Global Leadership Summit 2015 Session 2: Ed Catmull
Trey McClain
When I saw the work of Walt Disney, I wanted to be an animator. When I graduated, I couldn’t see a path for how to become as good as them, so I switched over to physics.
One of the great misconceptions is that art and physics are incongruent.
Art is about the enhanced ability to see. In what businesses would you not want that?
I don’t care how proficient the computers can be, it all comes down to the power of a story.
They think of stories as entertainment. Stories are the way we communicate with each other at every level. There are stories that are well-told and poorly-told. The difference is that the good stories connect with the emotions.
Every great film starts as an ugly baby. Our conceptions are not correct. If we had an idea that was great and everything around it was good, we’d be done.
How do we judge the people that are working on something that isn’t working? How do we help them? How do we measure progress? Our measure is how the team is working together.
The brain trust has a few principles. First, it’s peers talking to peers. Second, in that room, there is no power structure. They don’t have to take the notes; they’re just taking notes. If they know that someone in the room is going to override them, they come in defensive. Third, you have a vested interest in each other’s success. Fourth principle is that we give good notes.
Every once in a while, magic happens. You see a loss of ego and people begin to work on the problems.
Sometimes we have peers, sometimes it’s outside artists, sometimes we show it to an audience.
Culture is not always stable. There are two meanings of failure: the intellectual – we have all failed in our lives and we’re better for it; school meaning – failed class, etc and you are a failure. In politics, there are opponents that will bludgeon you with your failure. There is real danger with failure.
What are the real barriers to telling each other the truth? There are times that it is not always appropriate to be candid because it would devastate people.
Fail early, fail fast. It’s part of the creative process. We’re not saying it’s okay to fail, we’re saying we will fail. We need to make it safe for people to fail.
If you can get over the embarrassment, you can go further.
All good artists have to operate within constraints.
People have a passion to excel. If there work isn’t noticed on the screen, we haven’t taken advantage of their ability.
The concept of post-mortems: you learn through any project. People get this intellectually, but it’s like taking medicine; they don’t want to do it. This is about examining and looking at what you’ve done. We change things so that we don’t become accustomed to what we’ve done and stop learning.
Disney acquisition: when the acquisition was made, they put Disney animation under us. We knew that they had failed, but we wanted to restore their heritage. Some thought we were spreading ourselves too thin.
We could lay out the principles to operate under in 4 hours. It took 4 years for them to incorporate them. Saying values is easy and agreeing to them is easy to do but making it happen is not.
Put open space in the center of the office called the Caffeine Patch. We’d do everything out in the open. It allows for inadvertant encounters.
We don’t have many rules. We don’t even have a lot framework because we don’t want to repeat ourselves.
We asked that they all go outside to learn something.
The real goal of what we’re doing is to have a positive impact on the world. Education is primarily story telling too.
Silent retreats: Most people think the notion of being by themself is a scary idea. When I was able to be alone for a little, I realized that the chattering voice in my head was not me. It’s important to be alone, quiet down.
My experience is that it takes four days to wind down. If we look at our lives, we need balance. Sometimes we don’t take care of our souls.
