I tend to flood and freeze up if I’m feeling overwhelmed. When this happens, it’s usually because I feel like the world is crashing down and all is lost. One trick I’ve learned is to force myself to m...
I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively. What stands in our way are these hidden barriers—the misconceptions and assumptions that impede us without...
His method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageous—These charts are bullshit! or This deal is crap!—and watching people react. If you were brave enough to come...
Given that we all agree, in principle, that postmortems are good for us, I’m always struck by how much people dread them. Most feel that they’ve learned what they could during the execution of the pro...
Everyone says they want to hire excellent people, but in truth we don’t really know, at first, who will rise up to make a difference.
Every morning, as I walk into Pixar Animation Studios—past the twenty-foot-high sculpture of Luxo Jr., our friendly desk lamp mascot, through the double doors and into a spectacular glass-ceilinged at...
Dick Levin’s Buy Low, Sell High, Collect Early, and Pay Late: The Manager’s Guide to Financial Survival,
Dailies are designed to promote everyone’s ability to be open to others, in the recognition that individual creativity is magnified by the people around you. The result: We see more clearly.
DISCUSSING FAILURE AND all its ripple effects is not merely an academic exercise. We face it because by seeking better understanding, we remove barriers to full creative engagement. One of the biggest...
Cuando eres consciente del problema del asa y la maleta lo ves por todas partes. La gente se aferra a las palabras y las historias, que no son más que sustitutos de la acción real y el significado. Lo...
Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional.
Clearly, it wasn’t enough for managers to have good ideas—they had to be able to engender support for those ideas among the people who’d be charged with employing them.
Candor isn’t cruel. It does not destroy. On the contrary, any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve e...
But when it comes to creativity, the unknown is not our enemy. If we make room for it instead of shunning it, the unknown can bring inspiration and originality.
As much as I admire the efficiency of the caterpillar in its cocoon, I do not believe that creative products should be developed in a vacuum (arguably, that was one of the mistakes we made on the film...
Andrew Stanton spoke next. Andrew is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can.
A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense. A good note is offered at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem. A good note doesn’t make demands; it...
«Hasta que no terminé de dirigir Monstruos S. A. no me di cuenta de que el fallo es una parte saludable del proceso —me dijo—. Durante la realización de esa película yo me lo tomaba como una cuestión...
Nosotros mismos acerca de nuestro papel en nuestro éxito. Franqueza, seguridad, investigación, autoevaluación y proteger lo nuevo son todos mecanismos que podemos utilizar para enfrentarnos a lo desco...
No matter how intensely we desire certainty, we should understand that whether because of our limits or randomness or future unknowable confluences of events, something will inevitably come, unbidden,...