From 20101, a talk by Pixar's Ed Catmull on how Pixar does what it does.
Part of the behavior is I don't know the answers. And at first that seems a little bit glib. But after awhile people get that I really don't know the answer to a lot of these things. So we set it up so that the management really doesn't tell people what to do. We discuss, we debate, [but] people start to refer to 'the management', and I say come on guys, there's three of us, we're all in this together, and then we're very open and honest about the problems.
Lasseter and Jobs get all the press, but Catmull deserves more credit than he gets for Pixar's success. (via df)
[1] I don't know why I put it like this. If something is good or interesting, who the hell cares when it's from? [Shouldn't you just delete it then? -ed] ↩
Scott Berkun transcribed some of the more interesting points of a video interview with Ed Catmull done during an Economist conference last month.
[At Pixar] there is very high tolerance for eccentricity, very creative, and to the point where some are strange... but there are a small number of people who are socially dysfunctional [and] very creative -- we get rid of them. If we don't have a healthy group then it isn't going to work. There is this illusion that this person is creative and has all this stuff, well the fact is there are literally thousands of ideas involved in putting something like this together. And the notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail.
The video is embedded in Berkun's post as well. (via sippey)
