Episode 1: Ed Catmull
Wizard of Awe: Peek Behind the Pixar Curtain with Ed Catmull
Season 3, Episode 1: Show Notes [TRANSCRIPT BELOW]
Ed Catmull is the Founder and former CEO at Pixar and former CEO of Disney Animation Studios. He dives deep into some of the ideas that he shared in his book Creativity Inc., so you can expect a real masterclass on the creative process and how this translates to high-level teams. We get into some insightful discussions on the objectivity problem, learning by doing, the dangers of overestimating past successes, and the constancy of change. Ed also makes amazing arguments for why learning should be centralized in the creative process and how balance is often struck through forward motion. Along the way, you can expect to hear some colorful anecdotes about some of the beloved movies that Ed was involved in, including Zootopia, Finding Nemo, and Monsters University. The wonderful thing about this conversation is how specific it is to the world of animated films, but also how these lessons and ideas translate for leaders in any field. Make sure to join us to hear it all!
Key Points From This Episode:
Edwin shares the story of the 'Zootopia incident' and the point it illustrates.
How a team can hold onto an element of a film that they love but is not working.
Solving the objectivity problem by drawing on trusted outside perspectives.
Assessing the group dynamic and sketching the role of the person in charge of gauging this.
Edwin comments on the place of customer feedback in internal discussions.
Reflecting on the failure of the Blue-Footed Newt project and why this and other initiatives might not have worked.
Explaining the reasons and roots for the 'three pitches rule'.
The importance of protecting new ideas and how Edwin approaches this.
Thoughts on assessing the creative process; Edwin talks about best practices for great hires.
Creating a trusting environment for interns and why this is so beneficial for all involved.
Edwin's tactics for identifying assumptions and how he looks for what he is missing at any given time.
Why our ideas about the past are as misleading as our predictions for the future!
Making use of deeper research trips to enhance an audience's sense of the truth.
Unpacking the real reasons for Steve Jobs' strength and success.
The inevitability of change and the instability of all moments.
Tweetables:
“I believe strongly that getting the feedback from the customers or users is an integral part of the creative process.” — Ed Catmull [0:19:19]
“Because the engineers and the software writers are listening and paying attention, then the animators feel like they're bringing something that they don't know about. You end up in a place that neither side knew at the beginning.” — Ed Catmull [0:20:22]
“You really have to value and appreciate what the users, or the potential users, have and recognize that they often want things that we don't know about.” — Ed Catmull [0:21:35]
“Our films are driven by how strongly people feel about something.” — Ed Catmull [0:28:08]
“Taking a risk on people that look like they've got the right intentions is not high risk.” — Ed Catmull [0:48:06]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
EPISODE 1 [TRANSCRIPT]
“EC: Because the engineers and the software writers are listening and paying attention, then the animators feel like they're bringing something that they don't know about, and so you end up in a place where neither side knew at the beginning.”
[0:01:57] JU: I am delighted to introduce a man who needs no introduction, Ed Catmull, founder, former CEO at Pixar, former CEO of Disney Animation Studios. Ed, thank you so much for joining us today.
[0:02:09] EC: I am really. It's my pleasure to be with you.
[0:02:11] JU: I've been so looking forward to this conversation. As I told you, actually, I've crowd sourced questions from a bunch of the designers and executives in my network, and I'm really eager to share them with you. If they're great questions, I don't get credit. But if it doesn't go well, I take full responsibility. I know we have a ton to cover, and so I just want to dive straight in.
With your permission, I thought it'd be really fun to zoom into one particular moment in 2014, which you write about in your book. It's called The Zootopia Incident, you could say. I thought it'd be fun to use this story as a way to get to the heart of your management values. Would you tell us a little bit about this mid-production screening, so to speak, where the Disney team brought Zootopia to the Pixar team? Bring us into their thought process in that moment. Why are they bringing the film to the team at this moment?
[0:03:00] EC: Well, they are bringing it, because they know that the team at Pixar wants to help them and can. The background for that is that for many years, as we were developing Disney, the rule was that we were keeping the studios very separate from each other, because we needed Disney to have its own strong culture at every level. This worked great. Now that they had reached that level, we still had a problem with every film, and that is you get lost in each film. Every film. There's always something that goes seriously wrong.
A hard thing for people to understand, but these babies are not born without pain. The first time we tried this was the film before at Pixar, which was Inside Out, because Inside Out had some problems, where we were stuck. With the first one where we said, “Okay, let's show it down at Disney for their brain trust.” They call it the story trust.
[0:04:03] JU: Okay.
[0:04:04] EC: They were able to tease out the issues that helped raise it to the high level that it got to. Pete Docter was able to see things he couldn't see before. Since that was successful, when he got to Zootopia down at Disney –
[0:04:20] JU: I can't imagine, as a Zootopia aficionado, it is probably my favorite Disney film, I can't imagine there being a problem with it, right? I'm already struggling to even wrap my mind around this, because to me, it's such an incredible film. I can't imagine it needing intervention at any time.
[0:04:35] EC: Yes. The original film, the fox, Nick, was the main character and Hopps is secondary to him. Was always the two of them. Nick's journey was to go from a cynical person to one that opened up from that. It was a world in which there were predators, which you saw. But in order to keep the predators in line, they wore these collars, which would shock them if they got too far out of line.
[0:05:05] JU: Okay. Okay. To my knowledge, that's not a part of the film that I saw, right? That's an interesting plot twist I didn't know about. Where is the team's head at that the – sounds like the Disney team brings the film to the Pixar team, because they know there's some challenge. Where's their head at? What's the timeline they're dealing with? What's the challenge they're trying to solve? Why did they shine the Bat signal in the sky at this point?
[0:05:28] EC: Well, the thing to know in general is that the filmmakers know they have problems. They're not deluded on any film. Excuse me. In general, they're not deluded.
[0:05:37] JU: Good clarification.
[0:05:39] EC: Sometimes they are. If you get deluded, or you get caught up in something and you fall in love with something that isn't working, that's when you need some outside force to come in and gently hit you across to forehead with the two by four.
[0:05:56] JU: Very gently. Very gently
[0:05:56] EC: Very gently. Because you know that this – the person that's doing this wants you to succeed. In this case, they knew there was a problem. They thought, well, since it worked when we gave notes to Pixar, maybe it would work if we show the film. Because see, but when Pixar gave the notes, it's confusing.
[0:06:18] JU: I got you. I'm tracking with you. I'm tracking with you. You did realize, we're able to help Pixar. Maybe they can help us now.
[0:06:24] EC: That's right. They came up and they showed the film. The way this works is we have a screening. We also have other people in the studio see it, because you need an audience. It affects how you perceive what you're seeing. Then we'd have the brain trust and then that group that was in charge of Zootopia with the Pixar brain trust. We're giving them notes for it. For the first 15 or 20 minutes, Andrew didn't say anything. As I mentioned, there were collars on the other predators.
[0:06:59] JU: Who's Andrew, by the way? You said Andrew didn't mention anything.
[0:07:01] EC: I'm sorry. Andrew Stanton. Okay. I mean, at Pixar, he's just Andrew.
[0:07:06] JU: Everybody knows Andrew. Yeah, exactly. We all know Andrew here. We're all among friends. Okay. Andrew Stanton from Pixar, famed, legendary producer, thought leader, he's sitting there and he's sitting silently is what you're saying.
[0:07:19] EC: Yes. Andrew's the one who did WALL-E, he did Finding Nemo and he's brilliant at structure and emotion. He's highly respected by the people at Pixar. That when he does talk, he's to the point. I mean, he's very thoughtful about what he does, but he also takes the time to think it through. About 20 minutes in, he said, “When I got into Zootopia and I see this world and the collars and the whole premise of it, I can never like this city. I can never want to go to the city. This is unforgivable.”
[0:07:59] JU: He drops a bombshell. I mean, a word like unforgivable from Andrew Stanton is not like, “Okay, next comment.” Where do you go from there?
[0:08:07] EC: That's right. Essentially, his notion is it needed a bombshell so that when they returned, because he wasn't telling them how to solve the problem, he was just saying, “This is unforgivable. It absolutely doesn't work.” When they return, they're pretty shaken and they have to figure out what it is, because he wanted them to rethink how this was going to work.
Now, the interesting thing was that there were already people at Disney who had said this doesn't work. That is the comments that they heard from Pixar were comments that they had heard within the group before. They weren't new ideas. But they had some things in the making of the film that they fell in love with. There was one scene in particular where when the child reaches a certain age, they get their collar, and it's treated as if it's a coming-of-age thing, but you know that it's actually not good. The adult polar bears who are putting this around their child also know this isn't good, but it's part of what it means to join an adult society.
[0:09:20] JU: You said, there's a beloved scene. It sounds like the team – maybe the team's holding on to, or they just feel like, really works. What does it take to have, if you just take that scene, how much effort, thought, investment has been placed into that scene, which sounds like maybe it's part of the problem, maybe it's part of the unforgivable part of the society. What is contributing to the Disney team's reluctance to embrace the feedback, it sounds like, they were getting?
[0:09:45] EC: Well, it's a very emotional scene. It's like — it's setting the emotional core for the film. Because it was a tent poll for the film that was far along in the production and they were putting more energy into it. This would be the classic case of falling in love with your darlings. Then someone comes along and says, “I'm sorry, you got to kill that. It's getting in the way. of the rest of your movie.” The thing that you've invested in heavily is actually ruining what you were doing. It's hard for them to let go of it. It took someone on the outside who was very respected to just say, “This is not working.”
[0:10:30] JU: When you say, it took somebody on the outside, like Andrew, it sounds like, they got a little bit of this feedback even from inside Disney. What was it? Why couldn't they see it when they were at Disney? Can you speak for a moment to the value of an outsider like Andrew?
[0:10:44] EC: Well, it was something we learned early on is that the people who are close to it all get used to it. Then they end up falling in love with it, too. What does it mean to have objectivity if you've been involved in the process a lot? The origin of the brain trust was actually to try to solve this problem. Because with our first films –
[0:11:08] JU: The objectivity problem, just to be clear.
[0:11:09] EC: Yeah. Okay. When we were starting with Toy Story and A Bug’s Life, we had someone who did that. It was Tom Schumacher down at Disney. It was great, because he was on the outside and he wanted us to succeed. He gave good notes. He was actually moved over into – he was moved to what? New York to be over their theatrical group, their musicals. Disney started to decline at that time in the quality of its films. We knew we were going to have a problem. The brain trust was formed in order to be an outside group.
[0:11:46] JU: In order to fill Tom's shoes, so to speak. This mechanism has been developed to provide objective perspective to folks who are in danger of falling in love with potentially problematic storylines, or problematic issues.
[0:12:00] EC: Yes. Now the problem was that didn't work.
[0:12:03] JU: Okay. Say more.
[0:12:04] EC: Okay. It turns out, because they were involved in the making of the film, they really weren't an objective outside force.
[0:12:13] JU: Even the brain trusts itself, you mean. Starts to lose its objectivity. Wow.
[0:12:17] EC: Yes. The interesting thing to me was it was formed for one purpose, and it didn't work at that purpose, but we discovered in the process that it was incredibly valuable in giving help and notes to each other. We ended up with a brain trust as a really potent tool, but we still need an outside force.
[0:12:41] JU: Hence, inviting Andrew, or others to those moments.
[0:12:44] EC: Yeah. Andrew could be that for Disney, or the brain trust, excuse me, because there were other great notes that came out of that session from Pixar, from the people. It's always several people who do something.
[0:12:56] JU: Sure.
[0:12:57] EC: Only a few people have that amazing ability completely breakthrough. We had to get something else at Pixar. It turns out, that was Steve Jobs. Because he could be an outside force and he can't ignore it. He wanted us to succeed. For us, it was like, figuring out what are these pieces? How do you get the objectivity on the outside that's going to work? Also, how do you have the problem on the inside? The brain trust proved to be one of our most potent tools for solving problems.
[0:13:29] JU: I want to drill into one part of the brain trust, because I think it's fascinating. You talk about one of the roles you emphasize is somewhat, in my world, we'd say it's meta. Meaning, it's another layer of abstraction beyond. I wanted to talk about the person whose job it is to be mindful of the group dynamic itself. Because you talk about a commitment to improving the mechanism. What I'm curious is this person who's attending to the group dynamic, what are they looking for in a brain trust meeting? How are they assessing what are the signs of health, or the signs of dysfunction that they're actually looking for in trying to improve the group dynamic?
[0:14:03] EC: You can look at it in two parts. One of them is the group itself is aware of the meta dynamics that are there. They will sometimes say, “Oh, this didn't work well.” I would also say, at Pixar, because it was really Jim Morris and I who were – we were part of all these meetings, but we weren't really the note givers for it.
[0:14:23] JU: You could append to the dynamic yourself, you're saying.
[0:14:25] EC: Yes. While it's fun to give notes, the trick is not to get lost in doing that. It's actually to look at how well is the group working. Is somebody holding back? Is somebody over doing it? Are people not listening? That's what we're looking at.
[0:14:43] JU: How do you know if someone's – just for example — I love that. How do you know if someone's holding back? What behavior, or body language are you looking for as call it the keeper of the context of the brain trust? How do you know if you go, “Hey, Andrew hasn't spoken up in a while”? What are you looking for there?
[0:15:00] EC: Well, the first thing to note is I can't read minds. All I can do is look at body language and their behavior and performance. All right. If I see some clues in terms of the way they're talking, or the way others are reacting to them, I can follow up afterwards to find out whether or not the clues are correct.
[0:15:22] JU: Is that in the moment, or you actually circle back later, like the next day?
[0:15:26] EC: I’ll circle back later.
[0:15:28] JU: Okay. I noticed yesterday, what was going on there? You'd actually reference a meeting.
[0:15:32] EC: Yeah, I just go ahead and ask them about things, or I'll talk with others, because other people are aware of the meta issues that are there, but that isn't their main job. My main job is to look at the meta issues. Theirs is to look at the story. I have to say that over several years, they do learn about how this works. They've also grown to trust each other. In general, the process works very well. There are times when it goes off the rails, when somebody is trying to exert too much authority, or they don't listen and other things like that that go wrong.
On the other side, every once in a while, just magic happens. Typically, at least once per film. By magic, I mean that the ego has left the room. When I say ego has left the room, it's that people can put out an idea, if it works, they don't feel all puffed up, or like, “Oh, thank goodness, I said something that worked in the other’s line.” If it doesn't work, they feel deflated, because they’ve become attached to what they're doing and they feel judged by what they said.
[0:16:39] JU: Just to make sure I'm understanding. When ego leaves the room, one of the evidences that ego leaves the room is there's a lack of a sense of ownership, or a detachment between an individual and the ideas they're contributing. They're not like a dog on a bone insisting on their way, but they're also not – they don't get discouraged if somebody moves on. Is that what you're saying?
[0:16:59] EC: Yes. Well, another way of saying it is you're trying to solve the problem for the film. The only thing they care about is whether or not it's working for the film. If they throw out an idea and it helps the film, good. If it doesn't, that's okay, too, because the focus is on getting the problem solved for the film. If everybody goes into that state, then you find that the nature of it changes and the nature of the discussion changes, all of which is around getting the film moving in the right direction, which also includes, you started going down a path and you say, “Okay, this path isn't working,” then the whole group would go back and reset and go in a different direction. By saying that people aren't attached to it, it's like, when you pull back and go in a different direction, people don't feel deflated. It's like, okay, they're in agreement. Let's try something.
[0:17:54] JU: The picture I got in my mind is almost like, either kids playing soccer, or something. Or a school of fish. There's this sense of we can all – let's all move in this direction. Let's all move over here. It's not somebody going, “No, no, no. But I want to be over here.” There's a fluidity to the movement of the group.
[0:18:09] EC: Yes.
[0:18:10] JU: Yeah. We're talking about film and I know you've mentioned actually, especially in the expanded edition of the book, which I love, by the way, it gave me a whole new opportunity to read the book. I loved reading it with fresh eyes. One of the things you mentioned is that brain trust has taken on a life of its own, right? One thing I would love to know is what about outside of film? Specifically, for example, I was talking with a CEO friend of mine, Bracken Darrell, who's the CEO of VF Corporation, formerly at Logitech. He told me, he actually loves the brain trust. He's tried to implement it and emulate it, but he said, he never caught it quite right.
One of the things he asked me and that I would love to dig in, or he asked me to ask you is, how do you incorporate customer feedback into the brain trust? Because at least in the book, there's a lot of team feedback. Is there a role for the customer voice, or the customer perspective, or how do you think about that, especially in areas maybe that aren't so, I don't know, specialized this film is the right word, or where customer feedback drives a lot of the product development process?
[0:19:10] EC: Well, I mean, first of all, it's one of the issues for us is we only get really one chance at audience feedback, which comes late in the game. I believe strongly that getting the feedback from the customers, or the people who use them is an integral part of the creative process. Let's say, from a software point of view, is we do write a lot of software, where our customers are the people in the company, the animation group.
[0:19:40] JU: Right. The engineer is the customer there. Yeah.
[0:19:43] EC: If you think about it, the people who are writing the software for the animators are not animators, okay. They can watch them and they can make a guess as to what's needed, but they don't really know. The animators are asking for certain features, but they don't really know what's possible. If they ask something early on, and we give them what they want, by the time they get it, they'll say, “Well, that isn't quite what I meant.” Or, “Oh, you can do more?” This then becomes this process where the user is bringing something to the table here, and the engineers value what they bring.
Because the engineers and the software writers are listening and paying attention, then the animators feel like they're bringing something that they don't know about. You end up in a place where neither side knew at the beginning.
[0:20:38] JU: Right. It's a reciprocal surprise process, almost.
[0:20:42] EC: Yeah. When it comes to getting the customer feedback, frankly, for us, it's a little bit easier, because they're in the same building.
[0:20:50] JU: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Maybe we could even use software, or animators’ tools as an example of this. I know that when you're doing a brain trust for a film, you screen the film, right, which to me is the metaphor in a way for a picture of enabling a team to immerse itself in each other's works in progress. You screen a film and you're immersed in the work in progress. What are other ways that folks outside of film, and maybe you could talk about animators and technology, someone's running a consumer goods company, or a technology company, what are analogs for immersing yourself in the work of others in order to have a productive brain trust, where you have the objectivity required to address a problem?
[0:21:32] EC: Well, for me, one of the first things is you really have to value and appreciate what the users, or the potential users have and recognize that they often want things that we don't know about. We can never take a process of where we know what they want. It's more like, our values come from the fact that we understand we're going to try to learn from them. If we value them, we're more likely to adapt to what they need. There really is that reciprocal part to engage them that's going to develop and get better. You have to start from that. Okay. Now, if we agree that's the thing, how do we do it? Because it's different for every kind of thing that you're doing.
[0:22:15] JU: Right, right. That's what I was wondering about is like, say your products a shoe, right? Do you have everybody wear the shoes, you know what I mean? I mean, say your product is a medical device. Do you have everybody – How do the folks who you've invited to a brain trust style objective feedback session acquire the requisite context and immersion in the work in progress, so that they can provide valuable feedback on it?
[0:22:39] EC: Yes. The way I would frame it is, that's your question. That's your problem. If you believe that's an important thing to do.
[0:22:46] JU: That's what you're orienting around. Yeah, I see.
[0:22:48] EC: Yeah. Now you keep trying to figure out how to do that. If it isn't, let's change what we're doing.
[0:22:57] JU: That's the really, the meta role that you said that you were holding, right, is you're attending to, does this group have sufficient context to be able to weigh in objectively? I see.
[0:23:07] EC: That was one of the points with the expanded one is that what the brain trust is, is not what it started off to be. Its goal to begin with was one that it couldn't do. It changed and it kept changing and it kept evolving. Over all those years, it's never been exactly the same thing. The personalities are different, the people are different.
[0:23:30] JU: It sounds like, even the objective is different, and the means by which you accomplish the objective is different.
[0:23:34] EC: Right. It isn't a stable thing.
[0:23:37] JU: That's great.
[0:23:38] EC: There's nothing stable in this picture.
[0:23:40] JU: That's great. Well, you talk later about when you got acquired, the Pixar people are going, “Thought you said things would never change.” I mean, to me, what I took from that section of the book is you go, “No, no, no. The norm here is change. Don't attribute all the changes to the acquisition.” I think brain trust is actually a fantastic portrait of that. It's what you said is so, so valuable. It's not static.
I want to switch gears and I want to talk about blue-footed newts, okay. This is something that you referred to as the Incubator Project. The reason that I was drawn to this, the reason I want to dig into it a little bit is we hear in the innovation space, we hear a lot about call it Skunkworks types setups, where with separate spaces and the value of such separation, etc. Why did the Incubator Project not work in your experience?
[0:24:29] EC: Well, the first thing to note is that we had several projects that didn't work. We would always try to do things to have them change. Typically, we would, if they really couldn't work, and you go at a lot of time, but you have to. If they can't fix it, then well, after trying a lot of things, we'll make a change. Often, it means we will change directors. Another example would be Ratatouille.
Ratatouille was a – a wonderful man designed it. In fact, the concept of the film came from him, the design of the film, the look. This is actually fairly well along and it wasn't working. At this point, we brought in Brad Bird to then take the film and he solved two big problems, so we're actually holding it back. In other words, the tent pole things that were screwing up the films, he solved. If you look at the final film, while everything was rewritten about it, the basic concept was the one that originally came from that first director.
[0:25:33] JU: What you're saying is the original concept and even vision is insufficient to result in an exceptional output. While the vision was there, Brad's perspective was required to turn it in. As you say, take it from suck to not suck, which I really liked.
[0:25:48] EC: Yeah. That's what happened in that case. We had other ones that were like that, like somebody else came in and they solved the problems, because these are hard problems. In this case, again, wonderful man, a challenging concept, just they had real problems trying to get it all to work. We did change directors. We brought in Pete Docter and we asked Pete to do it.
[0:26:11] JU: This, when we say it, now just for the audience's sake, we're now referring to the blue-footed newt project.
[0:26:17] EC: That's right.
[0:26:18] JU: Okay, yeah. Why did you call it, by the way, just as an aside, in case it may be helpful context, why do you refer to it as the incubator project? What was unique about the setup, or structure that justified a naming designation?
[0:26:29] EC: Yeah. In truth, I don't even remember. I mean, sometimes we'll try different things and often forget why we did them.
[0:26:37] JU: I love it.
[0:26:37] EC: It was just, we put them in a different building to let them try different things. In the end, it was like, the others think, because everyone would try something different. We're trying to solve the problem in different ways.
[0:26:48] JU: You get Pete Docter involved in the blue-footed newt project. It's set up a little bit differently. What happens? Why do you look back and say, “We shouldn't do films like that next time”? What did you take away from that experience that shaped how you moved forward with the next films?
[0:27:03] EC: What I took away is, that is what we do. If we're going to do these ideas that are unusual, then every once in a while, something like this will happen. In fact, that's the only film we didn't complete. Because if anything, I know what makes something work is getting the right people behind it to solve the problems. It's a little less about making the risky ideas, because they're all hard, and unless it's getting everything to work. We get near the edge at times. I'm surprised we completed as many as we did.
There wasn't anything about this one, which says, I wish we’d do it different. Not at all. It’s like, that was the consequence of taking a risk. We put Pete over it. What Pete said was, “Well, basically, since I'm pretty much starting from scratch, I have another idea which I think would be better and I'm more passionate about.” This would take place inside the head of a little girl. As soon as he said that, the general reaction was, “Yeah, that sounded like a pretty good idea.” Our films are driven by how strongly people feel about something. If he's passionate about doing that, then that's the most valuable asset that any group can have.
[0:28:19] JU: Maybe this is a good segue. I was actually going to talk about this later, but it's fitting now, so I'm switching my notes. Let's talk about the three pitches rule for a second, because that's an innovative mechanism. I'd love for you to explain where that comes from. Then as it relates to Pete's decision to push pause on the blue-footed newt project and start thinking about a story in this little girl's head in your comments about where folks’ passion is.
Talk about for a second, what's the three pitches rule? Then what I want to get to is, how do you know which of the three pitches to select?
[0:28:50] EC: There are a couple of things here. In fact, it's not a law there, because there's some people who don't work that way. That's fine. The basic notion is, if we pick someone because we think they can be a director, or they have directed, we know that when they develop something that they can get stuck. We've all been there, right? You're trying to, even doing your homework back in school, you get stuck. You start to bang your head against the wall, because you need to do it. If you pick an idea and you're trying to solve the problems, you do get stuck.
They're starting at an early point, and they don't even know exactly what the ideas they want to make. What I ask is they come up with three pitches. The reason for that is that if they get stuck, they switch to one of the other ideas. Over the course of a year, they're switching back and forth between these three ideas. They've got maybe one or two people helping them, plus the development department providing some resources for them. The idea is like, this is really one, two, three people, but it's really the director coming up with these three ideas. At the end of the year, they're going to pitch what they've come up with.
[0:30:02] JU: Right. They're going to showcase, “These are my three pitches of the next film I could direct.”
[0:30:08] EC: Yes. At this point, they're now going to show them to be other creative people in the company. I should note that as creative people, they've been in these in the past. They know how it works. They've watched how they work in the past. Now, even though that's true, the following things happen. Roughly what happens is that when they pitch their ideas, they start off by saying, “I love all three ideas equally. It doesn't matter to me which one you pick.”
[0:30:40] JU: Okay. Do you have reason to disbelieve that statement? Is that what you're insinuating?
[0:30:45] EC: We all know it's not true. That they really do prefer one of these ideas, sometimes very strongly. You can also understand why they would say that, because you're putting yourself out in front of people. You're vulnerable. You have to acknowledge people's vulnerability in any position they're in. In this case, they've got a setup. Typically, we have two story rooms. The story room's got about – can hold about 12 people in it. There's a table in the middle, two long walls. One wall will have the artwork for one idea, the other wall, the artwork for the other idea. Then we go to an adjacent room for the third wall.
With each one, they present them and it's about a half hour per story and it moves and so forth. My favorite one was Coco, where Lee Unkrich presented his three ideas. The first two were quite reasonable. We had a good discussion. Then we moved over into the third room.
[0:31:44] JU: Not to interrupt, but if I remember correctly, the first two, it been in developments and kicking around in people's minds for a while. There was a sense of these are both great options, right? That was my recollection.
[0:31:54] EC: Yeah. The first one was one that had been in development in the past. The second one was he wanted to do a musical. This was the first Pixar musical. At Disney, music's in the DNA of the company. This is not true at Pixar. That is musicals with five to seven numbers, obviously music.
[0:32:15] JU: That that second idea was a bold new direction for Pixar, you're saying.
[0:32:18] EC: Yeah, it was a whole new direction. It looked really interesting.
[0:32:23] JU: You got these two and then you go in the third room, now what happens?
[0:32:25] EC: I walk in the third room, we opened the door, the ceiling, the table, both walls and the end wall are covered with Mexican artwork.
[0:32:34] JU: Your typical set up for a three-pitches presentation, right?
[0:32:37] EC: That's right. At that moment, you walk into the room and every single person in that room knows which movie we're going to make. Now, the other interesting thing is he wanted it to be a musical. The other one, which we knew was the case, was that the final movie that came out actually bore little resemblance to that original pitch.
[0:32:59] JU: Hmm. Interesting.
[0:33:01] EC: The thing was, we all know that's the case. What we want is that they care about the idea.
[0:33:06] JU: It's almost like, they have to have the energy, the fuel in the tank to endure all of the necessary pivots and iterations that are going to be required to bring a film to fruition.
[0:33:15] EC: Yeah. It's going to change. How could it not change? One of the things was it ended up not being musical. The people that wrote the music for that very great song, which is Remember Me, they did that as part of the musical. That then became the pivotal single song that drove the emotion of the movie, which is very powerful at the end of the movie.
[0:33:38] JU: Wow.
[0:33:39] EC: Okay. What do you predict? I don't predict.
[0:33:43] JU: I love that. I love that as an example of preserving director passion and honoring that, which is required to ultimately deliver creative work. I want to shift slightly now, and you talk about this notion of protecting new ideas and the importance of protection, and you define protection a little bit differently than maybe some do. I want to talk about Finding Nemo for a second and start with, you said that we had this goal with Finding Nemo, because production costs are enormously high. If you're finalizing the story while you're producing, you had a goal that you said was worthy, but totally naive, of finalizing the story before you got in production. In the spirit of, in connection to this idea of protecting new ideas, I'd love to hear from you briefly, why was that a worthy goal? Then why was it naive to think that you could achieve it?
[0:34:29] EC: Well, if you were to walk into any production, it's clear that when you make changes, your costs go up. If a movie is going to change because you are altering it, while you're making it, then everything you put into it now has to be rethought and reworked. It doesn't take much to say, look at this and say, that's the reason movies costs a lot of money. You keep changing it. Quick changing –
[0:34:57] JU: Quit changing it. Just lock it and then we can just produce it and it will be done.
[0:35:00] EC: Write the script and make your decisions based upon the script. If you get that script right the first time, then it will be a lot cheaper to make.
[0:35:09] JU: By the way, I'm a recovering MBA and you're deeply appealing to my need for the ability to predict a budget. Thank you.
[0:35:18] EC: Yes. It's very clear to me that anybody that would come in with a nice MBA, would look at that and say, “Duh.”
[0:35:26] JU: Right. It’s a clear area of innovation. Just finish the story first, you dummies.
[0:35:31] EC: Yeah. In fact, we do write it first and then we start to make it and then we change the damn thing.
[0:35:37] JU: And why? Why change it after you start making it? What's going on then?
[0:35:41] EC: What we wanted to do was to figure out, okay, how do we get it right to begin with? Then Andrew pitched Finding Nemo. It was a brilliant presentation. It was sophisticated. It had lots of opportunity for humor, great filmmaking, wonderful pitch. Anybody that watched it said, “Okay, we're going to make that film.” Then we start to make it and certain things aren't working about it. We didn't have the sympathy for the father. The comedy of it wasn't working. It was confusing.
[0:36:18] JU: I suppose, what you're getting at is the stuff that you couldn't a priori know. You thought, I'm sure when you crafted the story, that sufficient sympathy is there for the father, right? It's almost as it's coming into production that you realize, whoa, something's – it's only in making it that you realize what needs to be rewritten. Is that right?
[0:36:36] EC: Yes. Because the pitch is somebody talking to a group of people who are themselves filmmakers. Andrew, who is one of the best people at pitching that I've ever seen, is performing in front of an audience, while he's looking them in the face.
[0:36:51] JU: Filling in the gaps, everybody's mental model is slightly different. Therefore, we all agree to some vague thing, which we say is fixed, but really is not.
[0:37:01] EC: Well, and the thing was, is that when you actually start to put it up, it's at that time when you feel like, okay, there's something wrong with the voice of the father doesn't quite work. Also, we don't know why he's so overprotective, because we don't find out until the end of the film.
[0:37:20] JU: In the original conceiving of the film.
[0:37:23] EC: Yes. Because remember at the first of the film, there was that barracuda that came in, wiped out the nest.
[0:37:28] JU: Oh, yeah.
[0:37:30] EC: We don't find that out until the end of the film, in the pitch. What it means is, is we don't really like the father through most of the movie, because he's overprotective. It's an annoying overprotective. If you move that barracuda scene up at the beginning, then you really understand and empathize with the father. Okay, so you don't know that until –
[0:37:53] JU: No, we didn't know that ahead of time.
[0:37:55] EC: When you actually see it and say, “Okay, we need to do this.” When you actually put these things together, and you've got them up in front of other people and you start to put them on storyboards, because we basically make a cartoon version of the films ahead of time, and then get them up with the music and with either with actors, or with people who are speaking the parts, like inside actors, will be filled in later with the real actors. There are some concepts that did work quite well from the beginning.
[0:38:27] JU: Well, to me, one just pragmatic takeaway for leaders, perhaps in other spaces is clear, which is there's no way to know how something's going to work until you start to do it, right? We talk at – I see Diego just dropped this line in the chat, building to think. Rather than thinking before you build is actually building in order to inform your thinking. I think the NBA, the budget and spreadsheets says, wow, this is a way better way to do it. We can cut a lot of costs if we do it. Ultimately, what you get at, and what you said so eloquently in the book is ultimately, if cost is the primary consideration, it subverts your ultimate goal. Your ultimate goal isn't saving costs. Your ultimate goal is making a spectacular film.
It's easy in the cold calculus of the spreadsheet to say, “Oh, let's do it this way.” If you don't have that flexibility, and you aren't willing to actually change what you're learning, or how you're thinking based on what you’ve built, then you end up delivering a suboptimal product. Is that a fair summation of what you learned there?
[0:39:24] EC: Yes. I think the building to think actually does capture, because it's saying, okay, we're doing something, but we're going to learn in the process. We always want to learn. Our whole process should be one about informing and getting it to be better. Figuring out why we're having problems, because it may be, in fact, it's frequently the case that we will not make the same mistake again, but we will make other ones.
[0:39:51] JU: Right. Right. We shouldn't assume we're not going to make any more mistakes.
[0:39:54] EC: Yes. We are learning. We're examining each one of these things and say, okay, can we actually learn from that? It was actually one of the great lessons I got. This is after I graduated from Utah, and I was then over a group. My experience at Utah when I was a graduate student working on my PhD was profound. This is a wonderful environment. It set the course of my life. I came out thinking, “This is the kind of environment I want to have wherever I go.”
[0:40:23] JU: Recreate it. Yeah.
[0:40:26] EC: I tried to set it up. I knew I wasn't in university, so I wasn't that dumb. But it was a research environment. I tried to set up these things. Some of the things were very successful. That's what led to basically, George Lucas coming to hire me to run his group at Lucasfilm. As I left to go to Lucasfilm, I could look back on the things I had tried, and some of the things were successful and about a half the ideas were crock.
For me, the most important thing that I came away with was at the time I thought, "I'm going to come up with new ideas for the future. I bet that my ratio of right to wrong will be about the same, of 50/50."
[0:41:08] JU: Wow. What a humble way to think about. It's easy to think, okay, all my failures in the past. Now every idea I have moving forward, 100% success rate. What were the implications there? If you, I mean, just to continue on the line of thought, if you say, I assume 50% of the great ideas I have now moving forward are still going to fail, what are the implications on that, on the structure that you create there?
[0:41:30] EC: Because I believe that going forward, that about half the new things in the future that would not work, and that ratio would continue for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, turns out to be true, or fortunately.
[0:41:42] JU: Yeah. I think it's a wonderful thing, right? It's like Moore's Law. You will continue to get half the things right.
[0:41:47] EC: Yeah. The important thing for me was to realize that I was going to be wrong more than I thought I was. Of course, you can't really measure what the number is, but there’s that thing that I found very useful. As we work on every new film, we're going to try new things every time. We're always going to do it.
[0:42:07] JU: Some proportion’s not going to work.
[0:42:08] EC: Some will not work. There are also things that work, but in the future, they won't even be appropriate anymore.
[0:42:16] JU: Because of technological advances, or otherwise. Yeah.
[0:42:19] EC: Yeah. Or the people are different. There are sorts of things that change.
[0:42:21] JU: Okay. Actually, I want to get to people here. We have a mutual friend, R.C. Buford, who's the CEO of the San Antonio Spurs. He was telling me, or he asked me to ask this question, which I thought was great, around recruiting and people management. He said, “Can creativity be measured and/or assessed in the selection process and in the people management assessment systems?”
[0:42:46] EC: Well, first of all, I think that most people have got the ability to be additive. The real issue is that the managers are the main block to creative solutions. Hence, the title of the book. What are the unseen forces? Well, it turns out the managers are the unseen force.
[0:43:04] JU: Okay, don't give away the ending. That's my last question, because that's my – as you know, my primary obsession. But R.C. asked, can creativity be assessed? The first thing you said was, most people have the ability to be additive, but managers block. Okay, continue with the people management thread there. It stands, you're saying, most people can contribute additively creatively. What does it look like? How do you think about assessing creativity once somebody's in, are they being additive or not? Please continue.
[0:43:32] EC: Well, as we've hired, and I found this in general, is that there are some people who are extremely good and they're companies that dearly value them. They're not readily available. There are people who are very experienced, but they're not strongly attached. sometimes the experienced people are not the ones to get, because if they're really good, they're coming and you’re going to hang onto them. I don't say the most important thing is experience. Now, I want to overgeneralize, because sometimes you actually get somebody that's demonstrably good and you really want them, or they come because they really want to be with you.
What I'm looking more for is, what's their arc? What I found is frequently, if you get somebody, even if they don't have much experience, but they're on an upward arc, then they're likely to be good.
[0:44:20] JU: What’s on the axis? Not to get too nerdy here for a second, but if you think about an arc, what are you attuned to? What are you paying attention to that's mapping that curve?
[0:44:29] EC: Well, in the case of, well, here's something we did at Pixar. This is early on, where for A Bug's Life, which is our second film, they went out and they tried to hire experienced people from other places. I couldn't convince them to do otherwise. First of all, I don't try to over-control, but we actually had the highest percentage of people who were let go after a film, because frankly, they were mediocre based upon what they drew from.
The other one was, once they had made our first film, then people tend to think that they wanted to hire people like they were. In fact, when they came to the company for Toy Story, they had never done it before.
[0:45:08] JU: They misattribute reasons for success, etc.
[0:45:11] EC: Yes. Now, they've learned since then. But I also wanted them to put in a program for interns. What I found to begin with was nobody wanted to get interns. Well, what they said was they didn't want the interns, was because they didn't want to babysit while they're doing their production.
[0:45:31] JU: Right. They want to protect their budgets, right? I mean, they don't want to be funding their own babysitting.
[0:45:36] EC: Yes. But it turns out, the budget was actually the real issue. More important than what they thought of babysitting, which is a stupid answer in any case. Once they realized the real issue was their budget, then we just made it a company expense they didn't have to pay for.
[0:45:53] JU: How did you identify that the real issue was budget, by the way? Because that's a non-trivial reframe, right? If you're trying to solve the problem of perceived babysitting, that's one thing. If you're trying to solve the problem of we don't have the budget, it's totally different. How did you discern the distinction there?
[0:46:07] EC: Well, it was a comment made in some meeting about the cost of it. It was a side comment, which is usually how you figure things out, right? You're always looking for clues. I'm a big believer in clues, both in terms of looking at them, as well as giving them. In this case, it was one of those comments that was made from which I deduced that the real issue was paying for it. I then went back to them and said, we're going to pay for the interns, only to learn that they immediately said, “Okay, good idea.”
[0:46:42] JU: It's amazing how fast something goes from being a bad idea to a good idea when you don't have to pay for it.
[0:46:47] EC: Yeah. It was more like a confirmation of my presumption. That was the real issue there. That first year, we brought in eight interns from different schools on the film. The thing that happened right away, and this is because of the needs of the film, is that they were taught to use the tools and they actually did work on a film. They were not babysitting. They were doing production work, which was cool to them. Then they went back to school, because these essentially were juniors and they had one year of school left. Our issue with all of them is we want to make sure they all finished their schooling. We weren't trying to steal them away, even though they had done a really good work. Now they go back to school and they're coming from different schools. They said, “We got to do production work on this film that came out.”
[0:47:39] JU: Incredible.
[0:47:41] EC: Like, Nemo or something like that. Next year, a lot of their classmates applied for the interns.
[0:47:48] JU: That's where we can do real work. We're not being given grunt work. It's actually, it’s the greatest sales pitch for an internship.
[0:47:54] EC: Yeah. Of those first eight people, seven came back later to become full-time hires at the company. If you think about the game, one of them is that what I found is that taking a risk on people that look like they've got the right intentions is not high risk. You just assume they're going to do good work. This is very important to me is that people don't have to earn your trust. We actually start off, we give them our trust.
There are people who actually may not do well. All right, that's an issue. But I would say, the general case is that the trust that we've given them, was worth giving them. The second thing is that they're coming as an intern. Well, we get to know them. I'm spending three to six months with them, so we actually know who they are. When it comes time to have them come back, well, we've already been exposed to them, so –
[0:48:47] JU: Right. It's much less of a blind selection problem. Okay, so I want to get to a rapid-fire lightning round. I'm mindful of the time, but there's a few questions I'm dying to ask, so let's just see if we can do them quickly. If you want to expound, I mean, you have the mic and the stage. You can expound as long as possible. I want to just –
[0:49:04] EC: You got to be careful, because I have 50 years of rabbit holes to go down.
[0:49:09] JU: Anybody who knows me well, most of this audience knows I love nothing more than a good rabbit trail. We may be in trouble. Folks, buckle in. We're not near done.
Okay. First thing, rapid-fire lightning round, the hidden. I am obsessed with assumptions. Because I find, by the way, that many times, identifying the assumption, or the wrong assumption is actually the breakthrough, okay. You talk about this in the hidden. My question for you is, do you have tactics for identifying assumptions?
[0:49:41] EC: Oh, well, the first one is to start off with the notion that I'm actually missing something. I'm always missing something. I'm looking for clues. My tactic is to look for the clues, and that if I do get a clue, it doesn't mean I'm right, but it's worth digging further.
[0:50:01] JU: Just digging on that. I love that. You said you're mindful that you're missing something. When do you need to remind yourself of that? What triggers the thought, “I'm missing something”? Because I would assume, you aren't just walking around all the time in every part of your life saying, “I'm missing something.” What reminds you to that, “Oh, yeah. I'm probably missing something”? What happens before that?
[0:50:20] EC: Typically, I do try to set up something where I'm either, I walk around and talk with people. On a weekly basis, I try to have a random lunch with people. Part of that is that I want to give a signal of availability. The other one is, I'm just listening for signals, or cues, are people hesitant, or if they come in my office to raise an issue, then how do they do it? How do they approach it? How do they raise it?
[0:50:49] JU: Right. That's great. Yeah, the great Bill Baker, I don't know if this, but at Bell Labs, he was known to eat lunch with a different person. They said, sometimes he'd eat with the janitor. By the end of lunch, they said he would know everything there was to know about janitorial at Bell Labs, because he just saw his lunch as a time to really learn. I love that. Okay. Next question for you. Not that we could go, and by the way, if you want to go back to the rabbit trail, I'm not going to say no. There's an old adage, ‘hindsight is 20/20’. Your thoughts?
[0:51:15] EC: A complete nonsense. It’s our view of what takes place in the past is no better than I view the future. Because we're so blind to the things that help make us what we are, that we draw these incorrect conclusions about how we got where we are. Just as when we look off in the future, like we can see, well, it's a little fuzzy beyond a certain point. It's the same looking backwards. It just isn't true.
[0:51:41] JU: What are the implications, knowing that hindsight is not 20/20, how does that shape your worldview, your path forward, etc.? Because that to me is really powerful. The thought that hindsight 20/20 is complete nonsense is incredibly powerful. How do you operationalize that in your day-to-day?
[0:51:59] EC: Well, you have learned something in the past, but the 20/20 notion is that you have a clear view of it. You don’t. You have a coarse view of it. If you look forward in the future, then the question is, what assumptions do you make about what's going to happen? There's certain things where our intuitions about the future are completely lacking, like exponential change, which we're going through and have been for some time, is not intuitive at all to us. There are tools that we can have to make decisions about the future. Looking back, if we think we've got a clear view, then we can basically think we’re geniuses when we're lucky, when in fact, we were just lucky.
[0:52:42] JU: Right. Well, and that reminds me of maybe one thing I hadn't thought of as I was reading the book, but one thing could be, we often post-mortem failures, because we want to understand failures. But then post-morteming success and just asking the question, what is the randomness to which we are a – what is the luck to which we attribute our competence, is probably a useful retroactive to inform, or at least correct our cloudy vision of the past.
[0:53:07] EC: Yeah. That's a tricky one, because over and over again, it's a big problem. If a company is successful, typically, the leaders will think it's because they are geniuses. It screws their heads up. Very serious problem is that the success actually is one of the things that's most likely to damage a company. They're less likely to listen. If you fail, or your company is stressed, you're more likely to listen to alternate ways of doing things. If you're successful, it's because you're really good, and so you don't need to listen to others.
[0:53:42] JU: I don't need to listen. Did you see our last quarter's performance? We don't need to listen. Okay. Okay. Next rapid-fire question. Research trips. What are they? How do you use them? When do you need them?
[0:53:53] EC: Well, in the context of the movie, because research means different things to different people. In this case is we are telling stories, but it's fairly easy to base stories on our assumptions, or prejudices, or things that we know. The whole purpose of getting into the outside world is to find out things that we didn't know.
[0:54:12] JU: Stuff we hadn't seen before. Maybe give the example of Monsters University. I thought that was a great example of that.
[0:54:18] EC: Well, in the case of Monsters University, it was, okay, let's go into the dorm room. Let's go to universities. Even though people have been to school, you think about it, most people only have the experience of one or two schools they've been to. It’s like a lot of places. In the case of Finding Nemo, so here's one that people might think is a little odd, but one of the story points is the fish goes into the dental drain and it goes down through the sewage system into the ocean. The question is, could a fish really do that?
[0:54:50] JU: Wait, I thought we had to suspend disbelief here, Ed. Come on.
[0:54:54] EC: We do at times, but sometimes you actually need something. We went on a tour of the San Francisco sewage treatment plant to find out whether or not a fish could make it through the treatment plant. Answer is it can. In the case of Ratatouille, we went into the best restaurants in Paris. Some research trips are easier than others.
[0:55:15] JU: I was going to say, that must have been really hard for the team.
[0:55:17] EC: That was hard for the team. But they went into the kitchens. It's like, what's the culture like, because it turns out the culture in the kitchens isn't the same thing that you see on the cooking channel, or you see in your house when you cook. Now, the interesting thing to me that we found in these research trips is we're finding things that we didn't know, but the audience doesn't know either, because they haven't been in these kitchens.
[0:55:39] JU: Or they haven't been looking like that, right? Yeah.
[0:55:42] EC: The thing is, if you put those elements in the film, even if the audience doesn't know if it's true, they sense that it is. That's what you want. I think that's true with products there. It's like, do we assume we know what the customers want, or do we go out and check? Do we find that? Do we talk to people?
[0:56:01] JU: Right. It reminds me, it's a little bit analogous, but it reminds me of one of my favorite stories about Steve Jobs when he was frustrated with one of the original designs of the Mac. He got up and went to Macy's in Palo Alto, just down the street here. He was haunting the aisles, going back and forth through Macy's. Just looking, looking, looking. He stumbles on a Cuisinart food processor. He picks it up, he buys it, he brings it back to the team, and he says, “It's supposed to look like this.” To me, that's one, you go, “Wait, why is a computer supposed to look like that?” But two, the point is, when you're stuck, get out of the office. What you're saying is, even further, even when you think you're not stuck, get out of the office, right?
[0:56:42] EC: Yes. Get out and find out something you didn't know.
[0:56:44] JU: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. That could be the bumper sticker over this whole thing. Find out something you didn't know. I have two, right before our questions left. You told me when we spoke the other day that you get two questions by a wide margin at the end of your talks. One is your favorite movie, which we don't need to go into that. It's like picking a favorite child, I'm sure. The other you said, “What do I do if my boss doesn't understand this?” Well, how do you answer that question? I get, Ed, what you're saying here, and I have absorbed these principles. But my boss. How do you respond to that?
[0:57:16] EC: The one thing, because it's always a hard question to answer, is that they should never forget that they asked this question. Because they do have some autonomy and control of how they treat people. Because sometimes, their boss is not going to listen. I know that. We all know that. We need to have people say, “Okay, I'm going to learn from this.” The way I treat people, the way I encourage people is very important. It should be a value that we have.
[0:57:50] JU: Yeah. It's a beautiful answer. I love that. Just to put a fine point on it. Never forget that you asked that question. Because at some point, you're going to be the person who is the boss, who needs to remember these things. Okay, this gets to the subtitle. Here's where I wanted to end. Your subtitle for your book is Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. For me, you and I spoke about this a little bit, but it reminded me of what Danny Kahneman says about restraining forces. That the much more elegant way of achieving behavior change isn't providing motivation, it's actually removing restraint. You talk about overcoming the forces that stand in the way.
First of all, maybe there's two parts of this question. First part, you said managers are oftentimes individuals can be additive, but managers stand in the way. What do you do about that? If the managers, maybe middle management is what’s standing in the way of true inspiration, what do you do about that?
[0:58:43] EC: It was one of the things that drew me to begin with was that when I was at Lucasfilm, and I was visiting a lot of companies, because I was in this enviable position of the leaders of the companies would want to talk with me, because they want to sell to Lucasfilm. Sexy company. The engineers wanted to talk, because I had a technical background. First of all, notice there's this cultural difference.
But this is importantly, the leaders of these companies were making some really dumb decisions. It was this bizarre thing that for me was, why is it that the leaders of technical companies were actually not paying attention to what was taking place inside their own industry? Why were they so blind to this? Why is it that you look at the workstation companies that none of them survived until today? Was this inevitable?
[0:59:37] JU: Wow.
[0:59:38] EC: It's clear to me, it was not inevitable, but in fact that the leaders actually were stuck on their business models and weren't even open to figuring out how to adapt to something that was going to happen in the future. That was a blindness, that was in a way. That was something that they couldn't see. The question was, why couldn't they see it and how does one overcome that? The person that I saw who was frankly best at that was Steve Jobs. He could imagine how things might need to be different, which would be a very different business model. Selling phones for instance, is a very different business model than selling laptops. Most people couldn't do that.
[1:00:21] JU: Do you think there's anything to why was it that Steve was able to imagine how things might need to be different? What was it about him?
[1:00:28] EC: For me, what happened was that he did learn. He started off with a behavior that was well-known. That's when I first knew him and I witnessed that. He was also very smart and he learned from his mistakes. He made some serious mistakes. He made some design mistakes with his hardware, made some business mistakes with – I'm talking about NeXT computer. The thing about mistakes was he learned from the mistakes. He also made a brilliant decision regarding the software. That software was the sole reason that years later, Apple bought NeXT, was to get that software.
Now, so what was happened is Steve over this period of time, because he was going through essentially, the hero's journey. This screwed up. That didn't work. The first version of Pixar didn't work. It's just a freaking disaster. But he's learning. In the years of ’91 to ’95, he went through a profound transformation. By the end of this period, the people are with him, stayed with him for the rest of his life. Part of that was, which is a thing that people don't get, was that he was arguing about the problem. It wasn't about him being right, it was about getting to the right solution.
[1:01:44] JU: Wow.
[1:01:45] EC: It meant having people who knew how to disagree with him, but he valued they disagree with – he valued the fact they disagree with him. In fact, at Pixar, because we were a public company for 10 years, he fired two members of the board of directors, because they never disagreed.
[1:02:03] JU: That's awesome.
[1:02:04] EC: He just said, “It isn't any good if we have people who just agree with me.” What's the mindset that got him there? One of them was, okay, this really is about getting the product right. It's not about being right. Because the people who disagree with him, frankly, sometimes they're right, and he'll accept it. Sometimes he would say, “No, this is what we have to go.” Then he realized later that they were right. The point was, he had the disagreements inside the company.
[1:02:32] JU: Yeah. No, it’s so good. I mean, recently we had Ron Johnson on the show, who was Steve's head of retail at Apple. He told these stories about how Steve would – he said, sometimes they would get in the car and they'd drive to the store. He said, I remember one time, Greg MckEown, he's a friend of mine, an author, an amazing thought leader. He and I did this joint interview with Ron. We asked him, “Hey, what are five key moments in your relationship with Steve Jobs?” One of the moments he described was having to give some very direct feedback about how fundamentally they needed to reorient the store around a new strategy that was emerging.
Similar, actually, to the Zootopia, maybe coming full circle. It's like, this thing's in production and we're realizing Nick shouldn't be the main character. We're realizing the collar scene isn't right. I mean, the entire layout of the story was wrong. Ron said, he told Steve when he got in the car and they drove to the store and Steve didn't say a word. He said, “I knew that he was not happy.” He said, “We get out of the car and he walks into the store and he said, “So, Ron tells me that all of this is wrong,” asking what you need to do to fix it.” He got back in the car and drove away.
It's just a great example to me of it's the disagreement is painful at times. Ron said, usually they're talking in the car the whole time. It's very weird for it to be silent the whole time. He said, it's clear, he's taking the disagreement seriously and he values the input so much so that by the time they get to the store, he's already changed his mind, which I think is just a really incredible example.
The other thing I want to just circle back to as we wrap up here is this comment that you made about inevitability. To me, it seems when we think about the subtitle, Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of Inspiration, it seems that there are some folks who just don't want things to change. That's part of what I'm taking from what you've said. Even your attitude of, I'm going to continue to be wrong 50% of the time, there's something there that I really feel is an important mindset that change is inevitable and allowing yourself to entertain the prospect of how is the inevitable going to unfold is probably a much safer way to approach the future than assuming things are going to remain this — I mean, to state the obvious. I wanted to give you that word inevitability of change and see if that resonated with you, or if you have any thoughts, again, about the unseen forces that hinder inspiration.
[1:04:48] EC: For me, one of the important things to understand, which was for me, it's an important realization, was that if we look at whatever we're doing, even we're in a sweet spot, we've got things going well, that the underlying technology continues to change, the understanding that people are coming in to use our tools, or to make what we're making continues to change, the expectations of the customer's change, there is nothing in this picture that is stable.
The concept that we're going to hit some sweet spot, like a stable point, is a complete illusion. It doesn't work that way. There isn't anything that's stable. It's like, okay, it is the way things are. I get that. Our job is to continually adapt, not to reach stability. It's to solve the problems that we have now and figure them out, and that process will keep on going. It's okay.
[1:05:48] JU: Yeah. It's almost like the metaphor you and I talked about the other day is the idea of the bicycle, is balance is only achieved by movement. If you stop moving, you lose the balance and you fall over.
[1:05:59] EC: Yeah. If you say, okay, you have to move to stay balanced. But also, your view keeps changing. The purpose of the bicycle is to move. It isn't just to stay where you are and stay balanced, because it happens to be nice. It's not the purpose.
[1:06:15] JU: The point is the movement. That's beautiful. I can't think of a better way to rap. Ed, we could, as I think you and I both know, we could go off on another thousand tangents. Perhaps, maybe we call it a day here. We could get audience feedback and maybe we do a part two at some time. I just want to say, thank you so much, putting this work into the world. I know many people, our mutual friend, Bob Sutton, included you say, this is the best book on management and creativity I've ever read. I can't recommend your book highly enough. I love the expanded edition. I love what you've done with it. I tremendously am grateful for you making the time to join us today.
[1:06:47] EC: I really appreciate being with you, Jeremy.
[1:06:48] JU: Yeah, thanks so much. I hope, folks had a great time. Give us your feedback. Let us know in the comments what you thought in today’s conversation. Next week, I'll be talking with Jennifer Wallace, who's the author of Never Enough, which is talking — concerned with achievement culture among youth and parents. It's a very important topic, one that as a father of four, I'm really excited to dive into. I hope you'll join us next week. Until then, thanks so much. You can find the recording here and then we'll post it to podcast platforms later. Have a great day.
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