When I was leaving NeXT in 1994, Jobs asked me to interview with Catmull and Lasseter at PIXAR, an amazing visit before their first movie came out.
Here are some of my notes from the DFJ ETL today at Stanford (and the full podcast is here):
“I saw Jobs early, and I saw him overreach, and go for the homerun and get the homerun, but lose the game. But he was so smart; he was learning from those mistakes. The way he delivered hard news changed with people and he became an empathetic person. Most of the people who saw the change in Steve then stayed with him for the rest of his life. That arc in Steve is unreported. The change in Steve, which to me was very dramatic, was not publicly known.”
“I had a good relationship with Steve, but we didn’t want him there full time. He was really good part time, because he faced outward, and let us figure out how to make this movie.”
“Story telling is not just entertainment, it is how we communicate.”
“For me managing is a creative act. It is problem solving.”
“You know you are a creative company if you can’t draw the line between the technical and the art.”
Disney asked Lasseter and me to run Disney animation studio. They were demoralized and led poorly. The process people had taken over, and they made bad film after bad film. I knew almost nobody there. It took a while to teach them the principles. It takes trust, and that takes time to earn. We had to go through some screw-ups and stick together. Then we had 6 blockbusters in a row. But it’s largely the same people who were there when they were failing. They changed and are a different group of people together. They had to come watch a PIXAR team meeting and not say anything. Just seeing how it worked changed their behavior.
The story of the hungry beast and the ugly baby: The revenue and cost center of the company is the hungry beast that needs attention. The most organized people run the beast. They bring the values of being on schedule. The very nature of what we are doing up front is completely different. New ideas are fragile and you can’t judge them at that point. You can judge how the process is working but not the product.
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