Building Pixar, Working With Steve Jobs, and Cultivating Creativity | Ed Catmull

Key points

• The Brain Trust is a built mechanism for candour, not a slogan: most companies' 'truth-seeking' is 'full of shit' because subordinates tell leaders what they want to hear; Pixar's version works because 'the discussion is always about the topic, it isn't about who's right,' and it gives a vulnerable creative team space to actually listen.
• Power distorts the room, so it must go quiet first: 'the people with power, either real or perceived power, need to shut the hell up for the first 10 to 15 minutes' — if a powerful voice speaks early it sets the tone; Steve Jobs was banned from the Brain Trust because his voice was so strong it would derail the dynamics regardless of timing.
• Disagreement as the test of value: Steve fired two Pixar board members for never disagreeing ('if they don't disagree with me, then they aren't bringing any value'); he and Catmull disagreed constantly, and roughly a third of the time each conceded, a third Catmull 'just did what I wanted' — and Steve was fine with it because they'd genuinely discussed it ('there's no upside in being wrong').
• Steve as a fresh 'outside force': used at board screenings (the morning 'how's it going, Ed?' calls where Catmull would flag a problem but 'never tell him what to think'); crucially, Steve 'never said anything that had not been said by somebody else before,' but was so clear and articulate it 'broke through' where familiar colleagues got tuned out — and the leader's real job is to 'observe and manage the dynamics.'
• Hard problems are the strategy: easy problems yield derivative, mediocre work, but 'if you take on a hard problem and you just keep pushing at it, then the fact that it was hard is what's going to make it different' (a rat that wants to cook — 'nobody's going to copy it').
• No mission statement, by design: 'a mission statement is an answer when typically we should always be asking questions' — keeping the company perpetually asking 'are we doing the right thing?'; paired with John Lasseter's 'quality is the best business plan' as the explicit opposite of short-term-growth management (Catmull's cautionary tale: Jack Welch / GE in 'The Man Who Broke Capitalism,' whose disciples then damaged Boeing).
• Judge a stuck project by team spirit, and push things through: early work always 'sucks,' so the basis to continue is whether the team is 'really working together... laughing and then they're angsting' — Pixar completed 21 of 22 films started (Disney 10 of 11), and the one rule on directors is they 'can't lose the team' (changing directors on Toy Story 2 and Inside Out).
• Calibration as a habit: at New York Tech half his management theories were 'a crock,' and that ratio holds for life — 'I'm wrong half the time' — but assuming so means 'I catch it earlier... spend less time on the wrong decision,' which only looks like a better record.
• The post-achievement void and the real mission: after delivering his 20-year goal (the first CG feature), Catmull hit a year of 'now what?', having watched Silicon Valley founders make the Fortune cover then 'do something obviously stupid and pop like a bubble' — so his new mission became building a culture sustainable enough to outlive him; and wrestling with 'how much of this was me?' he concluded the question itself 'is an act of separation,' landing on 'how much can I do with others?'
• Culture as the uncopyable moat: Disney had the contractual right to inspect everything Pixar did and never asked (they 'stopped thinking' at 'it's just John and Ed and Steve, we can't copy that'); Pixar deliberately dissolved first-class/second-class silos so technologists and artists were true peers, shared knowledge openly (publishing everything to attract people who 'wanted to be part of a bigger community'), kept few rules ('as soon as you make more rules, people worry about permission'), and let fun and custom workspaces grow bottom-up as 'a sign of health' — the same positive-sum instinct George Lucas had in wanting the whole industry healthy ('you have a vested interest in wanting the rest of the industry to be healthy').

Notable quotes

Themes

• mechanisms for honest feedback (the Brain Trust)
• disagreement and candour as the engine
• quality over short-term growth
• building a culture that outlives the founder
• technology and art as peers