Building a sense of purpose at Pixar
The
cofounder of Pixar Animation Studios recalls how a serious organizational rift
led him to a new sense of mission—and how it helped Pixar develop a more open
and sustainable creative culture.
I wish I could bottle how it felt to come into work during those first
heady days after Toy Story came out. People seemed to walk a little
taller, they were so proud of what we’d done. We’d been the first to make a
movie with computers, and—even better—audiences were touched deeply by the
story we told. As my colleagues went about their work, every interaction was
informed by a sense of pride and accomplishment. We had succeeded by holding
true to our ideals; nothing could be better than that. The core team who had
joined us in 1994 to edit Toy Story immediately moved on to A Bug’s
Life, our movie about the insect world. There was excitement in the air.
But while I could feel that
euphoria, I was oddly unable to participate in it.
For 20 years, my life had been
defined by the goal of making the first computer-graphics movie. Now that this
goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost
feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose. Now what? The
act of running a company was more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn’t special.
Pixar was now successful, yet there was something unsatisfying about the
prospect of merely keeping it running.
It took a serious and unexpected
problem to give me a new sense of mission.
For all of my talk about the leaders
of thriving companies who did stupid things because they’d failed to pay
attention, I discovered that, during the making of Toy Story, I had
completely missed something that was threatening to undo us. And I’d missed it
even though I thought I’d been paying attention.
Throughout the making of the movie,
I had seen my job, in large part, as minding the internal and external dynamics
that could divert us from our goal. I was determined that Pixar not make the
same mistakes I’d watched other Silicon Valley companies make. To that end, I’d
made a point of being accessible to our employees, wandering into people’s
offices to check in and see what was going on. John Lasseter1
and I had very conscientiously tried to make sure that everyone at Pixar had a
voice, that every job and every employee was treated with respect. I truly
believed that self-assessment and constructive criticism had to occur at all
levels of a company, and I had tried my best to walk that talk.
Now, though, as we assembled the
crew to work on A Bug’s Life, I discovered we’d completely missed a
serious, ongoing rift between our creative and production departments. In
short, production managers told me that working on Toy Story had been a
nightmare. They felt disrespected and marginalized—like second-class citizens.
And while they were gratified by Toy Story’s success, they were very
reluctant to sign on to work on another film at Pixar.
I was floored. How had we missed
this?
The answer, at least in part, was
rooted in the role production managers play in making our films. Production
managers monitor the overall progress of the crew; they keep track of the
thousands of shots; they evaluate how resources are being used; they persuade
and cajole and nudge and say no when necessary. In other words, they do
something essential for a company whose success relies on hitting deadlines and
staying on budget: they manage people and safeguard the process.
If there was one thing we prided
ourselves on at Pixar, it was making sure that Pixar’s artists and technical
people treated each other as equals, and I had assumed that same mutual respect
would be afforded to those who managed the productions. I had assumed wrong.
Sure enough, when I checked with the artists and technical staff, they did
believe that production managers were second class and that they impeded—not
facilitated—good filmmaking by overcontrolling the process, by micromanaging.
Production managers, the folks I consulted told me, were just sand in the
gears.
My total ignorance of this dynamic
caught me by surprise. My door had always been open! I’d assumed that would
guarantee me a place in the loop, at least when it came to major sources of
tension, like this. Not a single production manager had dropped by to express
frustration or make a suggestion in the five years we worked on Toy Story.
Why was that? It took some digging to figure it out.
First, since we didn’t know what we
were doing as we’d geared up to do Toy Story, we’d brought in
experienced production managers from Los Angeles to help us get organized. They
felt that their jobs were temporary and thus that their complaints would not be
welcome. In their world—conventional Hollywood productions—freelancers came
together to make a film, worked side by side for several months, and then
scattered to the winds. Complaining tended to cost you future work
opportunities, so they kept their mouths shut. It was only when asked to stay
on at Pixar that they voiced their objections.
Second, despite their frustrations,
the production managers felt that they were making history and that John was an
inspired leader. Toy Story was a meaningful project to work on. The fact
that the production managers liked so much of what they were doing allowed them
to put up with the parts of the job they came to resent. This was a revelation
to me: the good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realized that this was
something I needed to look out for. When downsides coexist with upsides, as
they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of
being labeled complainers. I also realized that this kind of thing, if left
unaddressed, could fester and destroy Pixar.
For me, this discovery was bracing.
Being on the lookout for problems, I realized, was not the same as seeing
problems. This would be the idea—the challenge— around which I would build my
new sense of purpose.
While I felt I now understood why
we had failed to detect this problem, we still needed to understand what people
were upset about. To that end, I started sticking my head into people’s
offices, pulling up a chair and asking them for their view on how Pixar was and
wasn’t working. These conversations were intentionally open ended. I didn’t ask
for a list of specific complaints. Bit by bit, conversation by conversation, I
came to understand how we’d arrived in this thicket.
There had been a great deal riding
on Toy Story, of course, and since making a film is extremely
complicated, our production leaders had felt tremendous pressure to control the
process—not just the budgets and schedules, but also the flow of information.
If people went willy-nilly to anybody with their issues, the production leaders
believed, the whole project could spiral out of control. So, to keep things on
track, it was made clear to everyone from the get-go: if you have something to
say, it needs to be communicated through your direct manager. If animators
wanted to talk to modelers, for example, they were required to go through “proper
channels.” The artists and technical people experienced this “everything goes
through me” mentality as irritating and obstructionist. I think of it as
well-intentioned micromanaging.
Because making a movie involves
hundreds of people, a chain of command is essential. But in this case, we had
made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the
organizational structure. Of course an animator should be able to talk to a
modeler directly, without first talking with her manager. So we gathered the
company together and said that going forward, anyone should be able to talk to
anyone else, at any level, at any time, without fear of reprimand.
Communication would no longer have to go through hierarchical channels. The
exchange of information was key to our business, of course, but I believed that
it could—and frequently should—happen out of order, without people getting bent
out of shape. People talking directly to one another and then letting the
manager find out later was more efficient than trying to make sure that
everything happened in the “right” order and through the “proper” channels.
Improvement didn’t happen overnight.
But by the time we finished A Bug’s Life, the production managers were
no longer seen as impediments to creative progress but as peers—as first-class
citizens. We had become better.
This was a success in itself, but it
came with an added and unexpected benefit: the act of thinking about the
problem and responding to it was invigorating and rewarding. We realized that
our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but also to
foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions. Questions like:
If we had done some things right to achieve success, how could we ensure that
we understood what those things were? Could we replicate them on our next
projects? Was replication of success even the right thing to do? How many
serious, potentially disastrous problems were lurking just out of sight and
threatening to undo us? What, if anything, could we do to bring them to light?
How much of our success was luck? What would happen to our egos if we continued
to succeed? Would they grow so large they could hurt us and, if so, what could
we do to address that overconfidence? What dynamics would arise now that we were
bringing new people into a successful enterprise as opposed to a struggling
start-up?
What had drawn me to science, all
those years ago, was the search for understanding. Human interaction is far
more complex than relativity or string theory, of course, but that only made it
more interesting and important; it constantly challenged my presumptions. As we
made more movies, I would learn that some of my beliefs about why and how Pixar
had been successful were wrong. But one thing could not have been more plain:
figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture—one that didn’t just
pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence,
communication, originality, and self-assessment but was really committed
to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became—wasn’t a singular assignment.
It was a day-in, day-out full-time job. And one that I wanted to do.
As I saw it, our mandate was to
foster a culture that would seek to keep our sight lines clear, even as we
accepted that we were often trying to engage with and fix what we could not
see. My hope was to make this culture so vigorous that it would survive when
Pixar’s founding members were long gone—a culture enabling the company to
continue producing original films that made money, yes, but also contributed
positively to the world. That sounds like a lofty goal, but it was there for
all of us from the beginning. We were blessed with a remarkable group of
employees who valued change, risk, and the unknown and who wanted to rethink
how we create. How could we enable the talents of these people, keep them
happy, and not let the inevitable complexities that come with any collaborative
endeavor undo us along the way? That was the job I assigned myself, and the one
that still animates me to this day.
byEd Catmull
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Media_Entertainment/Building_a_sense_of_purpose_at_Pixar?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1404
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