Pixar's Ed Catmull on Management
A very interesting video from 2009 of Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar, showed up in my twitter-feed this morning; its called “Keep Your Crises Small”:
It’s almost an hour long and was filmed at Stanford Graduate School of Business so it's mostly from a management and business perspective about the challenges that Pixar has had even though it has been successful. I spent a few years being pretty interesting in a lot of management and business stuff and read a lot about it; enough to become a little cynical I guess — management theory has some truth to it but there are lots of gurus who don’t really know very much in the end. This presentation is far from some management consultant guru and is packed with interesting and useful knowledge. Ed seems like a very pragmatic manager and he cuts through a lot of bullshit. I’d like to think its because of his technical background but I might be biased there :).Anyway, watch that if you have any interest in either background information about Pixar or practical management stuff, albeit on a a pretty high level.
Some of my notes:
- Don’t confuse organizational structure with communications structure, i.e. keep information flowing between teams and everywhere even if you put up a hierarchical structure
- Managers hate being surprised, don’t let them know about something new at a meeting among everyone else
- Success hides problems. Just like a healthy body can take a lot of unhealthy behavior, a successful company can get away with a lot of bad decisions
- People (and teams) are more important than ideas, good teams will do great things with mediocre ideas but mediocre teams will do mediocre stuff with good ideas
- People copy the wrong things, don’t copy 3D technology if the really good thing is the storytelling — easy to copy technology but almost always the wrong thing to copy
- Always do a post-mortem after projects but always change the metrics so people don’t game the system
- There are services that give you the essence of business books and they are really interesting because they show how content-free the books are (Henry: YES!)
- There are some phrases that are “truths” and important in the community but doesn’t actually change behavior, “Story is important” (movie making), “Designing from the inside out” (Architecture), “Quality is king” (Engineering)
- Human organizations are inherently unstable but fail very slowly, most people won’t notice it and let the success blind them — collapse is then quick.
- Constant self-assessment important, look for the hard truths — especially when successful.
