My Rating: 7 of 10

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Summary

This book often goes a bit too far into the weeds, but if you work on creative teams, Ed Catmull’s explanation of the rules and guidelines to successfully run a Braintrust are invaluable. Terrific for managerial insights, especially for managing and working with creatives.

Notes

What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. This, more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning. It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission.

LOCATION: 56

The hundred or so men and women who produced it had weathered countless ups and downs as well as the ever-present, hair-raising knowledge that our survival depended on this 80-minute experiment. For five straight years, we’d fought to do Toy Story our way. We’d resisted the advice of Disney executives who believed that since they’d had such success with musicals, we too should fill our movie with songs.

LOCATION: 66

I’d spent two decades building a train and laying its track. Now, the thought of merely driving it struck me as a far less interesting task. Was making one film after another enough to engage me? I wondered. What would be my organizing principle now? It would take a full year for the answer to emerge.

NOTE: Interesting… The combination of fields. Synergy is how you create new arenas where you are the forefront. Also the future… you will always have another act. Keep moving forward don’t look back

LOCATION: 94

From the start, my professional life seemed destined to have one foot in Silicon Valley and the other in Hollywood.

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What interested me was not that companies rose and fell or that the landscape continually shifted as technology changed but that the leaders of these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work.

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We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

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I’ve spent nearly forty years thinking about how to help smart, ambitious people work effectively with one another. The way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it. I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be creative—whatever form that creativity takes.

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The most compelling mechanisms to me are those that deal with uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot see. I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur.

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Often, finding a solution is a multi-step endeavor. There is the problem you know you are trying to solve—think of that as an oak tree—and then there are all the other problems—think of these as saplings—that sprouted from the acorns that fell around it. And these problems remain after you cut the oak tree down.

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They had to develop the tools to perfect sound and color, to use blue screen matting and multi-plane cameras and xerography. Every time some technological breakthrough occurred, Walt Disney incorporated it and then talked about it on his show in a way that highlighted the relationship between technology and art. I was too young to realize such a synergy was groundbreaking. To me, it just made sense that they belonged together.

LOCATION: 234

The bigger my staff became, the more urgent it was that I figure out how to manage them. I created a flat organizational structure, much like I’d experienced in academia, largely because I naïvely thought that if I put together a hierarchical structure—assigning a bunch of managers to report to me—I would have to spend too much time managing and not enough time on my own work. This structure—in which I entrusted everybody to drive their own projects forward, at their own pace—had its limits, but the fact is, giving a ton of freedom to highly self-motivated people enabled us to make some significant technological leaps in a short time.

LOCATION: 460

At Lucasfilm, then, I decided to hire managers to run the graphics, video, and audio groups; they would then report to me. I knew I had to put some sort of hierarchy in place, but I also worried that hierarchy would lead to problems. So I edged in slowly, feeling suspicious of it at first, yet knowing that some part of it was necessary.

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Steve disagreed. “This is our moment,” he said. He went on to lay out his logic: Let’s assume that Toy Story is a success, he said. Not only that, let’s assume it is a big success. When that happens, Disney CEO Michael Eisner will realize that he has created his worst nightmare: a viable competitor to Disney. (We only owed his studio two more films under our contract, then we could go out on our own.) Steve predicted that as soon as Toy Story came out, Eisner would try to renegotiate our deal and keep us close, as a partner. In this scenario, Steve said, he wanted to be able to negotiate better terms. Specifically, he wanted a 50/50 split with Disney on returns—a demand, he pointed out, that also happened to be the moral high ground. In order to fulfill these terms, however, we would have to be able to put up the cash for our half of the production budgets—a significant amount of money. And to do that, we would have to go public. His logic, as it often did, won the day.

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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. I also realized that this kind of thing, if left unaddressed, could fester and destroy Pixar. For me, this discovery was bracing. Being on the lookout for problems, I realized, was not the same as seeing problems. This would be the idea—the challenge—around which I would build my new sense of purpose.

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Going forward, anyone should be able to talk to anyone else, at any level, at any time, without fear of reprimand. Communication would no longer have to go through hierarchical channels. The exchange of information was key to our business, of course, but I believed that it could—and frequently should—happen out of order, without people getting bent out of shape. People talking directly to one another, then letting the manager find out later, was more efficient than trying to make sure that everything happened in the “right” order and through the “proper” channels.

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On the most basic level, Toy Story 2 was a wakeup call. Going forward, the needs of a movie could never again outweigh the needs of our people. We needed to do more to keep them healthy. As soon as we wrapped the film, we set about addressing the needs of our injured, stressed-out employees and coming up with strategies to prevent future deadline pressures from hurting our workers again. These strategies went beyond ergonomically designed workstations, yoga classes, and physical therapy. Toy Story 2 was a case study in how something that is usually considered a plus—a motivated, workaholic workforce pulling together to make a deadline—could destroy itself if left unchecked. Though I was immensely proud of what we had accomplished, I vowed that we would never make a film that way again. It was management’s job to take the long view, to intervene and protect our people from their willingness to pursue excellence at all costs. Not to do so would be irresponsible.

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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.

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In Hollywood, studio executives typically communicate their criticisms of an early cut of a film by giving extensive “notes” to the director. The movie will be screened and suggestions will be typed up and delivered a few days later. The problem is, directors don’t want the notes, because they are usually coming from people who aren’t filmmakers and are seen as ignorant and interfering. There is a built-in tension, then, between directors and the studios that employ them; to put it in stark terms, the studios are paying the bills and want the films to be commercially successful, while the directors want to preserve their artistic vision. I should add that some notes offered by studio executives are quite astute—people outside of the production can often see more clearly. But when you add oft-held resentments about input from “non-creative” people to how difficult it is to be a director in the first place—presiding over a project that, as I’ve said, sucks for months before it gets good—this tension makes it difficult to bridge the divide between art and commerce. Which is why we don’t give notes this way at Pixar. We have developed our own model, based on our determination to be a filmmaker-led studio. That does not mean there is no hierarchy here. It means that we try to create an environment where people want to hear each other’s notes, even when those notes are challenging.

NOTE: Super important. Descriptive not prescriptive. The responsibility to solve lies with creator.

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You may be thinking, How is the Braintrust different from any other feedback mechanism? There are two key differences, as I see it. The first is that the Braintrust is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling and, usually, people who have been through the process themselves. While the directors welcome critiques from many sources along the way (and in fact, when our films are screened in-house, all Pixar employees are asked to send notes), they particularly prize feedback from fellow directors and storytellers. The second difference is that the Braintrust has no authority. This is crucial: The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. After a Braintrust meeting, it is up to him or her to figure out how to address the feedback. Braintrust meetings are not top-down, do-this-or-else affairs. By removing from the Braintrust the power to mandate solutions, we affect the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential. While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle, underlying issues elsewhere in the story.

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Think of it like a patient complaining of knee pain that stems from his fallen arches. If you operated on the knee, it wouldn’t just fail to alleviate the pain, it could easily compound it. To alleviate the pain, you have to identify and deal with the root of the problem. LOCATION: 1475

The film itself—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people.

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In the very early days of Pixar, John, Andrew, Pete, Lee, and Joe made a promise to one another. No matter what happened, they would always tell each other the truth. They did this because they recognized how important and rare candid feedback is and how, without it, our films would suffer. Then and now, the term we use to describe this kind of constructive criticism is “good notes.”

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As 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.

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It would be a mistake to think that merely gathering a bunch of people in a room for a candid discussion every couple of months will automatically cure your company’s ills. First, it takes a while for any group to develop the level of trust necessary to be truly candid, to express reservations and criticisms without fear of reprisal, and to learn the language of good notes. Second, even the most experienced Braintrust can’t help people who don’t understand its philosophies, who refuse to hear criticism without getting defensive, or who don’t have the talent to digest feedback, reset, and start again. Third, as I’ll discuss in later chapters, the Braintrust is something that evolves over time. Creating a Braintrust is not something you do once and then check.

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“You can and should make your own solution group,” Andrew Stanton says, adding that on each of his own films, he has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate from the official Braintrust. “Here are the qualifications required: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.”

LOCATION: 1668

Left to their own devices, most people don’t want to fail. But Andrew Stanton isn’t most people. As I’ve mentioned, he’s known around Pixar for repeating the phrases “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” He thinks of failure like learning to ride a bike; it isn’t conceivable that you would learn to do this without making mistakes—without toppling over a few times. “Get a bike that’s as low to the ground as you can find, put on elbow and knee pads so you’re not afraid of falling, and go,” he says. If you apply this mindset to everything new you attempt, you can begin to subvert the negative connotation associated with making mistakes. Says Andrew: “You wouldn’t say to somebody who is first learning to play the guitar.

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To be wrong as fast as you can is to sign up for aggressive, rapid learning. Andrew does this without hesitation.

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“The process of developing a story is one of discovery,” Pete says. “However, there’s always a guiding principle that leads you as you go down the various roads. In Monsters, Inc., all of our very different plots shared a common feeling—the bittersweet goodbye you feel once a problem”—in this case, Sulley’s quest to return Boo to her own world—“has been solved. You suffer through it as you struggle to solve it, but by the end you’ve developed a sort of fondness for it, and you miss it when it is gone. I knew I wanted to express that, and I was eventually able to get it in the film.” While the process was difficult and time consuming, Pete and his crew never believed that a failed approach meant that they had failed. Instead, they saw that each idea led them a bit closer to finding the better option. And that allowed them to come to work each day engaged and excited, even while in the midst of confusion. This is key: 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.

NOTE: Super Important to have this mentality. You’re on a process of discovery and not getting there doesn’t mean you failed.

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Instead of hoping that our director candidates would absorb our shared wisdom through osmosis, we resolved to create a formal mentoring program that would, in a sense, give to others what Pete and Andrew and Lee had experienced working so closely with John in the early days. Going forward, every established director would check in weekly with his mentees—giving them both practical and motivational advice as they developed ideas they hoped would become feature films. Later, when I was reflecting on the off-site with Andrew, he made what I think is a profound point. He told me that he thinks he and the other proven directors have a responsibility to be teachers—that this should be a central part of their jobs, even as they continue to make their own films. “The Holy Grail is to find a way that we can teach others how to make the best movie possible with whoever they’ve got on their crew, because it’s just logic that someday we won’t be here,” he said. “Walt Disney didn’t do that. And without him, Disney Animation wasn’t able to survive without enduring a decade and a half, if not two, of a slump. That’s the real goal: Can we teach in a way that our directors will think smart when we’re not around?”

LOCATION: 1930

I’ve known many managers who hate to be surprised in meetings, for example, by which I mean they make it clear that they want to be briefed about any unexpected news in advance and in private. In many workplaces, it is a sign of disrespect if someone surprises a manager with new information in front of other people. But what does this mean in practice? It means that there are pre-meetings before meetings, and the meetings begin to take on a pro forma tone. It means wasted time. It means that the employees who work with these people walk on eggshells. It means that fear runs rampant.

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Pixar have gone through difficult times together, solved problems together, and that is how they’ve built up trust in each other. Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.

LOCATION: 1967

If there is fear, there is a reason—our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.

LOCATION: 2024

Disney Animation Stumbling

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as an ascendant Disney Animation was enjoying a remarkable string of hit films—The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King—I began to hear a phrase being used again and again in the executive suites of its Burbank headquarters: “You’ve got to feed the Beast.” As you may recall, Pixar had entered into a contract to write a graphics system for Disney—the Computer Animation Production System, or CAPS—that would paint and manage animation cels. We began working on CAPS while Disney was producing The Little Mermaid, so I had a front-row seat from which to view the way that film’s success led to the studio’s expansion and to its need for more film projects to justify (and occupy) the growing staff. In other words, I was there to witness the creation of Disney’s Beast—and by “Beast” I mean any large group that needs to be fed an uninterrupted diet of new material and resources in order to function. I should say that none of this was happening by accident or for the wrong reasons. The Walt Disney Company’s CEO, Michael Eisner, and the studio’s chairman, Jeffrey Katzenberg, had committed to reviving animation after the long fallow period that followed Walt’s death. To their credit, the result was an artistic flourishing that drew on the talents of legendary artists who’d been at the studio for decades as well as the fresh thinking of more recent hires. The films they produced not only were huge economic drivers for the company, but they immediately became iconic in the popular culture and, in turn, prompted the animation explosion that would ultimately enable Pixar to make Toy Story. But the success of each new Disney film also did something else: It created a hunger for more. As the infrastructure of the studio grew to service, market, and promote each successful film, the need for more product in the pipeline only expanded. The stakes were simply too high to let all those employees at all those desks in all those buildings sit idle.

LOCATION: 2027

In fact, the intentions and values of the high-caliber people working in production were surely admirable. But the Beast is powerful and can overwhelm even the most dedicated individuals. As Disney expanded its release schedule, its need for output increased to the point that it opened animation studios in Burbank, Florida, France, and Australia just to keep up with its appetites. The pressure to create—and quickly!—became the order of the day. To be clear, this happens at many companies, not just in Hollywood, and its unintended effect is always the same: It lessens quality across the board. After The Lion King was released in 1994, eventually grossing $952 million worldwide, the studio began its slow decline. It was hard, at first, to deduce why—there had been some leadership changes, yet the bulk of the people were still there, and they still had the talent and the desire to do great work. Nevertheless, the drought that was beginning then would last for the next sixteen years: From 1994 to 2010, not a single Disney animated film would open at number one at the box office. I believe this was the direct result of its employees thinking…

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When it comes to feeding the Beast, success only creates more pressure to hurry up and succeed again. Which is why 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.

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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. Their interaction with one another—the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals—yields the balance we seek. But that only happens if they understand that achieving balance is a central goal of the company.

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People want to hang on to things that work—stories that work, methods that work, strategies that work. You figure something out, it works, so you keep doing it—this is what an organization that is committed to learning does. And as we become successful, our approaches are reinforced, and we become even more resistant to change. Moreover, it is precisely because of the inevitability of change that people fight to hold on to what they know. 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. If you polled the employees of any creative company, my guess is that the vast majority would say they believe in change. But my experience, postmerger, taught me something else: Fear of change—innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason—is a powerful force. In many ways, it reminded me of Musical Chairs: We cling as long as possible to the perceived “safe” place that we already know, refusing to loosen our grip until we feel sure another safe place awaits.

NOTE: Great analogy use for toolbox

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Sometimes a big event happens that changes everything. When it does, it tends to affirm the human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones. That’s a problem, inside companies. 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. We become so caught up in our big problems that we ignore the little ones, failing to realize that some of our small problems will have long-term consequences—and are, therefore, big problems in the making. 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. In other words, it is important that we don’t freak out or start blaming people when some threshold—the “holy cow” bucket I referred to earlier—is reached. We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault.

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The real point is that you can learn to set aside preconceptions. It isn’t that you don’t have biases, more that there are ways of learning to ignore them while considering a problem. Drawing the “un-chair” can be a sort of metaphor for increasing perceptivity. Just as looking at what is not the chair helps bring it into relief, pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions.

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It isn’t just postmortems, though: In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. Looking inward, to them, often boils down to this: “We are successful, so what we are doing must be correct.” Or the converse: “We failed, so what we did was wrong.” This is shallow. Do not be cowed into missing this opportunity. There are five reasons, I believe, to do postmortems. The first two are fairly obvious, the next three less so.

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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.”

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This is key to an idea I introduced earlier in the book: 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. But if you find that the ship is just spinning around—and if you assert that such meaningless activity is, in fact, forward motion—then the crew will balk. They know better than anyone when they are working hard but not going anywhere. 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.

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belief that each film belongs to everyone at the studio (and is related to our “ideas can come from anywhere” credo; everyone is encouraged to give notes and pitch in, and they do). LOCATION: 4089

Yes. But like I always say when talking about making a movie, easy isn’t the goal. Quality is the goal.

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God,” he said. “I was just arguing with Steve Jobs. Did I blow it?” “On the contrary,” I told him. “You won.” I could see something that Bill couldn’t: Steve had responded to Bill’s passion about the issue. The fact that Bill was willing to stand up so forcefully and articulately for what he believed showed Steve that Bill’s ideas were worthy of respect. Steve never raised the format issue with us again.

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Managing A Creative Culture

Here are some of the principles we’ve developed over the years to enable and protect a healthy creative culture. I know that when you distill a complex idea into a T-shirt slogan, you risk giving the illusion of understanding—and, in the process, of sapping the idea of its power.

An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior. But while I have been dismissive of reductive truths throughout this book, I do have a point of view, and I thought it might be helpful to share some of the principles that I hold most dear here with you.

The trick is to think of each 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 potential 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 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.…

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