By Priyanka Sangani
When the Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar Animation Studio eight years ago, its animation business, Disney Animation, was going through the roughest patch in its history. Pixar, on the other hand, was having a dream run.
Pixar execs Ed Catmull and John Lasseter were asked to head both companies and the first thing they decided was to keep them separate – neither studio would do any work for the other. “We were suddenly put in charge of a group that we didn’t know at all.
All we knew is that they were demoralised and had failed. We had all these principles about how to run an organisation based on candour, fearlessness and trust and while we had taken a conscious decision to keep both the businesses separate, we decided we would apply these principles here as well,” says Mr Catmull, president, Pixar and Disney Animation.
The duo thought that instilling these principles would take them two years; it took them four. “Stating the principles isn’t the same as actually doing it. They needed to go through some problems and failures as a group before they earned each others’ trust,” says Mr Catmull.
The results are there for everyone to see. All the films made by Disney Animation after this acquisition have been critical successes, with the most recent one, Frozen, going on to become the highest grossing animation film of all times.
“The same people who were there when it was failing are there when it is successful,” says Mr Catmull over the phone from his home in California. Pixar will go into the history books for making Toy Story, the first feature length computer animation film in 1995.
The company started off as a part of Lucasfilm which was eventually sold to Steve Jobs in 1986 which is when Pixar was formed. The various challenges it faced as it grew has played an important role in shaping its culture where the focus is on creativity, but not at the risk of alienating the non-creative people in the organisation.
The desire to share the forces and factors that shaped Pixar’s culture spurred Mr Catmull to write a book, Creativity, Inc. co-authored with business writer Amy Wallace. The culture at Pixar has been consciously shaped so that it can outlive its founders and ensure that unseen forces don’t get in the way of the creativity that drives the organisation. Mr Catmull’s personal journey has been an interesting one.
As a kid, he had a dream to make the world’s first computer animated film and that is what led him to joining Lucasfilm after studying physics and computer science (then an emerging field) at the University of Utah.
Solving the problems in front of him is what has always driven him – it’s just that the nature of the problem kept changing. These started off as technical problems – not having the technology to make a movie using computers – and then became human ones. Being strategically located just an hour away from Silicon Valley and one hour plane ride from Hollywood, Mr Catmull found himself in a unique position.
In the early days of Silicon Valley, there were creative groups that were successful but then they’d fall apart. “Observing from the outside you realise that there’s something wrong that smart people are missing out on and that leads you to realise that if they are missing out on it, I’ll probably miss it too. Then this leads to figuring out what these things are and working at fixing them,” he says.
Given his background, Mr Catmull viewed these problems as a scientist, and not a manager. “I came to believe that most companies were trying to do the right thing, but in focusing on doing this right thing, they were missing out on a deeper problem – how human emotions form barriers and fears that get in the way,” he says.
This led him to the realisation that most companies were so focused on competition that they didn’t introspect deeply enough on the other destructive forces that were at work. “If we can figure out what it is about managing and adapting to change that is so hard then we can find problems before they hit us. You have to work through the problem and not go around it. It’s an abstract but philosophical approach,” he says.
What companies need to do is periodically become introspective. It’s important to examine the deeper reasons as to why they made mistakes or why they succeeded at something. Mr Catmull draws an analogy with meditation: “Facing inwards is a different experience from when you face the outside world, but until you experience it, you won’t know it. Similarly, it’s important for companies to occasionally be introspective and integrate it with how they act towards the outside world.”
The act of management itself is a creative act, and the issues in the entertainment business are applicable to other situations as well. “The trick to solving a lot of problems lies in understanding the blocks and barriers that are based on human emotions. While we can address these, it also means that a problem never completely goes away because human nature is always there,” says Mr Catmull.
For instance, the fear of failure normally stops people from engaging or speaking up in a discussion. An experiment Mr Catmull often tries is asking a group what can be done to make people more creative.
Only a handful raise their hands, whereas when he asks how many know of ways to make people hold back, all the hands in the room go up. That’s because failure tends to be viewed through two contradictory lenses.
While most leaders agree that their failures and mistakes have provided some of their biggest learnings and eventual success, at the same time there will be opponents who will bludgeon you for failing.
“There is a very real aura of danger around failing and this is not going to go away. We operate in an environment where both these meanings are here to stay. Leaders need to accept that people have real fears about their responsibilities and the consequences of executing their job. It’s an active thing for leaders to make it safe so that if people fail, they aren’t punished and this is something that happens by example over a period of time,” he says.
A unique aspect at Pixar is a think-tank called Braintrust. It’s made up of some of the most senior people in the company including Messrs Catmull and Lasseter. This group acts like a peer review system, going over the progress of each movie Pixar is producing with the director every few months. However, while it does provide critical feedback on the film, the decision on what to do with that feedback is left entirely up to the director.
The company tried replicating this in other parts of the business over the years and failed every time. It took them time to realise that the reason Braintrust worked so well was because the group had no authority.
The individuals in the room – collectively and individually – were extremely powerful and this could cause people responsible for the project to enter the meeting in a defensive posture. “We made it clear that nobody in that room, not even John or me, could override the director.
By removing the authority from the room we were making it safer for the director to approach it with an open mind,” says Mr Catmull. The rationale delves deep into human psychology. People don’t want to embarrass themselves or other people, and they tend to naturally defer to those with more authority and experience. These barriers keep them from saying what they think.
“The idea at Braintrust is about the dynamics in the room and discussing things with candour,” he says. Another conflict most organisations face is the power struggle between different departments, in this case creative and production. A healthy organisation accepts that each domain has a somewhat different agenda and respects that.
At the same time the leader must realise that if any one department wins, it is detrimental to the organisation as the goals of the department have come first over the greater good. “We talk about balance as a calm yogic state, but it’s the wrong metaphor. It’s more about a physical activity like sports where things are dynamic and it is people who can adapt to the realities of this changing environment who are good at balance,” he says.
Finally, he says that writing this book doesn’t mean that Pixar has it all figured out. “The figuring-it-out process is what we continually do. This is just the approach you take so that you are continually facing in towards the problem,” he says.When the Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar Animation Studio eight years ago, its animation business, Disney Animation, was going through the roughest patch in its history. Pixar, on the other hand, was having a dream run.
Pixar execs Ed Catmull and John Lasseter were asked to head both companies and the first thing they decided was to keep them separate – neither studio would do any work for the other. “We were suddenly put in charge of a group that we didn’t know at all.
All we knew is that they were demoralised and had failed. We had all these principles about how to run an organisation based on candour, fearlessness and trust and while we had taken a conscious decision to keep both the businesses separate, we decided we would apply these principles here as well,” says Mr Catmull, president, Pixar and Disney Animation.
The duo thought that instilling these principles would take them two years; it took them four. “Stating the principles isn’t the same as actually doing it. They needed to go through some problems and failures as a group before they earned each others’ trust,” says Mr Catmull.
The results are there for everyone to see. All the films made by Disney Animation after this acquisition have been critical successes, with the most recent one, Frozen, going on to become the highest grossing animation film of all times.
“The same people who were there when it was failing are there when it is successful,” says Mr Catmull over the phone from his home in California. Pixar will go into the history books for making Toy Story, the first feature length computer animation film in 1995.
The company started off as a part of Lucasfilm which was eventually sold to Steve Jobs in 1986 which is when Pixar was formed. The various challenges it faced as it grew has played an important role in shaping its culture where the focus is on creativity, but not at the risk of alienating the non-creative people in the organisation.
The desire to share the forces and factors that shaped Pixar’s culture spurred Mr Catmull to write a book, Creativity, Inc. coauthored with business writer Amy Wallace. The culture at Pixar has been consciously shaped so that it can outlive its founders and ensure that unseen forces don’t get in the way of the creativity that drives the organization. Mr Catmull’s personal journey has been an interesting one.
As a kid, he had a dream to make the world’s first computer animated film and that is what led him to joining Lucasfilm after studying physics and computer science (then an emerging field) at the University of Utah.
Solving the problems in front of him is what has always driven him – it’s just that the nature of the problem kept changing. These started off as technical problems – not having the technology to make a movie using computers – and then became human ones. Being strategically located just an hour away from Silicon Valley and one hour plane ride from Hollywood, Mr Catmull found himself in a unique position.
In the early days of Silicon Valley, there were creative groups that were successful but then they’d fall apart. “Observing from the outside you realise that there’s something wrong that smart people are missing out on and that leads you to realise that if they are missing out on it, I’ll probably miss it too. Then this leads to figuring out what these things are and working at fixing them,” he says.
Given his background, Mr Catmull viewed these problems as a scientist, and not a manager. “I came to believe that most companies were trying to do the right thing, but in focusing on doing this right thing, they were missing out on a deeper problem – how human emotions form barriers and fears that get in the way,” he says.
This led him to the realisation that most companies were so focused on competition that they didn’t introspect deeply enough on the other destructive forces that were at work. “If we can figure out what it is about managing and adapting to change that is so hard then we can find problems before they hit us. You have to work through the problem and not go around it. It’s an abstract but philosophical approach,” he says.
What companies need to do is periodically become introspective. It’s important to examine the deeper reasons as to why they made mistakes or why they succeeded at something. Mr Catmull draws an analogy with meditation: “Facing inwards is a different experience from when you face the outside world, but until you experience it, you won’t know it. Similarly, it’s important for companies to occasionally be introspective and integrate it with how they act towards the outside world.”
The act of management itself is a creative act, and the issues in the entertainment business are applicable to other situations as well. “The trick to solving a lot of problems lies in understanding the blocks and barriers that are based on human emotions. While we can address these, it also means that a problem never completely goes away because human nature is always there,” says Mr Catmull.
For instance, the fear of failure normally stops people from engaging or speaking up in a discussion. An experiment Mr Catmull often tries is asking a group what can be done to make people more creative.
Only a handful raise their hands, whereas when he asks how many know of ways to make people hold back, all the hands in the room go up. That’s because failure tends to be viewed through two contradictory lenses. While most leaders agree that their failures and mistakes have provided some of their biggest learnings and eventual success, at the same time there will be opponents who will bludgeon you for failing.
“There is a very real aura of danger around failing and this is not going to go away. We operate in an environment where both these meanings are here to stay. Leaders need to accept that people have real fears about their responsibilities and the consequences of executing their job. It’s an active thing for leaders to make it safe so that if people fail, they aren’t punished and this is something that happens by example over a period of time,” he says.
A unique aspect at Pixar is a think-tank called Braintrust. It’s made up of some of the most senior people in the company including Catmull and Lasseter. This group acts like a peer review system, going over the progress of each movie Pixar is producing with the director every few months. However, while it does provide critical feedback on the film, the decision on what to do with that feedback is left entirely up to the director.
The company tried replicating this in other parts of the business over the years and failed every time. It took them time to realise that the reason Braintrust worked so well was because the group had no authority.
The individuals in the room – collectively and individually – were extremely powerful and this could cause people responsible for the project to enter the meeting in a defensive posture. “We made it clear that nobody in that room, not even John or me, could override the director.
By removing the authority from the room we were making it safer for the director to approach it with an open mind,” says Mr Catmull. The rationale delves deep into human psychology. People don’t want to embarrass themselves or other people, and they tend to naturally defer to those with more authority and experience. These barriers keep them from saying what they think.
“The idea at Braintrust is about the dynamics in the room and discussing things with candour,” he says. Another conflict most organisations face is the power struggle between different departments, in this case creative and production. A healthy organisation accepts that each domain has a somewhat different agenda and respects that.
At the same time the leader must realise that if any one department wins, it is detrimental to the organisation as the goals of the department have come first over the greater good. “We talk about balance as a calm yogic state, but it’s the wrong metaphor. It’s more about a physical activity like sports where things are dynamic and it is people who can adapt to the realities of this changing environment who are good at balance,” he says.
Finally, he says that writing this book doesn’t mean that Pixar has it all figured out. “The figuring-it-out process is what we continually do. This is just the approach you take so that you are continually facing in towards the problem,” he says.
Source:The Economic Times
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