Bill’s Upcoming Keynote for the Oregon State Chamber–Dreams and Dreamers: How to Innovate like Walt Disney and the Pixarians

http://www.oregonstatechamber.org/

Pixar–A Case for Collaboration

Too many companies encourage competition with "employee of the month" or "team of the year" programs. Eliminating competition from the workplace is one of the hardest concepts for most managers to grasp. We are a society that rewards competition through our athletics, classrooms, achievements, etc. Alfie Kohn, author of The Case Against Competition, conducted extensive research on the results of competition in the workplace. After over five years of collecting data, he concluded that the most successful organizations embrace a culture of cooperation. Pixar president Ed Catmull stated that he often has discussions with his counterparts at other studios. The heads of other studios claim that the reason Disney and Pixar are so successful is that they get ALL the BIG IDEAS ideas. But Ed claims that it’s not about the BIG IDEA that will generate a hit such as Toy Story or Up…it’s about the thousands of ideas that come from EVERYONE on a project to produce a magical result!

No Short-term Stupidity at Pixar

The focus on short-term results has become the primary motive for most business leaders today. A dozen years ago, the average tenure of a CEO was 10 years; today, it is less than 5 years. Wall Street expects a new CEO to implement a new strategy in his or her first 100 days on the job. So, instead of investing in future technologies and growth, CEOs are manipulating costs; eliminating jobs and training; ignoring new markets and R&D; and compromising quality… all for the next Wall Street analyst’s meeting.

Pixar and Disney Animation Studios president Ed Catmull gets it! He recently wrote, “Managers who focus on maximizing short-term profits end up driving out things that generate long-term value – like R&D. They use all sorts of excuses when they make those decisions, including to please Wall Street and create shareholder value. But they are just excuses for poor thinking.”

Pixar director Brad Bird echoes Ed’s thoughts: “It is never about cheaper and faster. It’s creating for the long-term. People here love the characters and they are aware these films, if done correctly, are living things.”

During the last half of Michael Eisner’s tenure as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, he totally lost sight of their long-term vision “to provide the finest in family entertainment.” During the late 1990s, Disney released more than one dozen “formulaic” animated feature films. A formulaic film is one that capitalizes on a prior storyline with little or no original creative thought. The Lion King II and 102 Dalmatians are classic products of this time of “stagnation” in Disney’s history. Prior to purchasing Pixar in 2007, Disney and Pixar were in partnership (Disney financed and distributed the Pixar films). After the phenomenal success of Toy Story in 1995, Disney advised Pixar to make Toy Story II as a formulaic direct to video, cheap feature. Luckily, Pixar leaders Ed Catmull and John Lasseter (now chief creative officer of Pixar and Disney Studios) refused to compromise quality. John said, “These were the people that gave us Cinderella II. We believe that the only reason to a sequel is if you have a great story, period…We want these (Pixar) films to be at the same level of the films that Walt Disney made.”

In The Disney Way, we wrote about Disney’s current CEO Bob Iger: “Having been on the job for less than four months, Bob Iger surprised the business community by purchasing Pixar (in 2007) for $7.4 billion.” This was a critical junction in the Disney organization’s history…and Bob was the leader who would steer them back on the track to long-term success. Bob had had a revelation while watching the opening day parade of Hong Kong Disneyland. Not one of the new characters were from Disney…they were all born in the creative storytelling playground we have all come to know as Pixar! Bob realized that the last ten years at Disney had been a failure and he vowed to resurrect the passion that Walt once brought to every project, from features films to theme park attractions.

Bob Iger continues to impress us with his long-term mentality. In Innovate the Pixar Way, we cite Bob’s response to an entertainment analyst claiming that many of the Pixar films lack the commercial success to create merchandise franchises: “We seek to make great films first. If the film gives birth to a franchise, we are the first to leverage such success. A check the boxes approach to creativity is likely to result in blandness and failure.”

Today’s business leaders must embrace the long-term genius of the likes of Walt Disney, Bob Iger, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter. Of course, long-term thinking does not mean that you should ignore the short-term job. Pixar’s brand of self-motivated talent is always in a “want to” mode – enthusiastically improving everything they do. The lesson is to constantly plus your short-term efforts while working to accomplish your long-term dream. Never comprise long-term results for short-term gains. Would you rather provide a knock-your-socks-off product that your customers will remember like Toy Story II, or the unimaginative, forgettable product like 102 Dalmatians?