Top highlights from Creativity, Inc.
Failure isnt a necessary evil. In fact, it isnt evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
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You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
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If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.
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Dont wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. Itll be pretty when we get there, but it wont be pretty along the way.
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If you arent experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.
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Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.
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I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not knownot just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we dont know can we ever hope to learn it.
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When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.
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Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.
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When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
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Fear can be created quickly; trust cant.
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For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you dont know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarrepersonally, I think the person who cant change his or her mind is dangerous. Steve Jobs was known for changing his mind instantly in the light of new facts, and I dont know anyone who thought he was weak.
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Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.
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The future is not a destination - it is a direction.
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Youll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.
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What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you dont empower them to fix whats broken?
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You dont have to ask permission to take responsibility.
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Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work onbut it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.
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it is not the managers job to prevent risks. It is the managers job to make it safe to take them.
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But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make themif you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the linewell, youre deluding yourself. For one thing, its easier to plan derivative workthings that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.
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What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it. This, more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning. It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission.
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What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power positionthat driving the train is the way to shape their companies futures. The truth is, its not. Driving the train doesnt set its course. The real job is laying the track.
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Quality is the best business plan.
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By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. Over the years, I have met people who took what seemed the safer path and were the lesser for it...I had taken a risk, and that risk yielded that greatest reward...Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.
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We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.
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I tend to flood and freeze up if Im feeling overwhelmed. When this happens, its usually because I feel like the world is crashing down and all is lost. One trick Ive learned is to force myself to make a list of whats actually wrong. Usually, soon into making the list, I find I can group most of the issues into two or three larger all-encompassing problems. So its really not all that bad. Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.
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The way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it. I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be creativewhatever form that creativity takesand that to encourage such development is a noble thing.
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Heres what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it werent true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised. Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach. Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.
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We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.
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We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.
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Managements job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
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We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission.
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THERE IS NOTHING quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.
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Instead of saying, The writing in this scene isnt good enough, you say, Dont you want people to walk out of the theater and be quoting those lines? Its more of a challenge.
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This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
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in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called beginners mind. And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it.
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If youre sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing? he says. You have to embrace that sailing means that you cant control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it
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The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goalit leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.
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We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions.
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Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of learning.
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The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I dont care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table. Believe me, you dont want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out. The best inoculation against this fate? Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close.
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Uncertainty and change are life's constraints. And that's the fun part.
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In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desiresthey want to be heard, but they dont have to win.
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People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of thingsin order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movies writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.
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It isn't enough to pick a pathyou must go down it. By doing so, you see things you couldn't possibly see when you started out; you may not like what you see, some of it may be confusing, but at least you will have, as we like to say, "explored the neighborhood." The key point here is that even if you decide you're in the wrong place, there is still time to head toward the right place.
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You cant manage what you cant measure is a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors. But in fact, the phrase is ridiculoussomething said by people who are unaware of how much is hidden. A large portion of what we manage cant be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. The problem comes when people think that data paints a full picture, leading them to ignore what they cant see. Heres my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of what you do. And at least every once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.
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Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.
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isnt enough to pick a pathyou must go down it.
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Theres something else that bears repeating here: Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear.
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His method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageousThese charts are bullshit! or This deal is crap!and watching people react. If you were brave enough to come back at him, he often respected itpoking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it.
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When it come to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.
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For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesnt matter if you are getting the story right.
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when someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenchedand that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to let it evolve, it could be destroyed.
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Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our peoples intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reasonour job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Managements job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
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Dont confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work onbut it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.
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Im a firm believer in the chaotic nature of the creative process needing to be chaotic. If we put too much structure on it, we will kill it. So theres a fine balance between providing some structure and safetyfinancial and emotionalbut also letting it get messy and stay messy for a while. To do that, you need to assess each situation to see whats called for. And then you need to become whats called for.
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If you dont try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
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The first principle was Story Is King, by which we meant that we would let nothingnot the technology, not the merchandising possibilitiesget in the way of our story.
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