Case: A Creative Culture at Pixar There are a few industries in which senior management is much more likely to lose sleep worrying about creativity than worrying about predictability and efficiency. One of these industries is the film industry. Either a movie is exciting to watch and draws large audiences—or not. Of course it’s important for the movie to be high quality and meet production goals. But creativity comes first. Arguably one of the most creative film studios in the United States is Pixar Animation Studios, creator of Toy Story; A Bug’s Life; Monsters, Inc.; The Incredibles; Up; Finding Nemo; Cars; Ratatouille; WALL·E; Brave; and other films. Every year, it seems, an engaging new movie emerges from Pixar to delight audiences. How is it that the studio has been able to generate blockbuster after blockbuster, year after year? President Ed Catmull set out to answer that question in the article “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.” He wrote that well before his company was successful, he had developed a healthy fear of success turning into failure: Observing the rise and fall of computer companies during my career has affected me deeply. Many companies put together a phenomenal group of people who produced great products. They had the best engineers, exposure to the needs of customers, access to changing technology, and experienced management. Yet many made decisions at the height of their powers that were stunningly wrongheaded, and they faded into irrelevance. How could really smart people completely miss something so crucial to their survival? I remember asking myself more than once: “If we are ever successful, will we be equally blind?”7 Catmull is a computer graphics expert whose lifelong dream was to create the first computer-animated film. With Toy Story, he realized that dream, so he began to search for a new challenge. He decided his next goal would be to build a studio that had the depth, robustness, and perseverance to enable it to produce spectacular movies long after he and the other founders retired. From observing the failures of his colleagues in the computer industry, he concluded that he should focus on creating a great culture in which creativity would flourish.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 09:58:01 +0000