Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small

• Successful companies lose their leads by making serious mistakes that people outside the companies readily recognize...The people outside the company that recognize the mistake are like Cassandra
• Quoting a Studio Executive: "Our central problem is not finding good people, but finding good ideas!".  Ed Catmull ask's people which do you think is more important, good people or good ideas?  His answer is this...  "If you give a good idea to a mediocre group of people, they'll screw it up.  If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it or they'll throw it away and come up with something else."
• When we first started out with Disney, we got a few things right... We had a culture where artists and technical people were peers with each other.  They socialized with each other.  They each thought the other was world class. The compensation structure was the same. They were allowed to intermarry.  If there were problems, and there were always problems, people felt comfortable about coming in and expressing their problems.  We couldn't fix every problem but it was important to hear them.  We also had a brain trust... that trusted each other... and could be brutally honest with one another.  But they didn't think of it as being brutally honest but being "necessarily honest" and it was always taken that way.  It was never a matter of ego or putting somebody down.  It was always about the story.  Therefore you can say something hard, but it was taken in the right spirit.  Getting that kind of comaraderie in a key group of people is just gold.
• We had a review process that was unique.  In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day... people normally tend to want to hold stuff back till it's "right".  The trick is to stop that behavior. We show it every day when it's incomplete.  If everybody does it every day, then you get over the embarrassment.   And when you get over the embarrassment, you're more creative... starting down that path helped everything we did. ... the advantage to working that way is that when you're done, you're done.  ... A lot of people want to hold it and show it two weeks later to get done... only it's never "right". So they're not done.  So you need to go through this iterative process...  The trick was to do it more iteratively to change the dynamics.
• Going into our second film ("A Bug's Life") we had a major disaster... The notion of controlled information flow that we had, pissed everybody off... We confused our organizational structure with the communication structure.  They are different.  Yes you must be organized, and things must happen in the proper order or you can loose control.  But Communication needs to be able to happen between anybody in the company at any time.  It really is "peer to peer".
• Success hides problems...
• The confusion is that "an idea" as a singular entity is key to success...  wrong, it takes thousands of good ideas to make a successful product. And you have to get most of them right to do it!  That's why you need a team that works well together.
• The goal of our development department was not find good ideas but to put together teams that function well together.  This group is loved by the directors because it's a support group.  Not someone telling them what to do it's a support group.  We measure progress by how well the team functions together because initially, when films are put together they're a mess. It's like everything else in life, the first time you do it it's a mess.  But if the team functions well, they will succeed.
• Competitors could try and copy our technology or story ideas, but they could not copy our process.
• Postmortems are great but nobody likes to do them.  If you don't continue to change the postmortem process each time, participants will try and game the system.   A deep postmortem is always valuable even though no one likes doing it.
• "Once you can articulate an important idea into a concise statement, then you can use the statement without fear of changing behavior."  It's not what you say, it's what you do!
• Why do successful companies fail?  Human organizations are inherently unstable.  They will fall over and you have to work to keep them upright. But they fall slowly.  Most people don't notice it... They let their success blind them. The falling takes place slowly but the collapse is quick...  I think the greeks had it backwards.  Cassandra wasn't cursed, it was the people who did not listen...