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This is based on an article on Gigaom, "Pixar's Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation", that Daring Fireball linked to, and it is literally, a checklist for every company in the world on "How to do things right":
Lesson Five: High Morale Makes Creativity CheapI would say that if you have to pick one thing to not go cheap on as an employer, morale is it. If you have high morale, you also have loyalty, and a group that will stick with you through thick and thin, when the cash falls like manna, and when you have to wander in the desert.The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.
Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. [what’s true for a movie is true for a startup!] If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Without good morale, you're fucked. You may limp along for years, even decades, but you will never truly excel, and you'll be doing nothing but vampiring off of past work and glory. Another point:
Lesson Six: Dont Try To “Protect your success”If all you do is protect what you have, you are not growing, you are preserving. There's another name for a well-preserved organism: Mummy. If you want your company to be the walking dead, trodding the same path for eternity, then preserve it. But you'll do no better than you are right now. To succeed, you have to take risks.The Quarterly: Engagement, morale—what else is critical for stimulating innovative thinking?
Brad Bird: The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”
Another one that I love:
Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.The other thing this does is make siloism and empire-building difficult. When you have to deal with everyone else all the time, you can't hide away, nor can you hide information. I have worked at companies that make siloism an unspoken core value, and it is like death. When you can't just talk to someone else without manager approval and a meeting? When never even talk to people in your own department except by accident? That is the mark of a company that is limping along, with leadership that only looks at the bottom line. "As long as we made a profit, everything is perfect." Penny-wise, but so terribly pound-foolish, and when the master of the silo leaves, so does all the knowledge they never shared with anyone else.
Lesson Seven: Encourage Inter-disciplinary LearningBrilliant. The company I work for now has something similar to this. I don't know if I'll ever use it, but I'm tickled pink that they do that. It's an amazing concept, one that the military is good at. Why is this important? Because you never know what hidden desires or talents someone has until you give them a chance to use them. Think of Al Davis in the early years of the Oakland Raiders, taking players who were thought of as poor, or broken-down, and figuring out where they really needed to be, and making them, and the Raiders, into superstars. Just because someone's in IT doesn't mean they don't go home and write, or compose music, but if you never ask them, you'll never know, and you just might miss out on someone amazing. A job title is a convenience, not a straightjacket.The Quarterly: Is there anything else you’d highlight that contributes to creativity around here?
Brad Bird: One thing Pixar does [is] “PU,” or Pixar University. If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. [and more creative].
Finally, the most important one:
Lesson Nine: Making $$ Can’t Be Your FocusI have to disagree with Brad here. For any company to succeed in the long run, making money cannot be the focus. You do have to make money, but that cannot be why you do work. If your primary focus becomes shit like profit and shareholder value, then walk, you have no more value to offer, unless you become an accountant. When you focus on doing what you do so well that it makes you giddy, you can make money forever. When all you care about is the next quarter, then that's what your commercial lifespan is. Three month. You live and die every three months.The Quarterly: How would you compare the Disney of your early career with Pixar today?
Brad Bird: When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain… The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”
Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.
Is that what anyone wants to do?
More companies should read this, and even better, listen to it.
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Posted by John C. Welch at 13:12 | Permalink
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This story triggers me into an atempt to describe the environment I am finding myself in today. It's a bit of a lament/rant and extremely incomplete but hey, maybe I'll feel better afterwards ;-).
All the good lessons from the article are lost on the Dutch Educational System as it exists today.
In Holland the entire educational system has gone through a process of fusing virtually all the state- and independant schools with 500 to 1000 students into large corporations during the last four decades. Now we are in a situation where instead of having a dean and two or three adjuncts who facilitate the corps of well qualified teachers and assistants, the teachers are regarded as trash (together with the assistants and concierges) by hordes of CEO's, CFO's, etc. in management teams who control lower management teams with directors and financial controllers and lots of other managers for insulation. Serious efforts are underway for years to eliminate most academics from schools and replace them with cheap "coaches" in order to save money. This will probably succeed in the next five years when most of the remaining academics will retire. Universities still have academics graduating from them of course, but teacher salaries have been cut so substantially that there is no point to even consider a career in education for young academics.
Power and money is what drives our educational quango's nowadays, present-day managements have long forgotten any of the educational goals of the past. These upper managements consist mostly of wouldbe- or ex-politicians and (not-very-successful) businessmen who fled the stressful competition of commerce.
The Dutch governament was busy executing its dogma of less and less control but forgot to maintain control over the examination standards. It also decided it was better to pay the quango's per student leaving the system with a diploma, so the quango's dropped the examination standards they themselves now controlled in order to maximise the number of students they could deliver with a diploma, thus maximising revenue. Simple economics.
I work in one of the largest of these quango's (higher education) with some 30,000+ students, down from 40,000 a few years back. There are four main campuses in four big cities which house the many departments which I will call tribes. A fifth campus in a separate fifth city houses our IT-tribe (some 150 people) with its data-centre. These people cannot be contacted directly, only via helpdesks, unless you happen to know the way. There are some 50 IT-footsoldiers detached to the four campuses. There are some 6500 Windows PC's in all, plus maybe 200 Macs scattered here and there (not managed by IT).
Absolutely everything is monetized; anything anybody does for anybody else in the organisation has to be paid for as must any other resource. This means a massive administration at many levels of all the money being pumped around and a serious incentive not to become too creative and for instance help out another tribe and thus trigger efforts by beancounters to recover the money the action would represent.
Our IT-department is the largest of all the tribes that constitute the organisation, they have their own representative at the central board of directors (which the educational tribes have not). They dictate how the computers will be used by the other tribes that do the educating. No educational considerations come into play here. They run a typical business network because they all come from IT companies that work for other companies and are clueless about what makes education tick. Windows is of course the beginning and end of all their solutions, and Microsoft heavily subsidises everything in order to keep it that way.
My own quango is no different from the others in Holland. All this has resulted in an educational system that is run in a very explicitly Stalinist way, most educational diversity has been stamped out. What's left is mostly indistinguishable grey goo.
A vocal national grass-roots counter/protest movement has been emerging over the last few years. At several institutions students have spontaneously gone on strike, demanding serious educating by qualified teachers. Several reports have been published and a parliamentary investigation has been carried out, all lambasting the way government has been handling education. But the powers that be are content with the way things are (read: where the money flows) and are only paying lipservice to change. It's going to take many years to initiate fundamental changes and then many generations to crawl back from the brink we're at to the high standards that once ruled the system.
Anticipating possible change, my quango has sacked its CEO (for squandering 10+ million Euro's on pet political projects) and appointed in his place a veteran politician and manager to align the organisation with whatever direction the governament may take the educational system in in the near future.
The movie at the very bottom of this page
http://web.mac.com/planeten.paultje/Planeten_Paultje/BON.html
has a nice take on the rock-bottom quality the Dutch educational system now provides.
Posted by:
Planeten Paultje 
|
May 3, 2008 10:58 PM
Addendum:
On a positive note I can add that a few years back a small trend started with the first Dutch school (middle education) entering a self instigated program in which over four years the entire school will migrate to Macs; all Wintels will be gone soon. Amazingly this school is part of a quango.
You have no idea how unthinkable this move was in Holland, where Macs did not exist in mainstream education, just a few specialised departments would traditionally use them.
By now there are several schools preparing similar programs for moving away from Windows completely, with consent of their quango's who are finally starting to check up on IT TCO themselves, instead of leaving that to their IT departments.
With these Wintel machines leaving, the Wintel-only large-ivory-tower-with-moat IT-shops and their pythonesque constrictor mentalities are also being seriously eroded.
So all in all I'm remaining positive :-).
Posted by:
Planeten Paultje |
May 4, 2008 4:55 AM
"I have to disagree with Brad here. For any company to succeed in the long run, making money cannot be the focus."
I would argue that "For any "private" company to succeed..". Public companies have to focus on, as you put it, shit like profit and shareholder value. That is what the are valued on and judged on and ultimately determined if they are profitable, great, etc. A lot of times public companies are afraid to rock the boat or disrupt business as usual because of their perception of how it will be received by Wall Street. The focus in on share holder value and personal wealth. Does that mean it's time to walk? Perhaps in your opinion but unfortunately that's not indicative of the real world; convincing shareholders that making money isn't the long term focus is a fools argument. But to be quite honest, even private companies operate this way, that is with a focus on revenue minus the hassles of Wall Street. So I think Brad is absolutely right, maybe it is true for an imagination based company but certainly not every company.
Posted by:
r2nupt |
May 6, 2008 8:45 AM
rnupt: There's a difference between making sure you are profitable over time, and focusing on making money.
For example, Apple is a highly profitable company. However, there's no way you can seriously say their focus is on making cash, because if all they wanted to do was make more $$, they're going about it the wrong way from a POV that only cares about cash.
The same can be said about a lot of companies. Ford & GM are all about making money. Toyota and Honda are about making product, and if it's not immediately profitable, they can deal with that, and their shareholders understand this.
Who's doing better over the long run?
Is BMW all that concerned that their sales are
Note that I didn't say "Fuck making money". In fact, the next sentence says:
You do have to make money, but that cannot be why you do work.
Making money cannot be the prime motivator for *why* you do work, unless your work is the actual making of money, either in a mint, or financial services. Making money is something you have to do, and you have to keep it in mind, but if it becomes your focus, you have lost track of what you're supposed to be doing.
Making money, as it turns out, is pretty damned easy. Doing good work and staying in business year after year and having good people doing your work? That's much harder.
Posted by:
John C. Welch 
|
May 6, 2008 11:27 AM
