In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The...
In big organizations there are advantages to consistency, but I strongly believe that smaller groups within the larger whole should be allowed to differentiate themselves and operate according to thei...
If we can constantly change and improve our models by using technology in the pursuit of art, we keep ourselves fresh.
If fear hinders us even in grade school, no wonder it takes such discipline—some people even call it a practice—to turn off that inner critic in adulthood and return to a place of openness. In Korean...
I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot...
Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key...
From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or—worse!—aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus...
FOR MOST OF us, failure comes with baggage—a lot of baggage—that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad;...
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,
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...
Communication would no longer have to go through hierarchical channels. The exchange of information was key to our business, of course, but I believed that it could—and frequently should—happen out of...
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.
By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. Over the years, I have met people who took what seemed the safer path and were the lesser for it...I had taken a risk, and that risk yielde...
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 we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn’t.
As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization-be it an animation studio or a record label-is an ecosystem. 'You need all the seasons,' he says. 'You need storms. It's like an ecology. To...
As Joe Ranft said at the time, Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.
After talking about it, however, Alvy and I decided to do the opposite—to share our work with the outside world. My view was that we were all so far from achieving our goal that to hoard ideas only im...
ARPA had been created in response to Sputnik, and one of its key organizing principles was that collaboration could lead to excellence.