I believe that no creative company should ever stop evolving, and this would be our latest attempt to avoid stagnation.
But the truth is, I have no way of accounting for all of the factors involved in any given success, and whenever I learn more, I have to revise what I think. That’s not a weakness or a flaw. That’s re...
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...
Was so fundamental to creative work. Employees were spread out over four floors,
Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the ke...
This was a critical decision that was not obvious to most people. Most people assumed that Pixar would do 3D movies and Disney would do 2D. Or
This is not a call for working faster or doing more overtime or making do with fewer people, he said in one town hall forum.
There are two parts to any failure: There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. It is this second part that we control...
The thesis of this book is that there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process. In the coming pages, I will discuss many of the steps we fo...
The story of Cassandra is traditionally taken as a parable about what happens when valid warnings are ignored. But for me, it raises different issues. Why, I always wonder, do we think of Cassandra as...
The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most truste...
The antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world. Fear and trust are powerful forces, and while they are not opposites, exactly, trust is the be...
The animators who work here are free to—no, encouraged to—decorate their work spaces in whatever style they wish. They spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung with miniature ch...
That they liked so much of what they were doing allowed them to put up with the parts of the job they came to resent. This was a revelation to me: The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realized t...
That couldn’t have happened if the producer of the movie—and the company’s leadership in general—hadn’t been open to a new viewpoint that challenged the status quo. That kind of openness is only possi...
Sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes, he says. So I try to trick them. I’ll say, ‘This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but j...
Similarly, it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them. • Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary conseq...
Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like high-minded goals, but they are fundamentally misguided. Take something like the Golden Fleece Awards, which were established in 1975 to call attentio...
People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you’ve effed up, as Andrew says. It’s a huge lesson: Include people in your problems, not just your solutions.
One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.