The way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it. I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be cre...
There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.
They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable.
Third, and relatedly, Notes Day was led from within. Many companies hire outside consulting firms to organize their all-staff retreats, and I understand why: Doing them well is a monumental, enormousl...
To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines,...
Tom nudged them along, sending this hypothetical prompt to anyone who asked: The year is 2017. Both of this year’s films were completed in well under 18,500 person-weeks …. What innovations helped the...
Ultimately, what we're after is authenticity. What feels daunting to the filmmakers when John sends them out on such [research] trips is that they don't yet know what they are looking for, so they're...
We believe that ideas—and thus, films—only become great when they are challenged and tested.
We face hundreds of challenges, every day, in our lives. The majority hardly qualify as challenges
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.
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 their compa...
When I advocate for protecting the new, then, I am using the word somewhat differently. I am saying that when someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also th...
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...
When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality—a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back u...
When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers.
Which meant that the people working on Up had to be able to roll with that evolution without panicking, shutting down, or growing discouraged.
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...
Yet randomness remains stubbornly difficult to understand. The problem is that our brains aren’t wired to think about it. Instead, we are built to look for patterns in sights, sounds, interactions, an...
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 equ...
Prescient
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