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 at...
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.
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 a...
Here are the qualifications required: 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.
He told me that he thinks he and the other proven directors have a responsibility to be teachers—that this should be a central part of their jobs, even as they continue to make their own films.
From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment.
Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas. In
Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of learning.
Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and vision is often an illusion.
Countless times, I remember watching him toss ideas—pretty far-out ideas—into the air, just to see how they played. And if they didn’t play well, he would move on.
By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.
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...
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.
Before I go on, I want to say something about the word protection. I worry that because it has such a positive connotation, by implication anything being protected seems, ipso facto, worth protecting.
Among the things he learned: John was so tightly scheduled, and meetings with him were so precious, that people tended to overprepare to see him, which served no one. In fact, John said, there were a...
Among the ideas this group put on their exit forms: fostering more empathy between departments through a job-swapping program, establishing a lunch lottery that would match people at random to encoura...
Among the handful of companies that were trying to solve these problems, most embraced a culture of strictly enforced, even CIA-like secrecy. We were in a race, after all, to be the first to make a co...
«Confía en el proceso». Este nos gustaba porque era muy tranquilizador: aunque es inevitable que surjan dificultades y pasos en falso durante una iniciativa creativa, puedes apostar
Want to stress that you don’t have to work at Pixar to create a Braintrust. Every creative person, no matter their field, can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of inte...
Those of you in management positions, be aware that some of this is going to feel like it’s directed at you personally. I’m not kidding. It’s going to happen. But put your tough skin on, and for the s...