pixar

You may be familiar with my thesis that Pixar can do no wrong. The president of Pixar wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review a few months ago called "How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity." It's pretty amazingly great. I mean, maybe that's how all company presidents talk about their culture, but if it's really the way he describes it, I want to work there. Or somewhere just like Pixar that is within 30 minutes of my apartment on public transportation.

Of course, I am obnoxiously posting this way late and the full text isn't available for free anymore. That's annoying. I'll summarize the main bits I remember.

First: He thinks the initial idea for a movie is way less important than the 50 million ideas required along the way to execute it well.

Second: It's ok for people to challenge each other in meetings or e-mail comments later, and they're nice about it.

Third: They actually made a decision to make good movies. When they were first working on Toy Story 2, it wasn't that great. It was going to be a straight-to-video release, and it was kind of half-hearted and lame. And they made the decision to scrap it and make a good movie. They put a big-shot story team on it and made it awesome. I saw it in the theater, and I was worried - one dutiful sequel, coming up - and wow, it's hilarious.