When Steve first bought us, there was a confidence he had. Some people call it arrogance; I call it confidence. But it was basically a belief that he could do anybody’s job better than they could. But as Pixar evolved into an animation studio, he started to look at all the work that we were doing, and he was amazed. He realized he couldn’t even come close to doing what we could do.
Pixar made him so proud - because he felt the world was better for the films we made. He used to say regularly that as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually they all ended up in landfills. Pixar movies, on the other hand, would live forever. He believed, as I do, that because they dig for deeper truths, our movies will endure, and he found beauty in that idea.
To whom it may inspire,
I, like many of you artist 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 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 outrages production problems. In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision…
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.
We had learned long ago that while everyone appreciates cash bonuses, they value something else almost as much: being looked in the eye by someone they respect and told, “Thank you.” At Pixar, we’d devised a way to give our employees money and gratitude. When a movie makes enough money to trigger bonuses, John and I join with the directors and producers and personally distribute checks to every person who worked on the film. The distribution of bonuses one by one can take a while, but we feel it’s essential to take the time to shake each person’s hand and tell them how much their contribution mattered.
Still, as we began to spend more time at Disney, the general feeling at Pixar, which many people articulated to John and me directly, was that our reduced presence in Emeryville, and our focus on Burbank’s needs, was a bad sign for the company. One Pixar manager likened the situation to the aftermath of a divorce, when your parents remarry and adopt the kids of their new spouses. “We feel like we’re the original kids, and we’ve been good, but the adopted kids are getting all the attention,” he told us. “We’re being punished, in a sense, for needing less help.”
John and I immediately arranged a dinner with the directors - and told them that if they ever resorted to that kind of thinking again, we’d be finished as a studio.
“Disney Animation was sort of like a dog that had been beaten again and again,” Byron Howard, the director, told me when I asked him to describe the mindset back then. “The crew wanted to succeed, but they were afraid of pouring their hearts into something that wasn’t going to succeed. You could feel that fear. And in notes meetings, everyone was so afraid of hurting someones’ feelings that they held back. We had to learn that we weren’t attacking the person, we were attacking the project. Only then could we create a crucible that boils away everything that’s not working and leaves the strongest framework.”
Earning trust takes time; there’s no shortcut to understanding that we really do rise and fall together. Without vigilant coaching - pulling people aside who didn’t speak their minds in a particular meeting, say, or encouraging those who seem eternally hesitant to jump into the fray - our progress could have easily stalled.
Most people have heard of the Eastern teaching that it is important to exist in the moment. It can be hard to train yourself to observe what is right now (and not to bog down in thoughts of what was and what will be), but the philosophical teaching that underlines that idea - the reason that staying in the moment is so vital - is equally important: Everything is changing. All the time. And you can’t stop it. And your attempts to stop it actually put you in a bad place. It causes pain, but we don’t seem to learn from it. Worse than that, resisting change robs you of your beginner’s mind - your openness to the new.
At the Shambhala Mountain Center that summer, I didn’t bail. Even though the terminology was alien to me, it resonated with many of the issues I spent so much time thinking about at Pixar: control, change, randomness, trust, consequences. The search for a clear mind is one of the fundamental goals of creative people, but the route each one of us travels to get there is unmarked. For me, a man who has always valued introspection, silence was a path I hadn’t tried before. I’ve gone on a silent retreat every year since, and in addition to benefiting personally, I have done a lot of thinking about the management implications of mindfulness.
If you are mindful, you are able to focus on the problem at hand without getting caught up in plans or processes. Mindfulness helps us accept the fleeing and subjective nature of our thoughts, to make peace with what we cannot control. Most important, it allows us to remain open to new ideas and to deal with our problems squarely. Some people make the mistake of thinking that they are being mindful because they are focusing diligently on problems. But if they are doing so while subconsciously bound up with their worries and expectations, with no awareness that they can’t see clearly or that others may know more, they aren’t open at all.
Similarly, within organizations groups often hold so tightly to plans and past practices that they are not open to seeing what is changing in front of them.
When mediating between two groups who aren’t communicating well, for example, Lindsey feigns confusion. “You say, ‘You know, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand. I’m sorry I’m slowing you down here with all my silly questions, but could you just explain to me one more time what that means? Just break it down for me like I’m a two-year-old.’”
Good producers - and good managers - don’t dictate from high. They reach out, they listen, they wrangle, coax, and cajole. And their mental models of their jobs reflex that. “One of Kahler’s big teachings is about meeting people where they are,” Katherine says, referring to what Kahler calles the Process Communication Model, which compares being a manager to taking the elevator from floor to floor in a big building. “People live on different floors and enjoy different views.” Regardless, to communicate effectively with them all, you must meet them where they live. “The most talented member of Pixar’s workforce - whether they’re directors, producers, production staff, artists, whatever - are able to take the elevator to whatever floor and meet each person based on what they need in the moment and how they like to communicate. One person may need to spew and vent for twenty minutes about why something doesn’t look right before we can move in and focus on the details. Another person may be all about, “I can’t make these deadlines unless you give me this particular thing that I need.’ I always think of my job as moving between floors, up and down, all day long.”
I’ve always been intrigued, for example, by the way that many people use the analogy of a train to describe their companies. Massive and powerful, the train moves inexorably down the track, over mountains and across vast plains, through the densest fog and darkest night. When things go wrong, we talk of getting “derailed” and of experiencing a “train wreck.” And I’ve heard people refer to Pixar’s production group as a finely tuned locomotive that they would love the chance to drive. What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position - that driving the train is the way to shape the companies’s futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.
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 tools. 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 fo 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 proportion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. The problem comes when people think that data paints the 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 very once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.
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.
So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all this?
It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal and accounting or security - that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way that they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, Pixar University changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea - that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge.
The same thing is true with color. When we look at a body of water, our brains think - and thus see - blue. If we’re asked to paint a picture of a lake, we pick the color blue, and then we’re surprised that it doesn’t look right on the canvas. But if we look at a different points in the same lake through a pinhole (thus divorcing it from the overall idea of “lake”), we see what is actually there: green and yellow and black and flashes of white. We don’t let the brain fill in. Instead, we see the color as it really is.
Let us return, for a moment, to the metaphor I used earlier in this chapter, that of the door. On one side is everything we see and know - the world as we understand it. On the other side is everything we can’t see and don’t know - unsolved problems, unexpressed emotions, unrealized possibilities so innumerable that imagining them is inconceivable. This side, then, is not an alternate reality but something even harder to fathom: that which has not yet been created.
The goal is to place one foot on either side of the door - one grounded in what we know, what we are confident about, our areas of expertise, the people and processes we can count on - and the other in the unknown, where things are murky, unseen, or uncreated.
Many fear this side of the door. We crave stability and uncertainty, so we keep both feet rooted in what we know, believing that if we repeat ourselves or repeat what is known to work, we will be safe. This feels like a rational view. Just as we know that the rule of law leads to healthier, more productive societies or that practice makes perfect or that the planets orbit the sun, we all need things that we can count on. 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.
We all know people who eagerly face the unknown; they engage with the seemingly intractable problems of science, engineering, and society; they embrace the complexities of visual or written expression; they are invigorated by uncertainty. That’s because they believe that, through questioning, they can do more than merely look through the door. They can venture across its threshold.
There are others who venture into the unknown with surprising success but with little understanding of what they have done. Believing in their cleverness, they revel in their brilliance, telling others about the importance of taking risks. But having stumbled into greatness once, they are not eager for another trip into the unknown. That’s because success makes them warier than ever of failure, so they retreat, content to repeat what they have done before. They stay on the side of the known.
As I discuss the elements of a healthy creative environment, you may have noticed that I have expressly not sought out to define the word creativity - and that’s intentional. I don’t do it because it doesn’t seem useful. I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively. What stands in our way are these hidden barriers - the misconceptions and assumptions that impede us without our knowing it. The issue of what is hidden, then, is not just an abstraction to be bandied about as an intellectual exercise. The Hidden - and our acknowledgement of it - is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success. Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown and to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. These concepts don’t necessarily make anything easier, but they can help us uncover hidden problems and, thus, enable us to address them. It is to this we now turn in earnest.
We face hundreds of challenges, every day, in our lives. The majority hardly qualify as challenges at all: one of our shoes has disappeared under the couch, the toothpaste tube is empty, the light in the refrigerator burns out. A smaller number a more disruptive but still relative minor: you sprain your ankle while jogging or the alarm clock fails to go off, making you late for work. An even smaller set causes larger ripples: you are passed over for an expected promotion; you have a heated argument with you spouse. Smaller still: you get into a car accident; a water main breaks in your basement; your toddler breaks his arm. Finally, there are far rarer major events like wars, diseases, terrorist attacks - importantly, there is no limit to how bad these can get. So it’s good that the more impactful an event is, generally speaking, the fewer of them there are. But, just like the tree branch that looks like a miniature tree, these challenges - though of different magnitudes - have more in common than people think.
Remember that while we are quick to assign patterns and causes to an event after it occurs, beforehand we don’t even see it coming. In other words, while we may attribute to it a pattern later, random events don’t come on time or on schedule. The distribution and nature of problems vary considerably between people - my problem seem to be like your problems, but they’re not exactly the same. Moreover, it’s not as if randomness happens in a vacuum. It is superimposed on the regular and repeatable patterns in our lives and, as such, is often hidden.
Sometimes a big event happens that changes everything. When it does, it tends to affirm the human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones. That’s a problem, inside companies. 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. What’s needed, in my view, is to approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they are, in fact, self-similar. In other words, it is important that we don’t freak out or start blaming people when some threshold - the “holy cow” bucket I referred to earlier - is reached. We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault.
Here’s a simple example: you leave late for work but still arrive in time for your 9am meeting. Congratulating yourself, you are oblivious to the fact that two minutes behind you on the freeway, someone blew a tire and blocked traffic for a half-hour. Without knowing it, you narrowly missed being late. Perhaps you draw the conclusion that tomorrow, you can afford to sleep a little later. But if you’d been in that traffic jam, you’d draw the opposite conclusion: never leave late again. Because it is our nature to attach great significance to the patterns we witness, we ignore the things we cannot see and make deductions and predictions accordingly.
This is the puzzle of trying to understand randomness: real patterns are mixed 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 woudl 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. In other words, we can’t see the alternatives that might well have happened if not for some small chance event. When a bad thing happens, people will draw conclusions that might include conspiracy or forces acting against them or, conversely, if a good thing happens, that they are brilliant and deserving. But these kinds of misperceptions ultimately deceive us. And this has consequences in business - and for the way we manage.
It wasn’t until I finished directing Monsters, Inc that I realized failure is a healthy part of the process. Throughout the making of that film, I took it personally - I believed my mistakes were personal shortcomings, and if I were only a better directer I wouldn’t make them. I tend to flood and freeze up if I’m feeling overwhelmed. When this happens, it’s usually because I feel like the world is crashing down and all is lost. One trick I’ve learned is to force myself to make a list of what’s actually wrong. Usually, soon into making that 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.
If I start on a film and right away know the structure - where is’t going, the plot - I don’t trust it. I feel like the only reason we’re able to find some these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And, by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start. This could be my Lutheran, Scandinavian upbringing, but I believe life should not be easy. We’re meant to push ourselves and try new things - which will definitely make us feel uncomfortable. Living through a few big catastrophes helps. After people survived A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2, they realized the pressure led to some pretty cool ideas.
People want to hang on to things that work - stories that work, methods that work, strategies that work. You figure something out, it works, so you keep doing it - this is what an organization that is committed to learning does. As we become successful, our approaches are reinforced, and we become even more resistant to change.
Moreover, it is precisely because of the inevitability of change that people fight to hold on to what they know. Unfortunately, we often have little ability to distinguish between what works and is worth hanging on to and what is holding us back and worth discarding. If you polled the employees of any creative company, my guess is that the vast majority would say they believe in change. But my experience, postmerger, taught me something else: Fear of change - innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason - is a powerful force. In many ways, it reminded me of Musical Chairs: We cling as long as possible to the perceived “safe” place that we already know, refusing to loosen our grip until we feel sure another safe place awaits.
Here’s what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren’t true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not jut inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised. Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach. Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.
While the idea of balance always sound good, it doesn’t capture the dynamic nature of what it means to actually achieve balance. 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. “It seems like it’s good psychologically to expect these movies to be troublesome,” Byron Howard told me. “It’s like someone saying, ‘Here, take care of this tiger, but watch your butt, they’re trick.’ I feel like my butt is safer when I expect the tiger to be tricky.”
As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization - be it an animation studio or a record label - is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflicts as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time - if, in fact, we don’t ever even have night - all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.”
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. I’m here to say that it can be done - but it is an unending job. A good manager must always be on the lookout for areas in which balance has been lost. 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 that they have a voice. In order to make corrections like this - to reestablish balance - managers must be diligent about paying attention.
While I can try to explain to you how to do it, show you videos, and suggest different methods for getting started, I could never fully explain how to achieve balance. That you learn only by doing - by allowing your conscious and subconscious mind to figure it out while in motion. With certain jobs, there isn’t any other way to learn than by doing - by putting yourself in the unstable place and then feeling your way.
In animation, we have many constituencies: story, art, budget, technology, finance, production, marketing, and consumer products. The people within each constituency have priorities that are important - and often opposing. Each group is focused on its own needs, which means that no one has a clear view of how their decision impact other groups; each group is under pressure to perform well, which means achieving stated goals.
Particularly in the early months of a project, these goals - which are subgoals, really, in the making of a film - are often easier to articulate and explain than the film itself. But if the director is able to get everything he or she wants, we will likely end up with a film that’s too long. If the marketing people get their way, we will only make a film that mimics those that already been “proven” to succeed - in other words, familiar to viewers but in all likelihood a creative failure. Each group, then, is trying to do the right thing, but they’re pulling in different directions.
If any one of those groups “wins,” we lose.
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 many 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 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 getting judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.
In this talk, I tell the story of how, when I was first a manager at New York Tech, I didn’t feel like a manager at all. And while I liked the idea of being in charge, I went to work everyday feeling like something of a fraud. Even in the early year of Pixar, when I was the president, that feeling didn’t go away. I knew many presidents of other companies and had a good idea of their personality characteristics. They were aggressive and extremely confident. Knowing that I didn’t share many of those traits, again I felt like a fraud. In truth, I was afraid of failure.
Not until about eight or nine years ago, I tell them, did the imposter feeling finally go away. I have several things to thank for that evolution: my experience of both weathering our failures and watching our films succeed; my decisions, post-Toy Story, to recommit myself to Pixar and its culture; and my enjoyment of my maturing relationship with Steve and John. Then, after fessing up, I ask the group, “How many of you feel like a fraud?” And without fail, every hand in the room shoots up.
As managers, we all start off with a certain amount of trepidation. When we are new to the position, we imagine what the job is in order to get our arms around it, then we compare ourselves against our made-up model. But the job is never what we think it is. The trick is to forget our models about what we “should” be. A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.
There is an alternative approach to being wrong as fast as you can. It is the notion that if you carefully think everything through, if you are meticulous and plan well and consider all possible outcomes, you are more likely to create a lasting product. But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them - if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line - well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work - things that copy or repeat something already out there. 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 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. The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). There’s a corollary to this as well: The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it. The nonworking idea gets worn into your brain, like a rut in the mud. It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction. Which, more often than not, is exactly what you must do.
There are arenas, of course, in which a zero failure rate is essential. Commercial flying has a phenomenal safety record because there is so much attention paid at every level to removing error, from manufacturing the engines to assembling and maintaining the planes to observing safety checks and the rules that govern air spaces. Likewise, hospitals have elaborate safeguards to make sure that they operate on the right patient, on the correct side of the body, on the right organ, and so on. Banks have protocols to prevent errors; manufacturing companies have a goal of eliminating line errors; many industries set goals of having zero injuries.
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.
It revolved around a 30-year-old man who was coping with a cast of frightening characters that only he could see. As Pete describes it, the man “is an accountant or something, and he hates his job, and one day his mom gives him a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid. He doesn’t think anything of it, and he puts it on the shelf, and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them. He thinks he’s starting to go crazy. They follow him to his job, and on his dates, and it turns out these monsters are all the fears that he never dealt with as a kid. He becomes friends with them eventually, and as he conquers the fears, they slowly begin to disappear.”
The process of developing a story is one of discovery. 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 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.
For most of us, failure comes with baggage - a lot of baggage - that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or - worse! - aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft-repeated arguments about the upside of failure. How many articles have you read on that topic alone? And yet, even as they nod their heads in agreement, many readers of those articles still have the emotional reaction that they had as children. They just can’t help it. That early experience of shame is too deep-seated to erase. All the time in my work, I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: it hurts.
We need to think differently about failure. I’m not the first one to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even when I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the goods and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.
He thinks of failure like learning to ride a bike; it isn’t conceivable that you would learn to do this without making mistakes - without toppling over a few times. “Get a bike that’s as low to the ground as you can find, put on elbow and knee pads so you’re not afraid of falling, and go,” he says. If you apply this mindset to everything new you attempt, you can begin to subvert the negative connotation associated with making mistakes. Say Andrew: “You wouldn’t say to somebody who is first learning to play the guitar, ‘You better think really hard about where you put your fingers on the guitar neck before you strum, because you only get to strum once, and that’s it. And if you get that wrong, we’re going to move on.’ That’s no way to learn, is it?”
Even though people in our offices have heard Andrew say this repeatedly, many still miss the point. They think it means accepting failure with dignity and move on. 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.”
The film itself - not the filmmaker - is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation - you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.
Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, says he thinks to make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others. To him, the Braintrust provides that pivot, and it is necessarily painful. “Part of the suffering involves giving up control,” he says. “I can think it’s the funniest joke in the world, but if nobody in that room laughs, I have to take it out. It hurts that they can see something you can’t.”
It take about 12,000 storyboard drawings to make one 90-minute reel, and because of the iterative nature of the process I’m describing, story teams commonly create ten times that number by the time their work is done.
To understand what the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: 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.
All directors, no matter how talented, organized, or clear of vision, become lost somewhere along the way. That creates a problem for those who seek to give helpful feedback. How do you get a director to address a problem he or she cannot see? The answer depends, of course, on the situation. The director may be right about the potential impact of his central idea, but maybe he simply hasn’t set it up well enough for the Braintrust to understand that. Maybe he doesn’t realize that much of what he thinks is visible on screen is, in fact, only visible in his own head. Or maybe the ideas presented in the reels don’t work and won’t ever work, and the only path forward is to blow something up or start over. No matter what, the process of coming to clarity takes patience and candor.
In Hollywood, studio executives typically communicate their criticisms of an early cut of a film by giving extensive “notes” to the director. The movie will be screened and suggestions will be typed up and delivered a few days later. The problem is, directors don’t want the notes, because they are usually coming from people who aren’t filmmakers and are seen as ignorant and interfering. There is a built-in tension, then, between directors and the studios that employ them; to put it in stark terms, the studios are paying the bills and want the films to be commercially successful, while the directors want to preserve their artistic vision. I should add that some notes offered by studio executives are quite astute - people outside of the production can often see more clearly. But when you add oft-held resentment about input from “non-creative” people to how difficult it is to be a director in the first place - presiding over a project that, as I’ve said, sucks for months before it gets good - this tension makes it difficult to bridge the divide between art and commerce.
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 behavior. 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.
If we are in this for the long haul, we have to take care of ourselves, support health habits, and encourage our employees to have fulfilling lives outside of work. Moreover, everyone’s home lives change as they - and their children - 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 balance!” 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 ever-changing 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.
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.
Three times between 1987 and 1991, a fed-up Steve Jobs tried to sell Pixar. And yet, despite his frustrations, he could never quite bring himself to part with us. When Microsoft offered $90M for us, he walked away. Steve wanted $120M, and felt their offer was not just insulting but proof that they weren’t worthy of us. The same thing happened with Alias, the industrial and automotive designs software company, and with Silicon Graphics. 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 $90M, then we must be worth hanging on to. It was difficult - an enervating - to watch this dance.
Pixar could not have survived without Steve, but more than once in those years, I wasn’t sure if we’d survive with him. Steve could be brilliant and inspirational, capable of diving deeply and intelligently into any problem we faced. But he could also be impossible: dismissive, condescending, threatening, even bullying. Perhaps of most concern, from a management standpoint, was the fact that he exhibited so little empathy. At that point in his life, he was simply unable to put himself in other people’s shoes, and his sense of humor was nonexistent. At Pixar, we have always had a pretty deep bench of jokesters and a core belief in having fun, but everything we tried with Steve fell painfully flat. Known for holding forth in meetings to the exclusion of all others, he once briefed a group of us who were about to go into a session with Disney execs by stressing how important it was that we “listen and not talk.” The irony was so obvious, I couldn’t resist saying: “Okay, Steve, I’ll try to restrain myself.” Everyone in the room laugh, but he didn’t crack a smile. The we went into the meeting and Steve held court for the full hour, barely letting the folks from Disney finish a sentence.
By this time, I’d spent enough time with Steve to know that he wasn’t insensitive at his core - the problem was that he had not yet figured out how to behave in a way that let everyone see that. At one point, in a fit of pique, he called me to say that he refused to make payroll; he only relented after I called him, furious, and read him the riot act about all of the families that were depending on those paychecks. In my entire career, that may be the only time I’ve ever slammed my door in frustration. Even if Pixar doubled in value, Steve told me, we still wouldn’t be worth anything. I felt increasingly burned out. I even thought about resigning.
A funny thing happened, though, as we went through these trials. Steve and I gradually found a way to work together. And as we did so, we began to understand each other. You’ll recall the question I asked Steve just before he bought Pixar: How would we resolve conflicts? And his answer, which I found comically egotistical at the time, was that he simply would continue to explain why he was right until I understood. The irony was that this soon became the technique I used with Steve. When we disagreed, I would state my case, but since Steve could think much faster than I could, he would often shoot down my arguments. So I’d wait a week, marshal my thoughts, and then come back and explain it again. He might dismiss my points again, but I would keep coming back until one of three things happened:
- He would say “Oh, okay, I get it” and give me what I needed
- I’d see that he was right and stop lobbying
- Our debate would be inconclusive, in which case I’d just go ahead and do what I had proposed in the first place. 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.
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.
So we did. Alvy would become one of my closest friends and most trusted collaborators. And ever since, I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am. The obvious payoffs of exceptional people are that they innovate, excel, and generally make your company - and, by extension, you - look good. But there is another, less obvious, payoff that only occurred to me in retrospect. The act of hiring Alvy changed me as a manager: By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. Over the years, I have met people who took what seemed the safer path and were the lesser for it. 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 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 it 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 art was imbued with such emotion - was the most interesting problem I’d ever considered. I wanted to climb through the TV screen an be part of this world.
The mid-1950s and early 1960s were, of course, a time of great prosperity and industry in the US. Growing up in Utah in a tight-knit Mormon community, my four younger brothers and sisters and I felt that anything was possible. Because the adults we knew had all lived through the Depression, WW2, and then the Korean War, this period felt to them like the calm after a thunderstorm.
I remember the optimistic energy - an eagerness to move forward that was enabled and supported by a wealth of emerging technologies. It was boom time in America, with manufacturing and home construction at an all-time high. Banks were offering loans and credit, which meant more and more people could own a new TV, house, or Cadillac. There were amazing new appliances like disposals that ate your garbage and machines that washed your dishes, although I certainly did my share of cleaning them by hand. The first organ transplants were performed in 1954; the first polio vaccine came a year later; in 1956, the term artificial intelligence entered the lexicon. The future, it seemed, was already here.
Then, when I was twelve, the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite into earth’s orbit. This was huge news, not just in the scientific and political realms but in my 6th grade classroom at school, where the morning routine was interrupted by a visit from the principal, whose grim expression told us that our lives has changed forever. Since we’d been taught that the Communists were the enemy and that nuclear war could be waged at the touch of a button, the fact that they’d beaten us into space seemed pretty scary - proof that they had the upper hand.
The US government’s response to being bested was to create something called ARPA, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Though it was housed within the Defense Department, its mission was ostensibly peaceful: to support scientific researchers in America’s universities in the hopes of preventing what it termed “technological surprise.” By sponsoring our best minds, the architects of ARPA believed, we’d come up with better answers. Looking back, I still admire that enlightened reaction to a serious threat: We’ll just have to get smarter. ARPA would have a profound effect on America, leading directly to the computer revolution and the Internet, among countless other innovations. There was a sense that big things were happening in America, with much more to come. Life was full of possibility.