Creativity, Inc.

Creative Culture

To nurture creativity is to accept that you will always be solving new problems. You will never have everything figured out.

Healthy cultures and healthy companies are not stable. They are ever-changing. And that change requires that leaders need to remain vigilant and nimble and, above all, that they make sure that core values are protected.

Great ideas really can come from anyone, and it is the leader’s job to make sure everyone feels free to contribute. But even if a leader succeeds in doing so in one moment or context, that doesn’t solve the problem forever.

To me, building a dynamic, creative culture is itself a creative act. I can think of only one thing to compare it to: raising a child. Both are 24-7 jobs that come with joys and challenges, many of them unexpected. To do either job well requires us to dig deeply within ourselves.

What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. This, more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning. It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission.

Despite being novice filmmakers at a fledgling studio in dire financial straits, we had put our faith in a simple idea: If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it, too.

Review after review focused on the film’s moving plotline and its rich, three-dimensional characters—only briefly mentioning, almost as an aside, that it had been made on a computer. While there was much innovation that enabled our work, we had not let the technology overwhelm our real purpose: making a great film.

What interested me was not that companies rose and fell or that the landscape continually shifted as technology changed but that the leaders of these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work.

Sincerely believing that we were in an inclusive meeting, we saw nothing amiss because we didn’t feel excluded. Those not sitting at the center of the table, meanwhile, saw quite clearly how it established a pecking order but presumed that we—the leaders—had intended that outcome. Who were they, then, to complain?

This is the nature of management. Decisions are made, usually for good reasons, which in turn prompt other decisions. So when problems arise—and they always do—disentangling them is not as simple as correcting the original error. Often, finding a solution is a multi-step endeavor. There is the problem you know you are trying to solve—think of that as an oak tree—and then there are all the other problems—think of these as saplings—that sprouted from the acorns that fell around it. And these problems remain after you cut the oak tree down.

Origins & Influences

Walt Disney was one of my two boyhood idols. The other was Albert Einstein. To me, even at a young age, they represented the two poles of creativity. Disney was all about inventing the new. He brought things into being—both artistically and technologically—that did not exist before. Einstein, by contrast, was a master of explaining that which already was. I read every Einstein biography I could get my hands on as well as a little book he wrote on his theory of relativity. I loved how the concepts he developed forced people to change their approach to physics and matter, to view the universe from a different perspective. Wild-haired and iconic, Einstein dared to bend the implications of what we thought we knew. He solved the biggest puzzles of all and, in doing so, changed our understanding of reality.

By sponsoring our best minds, the architects of ARPA believed, we’d come up with better answers. Looking back, I still admire that enlightened reaction to a serious threat: We’ll just have to get smarter. ARPA would have a profound effect on America, leading directly to the computer revolution and the Internet, among countless other innovations. There was a sense that big things were happening in America, with much more to come. Life was full of possibility.

An art teacher once told my parents I would often become so lost in my work that I wouldn’t hear the bell ring at the end of class; I’d be sitting there, at my desk, staring at an object—a vase, say, or a chair. Something about the act of committing that object to paper was completely engrossing—the way it necessitated seeing only what was there and shutting out the distraction of my ideas about chairs or vases and what they were supposed to look like.

Nevertheless, it soon became clear to me that I would never be talented enough to join Disney Animation’s vaunted ranks. What’s more, I had no idea how one actually became an animator. There was no school for it that I knew of. As I finished high school, I realized I had a far better understanding of how one became a scientist. The route seemed easier to discern. Throughout my life, people have always smiled when I told them I switched from art to physics because it seems, to them, like such an incongruous leap. But my decision to pursue physics, and not art, would lead me, indirectly, to my true calling.

…they welcomed us to the program, gave us workspace and access to computers, and then let us pursue whatever turned us on. The result was a collaborative, supportive community so inspiring that I would later seek to replicate it at Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Disney.

One of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Another, John Warnock, would co-found Adobe, known for Photoshop and the PDF file format, among other things. Still another, Alan Kay, would lead on a number of fronts, from object-oriented programming to “windowing” graphical user interfaces.

On one end of the spectrum, I noticed, we had the genius who seemed to do amazing work on his or her own; on the other end, we had the group that excelled precisely because of its multiplicity of views. How, then, should we balance these two extremes, I wondered. I didn’t yet have a good mental model that would help me answer that, but I was developing a fierce desire to find one.

Not only did I often sleep on the floor of the computer rooms to maximize time on the computer, but so did many of my fellow graduate students. We were young, driven by the sense that we were inventing the field from scratch—and that was exciting beyond words.

Professor Sutherland used to say that he loved his graduate students at Utah because we didn’t know what was impossible. Neither, apparently, did he: He was among the first to believe that Hollywood movie execs would care a fig about what was happening in academia.

To them, computers and animation simply didn’t mix. How did they know this? Because the one time they had turned to computers for help—to render images of millions of bubbles in their 1971 live-action movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks—the computers had apparently let them down. The state of the technology at the time was so poor, particularly for curved images, that bubbles were beyond the computers’ reach.

I had conflicting feelings when I met Alvy because, frankly, he seemed more qualified to lead the lab than I was. I can still remember the uneasiness in my gut, that instinctual twinge spurred by a potential threat: This, I thought, could be the guy who takes my job one day. I hired him anyway.

The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.

The act of hiring Alvy changed me as a manager: 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. By hiring Alvy, I had taken a risk, and that risk yielded the highest reward—a brilliant, committed teammate.

Early Pixar

…most embraced a culture of strictly enforced, even CIA-like secrecy. We were in a race, after all, to be the first to make a computer-animated feature film, so many who were pursuing this technology held their discoveries close to their vests. 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 impeded our ability to get to the finish line. Instead, NYIT engaged with the computer graphics community, publishing everything we discovered, participating in committees to review papers written by all manner of researchers, and taking active roles at all the major academic conferences.

“Who else should Lucasfilm be considering for this job?” Meaning, the job I was there to interview for. Without hesitation, I rattled off the names of several people who were doing impressive work in a variety of technical areas. My willingness to do this reflected my world-view, forged in academia, that any hard problem should have many good minds simultaneously trying to solve it. Not to acknowledge that seemed silly. Only later would I learn that the guys at Lucasfilm had already interviewed all the people I listed and had asked them, in turn, to make similar recommendations—and not one of them had suggested any other names! To be sure, working for George Lucas was a plum job that you’d have to be crazy not to want. But to go mute, as my rivals did, when asked to evaluate the field signaled not just intense competitiveness but also lack of confidence. Soon I’d landed an interview with George himself.

Lucasfilm was based in Marin County, one hour north of Silicon Valley by car and one hour from Hollywood by plane. This was no accident. George saw himself, first and foremost, as a filmmaker, so Silicon Valley wasn’t for him. But he also had no desire to be too close to Los Angeles, because he thought there was something a bit unseemly and inbred about it. Thus, he created his own island, a community that embraced films and computers but pledged allegiance to neither of the prevailing cultures that defined those businesses. The resulting environment felt as protected as an academic institution—an idea that would stay with me and help shape what I would later try to build at Pixar. Experimentation was highly valued, but the urgency of a for-profit enterprise was definitely in the air. In other words, we felt like we were solving problems for a reason.

While George wanted this new video-editing system in place, the film editors at Lucasfilm did not. They were perfectly happy with the system they had already mastered, which involved actually cutting film into snippets with razor blades and then pasting them back together. They couldn’t have been less interested in making changes that would slow them down in the short term. They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable. So when it came time to test our work, the editors refused to participate. Our certainty that video editing would revolutionize the process didn’t matter, and neither did George’s backing. Because the people our new system was intended to serve were resistant to it, progress screeched to a halt. What to do? If left up to the editors, no new tool would ever be designed and no improvements would be possible. They saw no advantage to change and couldn’t imagine how using a computer would make their work easier or better.

…building a company was like being on a wagon train headed west. On the long journey to the land of plenty, the pioneers would be full of purpose and united by the goal of reaching their destination. Once they arrived, he’d say, people would come and go, and that was as it should be. But the process of moving toward something—of having not yet arrived—was what he idealized.

A few months later, I ran into John again on the Queen Mary, of all places. The historic Long Beach hotel, which also happens to be a docked ocean liner, was the site of the annual Pratt Institute Symposium on Computer Graphics. Not knowing of his newly unemployed status, I asked if there was any way he could come up to Lucasfilm and help us make our first short film. He said yes without hesitation.

These men felt that it was their turn to be in charge but were so insecure about their standing within the company that they clung to their newfound status by stifling—not encouraging—younger talents. Not only were they not interested in the ideas of their fledgling animators, they exercised a sort of punitive power. They were seemingly determined that those beneath them not rise in the ranks any faster than they already had. John was almost immediately unhappy in this noncollaborative environment, though it was still a shock when he got fired. No wonder he was so eager to join us at Lucasfilm.

Despite our worries, the majority of the people I talked to after the screening said that they hadn’t even noticed that the movie had switched from full color to black-and-white wireframes! They were so caught up in the emotion of the story that they hadn’t noticed its flaws. This was my first encounter with a phenomenon I would notice again and again, throughout my career: For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.

Working with Steve

His aim didn’t seem to be to absorb the intricacies of our technology as much as to hone his own argument, to temper it by sparring with us.

At one point he turned to me and calmly explained that he wanted my job. Once he took my place at the helm, he said, I would learn so much from him that in just two years I would be able to run the enterprise all by myself. I was, of course, already running the enterprise by myself, but I marveled at his chutzpah. He not only planned to displace me in the day-to-day management of the company, he expected me to think it was a great idea!

After Steve left, Bill turned to me and said, “Boy, is he arrogant.” When Steve came by our booth again later, he walked up to me and said of Bill: “Boy, is he arrogant.” I remember being struck by this clash-of-the-titans moment. I was amused by the fact that each man could see ego in the other but not in himself.

I met with Steve and gently asked him how things got resolved when people disagreed with him. He seemed unaware that what I was really asking him was how things would get resolved if we worked together and I disagreed with him, for he gave a more general answer. He said, “When I don’t see eye to eye with somebody, I just take the time to explain it better, so they understand the way it should be.”

The chief financial officer, in particular, underestimated Steve, assuming he was just another rich kid in over his head. This CFO told me that the way to establish his authority in the room was to arrive last. His thinking, which he articulated out loud to me, was that this would establish him as the “most powerful player,” since he and only he could afford to keep everyone else waiting. All that it ended up establishing, however, was that he’d never met anyone like Steve Jobs. The morning of the big negotiating session, all of us but the CFO were on time—Steve and his attorney; me, Alvy, and our attorney; Lucasfilm’s attorneys; and an investment banker. At precisely 10 a.m., Steve looked around and, finding the CFO missing, started the meeting without him! In one swift move, Steve had not only foiled the CFO’s attempt to place himself atop the pecking order, but he had grabbed control of the meeting.

This CFO told me that the way to establish his authority in the room was to arrive last. His thinking, which he articulated out loud to me, was that this would establish him as the “most powerful player,” since he and only he could afford to keep everyone else waiting.

At precisely 10 a.m., Steve looked around and, finding the CFO missing, started the meeting without him! In one swift move, Steve had not only foiled the CFO’s attempt to place himself atop the pecking order, but he had grabbed control of the meeting.

There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.

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 back at him, he often respected it—poking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it. Watching him reminded me of a principle of engineering: Sending out a sharp impulse—like a dolphin uses echolocation to determine the location of a school of fish—can teach you crucial things about your environment. Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.

Instead of talking about whether it’s easier to lower a price than raise it, we should have been addressing more substantive issues such as how to meet the expectations of customers and how to keep investing in software development so that the customers who did buy our product could put it to better use.

I had been seeking simple answers to complex questions—do this, not that—because I was unsure of myself and stressed by the demands of my new job. But simple answers like the “start high” pricing advice—so seductive in its rationality—had distracted me and kept me from asking more fundamental questions.

Quality & Learning

Until that point, I’d associated manufacturing more with efficiency than with inspiration. But I soon discovered that the Japanese had found a way of making production a creative endeavor that engaged its workers—a completely radical and counterintuitive idea at the time.

But in 1947, an American working in Japan turned that thinking on its head. His name was W. Edwards Deming, and he was a statistician who was known for his expertise in quality control. At the request of the U.S. Army, he had traveled to Asia to assist with planning the 1951 Japanese census.

Among those who came to hear his ideas was Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corp.—one of many Japanese companies that would apply his ideas and reap their rewards. Around this time, Toyota also instituted radical new ways of thinking about production that jibed with Deming’s philosophies.

The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line. Japanese companies that implemented Deming’s ideas made it easy for workers to do so: They installed a cord that anyone could pull in order to bring production to a halt. Before long, Japanese companies were enjoying unheard-of levels of quality, productivity, and market share.

Instead of merely repeating an action, workers could suggest changes, call out problems, and—this next element seemed particularly important to me—feel the pride that came when they helped fix what was broken.

As we struggled to get Pixar off the ground, Deming’s work was like a beacon that lit my way.

While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

Toy Story Era

Three times between 1987 and 1991, a fed-up Steve Jobs tried to sell Pixar. And yet, despite his frustrations, he could never quite bring himself to part with us.

I came to believe that what he was really looking for was not an exit strategy as much as external validation. His reasoning went like this: If Microsoft was willing to go to $90 million, then we must be worth hanging on to. It was difficult—and enervating—to watch this dance.

Pixar could not have survived without Steve, but more than once in those years, I wasn’t sure if we’d survive with him.

Known for holding forth in meetings to the exclusion of all others, he once briefed a group of us who were about to go into a session with Disney execs by stressing how important it was that we “listen and not talk.” The irony was so obvious, I couldn’t resist saying: “Okay, Steve, I’ll try to restrain myself.” Everyone in the room laughed, but he didn’t crack a smile. Then we went into the meeting and Steve held court for the full hour, barely letting the folks from Disney finish a sentence.

Jeffrey Katzenberg sat at the end of a long, dark wood conference table in the Team Disney building on the studio’s lot in Burbank. The head of Disney’s motion picture division was in wooing mode—at least up to a point. “It’s clear that the talent here is John Lasseter,” he said, as John, Steve, and I sat there, trying not to be offended. “And John, since you won’t come work for me, I guess I’ll have to make it work this way.” Katzenberg wanted Pixar to make a feature film, and he wanted Disney to own and distribute it.

Jeffrey pushed relentlessly for more “edge.” Woody was too perky, too earnest, he thought. That didn’t necessarily jibe with our sense of the story, but being novices, we took his advice to heart. Gradually, over a period of months, the character of Woody—originally imagined as affable and easygoing—became darker, meaner…and wholly unappealing.

On November 19, 1993, we went to Disney to unveil the new, edgier Woody in a series of story reels—a mock-up of the film, like a comic book version with temporary voices, music, and drawings of the story. That day will forever be known at Pixar as “Black Friday” because Disney’s completely reasonable reaction was to shut down the production until an acceptable script was written.

For the next several months, they spent almost every waking minute together, working to rediscover the heart of the movie, the thing that John had first envisioned: a toy cowboy who wanted to be loved.

Together, the five of them soon learned an important lesson—to trust their own storytelling instincts.

…he wanted to take us public. “Bad idea,” John and I told Steve. “Let’s get a couple films under our belt first. We’ll only increase our value that way.” Steve disagreed. “This is our moment,” he said. He went on to lay out his logic: Let’s assume that Toy Story is a success, he said. Not only that, let’s assume it is a big success. When that happens, Disney CEO Michael Eisner will realize that he has created his worst nightmare: a viable competitor to Disney. (We only owed his studio two more films under our contract, then we could go out on our own.) Steve predicted that as soon as Toy Story came out, Eisner would try to renegotiate our deal and keep us close, as a partner. In this scenario, Steve said, he wanted to be able to negotiate better terms. Specifically, he wanted a 50/50 split with Disney on returns—a demand, he pointed out, that also happened to be the moral high ground. In order to fulfill these terms, however, we would have to be able to put up the cash for our half of the production budgets—a significant amount of money. And to do that, we would have to go public.

As we traveled from one investment house to another, Steve (in a costume he rarely wore: suit and tie) pushed to secure early commitments, while I added a professorial presence by donning, at Steve’s insistence, a tweed jacket with elbow patches. I was supposed to embody the image of what a “technical genius” looks like—though, frankly, I don’t know anyone in computer science who dresses that way.

Steve turned out to be right. As our first movie broke records at the box office and as all our dreams seemed to be coming true, our initial public offering raised nearly $140 million for the company—the biggest IPO of 1995. And a few months later, as if on cue, Eisner called, saying that he wanted to renegotiate the deal and keep us as a partner. He accepted Steve’s offer of a 50/50 split. I was amazed; Steve had called this exactly right. His clarity and execution were stunning.

For the first time since our founding, our jobs were safe. I wish I could bottle how it felt to come into work during those first heady days after Toy Story came out. People seemed to walk a little taller, they were so proud of what we’d done.

We had succeeded by holding true to our ideals; nothing could be better than that.

But while I could feel that euphoria, I was oddly unable to participate in it. For twenty years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer graphics movie. Now that that goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose. Now what? The thing that had replaced it seemed to be the act of running a company, which was more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn’t special. Pixar was now public and successful, yet there was something unsatisfying about the prospect of merely keeping it running.

Story & Standards

I’d made a point of being accessible to our employees, wandering into people’s offices to check in and see what was going on. John and I had very conscientiously tried to make sure that everyone at Pixar had a voice, that every job and every employee was treated with respect. I truly believed that self-assessment and constructive criticism had to occur at all levels of a company, and I had tried my best to walk that talk.

…production managers told me that working on Toy Story had been a nightmare. They felt disrespected and marginalized—like second-class citizens. And while they were gratified by Toy Story’s success, they were very reluctant to sign on to work on another film at Pixar. I was floored. How had we missed this?

My total ignorance of this dynamic caught me by surprise. My door had always been open! I’d assumed that that would guarantee me a place in the loop, at least when it came to major sources of tension like this. Not a single production manager had dropped by to express frustration or make a suggestion in the four years we worked on Toy Story. Why was that?

They felt that their jobs were temporary and thus that their complaints would not be welcome. In their world—conventional Hollywood productions—freelancers came together to make a film, worked side by side for several months, and then scattered to the winds. Complaining tended to cost you future work opportunities, so they kept their mouths shut. It was only when asked to stay on at Pixar that they voiced their objections.

When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers.

People talking directly to one another, then letting the manager find out later, was more efficient than trying to make sure that everything happened in the “right” order and through the “proper” channels.

The first principle was “Story Is King,” by which we meant that we would let nothing—not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities—get in the way of our story. We took pride in the fact that reviewers talked mainly about the way Toy Story made them feel and not about the computer wizardry that enabled us to get it up on the screen. We believed that this was the direct result of our always keeping story as our guiding light.

Everything about the project ran counter to what we believed in. We didn’t know how to aim low. We had nothing against the direct-to-video model, in theory; Disney was doing it and making heaps of money. We just couldn’t figure out how to go about it without sacrificing quality. What’s more, it soon became clear that scaling back our expectations to make a direct-to-video product was having a negative impact on our internal culture, in that it created an A-team (A Bug’s Life) and a B-team (Toy Story 2). The crew assigned to work on Toy Story 2 was not interested in producing B-level work, and more than a few came into my office to say so. It would have been foolish to ignore their passion.

A couple of hours later, he emerged, walked right into my office, and shut the door. Disaster is the word he used. The story was hollow, predictable, without tension; the humor fell flat. We’d gone to Disney and insisted on swinging for the fences, rejecting the idea of settling for a B-level product. Now we wondered: Were we doing just that?

“We know the film needs major changes,” he said. “And we’re in the process of mapping them out.” To his surprise, the Disney execs disagreed—the movie was good enough, and besides, there wasn’t time to do an overhaul. It’s only a sequel. Politely but firmly, Andrew demurred. “We’re going to redo it,” he said.

The next nine months would be the most grueling production schedule we would ever undertake—the crucible in which Pixar’s true identity was forged.

Steve Jobs added his endorsement. “Disney doesn’t think we can do this,” he said. “So let’s prove them wrong.” Then the heavy lifting began. For the next six months, our employees rarely saw their families. We worked deep into the night, seven days a week. Despite two hit movies, we were conscious of the need to prove ourselves, and everyone gave everything they had.

One morning in June, an overtired artist drove to work with his infant child strapped into the backseat, intending to deliver the baby to day care on the way. Some time later, after he’d been at work for a few hours, his wife (also a Pixar employee) happened to ask him how drop-off had gone—which is when he realized that he’d left their child in the car in the broiling Pixar parking lot. They rushed out to find the baby unconscious and poured cold water over him immediately. Thankfully, the child was okay, but the trauma of this moment—the what-could-have-been—was imprinted deeply on my brain. Asking this much of our people, even when they wanted to give it, was not acceptable. I had expected the road to be rough, but I had to admit that we were coming apart. By the time the film was complete, a full third of the staff would have some kind of repetitive stress injury.

Critics raved that Toy Story 2 was one of the only sequels ever to outshine the original, and the total box office would eventually top $500 million. Everyone was fried to the core, yet there was also a feeling that despite all the pain, we had pulled off something important, something that would define Pixar for years to come. As Lee Unkrich says, “We had done the impossible. We had done the thing that everyone told us we couldn’t do. And we had done it spectacularly well. It was the fuel that has continued to burn in all of us.”

People First

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

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. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched.

Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.

Excellence & Responsibility

To ensure quality, I believed, any person on any team needed to be able to identify a problem and, in effect, pull the cord to stop the line. To create a culture in which this was possible, you needed more than a cord within easy reach. You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. More and more, I saw that by putting people first—not just saying that we did, but proving that we did by the actions we took—we were protecting that culture.

Pixar’s people take pride in their work. They’re ambitious high achievers who want to do their best and then some. On the management side, we want the next product to be better than the last, while at the same time we need to meet budget and schedule requirements. Inspiring managers push their people to excel. That’s what we expect them to do. But when the powerful forces that create this positive dynamic turn negative, they are hard to counteract. It’s a fine line. On any film, there are inevitable periods of extreme crunch and stress, some of which can be healthy if they don’t go on too long. But the ambitions of both managers and their teams can exacerbate each other and become unhealthy. It is a leader’s responsibility to see this, and guide it, not exploit it. If we are in this for the long haul, we have to take care of ourselves, support healthy habits, and encourage our employees to have fulfilling lives outside of work.

Supporting your employees means encouraging them to strike a balance not merely by saying, “Be balanced!” but also by making it easier for them to achieve balance.

For example, when our younger employees—those without families—work longer hours than those who are parents, we must be mindful not to compare the output of these two groups without being mindful of the context.

“Trust the Process” had morphed into “Assume That the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool—a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals.

To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.

…the key is not to let this trust, our faith, lull us into the abdication of personal responsibility. When that happens, we fall into dull repetition, producing empty versions of what was made before.

Begun as a direct-to-video sequel, the project proved not only that it was important to everyone that we weren’t tolerating second-class films but also that everything we did—everything associated with our name—needed to be good. Thinking this way was not just about morale; it was a signal to everyone at Pixar that they were part owners of the company’s greatest asset—its quality.

John coined a new phrase: “Quality is the best business plan.” What he meant was that quality is not a consequence of following some set of behaviors. Rather, it is a prerequisite and a mindset you must have before you decide what you are setting out to do.

That didn’t mean that we wouldn’t make mistakes. Mistakes are part of creativity. But when we did, we would strive to face them without defensiveness and with a willingness to change.

I will be less than candid at work if it means not embarrassing or offending someone or in any number of situations where choosing my words carefully feels like the smart strategy. But that’s not to say lack of candor should be celebrated. 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.

Braintrust & Feedback

I was struck by how constructive the feedback was. Each of the participants focused on the film at hand and not on some hidden personal agenda. They argued—sometimes heatedly—but always about the project. They were not motivated by the kinds of things—getting credit for an idea, pleasing their supervisors, winning a point just to say you did—that too often lurk beneath the surface of work-related interactions. The members saw each other as peers. The passion expressed in a Braintrust meeting was never taken personally because everyone knew it was directed at solving problems.

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, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer-director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming. All directors, no matter how talented, organized, or clear of vision, become lost somewhere along the way. That creates a problem for those who seek to give helpful feedback. How do you get a director to address a problem he or she cannot see?

…directors don’t want the notes, because they are usually coming from people who aren’t filmmakers and are seen as ignorant and interfering. There is a built-in tension, then, between directors and the studios that employ them; to put it in stark terms, the studios are paying the bills and want the films to be commercially successful, while the directors want to preserve their artistic vision.

…the Braintrust has no authority. This is crucial: The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. After a Braintrust meeting, it is up to him or her to figure out how to address the feedback. Braintrust meetings are not top-down, do-this-or-else affairs. By removing from the Braintrust the power to mandate solutions, we affect the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential.

…we don’t want the Braintrust to solve a director’s problem because we believe that, in all likelihood, our solution won’t be as good as the one the director and his or her creative team comes up with. We believe that ideas—and thus films—only become great when they are challenged and tested. In academia, peer review is the process by which professors are evaluated by others in their field. I like to think of the Braintrust as Pixar’s version of peer review…

Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, says he thinks to make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others. To him, the Braintrust provides that pivot, and it is necessarily painful. “Part of the suffering involves giving up control,” he says. “I can think it’s the funniest joke in the world, but if nobody in that room laughs, I have to take it out. It hurts that they can see something you can’t.”

He calls it “the grand eye of Sauron”—a reference to the lidless, all-seeing character in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—because when it focuses on you, there’s no avoiding its gaze.

That is part of the reason why Steve Jobs didn’t come to Braintrust meetings at Pixar—a mutually agreed prohibition, based on my belief that his bigger-than-life presence would make it harder to be candid. We had reached this agreement way back in 1993, on a day that I happened to be visiting Microsoft, and Steve reached me by phone, worried that I was being wooed to take a job there. I had no intention of working at Microsoft, and it wasn’t why I was there, but I knew he was nervous, and I took the opportunity to exert some leverage. “This group works well together,” I told him of the Braintrust. “But if you go to its meetings it will change what they are.” He agreed, and believing that John and the story people knew more about narrative than he did, he left it to them. At Apple, he had the reputation for being deeply involved in the most minute detail of every product, but at Pixar, he didn’t believe that his instincts were better than those of the people here, so he stayed out. That’s how much candor matters at Pixar: It overrides hierarchy.

“Sometimes the Braintrust will know something’s wrong, but they will identify the wrong symptom,”

Even though Helen is his equal, what you’re seeing on the screen is this big threatening guy yelling and it felt like he was abusing her. Once I figured that out, all I did was have Helen stretch when she holds her ground and says, ‘This is not about you.’ I didn’t change any of the dialogue. I just changed the drawings to make her body bigger, as if to say, ‘I’m a match for you.’ And when I played the revised scene, the Braintrust said, ‘That’s much better. What lines did you change?’ I said, ‘I didn’t change a comma.’

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 doesn’t even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer. Most of all, though, a good note is specific. “I’m writhing with boredom” is not a good note.

“Here are the qualifications required: 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 trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.” Believe me, you don’t want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out. The best inoculation against this fate? Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close.

“The blessing of having fresh eyes is that you have none of the baggage,” he said. “You don’t know the budget. You don’t know the deadline. You don’t know which scenes have won raves from our bosses. You don’t know any of that. I know it may sound obvious, in retrospect, but we needed someone with fresh eyes to help us see the problems that were right in front of us.”

The Ikea Effect occurs when consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they had a hand in creating.

You have to come in generous and open, bringing all your skills with you. And you have to leave your ego at the door.”

Risk & Failure

Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).

Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.”

When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work—even when it is confounding them.

There is an alternative approach to being wrong as fast as you can. It is the notion that if you carefully think everything through, if you are meticulous and plan well and consider all possible outcomes, you are more likely to create a lasting product. But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them—if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line—well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work—things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.

When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive.

In general, movie crews are an understanding bunch. They recognize that there are always problems, so while they can be judgmental, they don’t tend to rush to judgment. Their first impulse is to work harder. When a director stands up in a meeting and says, “I realize this scene isn’t working, I don’t yet know how to fix it, but I’m figuring it out. Keep going!”—a crew will follow him or her to the ends of the earth. But when a problem is festering and everyone seems to be looking the other way or when people are sitting around waiting to be told what to do, the crew gets antsy. It’s not that they don’t like the director—they usually do. It’s that they lose confidence in the director’s ability to bring the movie home. Which is part of why, to me, they are the most reliable barometer.

In many workplaces, it is a sign of disrespect if someone surprises a manager with new information in front of other people. But what does this mean in practice? It means that there are pre-meetings before meetings, and the meetings begin to take on a pro forma tone. It means wasted time. It means that the employees who work with these people walk on eggshells. It means that fear runs rampant.

In many organizations, managers tend to err on the side of secrecy, of keeping things hidden from employees. I believe this is the wrong instinct. A manager’s default mode should not be secrecy. What is needed is a thoughtful consideration of the cost of secrecy weighed against the risks. When you instantly resort to secrecy, you are telling people they can’t be trusted. When you are candid, you are telling people that you trust them and that there is nothing to fear. To confide in employees is to give them a sense of ownership over the information. The result—and I’ve seen this again and again—is that they are less likely to leak whatever it is that you’ve confided.

Pixar’s head of management development, Jamie Woolf, put together a mentoring program that pairs new managers with experienced ones. A key facet of this program is that mentors and mentees work together for an extended period of time—nine months. They meet about all aspects of leadership, from career development and confidence building to managing personnel challenges and building healthy team environments.

When we are new to the position, we imagine what the job is in order to get our arms around it, then we compare ourselves against our made-up model. But the job is never what we think it is. The trick is to forget our models about what we “should” be. A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.

Every director at Pixar worries that his or her movie will be the one that fails, that breaks our streak of number one hits. “That pressure is there: You can’t be the first bomb,” says Bob Peterson, a longtime Pixar writer and voice artist. “What you want is for that pressure to light a fire under you to make you say, ‘I’m going to do better.’ But there’s a fear of not knowing if you can find the right answer. The directors here who are successful are able to just relax and let ideas be born out of that pressure.”

Stage One is when we identify a risk we should potentially take. This sounds simple, but it is difficult to stay open to things we associate with danger, so Stage One requires commitment. If we think too much about failure at this stage, we won’t take even the most necessary risks.

Too often, people let the terminology of failure infect their thinking. The result: They see any exercise in problem-solving as a series of failures rather than a series of learning moments. You don’t want to avoid risk altogether, or you’ll never innovate. But at the same time, you want to be smart about it.

There are times when you should take a big risk and times when the risks incurred should be small. So it is crucial to develop a thoughtful process to determine how much risk is appropriate.

The pressure to create—and quickly!—became the order of the day. To be clear, this happens at many companies, not just in Hollywood, and its unintended effect is always the same: It lessens quality across the board.

Protecting Originality

From 1994 to 2010, not a single Disney animated film would open at number one at the box office. I believe this was the direct result of its managers thinking that their job was to keep feeding the Beast.

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.” They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing—in the form of time and patience—in order to grow. What this means is that they have a hard time coexisting with the Beast.

…when someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched—and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to let it evolve, it could be destroyed. Part of our job is to protect the new from people who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness.

It was obvious to us that a large portion of our costs stemmed from the fact that we never seemed to stop tinkering with the scripts of our movies, even long after we started making them. It didn’t take a genius to see that if we could only settle on the story early on, our movies would be much easier—and thus cheaper—to make. This then became our goal—finalize the script before we start making the film.

Looking back, I realize we weren’t just trying to be more efficient. We were hoping to avoid the messy (and at times uncomfortable) part of the creative process. We were trying to eliminate errors (and, in so doing, to efficiently feed our beast). Of course, it was not to be.

By insisting on the importance of getting our ducks in a row early, we had come perilously close to embracing a fallacy. Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.

When efficiency or consistency of workflow are not balanced by other equally strong countervailing forces, the result is that new ideas—our ugly babies—aren’t afforded the attention and protection they need to shine and mature. They are abandoned or never conceived of in the first place. Emphasis is placed on doing safer projects that mimic proven money-makers just to keep something—anything!—moving through the pipeline…

When I talk about the Beast and the Baby, it can seem very black and white—that the Beast is all bad and the Baby is all good. The truth is, reality lies somewhere in between. The Beast is a glutton but also a valuable motivator. The Baby is so pure and unsullied, so full of potential, but it’s also needy and unpredictable and can keep you up at night. The key is for your Beast and your Babies to coexist peacefully, and that requires that you keep various forces in balance.

But all Beasts have one thing in common. 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 people and their interests become too powerful—when there is not sufficient pushback to protect new ideas—things go wrong. The Beast takes over.

In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires—they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win. Their interaction with one another—the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals—yields the balance we seek. But that only happens if they understand that achieving balance is a central goal of the company.

“You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t ever even have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.” It is management’s job to figure out how to help others see conflict as healthy—as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run. I’m here to say that it can be done—but it is an unending job. A good manager must always be on the lookout for areas in which balance has been lost.

I could never fully explain how to achieve balance. That you learn only by doing—by allowing your conscious and subconscious mind to figure it out while in motion. With certain jobs, there isn’t any other way to learn than by doing—by putting yourself in the unstable place and then feeling your way.

Ownership & Recovery

…managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions. What does that mean? It means that we must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by things we thought we knew but didn’t. As long as our intentions—our values—remain constant, our goals can shift as needed. At Pixar, we try never to waver in our ethics, our values, and our intention to create original, quality products. We are willing to adjust our goals as we learn, striving to get it right—not necessarily to get it right the first time. Because that, to my mind, is the only way to establish something else that is essential to creativity: a culture that protects the new.

I know some people who like to keep their gem completely to themselves while they polish it. But allowing this kind of behavior isn’t protection. In fact, it can be the opposite: a failure to protect your employees from themselves. Because if history is any guide, some are diligently trying to polish a brick.

They didn’t want the added expense of paying the interns. They only had so much cash in their budget and would rather spend it on experienced people. They had only so much time and resources, and the Beast was bearing down upon them. Their reaction was a form of protection, I suppose, motivated by a desire to protect the film and to aim every dollar at making it a success. But this stance didn’t benefit the company as a whole.

I suppose I could simply have mandated that our production managers add the cost of adding interns to their budgets. But that would have made this new idea the enemy—something to resent. Instead, I decided to make the interns a corporate expense—they would essentially be available, at no extra cost, to any department who wanted to take them on.

A few years in, it became clear that we didn’t need to fund interns out of the corporate coffers anymore; as the program proved its worth, people became willing to absorb the costs into their budgets.

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy,” Ego says. “We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach Systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The Systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds.

“Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year.

Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.

If all our careful planning cannot prevent problems, then our best method of response is to enable employees at every level to own the problems and have the confidence to fix them. We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission. In this case, Galyn’s need to get her work done with a newborn at home led her to improvise and to download a version of the film once a week. Had she not solved that problem that way, Pixar would have missed its deadline on Toy Story 2, which would have been catastrophic for a small public company. People who act without an approved plan should not be punished for “going rogue.” A culture that allows everyone, no matter their position, to stop the assembly line, both figuratively and literally, maximizes the creative engagement of people who want to help. In other words, we must meet unexpected problems with unexpected responses.

Most people grasp the need to set priorities; they put the biggest problems at the top, with smaller problems beneath them. There are simply too many small problems to consider them all. So they draw a horizontal line beneath which they will not tread, directing all their energies to those above the line. I believe there is another approach: If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, waiting for approval. Mistakes will still be made, but in my experience, they are fewer and farther between and are caught at an earlier stage.

The silver lining of a major meltdown is that it gives managers a chance to send clear signals to employees about the company’s values, which inform the role each individual should expect to play.

Success Traps

For years, Disney employees attempted to keep his spirit alive by constantly asking themselves, “What would Walt do?” Perhaps they thought that if they asked that question they would come up with something original, that they would remain true to Walt’s pioneering spirit. In fact, this kind of thinking only accomplished the opposite. Because it looked backward, not forward, it tethered the place to the status quo. A pervasive fear of change took root. Steve Jobs was quite aware of this story and used to repeat it to people at Apple, adding that he never wanted people to ask, “What would Steve do?”

The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

We were going to screw up, it was inevitable. And we didn’t know when or how. We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem—a hidden problem. From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment.

…the more important goal for me was to try to remain vigilant, to always be on the lookout for signs that we were screwing up—without knowing, of course, when that would occur or how it might come to light.

But I believe the deeper issue is that the leaders of these companies were not attuned to the fact that there were problems they could not see. And because they weren’t aware of these blind spots, they assumed that the problems didn’t exist.

Gradually, snarky behavior, grousing, and rudeness disappeared from view—from my view, anyway. I rarely saw bad behavior because people wouldn’t exhibit it in front of me. I was out of a certain loop, and it was essential that I never lose sight of that fact. If I wasn’t careful to be vigilant and self-aware, I might well draw the wrong conclusions. The phenomenon I’m describing, rooted so firmly in that primal human drive for self-preservation, probably doesn’t sound surprising: We all know that people bring their best selves to interactions with their bosses and save their lesser moments for their peers, spouses, or therapists. And yet, so many managers aren’t aware of it when it’s happening…

This problem is not caused by hierarchy itself but by individual or cultural delusions associated with hierarchy, chiefly those that assign personal worth based on rank. By not thinking about how and why we value people, we can fall into this trap almost by default.

The leader’s view, then, is obstructed by these people who are skilled at figuring out what the leader wants. When viewed from a single vantage point, a full picture of the dynamics of any group is elusive. While we are all aware of these kinds of behaviors because we see them in others, most of us do not realize that we distort our own view of the world, largely because we think we see more than we actually do.

…it becomes even harder when you are successful. 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.

A visual effects producer named Denise Ream was in that meeting, and she spoke up with a fairly radical suggestion: Production would be cheaper and take fewer person-weeks (the measure—the amount of work a single person could accomplish in a week’s time—that we use to calculate budgets) if we did something that sounded completely counter to that goal: Delay when the animators started on their work.[*] Denise, who had the benefit of a broader perspective because before joining Pixar she’d worked for years at Industrial Light & Magic, was addressing a reality that she saw more clearly than any of us did: The eagerness to get going, which gave the impression of efficiency, was ultimately counterproductive because animators often had to redo their work as changes were made…which led to animators sitting around, waiting for assignments…which led to increased costs.

“I believe that animators will work faster than you’re giving them credit for,” Denise said, “if they have all the pieces they need when they begin.” Boy, was she 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 possible in a culture that acknowledges its own blind spots. It’s only possible when managers understand that others see problems they don’t—and that they also see solutions.

But having stumbled into greatness once, they are not eager for another trip into the unknown. That’s because success makes them warier than ever of failure, so they retreat, content to repeat what they have done before. They stay on the side of the known.

Denise figured out how to make trying something new feel less risky. When I talked to her about it later, she said she knew that the risk wasn’t as big as some of the others believed. Why? Because she wasn’t committing to it forever. “All along,” she told me, “I knew that if it didn’t work, we could simply stop doing it.” Over and over again, I’ve seen people decline to try a new approach because they fear doing so will set it in stone. Denise, by contrast, saw that an experiment is just that: an experiment.

Constraints & R&D

Often, the bigger an organization gets, the more decisions are made that feel to many employees like they are not tailored to their needs but are, instead, one size fits all. If you aren’t transparent about the reversibility of any proposed changes, you risk creating resentments among your employees.

When filmmakers, industrial designers, software designers, or people in any other creative profession merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it gives the illusion of creativity, but it is craft without art. Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft. Even though copying what’s come before is a guaranteed path to mediocrity, it appears to be a safe choice, and the desire to be safe—to succeed with minimal risk—can infect not just individuals but also entire companies. If we sense that our structures are rigid, inflexible, or bureaucratic, we must bust them open—without destroying ourselves in the process.

…artists who work on our films care so much about every detail that they will sometimes spend days or weeks crafting what Katherine Sarafian, a Pixar producer, calls “the equivalent of a penny on a nightstand that you’ll never see.”

The moment is over in three seconds, and during it, only a few of the CD cases are at all visible. But for every one of those CDs, Pixar artists created not just a CD cover but a shader—a program that calculates how an object’s rendering changes as it moves. “Can you see all the CD cases?” Sarafian says. “No. Was it fun to design them all? Yes. Maybe it was an in-joke, but there was someone on the crew who believed that each one of those was going to be seen close-up, and so they were lovingly crafted.” I don’t want to think about how many person-weeks this consumed. Clearly, something in our process had broken—the desire for quality had gone well beyond rationality. But because of the way production unfolded, our people had to work on scenes without knowing the context for them—so they overbuilt them just to be safe. To make things worse, our standards of excellence are extremely high, leading them to conclude that more is always more. How, then, do you fix the “beautifully shaded penny” problem without telling people, in effect, to care less or to be less excellent?

Many of our limits are imposed not by our internal processes but by external realities—finite resources, deadlines, a shifting economy or business climate. Those things, we can’t control. But the limits we impose internally, if deployed correctly, can be a tool to force people to amend the way they are working and, sometimes, to invent another way. The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.

…the limits we impose internally, if deployed correctly, can be a tool to force people to amend the way they are working and, sometimes, to invent another way. The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.

Another area where limits are invaluable is what we call “appetite control.” In Pixar’s case, when we are making a movie the demand for resources is literally bottomless. Unless you impose limits, people will always justify spending more time and more money by saying, “We’re just trying to make a better movie.” This occurs not because people are greedy or wasteful but because they care about their particular part of the film and don’t necessarily have a clear view of how it fits into the whole. They believe that investing more is the only way to succeed. In any creative endeavor, there is a long list of features and effects that you want to include to nudge it toward greatness—a very long list. At some point, though, you realize it is impossible to do everything on the list. So you set a deadline, which then forces a priority-based reordering of the list, followed by the difficult discussion of what, on this list, is absolutely necessary—or if the project is even feasible at all. You don’t want to have this discussion too soon, because at the outset, you don’t know what you are doing. If you wait too long, however, you run…

The solution we implemented may have been obvious, but here’s something that wasn’t: It could never have come from the people in the oversight group, because that would have required them to recognize and admit that their group’s existence was unnecessary. They were not in a position to challenge the preconception that their group was based on.

Creating this layer to enforce the limits actually made the limits less clear, diminishing their effectiveness. The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up? That approach never encourages a creative response. My rule of thumb is that any time we impose limits or procedures, we should ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If the answer is that they won’t, then the proposals are ill suited to the task at hand.

If Walt’s Nine Old Men didn’t use videotape, Andrew remembers telling Bob McCrea one day, maybe he shouldn’t either. “Don’t be an idiot,” Bob said. “If we’d had those tools then, we would have used them.”

I believe, however, that you should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected. Scientific research operates in this way—when you embark on an experiment, you don’t know if you will achieve a breakthrough. Chances are, you won’t. But nevertheless, you may stumble on a piece of the puzzle along the way—a glimpse, if you will, into the unknown. Our short films are Pixar’s way of experimenting, and we produce them in the hopes of getting exactly these kinds of glimpses. Over the years, Pixar has become known for including short films at the beginning of our feature films. These three- to six-minute films, each of which might cost as much as $2 million to make, certainly don’t yield any profits for the company; in the immediate term, then, they’re hard to justify.

While we’d used R&D to justify the program initially, we soon realized that our feature films were the major drivers of technological innovation—not our shorts.

And while we thought at first that directing a short would be superb preparation for directing a feature—a way to grow talent—we have come to believe we were wrong on this front, too. Directing a short is a terrific education, and some of what you learn will come in handy if you ever direct a feature. But the differences between directing a five-minute short and directing an 85-minute feature are many.

And yet, for all our faulty assumptions, the shorts accomplished other things for Pixar. People who work on them, for example, get a broader range of experience than they would on a feature, where the sheer scale and complexity of the project demand more specialization among the crew. Because shorts are staffed with fewer people, each employee has to do more things, developing a variety of skills that come in handy down the line. Moreover, working in small groups forges deeper relationships that can carry forward and, in the long term, benefit the company’s future projects.

Finally, we have learned that shorts are a relatively inexpensive way to screw up. (And since I believe that mistakes are not just unavoidable but valuable, this is something to be welcomed.)

Learning Loops

It is a fact of life, though a confounding one, that focusing on something can make it more difficult to see. The goal is to learn to suspend, if only temporarily, the habits and impulses that obscure your vision.

Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional.

It isn’t just postmortems, though: In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. Looking inward, to them, often boils down to this: “We are successful, so what we are doing must be correct.” Or the converse: “We failed, so what we did was wrong.” This is shallow. Do not be cowed into missing this opportunity.

I favor principles that lead you to think. Postmortems—but also other activities such as Braintrust meetings and dailies—are all about getting people to think and evaluate. The time we spend getting ready for a postmortem meeting is as valuable as the meeting itself. In other words, the scheduling of a postmortem forces self-reflection. If a postmortem is a chance to struggle openly with our problems, the “pre-postmortem” sets the stage for a successful struggle. I would even say that 90 percent of the value is derived from the preparation leading up to the postmortem.

By definition, postmortems are supposed to be about lessons learned, so if you repeat the same format, you tend to uncover the same lessons, which isn’t much help to anyone.

I’ve noticed what might be called a “law of subverting successful approaches,” by which I mean once you’ve hit on something that works, don’t expect it to work again, because attendees will know how to manipulate it the second time around.

Because we’re a creative organization, people tend to assume that much of what we do can’t be measured or analyzed. That’s wrong. Many of our processes involve activities and deliverables that can be quantified. We keep track of the rates at which things happen, how often something has to be reworked, how long something actually took versus how long we estimated it would take, whether a piece of work was completely finished or not when it was sent to another department, and so on.

A large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. The problem comes when people think that data paints a full picture, leading them to ignore what they can’t see. Here’s my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of what you do. And at least every once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.

I’ve known many people I consider to be creative geniuses, and not just at Pixar and Disney, yet I can’t remember a single one who could articulate exactly what this vision was that they were striving for when they started. In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself.

Andrew’s belief that we will all be happier and more productive if we hurry up and fail. For him, moving quickly is a plus because it prevents him from getting stuck worrying about whether his chosen course of action is the wrong one. Instead, he favors being decisive, then forgiving yourself if your initial decision proves misguided. Andrew likens the director’s job to that of a ship captain, out in the middle of the ocean, with a crew that’s depending on him to make land. The director’s job is to say, “Land is that way.” Maybe land actually is that way and maybe it isn’t, but Andrew says that if you don’t have somebody choosing a course—pointing their finger toward that spot there, on the horizon—then the ship goes nowhere. It’s not a tragedy if the leader changes her mind later and says, “Okay, it’s actually not that way, it’s this way. I was wrong.” As long as you commit to a destination and drive toward it with all your might, people will accept when you correct course. “People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you’ve effed up,” as Andrew says. “It’s a huge lesson: Include people in your problems, not just your solutions.”

Pete Docter compares directing to running through a long tunnel having no idea how long it will last but trusting that he will eventually come out, intact, at the other end. “There’s a really scary point in the middle where it’s just dark,” he says. “There’s no light from where you came in and there’s no light at the other end; all you can do is keep going. And then you start to see a little light and then a little more light and then, suddenly, you’re out in the bright sun.”

“I’m a firm believer in the chaotic nature of the creative process needing to be chaotic. If we put too much structure on it, we will kill it. So there’s a fine balance between providing some structure and safety—financial and emotional—but also letting it get messy and stay messy for a while. To do that, you need to assess each situation to see what’s called for. And then you need to become what’s called for.”

“The most talented members of Pixar’s workforce—whether they’re directors, producers, production staff, artists, whatever—are able to take the elevator to whatever floor and meet each person based on what they need in the moment and how they like to communicate. One person may need to spew and vent for twenty minutes about why something doesn’t look right before we can move in and focus on the details. Another person may be all about ‘I can’t make these deadlines unless you give me this particular thing that I need.’ I always think of my job as moving between floors, up and down, all day long.”

Leadership Awareness

What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position—that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.

What researchers later discovered by looking at the brain imaging was that even though the experienced meditators weren’t actively meditating in the course of the experiment, their threshold for pain was much higher than the non-meditators’. The meditators’ brains were paying attention to the pain, McGonigal explained, but because they knew how to turn off the inner chatter—the running commentary our untrained brains, or monkey minds, so happily serve up—they were better able to tolerate pain than those who did not practice meditation.

…the people who were suppressing thought that they were doing the same thing as the people who were addressing the problem. It is sobering to think that in trying to be mindful, some of us accidentally end up being exactly the opposite. We deflect and ignore. And for a while, at least, this behavior can even yield good results. But in the experiments McGonigal cited, people who’d made a practice of becoming mindful didn’t ignore the problem at hand—in this case, the painful heat source strapped to their legs. They saw and felt it for what it was but quieted their reaction to it—the brain’s natural tendency to amplify by overthinking—and thus coped much better.

Disney Merger

I knew that even when Steve and Michael’s relationship was at its worst, Steve still held the rest of Disney in high regard. For example, even when he didn’t agree with a proposal from Disney’s marketing folks, he would remind us privately that they knew more about that than he did.

Eisner was out, for one thing, having been replaced by Bob Iger. And one of Bob’s first acts as CEO had been to reach out to Steve in an effort to mend fences. Bob told Steve that Disney Animation was in trouble and that he didn’t know how to fix it. Bob’s honesty about that made Steve feel inclined to trust him. They’d then struck a deal to make the top shows on ABC available on iTunes, and that trust grew. To Steve, the ABC-iTunes deal demonstrated two things: Iger was a man of action, and he was willing to buck the knee-jerk, industry-wide trend to oppose distribution of entertainment content on the Internet.

But Walt Disney Company’s acquisition of Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion was not your typical merger. Steve had made sure of that. He proposed that John and I be put in charge of both Pixar and Disney Animation—I’d be president and John chief creative officer—because he thought, and Bob agreed, that if the leadership of the two studios were separate, an unhealthy competition would emerge that would eventually drag both studios down. (He also thought, frankly, that making us the stewards of both entities would guarantee that Pixar’s traditions didn’t get overtaken by those of the much larger corporation, the Walt Disney Company.)

A month earlier, at the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland, he’d had an epiphany. It happened as he was watching a parade of characters trooping by: Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Ariel…and Buzz Lightyear and Woody. “It occurred to me that the only classic characters that had been created in the past ten years were Pixar characters,” Bob said.

Something unusual had been built at Pixar, he said, and he wanted to understand it. For the first time in all the years that Pixar and Disney had worked together, someone from Disney was asking what we were doing that made our company different.

With Iger’s blessing, then, we set about drafting a document that came to be known as “The Five Year Social Compact.” This seven-page, single-spaced list was an enumeration of all the things that had to remain the same at Pixar, should the merger go through.

(Item number 1 ensured that Pixar’s executive team could still reward employees with bonuses, as Pixar has always done, once a film’s box-office receipts reached a certain benchmark.)

(Number 11, for example, stated that Pixar employees must remain free to exercise their creative freedom with their titles and names on their business cards; number 33 ensured that Pixar’s people could continue to exert “personal cube/office/space decorating to reflect person’s individuality.”)

(Number 29: “No assigned parking for any employee, including executives. All spaces are first-come, first served.”)

The minute the door shut behind us, Steve put his arms around us and began to cry, tears of pride and relief—and, frankly, love. He had succeeded in providing Pixar, the company he’d helped turn from a struggling hardware supplier into an animation powerhouse, with the two things it needed to endure: a worthy corporate partner in Disney and, in Bob, a genuine advocate.

Years later, I would ask the director Nathan Greno—who had been at Disney Animation for a decade when we arrived—what was going through his mind that morning when the merger was announced. “Here’s what I thought,” he told me. “I thought, ‘Maybe now the Disney I wanted to work for when I was a kid will come back.’ ”

Rebuilding Disney

I arranged to meet Disney’s facilities manager, Chris Hibler, for a tour. We started in the basement, and the first thing I noticed was the strange lack of personal items on employees’ desks. At Pixar, people’s work areas are virtual shrines to individuality—decorated, adorned, modified in ways that express the quirks and passions of the person who occupies that space. But here, the desks were sterile, cookie-cutter, utterly without personality.

In anticipation of my arrival, he confided, everybody had been told to clean off their desks in order to make “a good first impression.”

Employees were spread out over four floors, which made it a chore to drop in on one another. The bottom two floors were dungeon-like, with dreary, dropped ceilings, very few windows, and almost no natural light. Instead of inspiring and fostering creativity, it could hardly have felt more stifling and isolating. Upstairs on the top floor, the “executive suite” was set off by an imposing portal that discouraged entry—creating a sort of gated community kind of vibe. To put it simply, it struck me as a lousy work environment.

John and I made a point of leaving the shades on our office windows open so that people could see us and we could see them. Our goal—in our words and our actions—was to communicate transparency. Instead of a portal separating “us” from “them,” we installed a carpet whose brightly colored panels, like lanes of a road, guided people toward our offices, not away from them. We ripped out several walls to create a central gathering place right outside our doors, complete with a new coffee and snack bar.

One top executive at Disney got my attention right away by telling me that he didn’t know why Disney had bought Pixar in the first place. Apparently a lover of sports analogies, he told me that Disney Animation was on the one-yard line, ready to score. He felt Disney was on the verge of fixing its own problems—and finally ending its sixteen-year fallow period without a single number one film.

…as we talked to Disney directors, we discovered that they were used to receiving three sets of notes on their films. One came from the studio’s development department, another from the head of the studio, and a third from Michael Eisner himself. The notes were not, in fact, “notes.” They were mandatory, delivered as a list, with boxes next to each item—boxes that had to be checked as each note was executed. Even worse: None of the people who were giving these notes had ever made a film before, and the three sets of notes often conflicted with one another, creating a sort of schizophrenic quality to the feedback.

Afterward, one of the Disney directors confided to me that many people in the room had major reservations about the film but didn’t say what they thought because John had kicked things off so positively. Taking their cues from him, they didn’t want to go against what they thought he liked. Not trusting their own instincts, they held back.

…if they ever resorted to that kind of thinking again, we’d be finished as a studio.

“Disney Animation was sort of like a dog that had been beaten again and again,” Byron Howard, the director, told me when I asked him to describe the mindset back then. “The crew wanted to succeed, but they were afraid of pouring their hearts into something that wasn’t going to succeed. You could feel that fear. 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 create a crucible that boils away everything that’s not working and leaves the strongest framework.”

Accountability & Rewards

…my feeling about employment contracts is that they hurt the employee and the employer. The contracts in question were one-sided in favor of the studio, resulting in unexpected negative consequences. First and foremost, there was no longer any effective feedback between bosses and employees. If someone had a problem with the company, there wasn’t much point in complaining because they were under contract. If someone didn’t perform well, on the other hand, there was no point in confronting them about it; their contract simply wouldn’t be renewed, which might be the first time they heard about their need to improve. The whole system discouraged and devalued day-to-day communication and was culturally dysfunctional.

I believed that it was our responsibility to make sure that Disney Animation was a place that people would want to work; if our most talented people could leave, then we would have to be on our toes to keep them happy. When someone had a problem, we wanted it to be brought quickly to the surface, not to fester. Most people know that they don’t get their way on everything, but it is very important that they know they are being dealt with straightforwardly and that they, too, will be heard.

…we decided early on that Pixar and Disney Animation should remain completely separate entities. What this meant was that neither would do any production work for the other, no matter how pressing the deadlines or how dire the situation. No exceptions. Why? Because we wanted each studio to know that it could stand on its own and solve its own problems.[*1] If we made it easy for one studio to borrow people or resources from the other to help solve a problem, the upshot would be that we’d mask the problem. Not allowing such borrowing was a conscious choice on our part to force problems to the surface where we could face them head-on.

Rhino was key to the humor and exposition of the film, but the animators said that he was so hard to animate that it was impossible for them to finish on time. Desperate, we turned for help to the film’s technical directors and asked if they could simplify the character’s rigging to make it easier to animate. Their answer? Rerigging would take six months, or two-thirds of the time we had left. In other words we were screwed.

After this meeting, three members of the crew took it upon themselves, over the weekend, to remodel and rerig Rhino. Within a week, the project was back on track. Why was a problem that took a few days to solve originally projected to take six months? The answer, I think, lay in the fact that for too long, the leaders of Disney Animation placed a higher value on error prevention than anything else. Their employees knew there would be repercussions if mistakes were made, so the primary goal was never to make any.

With the best intentions, the film’s production managers had responded to the crisis with a timetable that would ensure a character that was fully functional with no errors. (The irony is that if a solution only takes a few days to find, then you don’t care so much if there are errors because you will have plenty of time to fix them.) But seeking to eliminate failure was in this instance—and, I would argue, most instances—precisely the wrong thing to do.

…we had to instill an ethos at Disney Animation that made that behavior okay whether or not they were successful. That ethos had been at the studio once, but it was sadly absent when we arrived.

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 their own rules, so long as those rules work. This fosters a sense of personal ownership and pride in the company that, to my mind, benefits the larger enterprise.

Released in November 2010, Tangled was a runaway success, artistically and commercially.

The movie went on to earn more than $590 million worldwide, becoming the second-highest-grossing film from Disney Animation ever, after The Lion King. The studio had its first number one hit in sixteen years, and the reverberations within the building were palpable.

We had learned long ago that while everyone appreciates cash bonuses, they value something else almost as much: being looked in the eye by someone they respect and told, “Thank you.” At Pixar, we’d devised a way to give our employees money and gratitude.

John and I join with the directors and producers and personally distribute checks to every person who worked on the film. This jibes with our belief that each film belongs to everyone at the studio…

The distribution of bonuses one by one can take a while, but we feel it’s essential to take the time to shake each person’s hand and tell them how much their contribution mattered.

Costs & Scale

…they didn’t know what was coming—we’d suggested to them that it was a general meeting. But when they saw the envelopes in our hands, they knew something was up. It was Ann’s idea to give each crew member a hot-off-the-presses DVD of the movie as well—a small gesture that made our gratitude feel even more genuine. To this day, some Tangled veterans still display framed copies of the letter they received that day on their office walls. Would it have been easier simply to wire bonuses into employees’ direct deposit accounts? Yes. But like I always say when talking about making a movie, easy isn’t the goal. Quality is the goal. The ship was beginning to turn—and it would only keep turning.

Many people believe that when two companies that are in the same business merge, it is wasteful to maintain two separate development groups, or marketing groups, or finance groups, or pipelines. But I believe the opposite. In a field like computer animation, where things are always changing—and at warp speed—forcing Pixar’s and Disney’s technical and production staffs to merge would actually have slowed progress down. In my view, we were better off maintaining two distinct groups that were friendly with one another but had different approaches to solving problems, so they could learn from one another.

Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and “vision” is often an illusion. But they must also feel safe—always—to speak their minds.

When costs are low, it’s easier to justify taking a risk. Thus, unless we lowered our costs, we would effectively limit the kinds of films that we would be able to make.

It costs less to make films with smaller crews, and everyone agrees that the smaller the crew, the better the working experience. It’s not just that a leaner crew is closer and more collegial; it’s that on a smaller production it’s easier for people to feel that they’ve made an impact.

Increasingly, we sensed that our people, having enjoyed years of success, were under a great deal of pressure not to fail. Nobody wanted to have worked on the first movie that didn’t open at number one. And the result was a growing temptation to pour too much visual detail into each film—to make it “perfect.”

As a company, our determination to avoid disappointments was also causing us to shy away from risk. The specter of past excellence was sapping us of some of the energy that we’d once used to pursue excellence.

“There’s a lightness and a speed at Disney that I want to see more of at Pixar,” John said.

Guido is vice president of our Tools Department, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how to keep his 120 engineers happy. His challenge on that front is real: His department develops technology, but Pixar doesn’t sell technology. It sells stories enabled by technology. Which means that when a Pixar engineer develops a piece of software, it is deemed successful only insomuch as it helps our movies get made. It is natural for people to wonder how much of a difference they, individually, have made on any given film, and sometimes they feel their contributions aren’t sufficiently appreciated. For engineers, that uncertainty can be particularly acute. Guido knows that if he’s not careful, that disconnect can lead to low morale. So to retain the best engineers, he works extra hard to make sure they enjoy their jobs.

Notes Day

Guido had already told me about how, in just four months, personal project days had reenergized his staff.

Now, as we contemplated how to achieve our goal of cutting costs by 10 percent, Guido had a simple suggestion. “Let’s ask Pixar’s people—all of them—for ideas about how to do it,” he said.

“What if we closed Pixar for the day? Everybody will come to work but all we’ll talk about is how to solve this problem. We dedicate an entire day to it.” The room was instantly abuzz. “This is so Pixar,” Andrew said. “Totally unexpected. Yes! You want people to get excited? That’s going to do it.”

From the start, he made clear what Notes Day was—and wasn’t. “This is not a call for working faster or doing more overtime or making do with fewer people,” he said in one town hall forum. “This is about making three films every two years with roughly the same number of people we’ve got today. We hope to rely on improvements in technology. We hope that productions can share resources and avoid reinventing the wheel each time. We hope that artists can benefit from greater clarity from the directors.” But to make good on these hopes—and to realize other areas in which we could improve—Pixar’s leaders needed everyone to speak up.

When people asked for guidance on how to be involved, Tom nudged them along, sending this hypothetical prompt to anyone who asked: “The year is 2017. Both of this year’s films were completed in well under 18,500 person-weeks…. What innovations helped these productions meet their budget goals? What are some specific things that we did differently?”

It’s all well and good to gather people to discuss workplace challenges, but it was extremely important that we find a way to turn all that talk into something tangible, usable, valuable. How the day was designed, we felt, would be the deciding factor in accomplishing that.

Each of the Notes Day discussion groups would be led by a facilitator recruited from among the company’s production managers. The week before Notes Day, all facilitators attended a training session…

…to make sure something concrete emerged, the Working Group designed a set of “exit forms” to be filled out by each session’s participants.

Red forms were for proposals, blue forms were for brainstorms, and yellow forms were for something we called “best practices”—ideas that were not action items per se but principles about how we should behave as a company. The forms were simple and specific: Each session got its own set, tailored specifically to the topic at hand, that asked a specific question.

John often plays the role of inspirer-in-chief, and the people at Disney and Pixar alike rely on his energy and optimism. But this was no rah-rah call to action. Ambling to the front of the stage, John proceeded to deliver the most heartfelt and emotional speech I had ever heard him give.

“So, today, please be honest,” John continued. “And those of you in management positions, be aware that some of this is going to feel like it’s directed at you personally. I’m not kidding. It’s going to happen. But put your tough skin on, and for the sake of Pixar, speak up, and don’t stop the honesty. Trust me. That’s what today is about. It’s about making Pixar better forever, for all of you and for the next generations of Pixarians. This is going to fundamentally change the company for the better. But it starts with you.” It was time to go to class.

Notes Day was led from within. Many companies hire outside consulting firms to organize their all-staff retreats, and I understand why: Doing them well is a monumental, enormously time-consuming undertaking. But that our own people made Notes Day happen was, I believe, key to its success.

Feedback Systems

My goal has never been to tell people how Pixar and Disney figured it all out but rather to show how we continue to figure it out, every hour of every day. How we persist. The future is not a destination—it is a direction. It is our job, then, to work each day to chart the right course and make corrections when, inevitably, we stray. I already can sense the next crisis coming around the corner. To keep a creative culture vibrant, we must not be afraid of constant uncertainty. We must accept it, just as we accept the weather. Uncertainty and change are life’s constants. And that’s the fun part.

Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.

We did not address all of the problems raised during Notes Day; we certainly didn’t meet all our employees’ expectations. (I should warn any reader who is seeking to mimic Notes Day at their own company: You can never meet all your employees’ expectations.)

Pixar’s people measured the movies they made against Pixar’s previous films. Within the studio, that created enormous pressure to perform that went beyond mere fear of failure. On each successive film, our people were essentially trying to outdo themselves on innovation, on budget, on profit—a perpetual cycle that was wearing them out and getting in the way of the very success they sought.

I know that sounds honorable—it was honorable—but it had a downside: This emotional feeling was so strong that it overrode their logic when they made key decisions.

I’m happy to say that with one exception (The Good Dinosaur, whose costs went up when we changed directors late in production), every movie since Notes Day has, on average, met our 18,500 person-week goal.

Beginning in December 2013, when we announced Notesar, any staff member who attended a rough, in-progress screening would receive an email afterward with a link to a list of questions. Did they feel connected to the characters? Why or why not? Were the emotional moments landing? Did they think the movie would have meaning to viewers?

Why wait to get feedback from strangers at a test screening (which typically occurs late in a film’s production) when you can get notes, both good and bad, sooner from your trusted colleagues?

“Back in the day, pirates wanted to feel as connected to their mission as possible,” Frankel and Hessler said. “And captains wanted to feel connected to their crew so as not to fear mutiny. So on many ships, the crew agreed that after every battle, if they were dissatisfied with their captain, they could choose a new one. This ensured that pirate captains always were in sync with their peers. Each captain was, in essence, a Peer Pirate.”

These people would serve one-year terms, they said, and could not be managers—“to keep them as approachable as possible.” They proposed calling them Pixar’s Peer Pirates.

…in 2013, we learned that a producer on one of our films had explicitly discouraged that kind of free-flowing communication, declaring, in essence, “What happens on this film stays on this film.” Eventually, we replaced that producer. Nonetheless, it was a clear indication that even beyond that one film, a culture of secrecy had taken hold, casting a pall on the studio. This growing lack of candor was unacceptable, Hessler and Frankel told us. “It’s great that Pixar places a high value on playing nice with others,” they said. “But this creates a conflict-averse culture that can lead to resentment and hurt morale. Also, many ideas which could increase efficiency are either shot down or never heard. Employees need safe places to speak with their guard down.”

“Improvements could be implemented more effectively,” they reasoned, “if people weren’t walking on eggshells.”

Leadership & Talent

Steve was quiet for a minute, and we kept walking. Then he goes, “You know, Pete, the jury is still out as to whether you’re going to make it as a director.” And then he went on, implying that I was indecisive and so on. By this time, I’m not even hearing anything. I’m just walking, nodding. And he finally ends by saying, “So I suggest this be your last vacation for a while.” My family was in Hawaii for another three days after Steve left, but I was miserable. I didn’t sleep. When I got back to the office, I told Ed Catmull what happened. He just nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s Steve’s idea of a pep talk.”

…we changed Leadership Quickstart from a voluntary program to a mandatory one. We also changed the way we implemented it. “We decided it couldn’t just be about pulling people out of the workday to go to a training session,” Jamie recalls. “It had to be introduced into the flow of work.” Starting immediately, when a person was promoted into management, they received a congratulatory letter that told them LQ was one of many resources that were available to them (and specified when they were expected to attend).

Oddly, instead of revealing specific employee concerns, as we had hoped, the Peer Pirates were giving us a more general appraisal. We wanted to hear about the trees, but the Pirates kept talking about the forest. Our conclusion: We’d organized this effort the wrong way.

Instead of meeting with all the departments’ Peer Pirates at once, what if we asked each Peer Pirate to select six or seven colleagues from within their own department to form their own subgroup to meet with us? Jim predicted that these smaller, department-focused meetings would yield more penetrating analysis.

Of all our production departments, only two didn’t complain about how we cast our movies: Animation and Editorial. Jim and I were fascinated by this. What were these two departments doing differently?

“Your reluctance to cast unproven talent makes no sense because almost everybody rises to the occasion.” And yet, they still couldn’t bring themselves to do it—to embrace that 5 percent risk—because their emotional need to deliver a great film was overriding their logic. They viewed the hypothetical problems they were sure to face as very large risks, which led them to try to eliminate all other risks. So they tried to cherry-pick only the most proven people.

We soon learned that in the Animation Department, the casting process—while not perfect—was done differently. Department supervisors, senior managers, and associate producers worked together to assign people to each movie. Their view was that they knew their people better than anyone else. And because they wanted their entire department to thrive over the long term, they had an incentive to provide opportunities to people at all levels of mastery (not just to whoever was already seen to be on the A-team). That was the key: prioritizing the long-term good of the department.

“We rank our employees from Beginner to Exemplary,” Andy told me. “When I came in, the bulk of the group was ranked somewhere in the middle.” Beall attributed this to a lack of coaching. “Five or six years later, the average rank was closer to everyone exceeding expectations,” he said. “We didn’t doctor the results. We just changed the process to focus on: How do we make people stronger?”

I think Notes Day inadvertently contributed to a huge issue, where more and more employees feel they have a right to comment on everything, and some are resentful if their ideas don’t get acted on. This has been an exhausting trend to manage, and it is often hard to end the conversation.

…part of what gives a one-of-a-kind event like Notes Day its power is its singularity. Some things you cannot repeat. If you repeat the same process, you are unlikely to learn much. People begin repeating patterns because of what they think is expected. What was once new becomes the status quo. We need to try something different if we are to learn something different.

Creative Differences

Whether they occur in the arts, in literature, in science, in engineering, or in culture building, creative acts are deemed “creative” precisely because they are new. It is the job of good leaders to hold on to programs or mechanisms as long as they work, while never forgetting that we have to keep trying something new.

I realized that I had almost no ability to hold images in my mind. Even my dreams lacked pictures. While I drew a lot as a child and was a reasonably good artist in high school, I could never “see” what I was working on in my mind when my eyes were shut.

When the article was published, Dr. Zeman began hearing from other people—people like me—who said they had never had the ability to visualize. I began an email correspondence with him to learn more about this phenomenon, a variation on human experience that I told him Glen Keane and I shared. Dr. Zeman called it aphantasia, based on a Greek concept meaning “without imagery.”

…my level of aphantasia was “moderately rare”—he estimates maybe 2 percent of the population (one in fifty people) have it.

Paul said he’d suspected that he and John used different approaches. “John would be like, ‘I’m always looking for that key visual image that sums up a sequence.’ And I would think, ‘That’s so weird—for me, I need to know the key emotion.’ But mostly I was in awe of his process—his ability to ‘see’ what we were working on.” Notably, Paul had never described this to John because he worried that it reflected poorly on him. “It was hard to talk about, because the fact that I couldn’t see like John did made me feel like a charlatan,” Paul recalled. Until he heard about my discoveries, Paul didn’t know that he was one of many aphantasic animators at Disney and Pixar. He wrongly thought he was alone!

“I can’t see what I want to draw ahead of time,” he told me. “I know what I’m feeling and searching for, but I can’t see it.”

Back then, he said, he sometimes “feared the blank page. And I was jealous of my colleagues who embraced the blank page because they could already ‘see’ what would fill it.” (Only now did he understand that some of them were hyperphantasic.)

Because aphantasic artists had to iterate more to “find” the drawings their emotions evoked, Andy noticed that some in leadership positions deemed their early drawings “too messy” and their work process “too slow.”

Leadership Signals

It is vital that departing leaders make clear the values that the next generation is inheriting. Why is it vital? Because if those values aren’t communicated, they can be lost.

Throughout his life, he was always curious about and driven by technological change. Whether adding sound or color to his earliest films or putting animatronics to work in his theme parks, he always embraced whatever state-of-the-art technology could push his studio’s work forward. But after he died, the people who took over at Walt Disney Animation didn’t fully understand their founder’s commitment to technology. Walt was such a monumental, towering figure that the people who followed him were afraid to make any changes that might mess with his legacy. Other than at Disney Imagineering, the company basically stopped investing in technology, and the result was a culture of sameness—of merely mimicking what came before.

During those final months, I met with every single team at both studios, delivering a series of one-hour talks about what I’d learned and what ideals I hoped my colleagues would continue to nurture once I was no longer there. By design, these meetings were small—I didn’t want my colleagues to feel talked at; I wanted a conversational atmosphere.

…when new people are hired into a successful organization, they look around and make certain assumptions. No matter what they are told about the values of the place they’re joining, the behaviors they observe shape their understanding of the environment and its supposed rules. They assume that what they see is the norm and that they should fall in line. Some veteran employees fall into the same trap. The result: Even unintended or accidental patterns become set in stone as more and more people perceive them to be accepted practice and then emulate them.

It may sound obvious to say, but leaders set the tone. I like to say the best leaders don’t tell people how to act—they behave in a way that makes it safe for others to participate and be themselves.

And one of the most important ways to encourage risk-taking is to quietly affirm those who push boundaries.

Playfulness is crucial in any creative environment.

It’s really about delivering subtle messages—signals—to your people that reveal how you think about them and their environment. I believe strongly that managers of creative companies need to pay attention to the kind of signals they are sending. It can be as simple as encouraging your people as they try something unusual or as complicated as Pixarpalooza, our semiannual concert featuring bands that Pixar people have founded. The easiest way to endorse playfulness is to be playful yourself.

At Pixar, people are urged to follow and harness their personal passions. I believe that without passion—intense feelings about subjects, projects, stories, or approaches—there is no creativity. But with passion can come an intensity that some people mistake for conflict. I think it’s important to tease this out, because when people confuse the two, it can detract from their willingness to be candid.

When people feel as if speaking bluntly about something may seem too judgmental, they pull back. I know that people don’t like to judge or be judged, but when that preference gets in the way of telling it like it is, we need to be careful. Being candid doesn’t have to mean that we are attacking or being attacked. The key is to be thoughtful as we deliver criticism. If everyone in the room shares the same goal—making the movie the best it can be—I believe even passionate criticism can be offered, and heard, in a positive way.

Practicing our skills gives us more to be creative with but in and of itself doesn’t make us more creative. That is why the focus of this book is about removing obstacles, both inside ourselves and in others. There is greater leverage in removing barriers to creativity than in trying to grow it where it doesn’t exist.

The older I get, the more I believe that creativity requires no longer clinging to old ways, enjoying the growth of others, and thus creating an environment of both safety and responsibility. Creativity demands that we participate in relentless change, but it is best expressed in our understanding of and relationships with others.

I have no way of judging what someone’s talents are, but I can work to remove what stands in their way. I can make the environment better. The rest is up to them.

Steve Jobs Legacy

In the time I worked with Steve, he didn’t just gain the kind of practical experience you would expect to acquire while running two dynamic, successful businesses; he also got smarter about when to stop pushing people and how to keep pushing them, if necessary, without breaking them. He became fairer and wiser, and his understanding of partnership deepened—in large part because of his marriage to Laurene and his relationships with the children he loved so much. This shift didn’t lead him to abandon his famous commitment to innovation; it solidified it. At the same time, he developed into a kinder, more self-aware leader. And I think Pixar played a role in that development.

Steve sensed that there was something quite special going on at Pixar, but it frustrated him that he couldn’t figure it out—and kept losing money in the meantime. He had an expensive group that was ahead of its time. Could he hang on long enough for that potential to flower, especially if he didn’t know if it ever would flower? What kind of person signs on for that? Would you?

We tend to think of emotion and logic as two distinct, mutually exclusive domains. Not Steve. From the beginning, when making decisions, passion was a key part of his calculus.

He respected our determination to be the first to make a computer-animated feature film. He didn’t tell us how to do our work or come in and impose his will. Even when we were unsure how to reach our goal, our passion was something Steve recognized and valued. That’s what Steve, John, and I ultimately bonded over: passion for excellence—a passion so ardent we were willing to argue and struggle and stay together, even when things got extremely uncomfortable.

It wasn’t that passion trumped logic in Steve’s mind. He was well aware that decisions must never be based on emotions alone. But he also saw that creativity wasn’t linear, that art was not commerce, and that to insist upon applying dollars-and-cents logic was to risk disrupting the thing that set us apart. Steve put a premium on both sides of this equation, logic and emotion, and the way he maintained that balance was key to understanding him.

I recall Steve being critical of numerous facets of the building’s layout, but after an hour or so wandering around the place, I could tell he was getting the message: Creating separate buildings for each film would be isolating. He saw firsthand the way that the Disney people took advantage of the open floor plan, sharing information and brainstorming.

After that trip, he met again with his architects and laid out the principles for a single building. He took the creation of a new Pixar headquarters as a personal responsibility.

Steve had a remarkable knack for letting go of things that didn’t work. If you were in an argument with him, and you convinced him that you were right, he would instantly change his mind. He didn’t hold on to an idea because he had once believed it to be brilliant. His ego didn’t attach to the suggestions he made, even as he threw his full weight behind them. When Steve saw Pixar’s directors do the same, he recognized them as kindred spirits.

Steve stopped in the hallway and said he had been working on a list of three things he wanted to do—and I remember the words precisely—“before I sail away.”

To hear this once-unstoppable man scaling back his hopes and ambitions to a handful of last wishes was heartbreaking, of course, but I remember thinking that when Steve said it, it sounded natural. It felt like he had come to terms with the inevitability of not being here. In the end, he would achieve all three of his goals.

All of us who knew Steve well noticed the transformation. He became more sensitive not only to other people’s feelings but also to their value as contributors to the creative process. His experience with Pixar was part of this change. Steve aspired to create utilitarian things that also brought joy; it was his way of making the world a better place. That was part of why Pixar made him so proud—because he felt the world was better for the films we made.

There is a phrase that many have used to describe Steve’s knack for accomplishing the impossible. Steve, they say, employed a “reality distortion field.”

Much has been made of Steve’s refusal to follow rules—realities—that applied to others; famously, for example, he did not put a license plate on his car. But to focus too much on this is to miss something important. He recognized that many rules were in fact arbitrary.

Most people believe that their actions have consequences but don’t think through the implications of that belief. But Steve did. He believed, as I do, that it is precisely by acting on our intentions and staying true to our values that we change the world.

I remember him saying that he felt honored to have been a part of Pixar’s success. I told him I felt honored, too, and was thankful for his friendship, his example, and his loyalty. When we hung up, I said to myself, “That was the goodbye call.” I was right: He would live six more weeks, but I would never hear his voice again.

Candor & Process

There are many valid reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them.

If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.

A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent—address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier.

An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it. Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.

Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.

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 the goal. Making the product great is the goal.