Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows...
Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather.
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...
Not for George, though. He skipped the raise altogether and asked instead to retain ownership of licensing and merchandising rights to Star Wars. The studio that was distributing the film, 20th Centur...
Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.
My view was that we were all so far from achieving our goal that to hoard ideas only impeded our ability to get to the finish line.
My conclusion at the time was that finalizing the story before production began was still a worthy goal—we just hadn’t achieved it yet. As we continued to make films, however, I came to believe that m...
Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
Left to their own devices, most people don’t want to fail. But Andrew Stanton isn’t most people. As I’ve mentioned, he’s known around Pixar for repeating the phrases fail early and fail fast and be wr...
Lee Unkrich, «Hicimos lo imposible. Hicimos lo que todo el mundo dijo que no podríamos. Y lo hemos hecho espectacularmente bien. Eso fue el combustible que nos ha seguido impulsando».
It’s all well and good to gather people to discuss workplace challenges, but it was extremely important that we find a way to turn all that talk into something tangible, usable, valuable. How the day...
It is one of life’s cruel ironies that when it comes to feeding the Beast, success only creates more pressure to hurry up and succeed again. Which is why at too many companies, the schedule (that is,...
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy, Ego says. 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, whi...
In any business, it's important to do your homework, but the point I'm making goes beyond merely getting the facts straight. Research trips challenge our preconceived notions and keep cliches at bay....
In Monsters, Inc., all of our very different plots shared a common feeling—the bittersweet goodbye you feel once a problem—in this case, Sulley’s quest to return Boo to her own world—has been solved....
If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing? he says. You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements a...
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 f...
Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking or...
Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.
Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances a...