How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

I thought I'd share this article from the September issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Have a read and share your thoughts!

Permalink Reply by Ollie Francis on 1 September 2008 at 7:10pm: "If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people!"

The first sentence there is one of those things that, once you hear (or read) it, you think to yourself 'hey, I knew that anyway'. It is something we might already know, but it is still good to hear someone say it to us.

To have significant impact, such as pixar has had on the animation industry, originality is important. The thing is that originality does often lead to failure; after all, if it is original then no-one has done it before in exactly the same way so there are likely to be unforeseen events that may wreck progress. But what I think Pixar is saying is that what really leads to success is not just the ability to do something original, but to recover when things go wrong.

We are going to do a lot of things wrong in life, so it is comforting to know that what really matters is how we deal with it afterwards.

The article says that the key to recovery is to be surrounded by talented people.

We have lots of talented people in the Mosaic community.

Let's go do something original.

Any ideas?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Sam Radford on 2 September 2008 at 12:35pm: Exactly.

I guess the question really is, 'what's our Toy Story?' They decided to do something original and create a feature film length animation on the big screen. They went for what had never been done before. They were passionate about doing this. It wasn't a case of 'it'd be pretty nice to do an feature film length animation', it was 'we MUST do this'. As a mentor of mine regularly says, the people who change the world are the people who must.

So as well as thinking about doing something original, we need to think about creating something original that we simply MUST do. It needs to be fueled by passion. Something worth giving our lives to, even if it fails.; ▶ Reply to This