed harmful in that it offered false reassurance. These books were stocked with catchy phrases like “Dare to fail!” or “Follow people and people will follow you!” or “Focus, focus, focus!” (This last one was a particular favorite piece of nonadvice. When people hear it, they nod their heads in agreement as if a great truth has been presented, not realizing that they’ve been diverted from addressing the far harder problem: deciding what it is that they should be focusing on. There is nothing in this advice that gives you any idea how to figure out where the focus should be, or how to apply your energy to it. It ends up being advice that doesn’t mean anything.) 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.”
“The pricing advice I was given — by people who were smart and experienced and wellmeaning — was not merely wrong, it kept us from asking the right questions. Instead of talking about whether it’s easier to lower a price than raise it, we should have been addressing more substantive issues such as how to meet the expectations of customers and how to keep investing in software development so that the customers who did buy our product could put it to better use. 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.”
“Until that point, I’d associated manufacturing more with efficiency than with inspiration.
Several phrases would later be coined to describe these revolutionary approaches — phrases like “just-in-time manufacturing” or “total quality control” — but the essence was this: 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.”
“Deming’s approach — and Toyota’s, too — gave ownership of and responsibility for a product’s quality to the people who were most involved in its creation. Instead of merely repeating an action, workers could suggest changes, call out problems, and — this next element seemed particularly important to me — feel the pride that came when they helped fix what was broken. This resulted in continuous improvement, driving out flaws and improving quality. In other words, the Japanese assembly line became a place where workers’ engagement strengthened the resulting product. And that would eventually transform manufacturing around the world.”
“Their certainty about their existing systems had rendered them unable to see. They’d been on top for a while, after all. Why did they need to change their ways?
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.
A few years ago, when Toyota stumbled — initially failing to acknowledge serious problems with their braking systems, which led to a rare public embarrassment — I remember being struck that a company as smart as Toyota could act in a way that ran so counter to one of its deepest cultural values. Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments.”
“My memory of that period is that it was one of constant searching for a business model that would put us in the black. There was always reason to believe that the next thing we tried would be the thing that finally worked.”
“The only thing that made this leap easier was that we had decided to go all in on what we’d yearned to do from the outset: computer animation. This was where our true passion resided, and the only option left was to go after it with everything we had.”
“With each suitor, Steve started with a high price and was unwilling to budge. I came to believe that what he was really looking for was not an exit strategy as much as external validation. His reasoning went like this: If Microsoft was willing to go to $90 million, then we must be worth hanging on to. It was difficult — and enervating — to watch this dance.”
“Each outcome was equally likely, but when this third option occurred, Steve never questioned me. For all his insistence, he respected passion. If I believed in something that strongly, he seemed to feel, it couldn’t be all wrong.”
“The shutdown was terrifying. With our first feature film suddenly on life support, John quickly summoned Andrew, Pete, and Joe. For the next several months, they spent almost every waking minute together, working to rediscover the heart of the movie, the thing that John had first envisioned: a toy cowboy who wanted to be loved. They also learned an important lesson — to trust their own storytelling instincts.”
“Pixar was a movie studio the likes of which no one had ever seen, he said, built on a foundation of cutting-edge technology and original storytelling.”
“For twenty years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer graphics movie. Now that that goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose. Now what? The thing that had replaced it seemed to be the act of running a company, which was more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn’t special. Pixar was now public and successful, yet there was something unsatisfying about the prospect of merely keeping it running.
It took a serious and unexpected problem to give me a new sense of mission.
For all of my talk about the leaders of thriving companies who did stupid things because they’d failed to pay attention, I discovered that, during the making of Toy Story, I had completely missed something that was threatening to undo us. And I’d missed it even though I thought I’d been paying attention.
Throughout the making of the movie, I had seen my job, in large part, as minding the internal and external dynamics that could divert us from our goal. I was determined that Pixar not make the same mistakes I’d watched other Silicon Valley companies make. To that end, I’d made a point of being accessible to our employees, wandering into people’s offices to check in and see what was going on. John and I had very conscientiously tried to make sure that everyone at Pixar had a voice, that every job and every employee was treated with respect. I truly believed that self-assessment and constructive criticism had to occur at all levels of a company, and I had tried my best to walk that talk.”
“For me, this discovery was bracing. Being on the lookout for problems, I realized, was not the same as seeing problems. This would be the idea — the challenge — around which I would build my new sense of purpose.”
“The artists and technical people experienced this everything-goes-through-me mentality as irritating and obstructionist. I think of it as well-intentioned micromanaging.
Because making a movie involves hundreds of people, a chain of command is essential. But in this case, we had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure. Of course an animator should be able to talk to a modeler directly, without first talking with his or her manager. So we gathered the company together and said: Going forward, anyone should be able to talk to anyone else, at any level, at any time, without fear of reprimand. Communication would no longer have to go through hierarchical channels. The exchange of information was key to our business, of course, but I believed that it could — and frequently should — happen out of order, without people getting bent out of shape. People talking directly to one another, then letting the manager find out later, was more efficient than trying to make sure that everything happened in the “right” order and through the “proper” channels.
Improvement didn’t happen overnight. But by the time we finished A Bug’s Life, the production managers were no longer seen as impediments to creative progress, but as peers — as first-class citizens. We had become better.
This was a success in itself, but it came with an added and unexpected benefit: The act of thinking about the problem and responding to it was invigorating and rewarding. We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions. Questions like: If we had done some things right to achieve success, how could we ensure that we understood what those things were? Could we replicate them on our next projects? Perhaps as important, was replication of success even the right thing to do? How many serious, potentially disastrous problems were lurking just out of sight and threatening to undo us? What, if anything, could we do to bring them to light? How much of our success was luck? What would happen to our egos if we continued to succeed? Would they grow so large they could hurt us, and if so, what could we do to address that overconfidence? What dynamics would arise now that we were bringing new people into a successful enterprise as opposed to a struggling startup?
What had drawn me to science, all those years ago, was the search for understanding. Human interaction is far more complex than relativity or string theory, of course, but that only made it more interesting and important; it constantly challenged my presumptions. As we made more movies, I would learn that some of my beliefs about why and how Pixar had been successful were wrong. 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.
As I saw it, our mandate was to foster a culture that would seek to keep our sightlines clear, even as we accepted that we were often trying to engage with and fix what we could not see. My hope was to make this culture so vigorous that it would survive when Pixar’s founding members were long gone, enabling the company to continue producing original films that made money, yes, but also contributed positively to the world. That sounds like a lofty goal, but it was there for all of us from the beginning. We were blessed with a remarkable group of employees who valued change, risk, and the unknown and who wanted to rethink how we create. How could we enable the talents of these people, keep them happy, and not let the inevitable complexities that come with any collaborative endeavor undo us along the way? That was the job I assigned myself — and the one that still animates me to this day.”
Chapter 4 — Establishing Pixar’s Identity
“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.”
“The directors were shaken, and so were we. In a sense, we had failed them — causing them pain by putting them in a position they weren’t ready for. Our role in that failure required some soul searching on my part. What was it that we missed? What led us to make such flawed assumptions, and to fail to intervene when the evidence was mounting that the film was in trouble? It was the first time we gave a position to someone believing they could do it, only to find that they couldn’t. I wanted to understand why. While I pondered these things, the press of deadline forced us to move forward. We had nine months to deliver the film — not nearly enough time, even for the most experienced crew. But we were determined. It was unthinkable that we not do our best.”
“The gestation of Toy Story 2 offers a number of lessons that were vital to Pixar’s evolution. Remember that the spine of the story — Woody’s dilemma, to stay or to go — was the same before and after the Braintrust worked it over. One version didn’t work at all, and the other was deeply affecting. Why? Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the evolution of this storyline made it abundantly clear to me: 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.
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.
This is an issue I have thought a lot about over the years. Once, I was having lunch with the president of another movie studio, who told me that his biggest problem was not finding good people; it was finding good ideas. I remember being stunned when he said that — it seemed patently false to me, in part because I’d found the exact opposite to be true on Toy Story 2. I resolved to test whether what seemed a given to me was, in fact, a common belief. So for the next couple of years I made a habit, when giving talks, of posing the question to my audience: Which is more valuable, good ideas or good people? No matter whether I was talking to retired business executives or students, to high school principals or artists, when I asked for a show of hands, the audiences would be split 50–50. (Statisticians will tell you that when you get a perfect split like this, it doesn’t mean that half know the right answer — it means that they are all guessing, picking at random, as if flipping a coin.)
People think so little about this that, in all these years, only one person in an audience has ever pointed out the false dichotomy. To me, the answer should be obvious: Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.
Why are we confused about this? Because too many of us think of ideas as being singular, as if they float in the ether, fully formed and independent of the people who wrestle with them. Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people. 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 reiterate, it is the focus on people — their work habits, their talents, their values — that is absolutely central to any creative venture. And in the wake of Toy Story 2, I saw that more clearly than I ever had. That clarity, in turn, led me to make some changes. Looking around, I realized we had a few traditions that didn’t put people first. For example, we had a development department, as do all movie studios, that was charged with seeking out and developing ideas to make into films. Now I saw that this made no sense. Going forward, the development department’s charter would be not to develop scripts but to hire good people, figure out what they needed, assign them to projects that matched their skills, and make sure they functioned well together. 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.
In a sense, this was related to my thinking about W. Edward Deming’s work in Japan. Though Pixar didn’t rely on a traditional assembly line — that is, with conveyor belts connecting each work station — the making of a film happened in order, with each team passing the product, or idea, off to the next, who pushed it further down the line. To ensure quality, I believed, any person on any team needed to be able to identify a problem and, in effect, pull the cord to stop the line. To create a culture in which this was possible, you needed more than a cord within easy reach. You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. More and more, I saw that by putting people first — not just saying that we did, but proving that we did by the actions we took — we were protecting that culture.
On the most basic level, Toy Story 2 was a wakeup call. Going forward, the needs of a movie could never again outweigh the needs of our people. We needed to do more to keep them healthy. As soon as we wrapped the film, we set about addressing the needs of our injured, stressed-out employees and coming up with strategies to prevent future deadline pressures from hurting our workers again. These strategies went beyond ergonomically designed workstations, yoga classes, and physical therapy. Toy Story 2 was a case study in how something that is usually considered a plus — a motivated, workaholic workforce pulling together to make a deadline — could destroy itself if left unchecked. Though I was immensely proud of what we had accomplished, I vowed that we would never make a film that way again. It was management’s job to take the long view, to intervene and protect our people from their willingness to pursue excellence at all costs. Not to do so would be irresponsible.”
“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.
Supporting your employees means encouraging them to strike a balance not merely by saying, “Be balanced!” but also by making it easier for them to achieve balance. (Having a swimming pool, a volleyball court, and a soccer field on-site tells our workers that we value exercise and a life beyond the desk.) But leadership also means paying close attention to everchanging dynamics in the workplace. For example, when our younger employees — those without families — work longer hours than those who are parents, we must be mindful not to compare the output of these two groups without being mindful of the context. I’m not talking just about the health of our employees here; I’m talking about their long-term productivity and happiness. Investing in this stuff pays dividends down the line.”
“This was a reminder of something that sounds obvious but isn’t: Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act — and think — accordingly. Parroting the phrase “Story Is King” at Pixar didn’t help the inexperienced directors on Toy Story 2 one bit. What I’m saying is that this guiding principle, while simply stated and easily repeated, didn’t protect us from things going wrong. In fact, it gave us false assurance that things would be okay.
Once this became clear to me, I began telling people that the phrase was meaningless. I told our staff that it had become a crutch that was distracting us from engaging, in a meaningful way, with our problems. 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.
I should say here that even as I rail against “Trust the Process” as a flawed motivational tool, I still understand the need for faith in a creative context. Because we are often working to invent something that doesn’t yet exist, it can be scary to come to work. Early on in the production of a film, chaos reigns. The bulk of what the directors and their teams are doing is not cohering, and the responsibilities, pressures, and expectations are intense. How, then, do you move forward when so little is visible and so much is unknown?
I have seen directors and writers who were stuck and could not get unstuck, because they couldn’t see where to go next. It is here that some of my colleagues have insisted that I am wrong, that “Trust the Process” has meaning — they see it as code for “Keep on going, even when things look bleak.” When we trust the process, they argue, we can relax, let go, take a flyer on something radical. We can accept that any given idea may not work and yet minimize our fear of failure because we believe we will get there in the end. When we trust the process, we remember that we are resilient, that we’ve experienced discouragement before, only to come out the other side. When we trust the process — or perhaps more accurately, when we trust the people who use the process — we are optimistic but also realistic. The trust comes from knowing that we are safe, that our colleagues will not judge us for failures but will encourage us to keep pushing the boundaries. 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. As Brad Bird, who joined Pixar as a director in 2000, likes to say, “The process either makes you or unmakes you.” I like Brad’s way of looking at it because while it gives the process power, it implies that we have an active role to play in it as well. Katherine Sarafian, a producer who’s been at Pixar since Toy Story, tells me she prefers to envision triggering the process over trusting it — observing it to see where it’s faltering, then slapping it around a bit to make sure it’s awake. Again, the individual plays the active role, not the process itself. Or, to put it another way, it is up to the individual to remember that it’s okay to use the handle, just as long as you don’t forget the suitcase.
At Pixar, Toy Story 2 taught us this lesson — that we must always be alert to shifting dynamics, because our future depends on it — once and for all. Begun as a direct-to-video sequel, the project proved not only that it was important to everyone that we weren’t tolerating second-class films but also that everything we did — everything associated with our name — needed to be good. Thinking this way was not just about morale; it was a signal to everyone at Pixar that they were part owners of the company’s greatest asset — its quality.
Around this time, 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. Everyone says quality is important, but they must do more than say it. They must live, think, and breathe it. When our people asserted that they only wanted to make films of the highest quality and when we pushed ourselves to the limit in order to prove our commitment to that ideal, Pixar’s identity was cemented. We would be a company that would never settle. That didn’t mean that we wouldn’t make mistakes. Mistakes are part of creativity. But when we did, we would strive to face them without defensiveness and with a willingness to change. Struggling through the production of Toy Story 2 twisted our heads around, causing us to look inward, to be self-critical and to change the way we thought about ourselves. When I say this was the defining moment for Pixar, I mean it in the most dynamic sense. Our need for and embrace of introspection was just beginning.”
