Required Reading

| By Scott McClellan | Found in Communication | 1 Comment

This morning, I saw the following quote on Joshua Blankenship’s blog:

Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.
— Edwin Catmull, Pixar & Disney Animation President, excerpted from How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

If you have time, click the link above to read Catmull’s entire piece. If you don’t have time, make time. The more I hear about Pixar, the more blown away I am about their approach to business. If you see creativity as something that extends beyond Photoshop and After Effects, I think you’ll enjoy learning about the environment Catmull developed at Pixar. Yes, ministry is different from moviemaking. But concepts such as creativity and community seem to reach across the aisle, so to speak.

If you have a chance to read the article, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on applying Catmull’s ideals to your leadership team.

  • http://www.bartondamer.com barton damer

    That is an amazing article… really too much to talk about and soak in. Let me pull these quotes from it though:

    “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.”

    “Our philosophy is: You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support…”

    “we want everyone to question why we’re doing something that doesn’t seem to make sense to them. We do not want people to assume that because we are successful, everything we do is right.”

    “The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. “