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...
Frequently, the people in charge of the Beast are the most organized people in the company—people wired to make things happen on track and on budget, as their bosses expect them to do. When those peop...
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.
Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it.
Don’t Let Resentments Fester Many things that go wrong are caused by misunderstandings or screw-ups. These lead to resentments that, if left unaddressed, can fester for years. But if people are given...
But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.
Andrew Stanton spoke next. Andrew is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can.
And in notes meetings, everyone was so afraid of hurting someone’s feelings that they held back. We had to learn that we weren’t attacking the person, we were attacking the project. Only then could we...
A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.
This is why it is so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact...
Your employees are smart; that’s why you hired them. So treat them that way.
When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today.
When a bad thing happens, people will draw conclusions that might include conspiracy or forces acting against them or, conversely, if a good thing happens, that they are brilliant and deserving.
We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described t...
Sometimes you talk about the problems in fifty different ways until you find that one sentence that you can see makes their eyes pop, as if they’re thinking, ‘Oh, I want to do it.
Quality is the best business plan.
People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while...
Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new
Many of the rules that people find onerous and bureaucratic were put in place to deal with real abuses, problems, or inconsistencies or as a way of managing complex environments. But while each rule m...
I’ve known many managers who hate to be surprised in meetings, for example, by which I mean they make it clear that they want to be briefed about any unexpected news in advance and in private. In many...