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I'm joined by Ed Catmull as co-founder of Pixar and later as president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Ed played an absolutely key role in shaping that company's unique culture of collaboration which has gone on to become the gold standard for Creative workplaces worldwide

The shared experience for me was – these were people that were changing the world and they did it by creating something new

Things are going to keep changing at a faster rate

You can have a big vision. You don't know exactly what, where it's going, or when it's going to get there but you can take some steps to get there. So everything at that program was taking step by step developments towards that bigger vision. And as you took those steps, you were also modifying where you thought you could go

A big part of the Pixar success equation is this idea of developing talent inhouse, bringing in these people with potential, nurturing them, surrounding them with really competent people, and then on top of that establishing this culture of feedback and permissiveness in in which ideas could be shared and done in a way in which it wasn't about judgment or about the value or the self-worth of the individual but really about the ideas themselves

Every time we made a mistake, we would do some self-assessment – what was working, what wasn't working, and what was the value

For the most part, in any other organization anytime a boss or a leadership authority enters one of these rooms, it's going to have that kind of negative impact – it screws things up

He'd start off by saying to the director – “you can ignore everything I'm going to say because I'm not a director and you guys know things that I don't know”

People have difficulty conceiving of what it means to change their business plan

The underlying thing Steve did understand was that you have to find out what the truth is and adapt to it. If something wasn't right, he would switch

You would be stuck in this three picture deal with unfavorable terms and Steve's brilliance was – let's figure out a way to renegotiate this deal and the best way to do that is to IPO and stockpile a bunch of cash so that when Michael Eisner inevitably calls and says I want to renegotiate this deal to tie you up you then have leverage by Dent of all this money to go back to him and push for different terms basically an output deal where you would share. You're using Disney as a distribution arm in a partnership in which the revenue share was going to be on parity like 50/50 as opposed to the typical deal where you're getting a small slice of Disney’s gigantic take on a project

You commit to something with passion and when you're wrong you change. What does it mean to both be committed and at the same time say “I’ve just realized I'm wrong, we're going to change.” That's very hard and I'd say the best leaders, the best filmmakers that's what they do – we're going to go down this path, okay it's not working, we're going to change

Every once in a while magic would happened and by magic I mean that “eagles left the room.” That is when I say eagles left the room – people could say something, they weren't attached to their ideas, if they worked great, if they didn't work that's okay too. I'm not attached to it and for me that's the ideal state to be in

Actually, we don't use the term failure very much inside of Pixar. Now we do if we actually have something fail, we say that it fails we're not trying to avoid it, but the word's too loaded

“Well, of course I'm an honest person” when actually that isn't the right word because the opposite of honest is dishonest but there are times when you may not be candid for a variety of reasons

How do we keep people from getting stuck? The thing we tried which quite effective was to have people pitch three ideas for movies

It is less about the pitch and more about the energy that he's going to bring to what might be two years of working on something

If you get it right, if you actually bring something from the culture or from the place or what you're doing and you put it in the film, the audience senses that it’s correct even if they don't know if it's true, they sense it

Pixar is in the business of taking creative ideas and putting them into a story. Crafting a story and sharing that story with the world by its very definition it is a creative business

Personally, I believe solving problems is creative

If you don't try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature you will be ill prepared to lead

This leader said he wanted to make sure that every person in the room could talk, but in the room there are production assistants so these are people that are hired because of high potential but actually they don't have any experience and they don't know anything about the particular problem. So he told them this is the way he wanted to work and the other people objected only on the ground that they didn't have enough time. They didn't have anything against the others, they were good people, they had high potential, all those things, but we literally don't have the time. So he said “no, this is the way we're going to work.” Now the interesting thing was: by the end of the film everybody thought it was the right thing to do because when he did that they knew they were sending a message to the person who was the production assistant that they were valued but for the people who were opposed to be in the discussion it was a message to them that we value everybody and they ended up feeling a lot better about it also

The stuff that we don't know that we don't know is gigantic, it's huge. So how do you actually operate in a world in which there's so many possibilities of things

If people come and say “there's a problem” then I damn well better listen because they are seeing things that I can't see

It's more important for people to feel they're listened to than it is for them to believe they were correct

Understanding that every project at the beginning was terrible and it was only made better through you know this process

It's always messy, it's always hard, and it keeps changing, and you don't actually reach the point where everything is static and it's going to stay that way forever

What you're suggesting is a committee of trusted people who contribute to the betterment of a project or the individual. Everybody should sort of go out into their community and find people who can give them that kind of trusted feedback, and create a structure around that is a vehicle for improving your decisions. For me it’s not finite, it’s a continual discovery.

We're trying to do is make it possible for us to learn things, try things quickly, and then if they don't work, we move on to something else

The way to always pass that elevator test is to do something that's derivative

What peaks your interest that's worth doing

I want to make a movie about a rat that cooks. Well, you can't explain why that's a good idea in one minute, you can't explain why it's a good idea in a week, you can't explain why it's a good idea a good idea in 3 months. It actually sounds like a bad idea

Tell a story about this old this man, he is starting off with his girlfriend, and then they get married, and then they learn they can’t have children, and so they want to go on a trip around the world, but then she dies, and he's depressed, so he floats away. That doesn't sound like a good idea

He talked with a friend of his who was a writer, a part of his group of people that he trusts, and came back and said “we're going to kill the chef, the chef is dead,“ so now all of a sudden things clicked

I thought okay since this is so good this is probably the one where we get it right up front and it's going to be easier and cheaper to make. It turned out it had just as many problems, just as much drama, cost just as much

There is something about figuring something out which makes a group special

After we went public in the year afterwards I did ask this question of myself “was how much of it was me” and at the end of that year I realized that actually trying to answer this question is a bad thing to do. Because you're thinking about yourself and it's separating myself from others

The genuine appreciation of what others do is critical

The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue forever. So what happens is it either runs out or it morphs into something else

The important thing is to know that it is going to change and that it's unpredictable

Why great companies when they reach a certain level of scale suddenly no longer are great

Creativity isn't something that you can just summon it's not a product of a board meeting

In a lot of companies there's this notion of a prep meeting before the meeting. Because if the manager or the leader gets surprised in a meeting, they're not happy, they got surprised, basically it's disrespectful, it's the way it's treated. But what's the purpose of the meeting if you have to know ahead of time what it is about?

A sense of humility and an almost beginner's mind of curiosity to lead not from a place of “I know all the answers and I'm going to tell you what to do” but an appreciation that you don't have all the answers and to come to a meeting with a with a spirit of “tell me more about what I don't know” that then percolates down and gives everyone else permission beneath that leader to have that same kind of vibe about themselves

When you do something that's really hard and some of these ideas are really hard ideas, that once you've said “I'm going to solve it,” you have to become more creative, you have to do something which is unexpected to make it work

There's one thing that the creative leader can't do and that is they can't lose the confidence of their crew

If a person with a powerful voice or with actual power started to talk, that distorted the room because then people would respond to what the powerful person said. What it meant was that the person with power needed to shut up for the first 15 minutes, and then enter the discussion because if they entered there were setting the tone. With Steve it wouldn't matter when he spoke. Even if he shut up for 10 minutes, when he did talk, he was so powerful it would be overwhelming, and he understood that so he didn't come to the meetings

The interesting thing to me was that the directors would say that Steve had an insight about the films that nobody else had and they heard things from him they'd never heard before. Except that I'm in all of these meetings, I’ve heard everybody give all their notes. There was never ever anything that Steve said about a film that had not been said by somebody else before by one of the colleagues. So what it meant was that people that work together often also learn how to ignore each other

None of us had made a computer animated film, none of us had made an animated film, or a film of any kind, so we were all beginners. We had to figure everything out in the process

We don't have the luxury of calling a failure educational until after it happens not before it happens

The problem with a lot of mission statements is that it actually is starting with an answer and that doesn't generate new discussion, so we never had anything like “our goal is to make the best films” or anything like “our mission statement is to make the best films.” I'd rather be in a position where people say “Well, what are we doing here? What is our goal? What are we trying to do?” Because every time they ask that question then they're thinking about it and it's fluid, it should always be fluid

Every single Pixar movie was an absolute disaster before it was good

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