Index

 What is Creativity
 Roots of Pixar‟s Culture
 Power to the Creative
 Peer Culture
 Technology + Art = Magic
 Staying on the rails
What is Creativity
 Not a mysterious solo act but an involvement of
many different people
 The initial idea (called high-concept„) is just one
step of many
 Creativity must be present at any level of the
organization
 Overcome fear and take the risk to avoid being
average
 Accept the possibility of failure but be able to
recover
Roots of Pixar‟s Culture
 Smart people are more important than good ideas!
 It is Ok to hire people who are smarter than you!
 Reject mediocrity! Everything needs to be excellent!
 If you give a good idea to a mediocre team they
will screw it up, if you give a mediocre idea to a
great team they will either fix it or throw it away
and come up with something that works!
Power to the Creative
 Give your creative people control over every
stage of idea development
 Creative vision comes from 1-2 persons, enable
them to give clear directions to staff
 Give information to staff so they can do the job
without telling them how to do the job
 Each person on film should have a creative
ownership (even a very small task)
 Create great work-environment by forming cross-
company teams
Peer Culture
 “All for one and one for all”
 “The Brain Trust”
 Show unfinished work
 Get feedback from other directors and producers

 No obligations

 “The Dailies”
 Dailyreviews of the current stage of the animation
 Constant feedback/No surprises in the end

 New ideas for others

Technology + Art = Magic
 Overcome barriers such as:
 Different ‚languages„ spoken by different diciplines
 Natural class structure

 Learning together: training and cross-training

 Free up communication: people dont need permission to point out difficulties
 Decision making hierachy and communication strucuture are different things
 Create safety for staff to state ideas
 Constantly showing work
 Give safe opportunity to critizie (e.g. by e-mail)
 Pixar building is not functional but socialized structured
 Stay close to innovation happenings in academic community
 That shows that people are more important than ideas
 Attracts talents
Staying on the rails
 Just because you are successful does not mean you
are perfect!
 Postmortems
5 things you would do again
 5 things you would not do again

 Fresh Blood
 Encourage young and new employees to speak up
Questions?