Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview.

(If you like the interview, you should read his book.)

Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for groups of people working together.

To do this, he would pull people out of meetings, make groups smaller, make them bigger, just constantly work on fine-tuning getting the right people together at the right time with the right feedback (without ego).

Granted he didn’t always do it, but that was his goal. He says:

This is so important to get [these group dynamics right] because this is what our product is based on: getting this group of people to work well together. So paying attention to the dynamics of the room is the job. They’re the ones making the movies. I’m not making the movie. I’m just trying to get them to work well together.

When Steve Jobs came to Ed and essentially said, “We’re gonna bet everything at Pixar on Toy Story, and the same week that Toy Story is released in theaters we’re gonna IPO.” What did Ed think?

I thought it was crazy [laugh] I’ve learned a lot in this process. He was right.

I love this frank exchange and Ed’s ability to go from “I thought he was crazy” to “I learned”.

In a creative endeavor, where so many earlier iterations suck, how do you gauge whether you should keep going? Because to keep going can make you seem a tad crazy, e.g. “This sucks — let’s keep going!”

So how do you know whether you should keep investing in it? Ed’s answer:

What’s your basis for proceeding? For me, the basis was: what’s the spirit of the team? Because we all know it [sucks] but if they’re all working together — they’re laughing, and [doing things] together — then you say, “Let’s keep going. Let’s keep trying to solve it.”

I love this. He didn’t say, “You open a spreadsheet and do a cost analysis.” He said he looks at the spirit of the people working on it.

It really backs up what he said his job is: find and help groups of people work together. His attitude seems to be: a group of people with the right dynamics can solve anything.

Ed talks about Pixar’s willingness to take on hard problems because they believed a hard problem led to better outcomes (because few others were willing to do the hard work):

A hard problem is more likely to lead to an interesting film. If it’s easy, then it’s more derivative.

You know how to write a script, you know what the three-act structure is, you know all these elements of storytelling, and you put together all the pieces and you got a story. Is it a great story? Is it emotional? Sometimes yes, sometimes no […]

It’s fairly easy to come up with something that is mediocre — and it’s cheaper too.

If you take on hard things then you need to spend more time trying to figure out how to be different in what you’re doing. So if you take on a hard problem and you just keep pushing at it, then the fact that it was hard is what is going to make it different.

Stated again for emphasis: “the fact that it was hard is what is going to make it different”.

And it’s the execution that’s hard, not having the idea:

If you’re going to make a movie about a rat that likes to cook, that is not a slam dunk.

A lot of people want to keep their projects secret, but this is one where you could tell everybody: “We’re going to make a movie about a rat that cooks!”

His point being: nobody can steal that idea and make it good. Execution is everything there. And if you look at it and say, “Well that’s too hard. How could you make a film about a rat that likes to cook?” You’re skirting the hard work, which is exactly what is going to make you different.

Don’t skirt the hard thing. If you do something that’s hard, that’s the differentiation.

Lastly: I love Ed’s perspective on mission statements:

The reason [we never had a mission statement] is because a mission statement is an answer, when typically we should always be asking questions, like “What are we doing?”

His point being: if somebody asks “What are we doing?” and you immediately go back to the mission statement and say, “Oh, well we’re doing this” that’s not good. It’s better to always be questioning. “Are we doing the right thing? Are we going in the right direction?” You should always be wrestling with those questions.