By Dan Schawbel
I recently spoke to Ed Catmull, who is co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. Previously, he was Vice President of the computer division of Lucasfilm Ltd., where he managed development in the areas of computer graphics, video editing, video games and digital audio. Catmull has been honored with five Academy Awards, including the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for lifetime achievement in the field of computer graphics. He also received the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award for his lifetime contributions in the computer graphics field, and the animation industry’s Ub Iwerks Award for technical advancements in the art or industry of animation. Catmull is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Visual Effects Society, and the University of California President’s Board on Science and Innovation.
His new book is called Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. In the following interview, Catmull talks about how ideas are created at Pixar, how he’s created a winning culture there, why companies should embrace risk taking, lessons he learned from Steve Jobs about management and his best career advice.
Ed Catmull
Dan Schawbel: How are ideas conceived and transformed into successful movies at Pixar?
Ed Catmull: At Pixar, we believe strongly that filmmakers should develop ideas they are passionate about. This may sound like a no-brainer, but in fact in Hollywood, the big movie studios have whole departments devoted to acquiring and developing projects that will only later be paired with a director-for-hire. Pixar, by contrast, never buys pitches from the outside. Instead, we encourage our people to build their ideas from scratch and we give them the resources – and, crucially, the candid feedback – that are required to transform the first wisps of a story into a truly compelling film.
Schawbel: Can you describe the creative culture of Pixar and what other companies outside of your industry can learn from it?
Catmull: The importance of candor can’t be overstated. Pixar’s commitment to no-holds-barred communication and the mechanisms we employ to make it possible are among the company’s most impactful traditions, and you don’t have to run an animation company to learn from our example. In my book, I devote a whole chapter to Pixar’s Braintrust, which is I call our primary delivery system for straight talk.
The Braintrust – a group of smart, passionate people — meets every few months or so to assess each movie we’re making. It helps identify and solve whatever problems are keeping the film from working – not by prescribing the answer, but by breaking down whatever flaws exist andspitballing various fixes. Notably, in the wake of a Braintrust meeting, it is up to the director to figure out precisely how to remedy the problems. The Braintrust merely helps tease out the errors in logic or focus. But it only works if you create and protect a culture of candor at your company in which anyone can communicate with anyone else without fear of reprisal.
Schawbel: Many companies fear risk taking. How do you enable it and why is it so important to your business?
Catmull: It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them. What does this mean in practice? It means being encouraging, of course, when someone comes up with an idea – a movie about a rat who wants to be a gourmet chef, to use Ratatouille as an example – that may at first seem far-fetched. But it also means that when a far-fetched idea fails to pan out, you must make it clear in ways both explicit and implicit that there is no shame in that. It is only by trying new things that we can hope to create products that are original. Don’t just say those words; act like you believe them.
Schawbel: What did you learn about management from your time spent with Steve Jobs?
Catmull: I worked closely with Steve Jobs for 26 years, and for all that’s been written about him, I don’t believe that any of it comes close to capturing the man I knew. We tend to think of emotion and logic as two distinct, mutually exclusive domains, but that wasn’t true for Steve. When making decisions, passion was a key part of his calculus. He saw that creativity wasn’t linear, that art was not commerce and that to insist upon applying dollars-and-cents logic in every instance 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 is a model for management that I continue to follow.
Schawbel: What are your top three pieces of career advice?
Catmull:
1. Always hire people who are smarter than you are. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.
2. Remember that failure isn’t a necessary evil – in fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
3. Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is something we should continually do, but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.
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