The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste.

Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face of it, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, we don’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase.

the key is not to let this trust, our faith, lull us into the abdication of personal responsibility.

Mistakes are part of creativity.

STARTING POINTS THOUGHTS FOR MANAGING A CREATIVE CULTURE

Note: I copied the author's own summary to the top

Note: The trick is to think of each following statement as a starting point, as a prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.

When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today

Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a threat

If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.

It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute

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 (for not being candid) and then address them

Likewise, if someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Our first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions.

Further, if there is fear in an organization, there is a reason for it—our job is (a) to find what’s causing it, (b) to understand it, and (c) to try to root it out.

There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.

In general, people are hesitant to say things that might rock the boat. Braintrust meetings, dailies, postmortems, and Notes Day are all efforts to reinforce the idea that it is okay to express yourself. All are mechanisms of self assessment that seek to uncover what's real

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

Many managers feel that if they are not notified about problems before others are or if they are surprised in a meeting, then that is a sign of disrespect. Get over it.

Careful “messaging” to downplay problems makes you appear to be lying, deluded, ignorant, or uncaring. Sharing problems is an act of inclusion that makes employees feel invested in the larger enterprise.

The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.

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

Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead

Similarly, it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.

Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

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.

The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal—it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems

Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that's as it should be.

A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should bre 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.

Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances

Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.

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

The healthiest organizations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose

Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past

New crises are not alwaye lamentable—they test and demonstrate a company’s values. The process of problem-solving often bonds people together and keeps the culture in the present

Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaime by ourselves.

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.

PART II PROTECTING THE NEW

CHAPTER 5 HONESTY AND CANDOR

replace the word honesty with another word that has a similar meaning but fewer moral connotations: candor.

People have an easier time talking about their level of candor because they don’t think they will be punished for admitting that they sometimes hold their tongues. This is essential. You cannot address the obstacles to candor until people feel free to say that they exist (and using the word honesty only makes it harder to talk about those barriers).

healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms.

The Braintrust Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.

without trust, creative collaboration is not possible.

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.

early on, all of our movies suck.

“from suck to not-suck.”

Creativity has to start somewhere,

candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline

crude mock-up of the film, known as reels. Then the Braintrust watches this version

they do not prescribe how to fix the problems they diagnose. They test weak points, they make suggestions, but it is up to the director to settle on a path forward.

new version of the movie is generated every three to six months, and the process repeats itself.

start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process.

No matter what, the process of coming to clarity takes patience and candor.

we try to create an environment where people want to hear each other’s notes, even when those notes are challenging, and where everyone has a vested interest in one another’s success.

With few exceptions, our directors make movies that they have conceived of and are burning to make. Then, because we know that this passion will at some point blind them to their movie’s inevitable problems, we offer them the counsel of the Braintrust.

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.

The film itself—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

a director who’s struggling with his own dilemmas can see another director’s struggles more clearly than his own. “It’s like I can put my crossword puzzle away and help you with your Rubik’s Cube a little bit,”

people need to be wrong as fast as they can.

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. If you find out it’s the wrong hill, turn around and attack the other one.

Frank talk, spirited debate, laughter, and love.

That’s how much candor matters at Pixar: It overrides hierarchy.

A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense.

offered at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem.

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.

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. That’s an art form in itself. I always feel like whatever notes you’re giving should inspire the recipient—like, ‘How do I get that kid to want to redo his homework?’ So, you’ve got to act like a teacher. Sometimes you talk about the problems in fifty different ways until you find that one sentence that you can see makes their eyes pop, as if they’re thinking, ‘Oh, I want to do it.’ Instead of saying, ‘The writing in this scene isn’t good enough,’ you say, ‘Don’t you want people to walk out of the theater and be quoting those lines?’ It’s more of a challenge. ‘Isn’t this what you want? I want that too!’ ”

any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves.

CHAPTER 6 FEAR AND FAILURE

From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or—worse!—aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood,

if you fund thousands of research projects every year, some will have obvious, measurable, positive impacts, and others will go nowhere. We aren’t very good at predicting the future

yet the Golden Fleece Awards tacitly implied that researchers should know before they do their research whether or not the results of that research would have value.

Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of learning.

If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others.

While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.

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.

iterative trial and error—has long-recognized value in science.

There are arenas, of course, in which a zero failure rate is essential. Commercial flying has a phenomenal safety record

we’ve set up a system in which directors are allowed to spend years in the development phase of a movie, where the costs of iteration and exploration are relatively low.

required decision-making, not just abstract discussion. While everyone working on it had the best intentions, it got bogged down in hypotheticals and possibilities.

To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.

how do you know when to step in? The criteria we use is that we step in if a director loses the confidence of his or her crew.

watch carefully for signs that a movie is stuck. Here is one: A Braintrust meeting will occur, notes will be given, and three months later, the movie will come back essentially unchanged. That is not okay.

As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the whole.

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.

We tell ourselves that we will devote more time to our people if we, in turn, are given more slack in the schedule or budget, but somehow the requirements of the job always eat up the slack, resulting in increased pressure with even less room for error. Given these realities, managers typically want two things: (1) for everything to be tightly controlled, and (2) to appear to be in control.

Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t.

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 managers explain what their plan is without giving the reasons for it, people wonder what the “real” agenda is. There may be no hidden agenda, but you’ve succeeded in implying that there is one.

Are there ways to prove to your employees that your company doesn’t stigmatize failure?

Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.

CHAPTER 7 THE HUNGRY BEAST AND THE UGLY BABY

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.”

My conclusion at the time was that finalizing the story before production began was still a worthy goal—we just hadn’t achieved it yet. As we continued to make films, however, I came to believe that my goal was not just impractical but naïve. 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.

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.

when it comes to feeding the Beast, success only creates more pressure to hurry up and succeed again.

at too many companies, the schedule (that is, the need for product) drives the output, not the strength of the ideas at the front end.

In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. 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.

“It seems like it’s good psychologically to expect these movies to be troublesome,” Byron Howard, one of our directors at Disney, told me. “It’s like someone saying, ‘Here, take care of this tiger, but watch your butt, they’re tricky.’ I feel like my butt is safer when I expect the tiger to be tricky.”

“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.”

CHAPTER 8 CHANGE AND RANDOMNESS

People want to hang on to things that work—stories

And as we become successful, our approaches are reinforced, and we become even more resistant to change.

Unfortunately, we often have little ability to distinguish between what works and is worth hanging on to and what is holding us back and worth discarding.

Fear of change—innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason—is a powerful force.

One trick I’ve learned is to force myself to make a list of what’s actually wrong. Usually, soon into making the list, I find I can group most of the issues into two or three larger all-encompassing problems. So it’s really not all that bad. Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.”

We’re meant to push ourselves and try new things—which will definitely make us feel uncomfortable.

“Sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes,” he says. “So I try to trick them. I’ll say, ‘This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but just as a thought exercise, what if ...’ Or, ‘I’m not actually suggesting this, but go with me for a minute ...’

you have to pretend you’re not actually going to do anything, we’re just talking, just playing around. Then if you hit upon some new idea that clearly works, people are excited about it and are happier to act on the change.”

Another trick is to encourage people to play.

For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre—personally,

Managers often see change as a threat to their existing business model—and,

Play the ball where the monkey drops it.”

randomness remains stubbornly difficult to understand. The problem is that our brains aren’t wired to think about it. Instead, we are built to look for patterns

If you haven’t done the work of teasing apart what is random and what you have intentionally set in motion, you will be overly influenced by the analysis of outside observers, which is often oversimplified.

stochastic self-similarity.

Stochastic simply means random

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.

Look at a tiny section of a snowflake under a microscope, and it will resemble a miniature version of the whole.

while we may attribute to it a pattern later, random events don’t come on time or on schedule.

human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones.

When we put setbacks into two buckets—the “business as usual” bucket and the “holy cow” bucket—and use a different mindset for each, we are signing up for trouble.

failing to realize that some of our small problems will have long-term consequences—and are, therefore, big problems in the making.

approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they are, in fact, self-similar.

Our people have good intentions. To think you can control or prevent random problems by making an example of someone is naïve

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.

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.

Everyone says they want to hire excellent people, but in truth we don’t really know, at first, who will rise up to make a difference.

putting in place a framework for finding potential, then nurturing talent and excellence, believing that many will rise, while knowing that not all will.

We must acknowledge the random events that went oue way, because acknowledging our good fortune—and not telling ourselves that everything we did was some stroke of genius—lets us make more realistic assessments and decisions.

CHAPTER 9 THE HIDDEN

one of my core management beliefs: If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

making room in my head for the certainty that, like it or not, some problems will always be hidden from me has made me a better manager.

When faced with complexity, it is reassuring to tell ourselves that we can uncover and understand every facet of every problem if we just try hard enough. But that’s a fallacy. The better approach, I believe, is to accept that we can’t understand every facet of a complex environment and to focus, instead, on techniques to deal with combining different viewpoints.

In a healthy, creative culture, the people in the trenches feel free to speak up and bring to light differing views that can help give us clarity.

The eagerness to get going, which gave the impression of efficiency, was ultimately counterproductive

when managers understand that others see problems they don’t—and that they also see solutions.

While character is crucial, I am also certain there were an infinite number of “two-inch” events aside from my own that went our way—events

to be truly humble, those leaders must first understand how many of the factors that shape their lives and businesses are—and will always be—out of sight.

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.

“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”

only about 40 percent of what we think we “see” comes in through our eyes. “The rest is made up from memory or patterns that we recognize from past experience,”

Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather.

The tool is not reality. The key is knowing the difference.

While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.

PART III BUILDING AND SUSTAINING

CHAPTER 10 BROADENING OUR VIEW

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.

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.

fourth idea is that people who work or live together have, by virtue of proximity and shared history, models of the world that are deeply (sometimes hopelessly) intertwined with one another.

1. DAILIES, OR SOLVING PROBLEMS TOGETHER

Dailies are a key part of Pixar culture, not just because of what they accomplish—constructive midstream feedback—but because of how they accomplish it.

“Some people show their scenes to get critique from others, others come to watch and see what kind of notes are being given—to learn from their peers and from me—my style, what I like and dislike,” Mark told me. “The dailies keep everyone in top form. It’s an intimidating room to be in because the goal is to create the best animation possible. We go through every single frame with a fine-toothed comb, over and over and over again. Sometimes there are full-on debates because, truly, I don’t have all the answers. We work it out together.”

The first step is to teach them that everyone at Pixar shows incomplete work, and everyone is free to make suggestions.

2. RESEARCH TRIPS

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.

You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.

what we’ve found is that when we are accurate, the audiences can tell. It just feels right.

3. THE POWER OF LIMITS

“the beautifully shaded penny.”

artists who work on our films care so much about every detail that they will sometimes spend days or weeks crafting

How, then, do you fix the “beautifully shaded penny” problem without telling people, in effect, to care less or to be less excellent?

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—

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 out of time or resources.

However, some efforts to impose limits can backfire.

Disney Animation in 2006, thought that the best way to keep everybody operating within agreed-upon limits was to put in an “oversight group”

from the point of view of those who worked in production on any given film, the oversight group was a hindrance,

nitpicked every decision—even the tiniest decision—to death.

morale plummeted.

We simply eliminated the oversight group.

The micromanagement they imposed was of no value, since the production people already had a set of limits that determined their every move—the overall budget and the deadline.

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?

4. INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY AND ART

One of the advantages we had at Pixar, from the beginning, was that technology, art, and business were integrated into the leadership, with each of the company’s leaders—me, John, and Steve—paying a fair amount of attention to the areas where we weren’t considered expert.

5. SHORT EXPERIMENTS

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,

including short films at the beginning of our feature films. These three- to six-minute films,

learned that shorts are a relatively inexpensive way to screw up.

As Joe Ranft said at the time, “Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.”

6. LEARNING TO SEE

Elyse taught us that while many activities used both L-mode and R-mode, drawing required shutting the L-mode off. This amounted to learning to suppress that part of your brain that jumps to conclusions, seeing an image as only an image and not as an object.

For example, since the eyes and mouth—the loci of communication—are more important to us than foreheads, more emphasis is put on recognizing them, and when we draw them, we tend to draw them too large,

fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see.)

When we give notes on Pixar movies and isolate a scene, say, that isn’t working, we have learned that fixing that scene usually requires making changes somewhere else in the film, and that is where our attention should go.

Our filmmakers have become skilled at not getting caught up in a problem but instead looking elsewhere in the story for solutions.

7. POSTMORTEMS

Over the years, some were profound, and others were a complete waste of time. Sometimes people showed up but pulled their punches.

People, in general, would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong, using the occasion to give additional kudos to their most deserving team members. Left to our own devices, we avoid unpleasantness.

There are five reasons, I believe, to do postmortems.

1. Consolidate What’s Been Learned kindle

Any individual can have a great insight but may not have the time to pass it on. A process might be flawed, but you don’t have time to fix it under the current schedule.

Sitting down afterward is a way of consolidating all that you’ve learned—before you forget it.

2. Teach Others Who Weren’t There kindle

3. Don’t Let Resentments Fester kindle

4. Use the Schedule to Force Reflection kindle

5. Pay It Forward kindle

raise questions that should be asked on the next project.

you come up with a format that works well in one instance, people will know what to expect the next time, and they will game the process.

So try “mid-mortems” or narrow the focus of your postmortem to special topics.

One technique I’ve used to soften the process is to ask everyone in the room to make two lists: the top five things that they would do again and the top five things that they wouldn’t do again.

make use of data. 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.

There are limits to data, however, and some people rely on it too heavily. Analyzing it correctly is difficult, and it is dangerous to assume that you always know what it means.

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.

8. CONTINUING TO LEARN

Pixar University

we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over

something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable.

Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived.

it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things.

in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it.

By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new.

composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but getting rid of the damn thing.”

CHAPTER 11 THE UNMADE FUTURE

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

John Walker, stays calm by imagining his very taxing job as holding a giant upside-down pyramid in his palm by its pointy tip. “I’m always looking up, trying to balance it,” he says. “Are there too many people on this side or that side? In my job, I do two things, fundamentally: artist management and cost control. Both depend on hundreds of interactions that are happening above me, up in the fat end of the pyramid. And I have to be okay with the fact that 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.”

if he tightens up or thinks too much, he crashes.

he also knows that if he lingers too long in that frightened place, he will freak out. “So I tell myself that I have time, even when I don’t.

the course of a week, I cracked the lens of my goggles four times. Four times I had to go to the ski store and say, ‘I need a new piece of plastic,’ because I had shattered it crashing into something. And at some point, I realized that I was crashing because I was trying so hard not to crash. So I relaxed and told myself, ‘It’s going to be scary when I make the turns really fast, but I’m going to push that mountain away and enjoy it.’ When I adopted this positive attitude, I stopped crashing.

Athletes and musicians often refer to being in “the zone”—that mystical place where their inner critic is silenced and they completely inhabit the moment, where the thinking is clear and the motions are precise.

“The goal is to get so comfortable and relaxed with your instrument, or process, that you can just get Zen with it and let the music flow without thinking,

People want their leaders to be confident. Andrew doesn’t advise being confident merely for confident’s sake. He believes that leadership is about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.

collaboration brings complications. Other people have so much to recommend them: They will help you see outside yourself; they will rally when you are flagging; they will offer ideas that push you to be better. But they will also require constant interaction and communication.

“If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?”

Good producers—and good managers—don’t dictate from on high. They reach out, they listen, they wrangle, coax, and cajole. And their mental models of their jobs reflect that.

“One of Kahler’s big teachings is about meeting people where they are,” Katherine says, referring Kahler's Process Communication Model,

Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.

study of mindfulness,

resonated with many of the issues I spent so much time thinking about at Pixar: control, change, randomness, trust, consequences.

If you are mindful, you are able to focus on the problem at hand without getting caught up in plans or processes.

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.

PART IV TESTING WHAT WE KNOW

CHAPTER 12 A NEW CHALLENGE

Earning trust takes time; there’s no shortcut to understanding that we really do rise and fall together.

Without vigilant coaching—pulling people aside who didn’t speak their minds in a particular meeting, say, or encouraging those who seem eternally hesitant to jump into the fray—our progress could have easily stalled. Telling the truth isn’t easy.

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.

when talking about making a movie, easy isn’t the goal. Quality is the goal.

CHAPTER 13 NOTES DAY

try something that we hoped would break the logjam and reinvigorate the studio. We called it Notes Day,

what makes me most proud is how our people respond to crisis.

there is talk of “our” problem and of what “we” can do to solve it together.

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.” That honorable-sounding desire—we call it “plussing”—was accompanied by a kind of paralyzing anxiety.

“personal project days.” Two days a month, he allowed his engineers to work on anything they wanted, using Pixar’s resources to engage with whatever problem or question they found interesting.

At one point, he’d suggested shutting down Pixar for a week at the end of a movie’s production cycle to talk about what went right, what went wrong, and how to reboot for the next project—a sort of super-postmortem. The idea wasn’t practical, in the end, but it was thought-provoking.

In the end, four thousand emails poured into the Notes Day suggestion box—containing one thousand separate ideas in all.

people would determine their own schedules, signing up for only the sessions that interested them. Each of the Notes Day discussion groups would be led by a facilitator

sessions weren’t organized by job or by department. They were organized by individual interest.

the biggest payoff of Notes Day was that we made it safer for people to say what they thought.

What made Notes Day work? To me, it boils down to three factors. First, there was a clear and focused goal. This wasn’t a free-for-all but a wide-ranging discussion (organized around topics suggested not by Human Resources or by Pixar’s executives, but by the company’s employees) aimed at addressing a specific reality: the need to cut our costs by 10 percent.

Second, this was an idea championed by those at the highest levels of the company.

Third, and relatedly, Notes Day was led from within.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Things change, constantly, as they should. And with change comes the need for adaptation, for fresh thinking, and, sometimes, for even a total reboot—of

In times of change, we need support—from our families and from our colleagues.

In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision.

AFTERWORD THE STEVE WE KNEW

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.

Steve looked around at the circus—the elegantly turned-out men and women, the scrum of television interviewers, the throngs of paparazzi and screaming onlookers, the line of limousines pulling up at the curb—and said, “What this scene really needs is a Buddhist monk lighting himself on fire.”