Creativity, Inc.

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Highlights

This is the nature of management. Decisions are made, usually for good reasons, which in turn prompt other decisions.
Even after all these years, I’m often surprised to find problems that have existed right in front of me, in plain sight.
I loved the idea that animation could take me places I’d never been. But the land I most wanted to learn about was the one occupied by the innovators at Disney who made these animated films.
if viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job.
The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am.
our engineers built just such a device, which we named the Pixar Image Computer. Why “Pixar”? The name emerged from a back-and-forth between Alvy and another of our colleagues, Loren Carpenter. Alvy, who spent much of his childhood in Texas and New Mexico, had a fondness for the Spanish language, and he was intrigued by how certain nouns in English looked like Spanish verbs—words like “laser,” for example. So Alvy lobbied for “Pixer,” which he imagined to be a (fake) Spanish verb meaning “to make pictures.” Loren countered with “Radar,” which he thought sounded more high-tech. That’s when it hit them: Pixer + radar = Pixar! It stuck.
we were forced to abandon our plans. Clearly, it wasn’t enough for managers to have good ideas—they had to be able to engender support for those ideas among the people who’d be charged with employing them. I took that lesson to heart.
The movie was designed to run two minutes, but we were still racing against time to complete it. It wasn’t just that the animation process was labor-intensive, though it surely was; it was that we were inventing the animation process as we went along.
For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.
To be honest, I was uneasy about Steve. He had a forceful personality, whereas I do not, and I felt threatened by him. For all of my talk about the importance of surrounding myself with people smarter than myself, his intensity was at such a different level, I didn’t know how to interpret it.
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.
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.
In retrospect, when I sought the counsel of these more experienced men, 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.
Several phrases would later be coined to describe these revolutionary approaches—phrases like “just-in-time manufacturing” or “total quality control”—but the essence was this: 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.
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.
Pixar could not have survived without Steve, but more than once in those years, I wasn’t sure if we’d survive with him.
You’ll recall the question I asked Steve just before he bought Pixar: How would we resolve conflicts? And his answer, which I found comically egotistical at the time, was that he simply would continue to explain why he was right until I understood. The irony was that this soon became the technique I used with Steve.
This was a revelation to me: The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realized that this was something I needed to look out for: When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers.
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.
Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.
too often, we see a single object and think of it as an island that exists apart and unto itself.
the underlying goals remain the same: Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.
You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal.
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.
Once you’re aware of the suitcase/handle problem, you’ll see it everywhere. People glom onto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning.
As Brad Bird, who joined Pixar as a director in 2000, likes to say, “The process either makes you or unmakes you.”
“Quality is the best business plan.”
We would be a company that would never settle. 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.
But as valuable as the information is that comes from honesty and as loudly as we proclaim its importance, our own fears and instincts for self-preservation often cause us to hold back. To address this reality, we need to free ourselves of honesty’s baggage.
replace the word honesty with another word that has a similar meaning but fewer moral connotations: candor.
Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.
The fear of saying something stupid and looking bad, of offending someone or being intimidated, of retaliating or being retaliated against—they all have a way of reasserting themselves, even once you think they’ve been vanquished. And when they do, you must address them squarely.
How is the Braintrust different from any other feedback mechanism?
the Braintrust is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling and, usually, people who have been through the process themselves.
the Braintrust has no authority.
I like to think of the Braintrust as Pixar’s version of peer review, a forum that ensures we raise our game—not by being prescriptive but by offering candor and deep analysis.
You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
uses another analogy to describe the Braintrust. He calls it “the grand eye of Sauron”
But the Braintrust is benevolent. It wants to help. And it has no selfish agenda.
In a battle, if you’re faced with two hills and you’re unsure which one to attack, he says, the right course of action is to hurry up and choose.
The key is to look at the viewpoints being offered, in any successful feedback group, as additive, not competitive.
Andrew Stanton says, “There’s a difference between criticism and constructive criticism. With the latter, you’re constructing at the same time that you’re criticizing. You’re building as you’re breaking down, making new pieces to work with out of the stuff you’ve just ripped apart.
At one point, Steve Jobs called me to check in on our progress. “It’s really strange,” I told him. “We haven’t had a single big problem on this film.” Many people would have been happy with this news. Not Steve. “Watch out,” he said. “That’s a dangerous place to be.”
That early experience of shame is too deep-seated to erase. All the time in my work, I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: It hurts.
Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new
“You wouldn’t say to somebody who is first learning to play the guitar, ‘You better think really hard about where you put your fingers on the guitar neck before you strum, because you only get to strum once, and that’s it. And if you get that wrong, we’re going to move on.’ That’s no way to learn, is it?”
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.
The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it. The nonworking idea gets worn into your brain, like a rut in the mud.
One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.
Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty.
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.”
Another trick is to encourage people to play. “Some of the best ideas come out of joking around, which only comes when you (or the boss) give yourself permission to do it,” Pete says. “It can feel like a waste of time to watch YouTube videos or to tell stories of what happened last weekend, but it can actually be very productive in the long run. I’ve heard some people describe creativity as ‘unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.’ If that’s at all true, you have to be in a certain mindset to make those connections. So when I sense we’re getting nowhere, I just shut things down. We all go off to something else. Later, once the mood has shifted, I’ll attack the problem again.”
the unknown is not our enemy. If we make room for it instead of shunning it, the unknown can bring inspiration and originality.
stochastic self-similarity. Stochastic simply means random or chance; self-similarity describes the phenomenon—found in everything from stock market fluctuations to seismic activity to rainfall—of patterns that look the same when viewed at different degrees of magnification.
What’s needed, in my view, is to approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they are, in fact, self-similar.
If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order.
If we can agree that it’s hard, if not impossible, to get a complete picture of what is going on at any given time in any given company, it becomes even harder when you are successful. That’s because success convinces us that we are doing things the right way.
Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20-20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more.
Most think of animation as the characters just moving around in funny ways while they deliver their lines, but great animators carefully craft the movements that elicit an emotional response, convincing us that these characters have feelings, emotions, intentions.
We aren’t aware that the majority of what we think we see is actually our brain filling in the gaps.
Typically, people imagine consciousness to be something that is achieved inside our brains. Alva Noe, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley who focuses on theories of perception, has suggested another way of thinking about consciousness—as something we do, or enact, or perform in our dynamic involvement with the world around us. Consciousness, in other words, happens within a context.
When we are making a movie, the movie doesn’t exist yet. We are not uncovering it or discovering it; it’s not as if it resides somewhere and is just waiting to be found. There is no movie.
The Hidden—and our acknowledgement of it—is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success. Candor, safety, research, self-assessment,
four ideas that inform the way I think about managing. The first, which I discussed in chapter 9, is that our models of the world so distort what we perceive that they can make it hard to see what is right in front of us. (I’m using model somewhat generally here to mean the preconceptions we have built up over time that we use to evaluate what we see and hear as well as to reason and anticipate.) The second is that we don’t typically see the boundary between new information coming in from the outside and our old, established mental models—we perceive both together, as a unified experience. The third is that when we unknowingly get caught up in our own interpretations, we become inflexible, less able to deal with the problems at hand. And the fourth idea is that people who work or live together—people like Dick and Anne, for example—have, by virtue of proximity and shared history, models of the world that are deeply (sometimes hopelessly) intertwined with one another.
The first step is to teach them that everyone at Pixar shows incomplete work, and everyone is free to make suggestions. When they realize this, the embarrassment goes away—and when the embarrassment goes away, people become more creative.
Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.
You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.
When everything is functioning as it should be, art and technology play off each other and spur each other to new heights.
some people draw better than others. What are they doing that most of us aren’t? And if the answer is that they are setting aside their preconceptions, can we all learn to do that? In most cases, the answer is yes.
As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but … getting rid of the damn thing.”
creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Brad has told me that he thinks of directing the way he thinks about skiing. In either pursuit, he says, if he tightens up or thinks too much, he crashes.
The director, or leader, can never lose the confidence of his or her crew. As long as you have been candid and had good reasons for making your (now-flawed-in-retrospect) decisions, your crew will keep rowing.
I’ve come to respect that the most important thing about a mental model is that it enables whoever relies on it to get their job—whatever it is—done.
Lindsey jokes that she employs “the Columbo effect”—a reference to Peter Falk’s iconic TV detective, who appeared to bumble his way through a case, even as he inevitably zeroed in on the culprit. When mediating between two groups who aren’t communicating well, for example, Lindsey feigns confusion. “You say, ‘You know, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand. I’m sorry I’m slowing you down here with all my silly questions, but could you just explain to me one more time what that means? Just break it down for me like I’m a two-year-old.’ ”
each of these models contains so many of the themes we’ve talked about so far: the need to keep fear in its place, the need for balance, the need to make decisions (but also to admit fallibility), and the need to feel that progress is being made.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if your model is different than mine. Upside-down pyramid or invisible mountain, stampeding horses or meandering sheep, what’s essential is that each of us struggles to build a framework to help us be open to making something new. The models in our heads embolden us as we whistle through the dark. Not only that, they enable us to do the exhilarating and difficult work of navigating the unknown.