Creativity, Inc

Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.

And, by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start. This could just be my Lutheran, Scandinavian upbringing, but I believe life should not be easy. We’re meant to push ourselves and try new things—which will definitely make us feel uncomfortable. Living through a few big catastrophes helps.

To get a sense of how quickly things were changing, consider that when I was a graduate student, in 1970, we’d used huge computers made by IBM and seven other mainframe companies (a group that was nicknamed “IBM and the Seven Dwarves”). Picture a room filled with racks and racks of equipment measuring six feet tall, two feet wide, and 30 inches deep. Five years later, when I arrived at NYIT, the minicomputer—which was about the size of an armoire—was on the rise, with Digital Equipment in Massachusetts being the most significant player. By the time I got to Lucasfilm in 1979, the momentum was swinging to workstation computers such as those made by Silicon Valley upstarts Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, as well as IBM, but by that time, everyone could see that workstations were only another stop on the way to PCs and, eventually, personal desktop computers.

To ensure that it succeeded, I needed to attract the sharpest minds; to attract the sharpest minds, I needed to put my own insecurities away. The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
So we did. Alvy would become one of my closest friends and most trusted collaborators. And ever since, I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am.

The point is, we value self-expression here. This tends to make a big impression on visitors, who often tell me that the experience of walking into Pixar leaves them feeling a little wistful, like something is missing in their work lives—a palpable energy, a feeling of collaboration and unfettered creativity, a sense, not to be corny, of possibility. I respond by telling them that the feeling they are picking up on—call it exuberance or irreverence, even whimsy—is integral to our success.

Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up—it means you trust them even when they do screw up.

The people ultimately responsible for implementing a plan must be empowered to make decisions when things go wrong, even before getting approval. Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line.

This is not a call for working faster or doing more overtime or making do with fewer people

one of the consequences of wild success is the pernicious distortion of reality

I don’t understand a freaking thing that’s going on half the time—and that that is the magic. The trick, always, is keeping the pyramid in balance.