If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, .. I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
Archive for May, 2008
Cognitive Surplus
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008Innovation lessons from Pixar
Thursday, May 1st, 2008The 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.”
