During the Lucasfilm years, I definitely had my periods of feeling overwhelmed as a manager, periods when I wondered about my own abilities and asked myself if I should try to adopt a more forceful, a...
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 as always, my focus was on the challenges ahead and on staying true to our goal of recognizing problems early and engaging them fully.
Being confident about the value of our innovation was not enough. We needed buy-in from the community we were trying to serve.
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...
A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together.
We start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive,
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...
Taking a risk necessitated a willingness to deal with the mess created by the risk.
Sucede el 3 por ciento de las veces, aproximadamente. El 97 por ciento restante me siento frustrado, apurado, como un papel arrugado y tirado en una esquina. Lo importante es seguir luchando sin tregu...
Personally supervised by Walt himself to ensure that as many rooms as possible had windows to let in natural light.
YOU’LL REMEMBER THAT the exit forms filled out by Notes Day participants weren’t shy about asking, Who should pitch this proposal? That was by design—we wanted the best ideas to be pushed forward, not...
When we are making a movie, the movie doesn’t exist yet. We are not uncovering it or discovering it; it’s not as if it resides somewhere and is just waiting to be found. There is no movie. We are maki...
When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers.
When I say that the fate of any group enterprise, and the individuals within it, are interconnected and interdependent, it may sound trite. But it’s not. What’s more, seeing all of the interdependenci...
We tend to think of emotion and logic as two distinct, mutually exclusive domains. Not Steve. From the beginning, when making decisions, passion was a key part of his calculus.
We face hundreds of challenges, every day, in our lives. The majority hardly qualify as challenges
We believe that ideas—and thus, films—only become great when they are challenged and tested.