Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it.
To reiterate, it is the focus on people—their work habits, their talents, their values—that is absolutely central to any creative venture.
Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the ke...
This set Brad off. A lot of us in this room have not grown up—and I mean that in the best way, he said. The conundrum is how to become mature, how to take on responsibility and become reliable while a...
There are two parts to any failure: There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. It is this second part that we control...
The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.
The thesis of this book is that there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process. In the coming pages, I will discuss many of the steps we fo...
The story of Cassandra is traditionally taken as a parable about what happens when valid warnings are ignored. But for me, it raises different issues. Why, I always wonder, do we think of Cassandra as...
The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most truste...
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 antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world. Fear and trust are powerful forces, and while they are not opposites, exactly, trust is the be...
The animators who work here are free to—no, encouraged to—decorate their work spaces in whatever style they wish. They spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung with miniature ch...
That’s because success convinces us that we are doing things the right way. There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right...
That couldn’t have happened if the producer of the movie—and the company’s leadership in general—hadn’t been open to a new viewpoint that challenged the status quo. That kind of openness is only possi...
THERE IS NOTHING quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.
Sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes, he says. So I try to trick them. I’ll say, ‘This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but j...
So, when our two like-minded overlords demanded a list of names of people to lay off, Alvy and I gave them two: his and mine.
So I tell myself that I have time, even when I don’t. As in, ‘Okay, I’m going to proceed as if I have time—I’m going to sit back and muse rather than looking at the clock—because if I sit back and mus...
Similarly, it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them. • Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary conseq...
Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like high-minded goals, but they are fundamentally misguided. Take something like the Golden Fleece Awards, which were established in 1975 to call attentio...