The corporate culture of Pixar ties directly into my recent discussion of failure. We know Pixar as the creators of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille, but I doubt most people recognize it is a 30-year old collective of artists, animators, and creative minds who have been backed at various times by Lucasfilm, Apple, and Disney. President Ed Catmull and director Brad Bird both recently gave interviews on creativity and innovation. The interviews were held at different times under different circumstances but both Catmull and Bird seemed to focus around a few key points.
Repeated like a mantra by both men was the statement- don’t minimize risk. “Instead do risky things,” says Catmull, “If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable.” It is the fear of risk and resulting failure that directly hampers creativity. Brad Bird encourages his co-workers to, “do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities.” Ed Catmull adds to that idea with, “if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job.”
I love this idea that at a company with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake on any given project there is still a freedom to walk right out to the precipice and look down. Instead of harping on potential failures, Ed Catmull says Pixar works to “build the capability to recover when failures occur.” They do this by collectively pooling talents, and using dailies as a way to collaborate and discuss areas for improvement. Catmull also notes that there is no reliance on a single “high concept.” Instead he says, “Don’t focus on a single idea. There is no single idea. The importance is in the guiding and filtering of thousands of ideas generated by the collective.”
The final key is something I’ve always held Miles Davis and Neil Young in high regard for- foster a restless artistic spirit. Brad Bird cautions, “worry about being complacent. In areas of past success, guard against simply repeating successful formulas.” When Brad was asked to join Pixar by Ed and Steve Jobs, Pixar had been successful with toys and fish, but had been unable to create believable human characters. Brad immediately got to work on The Incredibles. The film had more backgrounds and locations than any previous Pixar film, and it starred a human family. After the success of The Incredibles Brad went on to direct Ratatouille, which had stagnated in production for nearly 5 years before Brad took the helm. Catmull summed up how Pixar fosters this restless nature to the Harvard Business Review, “Be clear that things never stay the same. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.”