I can’t help but think of one of my favorite moments in any Pixar movie, when Anton Ego, the jaded and much-feared food critic in Ratatouille, delivers his review of Gusteau’s, the restaurant run by o...
Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason—our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk...
Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on—but it is not...
Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.
Athletes and musicians often refer to being in the zone—that mystical place where their inner critic is silenced and they completely inhabit the moment, where the thinking is clear and the motions are...
Alex Schure
A fair amount of feedback had focused on John himself, and not all of it was positive. In
Leadership is about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.
Good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.
Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that...
Where, along the way, do we turn from the wide-eyed child into the adult who fears surprises and has all the answers and seeks to control all outcomes?
We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.
We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.
We frequently support the idea of pushing boundaries in theory, ignoring the trouble it can cause in practice.
The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed).
The models we have of our relationships at work, with friends, in our families, and in our society are all even more complicated than our visual models. These constructs—call them personal models—shap...
The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realized that this was something I needed to look out for: When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugg...
The Braintrust is valuable because it broadens your perspective, allowing you to peer—at least briefly—through others’ eyes. Brad
THERE IS NOTHING quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.
Story plays a role in the budget process when building reels.