Lessons from Pixar
(Originally written April 22. Posted with minor tweaks, April 25.)
Found an interesting article about Pixar, which fit the bill for my occasional team-building mailouts. Pixar seems to have developed a smoothly-functioning creative process, which churns out excellent (and excellently lucrative) art. Time of course will tell whether this has become ingrained in Pixar culture, or whether it’s the achievement of charismatic leaders unable to transmit their ethos to their successors.
One of Pixar’s managers, it seems, was interviewed for (or at) a conference put up by The Economist. There were a couple nice take-aways relating to creative work (my italics).
On managers’ self-destructive tendencies for creative work:
The notion that you’re trying to control the process and prevent error screws things up. We all know the saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And everyone knows that, but I think there is a corollary: if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things.
My personal favourite was this one here:
On the limits of platitudes:
I don’t like hard rules at all. I think they’re all bullshit.
Of course, preventing error in a mere animated project is different from preventing error in the design of objects; even an error in something as mundane as one of Pixar’s McDonald’s toys could cause injury or worse, to young kids. Still, I think excessive focus on preventing errors could be analogous to a sports team which is great at defence, but has no offence: in the end, in sports, business (and even war, come to think of it) defence can keep you from losing, but you do need some offence to win…
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The article’s author’s book The Myths of Innovation may be covered in the book club.