Excerpts from “Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small”

A few excerpts from the “Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small (with transcipt)” post on the Fearless Coder blog:

• Why do successful companies fail?
• (Pixar) did have a culture where the artists and the technical people were peers with each other. They socialized with each other. They each thought the other was world class. The compensation structure was the same.
• If there are problems – and there were always problems – people felt comfortable about coming in and expressing their problems. You couldn’t fix every problem, but it’s important to hear them.
• We had a certain group of people who were very remarkable at telling stories. And part of being remarkable was, not only that they were funny and focused and good at storytelling, but they had complete trust in each other. And they were very often – what you might call “brutally honest” – except for them, they didn’t think of it as “brutally honest.” They thought of it as “necessarily honest,” and it was always taken that way. It was never a matter of ego or putting somebody down. It was always about the story. And therefore, you could say something hard, and it was taken in the right spirit. And given that kind of camaraderie in the key group of people, it is just gold.
• in the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now, this is counterintuitive for a lot of people.
• Most people – if you can imagine this – you can’t draw very well, but even if you can draw very well, suppose you come in, and you’ve got to put together animation or drawings and show it to a famous, world-class animator. Well, you don’t want to show something which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right. And the trick is, actually, to stop that behavior. We show it every day when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative. And that’s – as I say – it’s not obvious to people, but starting down that path helped everything that we did. Show it in its incomplete form. There’s another advantage to doing that, and that is, when you’re done, you’re done.
• we had confused the organizational structure with the communication structure, a very common thing that happens in a lot of companies. They are different. Yes, you must be organized; things must happen in order. You can lose control. But communication needs to be able to happen between anybody in the company at any time.
• one of the tricks for a manager to learn is, you don’t need to be the first person to learn. Don’t get upset. Get over it. It actually doesn’t matter. The fact that somebody else talked about the problem ahead of time is a good thing – not a sign of disrespect.
• they really did like the fact that they were working on a groundbreaking film. It was very exciting to be making history. They loved that.
• one of the fundamental problems … with companies … is that “success hides problems” … They (look at their success and) let that get in the way of diving deep and finding the problems.
• “Which is more important … finding good ideas or finding good people? And the answer is very clear: the idea was the same. If you have a good idea and you give it to mediocre group, they’ll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they’ll fix it, or they’ll throw it away and come up with something else.
• …notice, they always remake good movies. And rarely do they beat the good movies. But the fact is, there are thousands of movies out there that are actually “great idea,” but they’re poorly executed. They should be remaking bad movies … The ones that do better aren’t those that just copy somebody else’s good product. They actually take the thing that’s going wrong and fix that
• we instituted a process in doing postmortems after every movie, trying to do a deep analysis. The first postmortems were very successful. We worked very hard to make sure people were safe – they didn’t get shot for pointing out problems. And everybody got a lot out of them. They valued them greatly. So we’re off to a good start. But then, as you go on to the next postmortem, people began to game the system. And it turns out, people know the value – they know they should do them – but they don’t like to do it. So why don’t they like to do the postmortems. Why don’t they like to do the analysis. Well, they’re kind of tired of working on something for three years. They don’t want to think about it anymore. Some people are defensive. Some people feel that one of the things they want to do in these meetings is make their team feel good. “Look what we did!” So it’s not really an in-depth analysis … again, it’s when you’re successful and the film goes off right, you kind of like to stop at that point – you sort of bask in it and not dive deeper. So what we found is, we have to change the way we do the postmortems every single film.
• the latest thing we’re doing until it gets gamed is, we’re asking them to pick, from their process, the five things that they would do again and the five things they wouldn’t do again. We try to get both to get the balance. What we’re really interested in are the things that they wouldn’t do again. but you try to get both out there. And the other – and this is a fairly important one – is to get a lot of facts about the process. When you put the facts up, and you factor it in, it actually stimulates discussion. And it’s those discussions which are very valuable.
• So let me summarize a few of the things we’ve learned. On is the constant review. The second is, it must be safe for people to tell the truth. Third is that communication should not mirror the organizational hierarchy. People and how they function is more important than ideas. And do not let success mask problems. Do a deep assessment.
• Early on, we came to believe that the story is the most important thing in our process – it led our decision-making process.  and so, as we had a lot of different polls, we’d come back to his driving principle, “It’s the story that counts.” And we thought this is one of the things that made us successful was this realization. And now so, having said that and we would say that and we would tell people about it. And we made all the sacrifices for it. And then, I discovered – as I was listening around – that studio says the same thing. Everybody says “The story’s the most important thing,” even if the story was drivel. It might be true – in fact, it is true – but it doesn’t affect behavior. Now, when I say “story is the most important thing,” I think the analogy is probably “quality is the most important thing.” It’s one of those things that’s true and you agree it’s true and you say it. That doesn’t mean anything.
• Every product that we’re making has got to be original, which implies that we can never repeat ourselves.  Now, this is … an important thing – because a lot of people in Hollywood don’t understand that. If something is successful – if you’ve got Star Wars or Shrek or whatever, then basically, “Let’s do that again,” right? We’ll try to do the same thing again. But you can’t think that way with any products. Everything is new and original. And therefore, our way of dealing with and solving the problems has got to be an original. So the secret is, we have to keep on digging deeper and deeper and knowing that we’re always missing something that’s important.
• I do believe that organizations – human organizations – are inherently unstable. They will fall over, and you have to work to keep them upright. But they fall slowly. Most people don’t notice it. They let their success blind them. They don’t see it’s falling over. The falling takes place slow, but the collapse is quick. You have to do constant assessment. You have to look for the hard truths. Mentioned Cassandra before – it’s the Greek myth. And again, she’s cursed with seeing the truth, but nobody will believe her. I don’t think the Greeks had it right, actually. I think the curse is on the people that don’t listen, right? We have to be the ones who are looking for it all the time. And when we hear things evaluate it, “Is it right?
• As far as heading for an audience, we don’t target a group – in particular, we don’t go after kids, all right. It’s a bad idea to target films for little kids. Two reasons. One is, it essentially is talking down to them. And if you talk down to them, they don’t like it that much. And for adults, it’s very boring. The truth is, children live in an adult world, and they’re used to hearing things they don’t understand. So our approach is, we want to make movies that we enjoy. There’s a physical humor and physical comedy that comes from acting from animation that kids do enjoy. So there’s a thing that they do like. And obviously, we don’t put in things into our movies that would offend families or their children. But we write the dialogue and the story for us. We want them to be meaningful to us. And that’s how we think about it.
• The question is animated actors vs. “live action” actors. The characters in our films are really a combination of the writers from the story team putting it together, the design, and the animators from the physical acting and the voice of the actor. Since we pick and select actors, we’ve got really remarkable voice. It’s really that collection that creates a character. And it’s just this part of the animations, which is different than live action. The time scale is different; the way that it’s put together is different. And in both “live action” and “animation,” you can also do it badly and you can do it well. It just depends upon talent.

Very long post, but it’s really just highlight from a terrific talk. View the video or read the whole thing at Fearless Coder blog.