Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration…
Introduction: Lost and Found
Ed Catmull is one of the Founder of Pixar, and the president of Pixar and Disney Animation. When Toy Story was released, he accomplished, after 20 years of efforts, his life objective: producing a computer-animated movie. The culture at Pixar is unique, some of the practices: - When we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to overcome it. - 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. - We had not let technology overwhelm our real purpose: making a great film.
After Toy Story, Ed could not define his next challenge. He needed something more than releasing movies after movies. After one year of introspection, he found it: finding ways to build and sustain a creative culture in the company. More precisely, his objective became to identify the hidden forces that hinder companies creativity, and destroy so many of them. These forces are: uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot see. Successful leaders have this kind of awareness, and they engage with these problems.
Part I: Getting Started
Chapter 1: Animated
During his boyhood, Ed had 2 idols: Walt Disney and Albert Einstein. But he found his aspiration more towards Walt Disney, as a symbol of a “creativity”. Every week, he would avidly watch the Disney program on TV. The 50s and the 60s were decades of great optimism in the US. In 1969, Ed graduated from the University of Utah (U of U), and he studied with prof. Ivan Sutherland, the pioneer of interactive computer graphics. This work was funded by ARPA. This professor would have a deep influence on him. In 1972, Ed made his first animated short-movie: Hand, a 3D representation of his hand, with texture. This was groundbreaking for the time. He also invented the “Z-Buffer” algorithm, which is one of the important algorithm used today in all graphical applications.
Chapter 2: Pixar is born
For Ed, this is 40 years of learning how to be a manager. In 1974, he was hired at the New York Institute of Technology by Alex Schure a Millionaire, who had the objective of making a computer-animated movie. Although young, Ed was nominated manager, and had to build a team. He hired Alex Ray Smith “Alvy”, someone that had better diploma, and skills as he had. This was a threat to Ed, but he decided to do it anyway. Alvy became his friend, this was one of the best decision he made. Always try to hire people smarter than you. The lesson was also: when faced with a challenge, get smarter. Alvy and Ed decided to open their work: publish about it, do not keep only for themselves as would do other institutions. In 1977, Star Wars was opened in theaters. George Lucas hired Ed - after some successful interviews where he demonstrated his honesty, clarity of vision and openness. Ed (and Alvy) moved to the west coast. Ed would lead a department, and had to hire also there, and managers - as he could not manage alone such a large team. There, experimentation was valued, but in the context of a for-profit company. Managing was hard. And there were some failures such as when trying to introduce a change with their new computer program and machine named Pixar that combined special effects with a real movie. They also hired John Lassenter, a brilliant story teller, who had been dismissed from Disney Animation Studio… currently going through a rough period, with loss of creativity, and many brilliant employees departure. After his divorce, George Lucas decided to sell his animation studio. The next year was very stressful. After many other options (including GM and Philips), Steve Jobs bought the company that would be named Pixar. He did it because he wanted - not to own an animation studio - but to build the next generation of home computers to compete with Apple. He bought Pixar 5 M\(, and with the promise to invest another 5 M\). Whatever happens, we have to be loyal to each other he said at the signature.
Chapter 3: A Defining Goal
1986: Ed finds now himself at the CEO position of a company that is supposed to sell high-end computers. But he has no clue about how to achieve that. They had to hire lots of staff, and manage thousands of problems. The hardest part for a manager: knowing on what to focus attention on. A hard part was also to manage a sane relationship with Steve Jobs. Inspiration to solve problems came from the japanese companies, Deming, and the Toyoto Production System. While Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT, Pixar was financially in the red. Steve tried several times to sell Pixar, but he did not accept prices offered. Then, in 1991, Pixar - which was also producing computer-animated movies - struck a 3-movies deal with Disney as a distributor. John Lassenter started to write the future scenario of Toy Story. At this time, Steve Jobs senses that it was the right time to go for an IPO so as to raise capital before the release of Toy Story. After this grand success, Ed had to face an internal problem: the production managers were reluctant to sign for another film, they felt disrespected by the artists and the technical staff. This was a serious break in the cohesion of the company. And that triggered for Ed a new mission. He had to see the problems. He assigned himself this mission: Figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture - one that doesn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence, communication, originality, and self-assessment but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became - wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. And one that I wanted to do.
Chapter 4: Establishing Pixar’s Identity
Pixar at this time had 2 principles: “Story is King” and “Trust the Process”. But, the production of Toy Story 2 turns out to be very difficult. To the point that the management decided to rework it significantly very late in the planning, against the will of Disney. It was a major challenge, and the team had to make a huge effort, with personal sacrifices and burn-out for many. Fixing the scenario and the movie was the responsibility of a group that emerged organically. What happened is that the previous team could not make a great story from the initial ideas. But the second team, on the same basis, managed to come up with a beautiful, successful story and movie. What is the lesson of this wake-up experience ? Trusting the process is not the right principle. We should trust the People. Ideas don’t come afloat from the ether, the good ideas are generated by a good team of people. A good team is not only made of bright people, but more so, made of people who complement well each-other, and who work well together, collectively. So the key is to build a great team. Also, as in the Toyoto Production System, anyone should be able to stop the “assembly line” to solve a problem he has identified. And preserving the health (physical and mental) of employees, contributing to their happiness at work, and outside work, pays a lot of dividends in the long run for the company. This difficult period, overcome collectively, defined Pixar identity for long.
Part II: Protecting The New
Chapter 5: Honesty and Candor
At work, there are often reasons not to be honest due to fear and the instinct of self-preservation. What to do about it ? We have first to forget about the moral baggage of honesty, and use the word: candor. Candor is frankness, and is voluntary. At Pixar, a group called the Braintrust emerged organically. This group composed of the most experienced and skilled, was a highly-functioning group. Their mission: review the progress of a new film, criticize it constructively. They were diagnosing the problems (in the scenario, in the film, etc) and raising them to the producer. By doing so, the Braintrust was providing an immensely valuable feedback with candor to the film team. And at the beginning, frankly, all the films are bad ! The Braintrust: - Is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling and having been through the process themselves, - Has no authority ! - Does not solve problems, but discovers and shows them ! To build a Braintrust, you must have people around you that make you think smarter, and puts lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. You want Candor in the meeting rooms, not in the hallways !
Chapter 6: Fear And Failure
As children at schools, we learn to fear failures. This shouldn’t be. Failure is the source of learning. Even if failure is painful, this is when we fail that we really learn. So how to learn as quickly as possible: to be wrong as fast as you can is to sign up for aggressive, rapid learning. Fail early and fail fast ! We must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future. But to experiment things, we have to go down a path, and “explore the neighborhood”. Over-planning, spending too much time mapping out a path, is not valuable, this is an escape from exploring and failing, and thus this is an escape from learning. When do we know that a project is failing: when the director has lost the confidence of his team. When this happens, the management must act. In a creative company, the goal is to uncouple fear and failure. You trust the employee, not that they will not make any mistake, but that if they make some, they will do their best to rectify them. At Pixar, this culture was so well established that they were considering suspicious the lack of failures in the development of a movie (as it was the case for Toy Story 3). Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
Chapter 7: The Hungry Beast And The Ugly Baby
At Disney, Ed witnessed the formation of a “Beast”: a large group that needs to be fed an uninterrupted diet of new material and resources in order to function. When a company grows, after its first successes, its business gets hungry for more. There is a pressure to produce, to repeat the same and get the same results. That is what happened to Disney, and probably led to its period of creative decline, and employee drought from 1994 to 2010. It was the result of employees thinking that their job was to feed the Beast. On the other side, there is the New, the “Ugly Baby”. It is the unformed, awkward new. It needs to be protected. Early criticism would easily destroy the Baby. What is exciting about the new, is its potential. While the obsession of the Beast, is to improve its Process, its productivity, losing sight of this: making the process better is not the goal, making something great is the goal. This is not all black and white. The Beast is also a motivator, and the Ugly Baby is sometimes too demanding. The key is for the Beast and the Ugly Baby to coexist peacefully, and to keep the various groups in the organization in balance. The most difficult is to curb the Beast appetite for more. Feeding the Beast should never become the central focus. A good manager is one that is on the lookout for a balance. When we introduce the new, we cannot avoid Complexity, and there will be Inertia and opposition. To move forward, we need to accept to take Risks and protect the new. The new needs to be protected, the established doesn’t need. The new needs friends.
Chapter 8: Change And Randomness
Ed once said to Pixar’s all employees (at the time of the merger with Disney): “Pixar will never change”. This was the dumbest thing he ever said ! And he had to correct his say many times after to explain that changes are still needed. The key is to remember that there is no growth or success without change. Every organization has a tendency to fight change. As we becomes successful, our approaches are reinforced, and we become even more resistant to change. But change and randomness are inherent to Life (and its beauty), and they are the source of Creativity. Steve Jobs had this ability to change his mind completely and instantly in the light of new facts. Opposition to change can come from self-interests, or from a lack of self-awareness - becoming blind to one’s own faults. That is what happened to the music industry when confronted to Apple and its iTunes. In Life, randomness always plays a decisive part as well. There are many, many uncontrolled events that decide our fate, our successes and our failures. So the reality is complex, and we need to acknowledge the complexity and richness of causes. We often tend to oversimplify our understanding (using the famous Occam’s Razor, in search of a single simplest explanation). We need to understand how pervasive randomness is, and accept it. Big problems and Small problems are in fact similar in nature, and even the small problems may have a huge impact one day if we don’t fix them. How do we deal with that ? The solution is to empower every employee at every level to tackle the problems they see. We need a culture of creative engagement where anyone can “stop the assembly line” to fix a problem. Human potential is also unpredictable. We don’t know how much an employee will rise up to make a difference. Working with change is what creativity is about.
Part III: Building and Sustaining
Chapter 10: Broadening Our View
Individually our view of the world is distorted, but it can get even worse when we are in a group. A group has a complex intertwined mental model, that can be completely distorted. How do we prevent our brain models to distort reality and prevent us from being creative, or worse prevent us from being able to function as a group ?
Dailies : Dailies are meetings run every morning when someone, or a team present to the rest of the company (directors and colleagues) their current work, what they have achieved so far. They open themselves to constructive criticism. Employees want to please, impress, and show their worth. Their creativity gets magnified by the feedback they receive from others. They see more clearly.
Research Trips: Pixar believes in the power of research. One way to research for a film is to go the real place with a field trip. Such trips fuel the films’ development, the artists’ inspiration. They enable a real attention to the details, and make the films a true creation.
The Power of Limits: Some limits can push a team to be creative in the search for solutions. It can be a tight deadline, a lower budget, etc. But the limits must not be artificial, and the team must be in charge to find by itself the way out. For resources management, Pixar came to evaluate work with the unit of “person-week”.
Integrating Technology and Art: as John Lassenter said: “Art challenges technology, technology inspires art”. Steve Jobs lived also with that principle.
Short Experiments: short experiments are superb ways of discovering things and an opportunity for a small team of people to learn to work together and tie bounds.
Learning to See: at the Pixar University, learning to draw provides the insight that without active effort and active training, we do not really see the reality as it is. Our mind obscures reality.
Postmortems: A postmortem is a meeting to explore what worked and what did not work. It is an exercise of self-assessment. As such it is not easy: people fear self-assessment. One way to ease the feelings is to ask every one to list the top 5 things that they would do again, and the top 5 things they wouldn’t do again. This is important to avoid blaming and resentment. Data can be of help too. We often hear the word: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. This is true to some extent only as we cannot measure the majority of what we do.
Continuing to Learn: This is essential to keep learning all our life long. That is why Pixar established the Pixar University: to provide free courses in many different areas to its employees. We have to push ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. In Zen, an achievement is to reach the “not know mind” (Korean Zen), or the “beginner’s mind” (Japanese Zen). When we attempt to avoid failures, when we stay with the same knowledge, with the same practices, we end up making failures more likely.
Chapter 11: The Unmade Future
There is a false romantic idea about creativity: that creative people get their creation in a flash of inspiration. The reality is very different: creative people work out their vision through focus effort, struggling to clarify their ideas. Creating something new is not a sprint, it is a marathon. Creativity is about going to a place where nobody has been before. We need to linger in that scary place. To avoid panick or desperation, we need the support of mental models. Mental models help us, fortify us when we are creating. A guitar teacher said: do not think. At Pixar, some say: be decisive, select a course of action and move forward until you are proven wrong. Some compare directing a movie to running through a long tunnel having no idea how long it will last, until they see light again. Some imagine themselves into a maze, trying to find their way out. Some thing that they are at an archaeological dig. Some have the image of climbing a mountain blindfolded. But this analogy is not exact: in fact, they are building themselves the mountain they are climbing ! For the producer, it is about balancing competing needs. Good producers need to meet and discuss with many different people. They think about taking an elevator and meeting each and every one in his own floor. We need these models to keep fear in place, to make decisions, and to feel that progress is made. The search for a clear mind is one of the characteristics of creative people. Meditation (meditative retreats) is a also a way to practice such a quest. For beginners at meditation, experiences show that the brain tries to suppress problems (pain). This is not the aim: meditation should lead to self-awareness, and the calm acknowledgment of problems to be solved.
Part IV: Testing What We Know
Chapter 12: A New Challenge
In January 2006, this was the merger of Pixar and Disney, as wished by Steve Jobs and Bob Iger. This merger would be the opportunity to test in a new context ideas about how to build a creative organization. The condition of the merger were clearly defined. Pixar and Disney Animation would remain two distinct studios. Pixar would keep its own identity and its own culture, with a manifesto of 59 bullet points that could not be altered in their way of working. One of them, was the freedom of Pixar employees to work without a contract, and be free to use their artistic talents also outside of the company. Then Ed and John Lassenter started to repair Disney Animation Studio. They discovered at Disney Animation a sense of alienation among the employees. Too much emphasis by every employee on trying to just prevent errors ! Ed and John created a new feedback group, similar to Pixar’s Braintrust. They eliminated the practice of the previous management who was sending “mandatory notes” (a practice of command and control). They also enabled employees to work without a contract as Pixar’s employees. And they created a culture of candor, and open feedback at all levels. They also took care of thanking personally employees after a successful film. After a few years, Disney Animation became also a functioning, creative studio, not exactly as Pixar, but quite as good.
Chapter 13: Notes Day
As years passed, with growth and success, the culture at Pixar started to decline. Some employee found that it was not safe anymore to offer differing ideas, there was again the fear of failures. Ed and John were looking for a way to reinvigorate the studios. They heard about the “personal project days” established in one engineering department. Inspired by this, they decided to run a company-wide event called “Notes Day”. A problem statement was proposed to the employees: what could enable the company to produce a creative, successful film with a budget 10% lower (in person-weeks) as today ? During this day, there was no usual work, and more than one thousand employees participated, forming thematic groups, to brainstorm and find ideas to improve the studio, and fix internal problems. There was almost 300 discussion topics. There were notes for brainstorms, proposals, and best practices. A topic was about “helping directors understand costs in story”, another was about “how to improve productivity”, another “what can we learn from work at other companies”, and so on. People brainstormed in group with other employee they usually don’t work with. Hundreds and hundreds of Notes were received. The Notes Day was a foundational event, it repaired the culture, it emphasized to all that when we face a problem, we mush marshal all our energies to solve it. Unleashing creativity requires to loosen controls, accept risks, trust colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. The goal is to achieve excellence.
Afterword: The Steve we knew
Ed had the chance to work closely with Steve Jobs during 26 years. Steve Jobs was not as he is now described in most biographies. He was a true genius that knew how to balance emotion and logic. He could be harsh and difficult, but at the same time, he knew how to change his mind in the light of new facts or new ideas. He deeply understood that employees are the most important assets of a company, and that their creative abilities must be preserved. That is why he took at heart the project of the new Pixar building (now named the Steve Jobs building). He was caring. He was true to his intention and his values of passion, creativity, art, product excellence at the service of people. This book is dedicated to him.
Starting Points: Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture
In this section, there are too many jewels to list them all. Just a few below… - Always try to hire people that are smarter than you… even if it seems like a potential threat. - If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. - If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem. - Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. - It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks, it is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them. - Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line. - Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances. - It takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on-board. - Don’t confuse the process with the goal… Making the product great is the goal.
My Review
I remember when Toy Story was released in the movie theaters. At the time, I was a teenager, already interested with computers, working on my first program in Visual Basic. The computer-animated movie impressed me a lot. It gave a sense that computers were about to make a revolution in movies and special-effects. I also remembered having studied the Z-Buffer algorithm later when I was a student. So this is with some personal bounds that I have approached this book. And I can say that I have learned a ton from this reading. The author has shared deep insights about what is a creative company, how to build one, how to restore one. I have appreciated how he tried to discover and analyze the hidden forces that hinder creativity. There are practices, social technologies, that can alleviate these problems, and the book list many of them validated in the context of Pixar and Disney Animation Studio. It is possible to establish a culture that promotes and protects learning and creativity. The lessons are applicable to many different domains, companies, groups, wherever creativity, problem solving, collective intelligence are essential sources of success. This is a highly recommended reading for anyone who is attached to understand creativity !