Innovation lessons from Pixar

Filed Under changing the world, entrepreneurship, failure, fear, google, innovation, people i like, perseverance, things to remind myself

The McKinsey Quarterly has a really interesting piece on innovation at Pixar–the company who brought you Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille. Keep in mind that Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company from Steve Jobs, the turn around artist and saviour of Apple (Apple Computer, who brought you the iPod), whose company in turn have Eric Schmidt (the CEO of a small little company despised by the behemoth Microsoft) on their board of directors.

Google and Apple are both well known for being innovators in their respective core markets, and suffice to say that they both share some innovation DNA from the top–and Pixar, through its relationship with Steve Jobs would probably have benefited from some of the common DNA between the two. Here are some of the highlights of this article, in which Oscar-winning director Brad Bird was asked about how he managed innovation.

The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. There was a point during the making of The Incredibles where we had a company meeting. We have them about twice a year, and anybody can bring up concerns. Somebody raised their hand and said, “Is The Incredibles too ambitious?” Ed Catmull said, “I don’t know” and looked over at me. I just said, “No! If there’s one studio that needs to be doing stuff that is ‘too ambitious,’ it’s this one. You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

Note: Walter Elias Disney (also known as “Walt Disney”–the person) is one of my heroes. He a self-made guy, and I admire his perseverance. A real entrepreneur that changed the world.

Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies. Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.”

One thing that was unbelievably different about this company was that they were worried about becoming complacent. When I came here, they had made three movies—Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2—that had all been big hits. I was coming off a film called The Iron Giant that was a highly regarded financial failure.

Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter said, in effect, “The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out. We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what you’re doing doesn’t make sense, but if you can convince us, we’ll do things a different way.” For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, “Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up”—when do you run into that?

Brad Bird talks about how he was hired by Pixar after his string of failures. This actually reminds me a lot of Eric Schmidt. The Google CEO search took forever, partially because the founders Larry and Sergey could afford it and were picky–but investors were pressing for adult supervision. Eric was selected despite his own string of failures, but it was also because of his failures, that he was selected.

He had battled Microsoft on so many fronts in his previous companies and lost, which made him the best candidate to battle Microsoft again (and win!)–as the behemoth was clearly identified as a potential strategic threat to Google. And to date, I’d say he’s done a jolly good job at further annoying, I mean, further keeping the giant at the gates while growing itself into a a mighty force. Learning from your failures is important! Not failing at all just means not learning.

On never staying complacent, and to never losing that hunger. I hope I never forget that.

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