“We're all working together; that's the secret.” —Sam Walton
“Originality is fragile. . . Our job is to protect the new.” —Ed Catmull
If you have good people on your team, chances are they will have good ideas. Some of them will be better than yours. Don’t get in the way. If you don’t understand an idea, ask questions and prompt your team to ask questions if they don’t understand your ideas. Five-year-olds ask 300-odd questions a day in school, yet by the time those five-year-olds hit middle school, the number of questions drops below 20. What do you think happens to creativity when people stop asking questions? Few managers actually say, “That’s a stupid question,” or “That’s a stupid idea,” but the eye roll and the body language can easily convey exasperation. And that irritation shuts everything down. Now, it’s true that not all ideas are good ideas (that includes your own, by the way) and off-point ideas can often delay action and derail productivity. Keeping things on point is the job of the manager or team leader. In effect, you’re like the conductor of an orchestra or the director of a movie. Notice that both of these jobs require an operating knowledge of the medium. You can’t conduct an orchestra if you can’t read music. And both of these jobs demand a simple, clear vision of the project.
Critique is always the hard part. It would be great if ideas were just ideas, but ideas are brain children—a part of the person who puts the idea forward. And rarely do first ideas, early ideas, emerge fully formed and beautiful. Pixar founder Ed Catmull calls them “ugly babies.” It’s easy for these ugly babies to be compared to a finished product and suffer greatly from the comparison. But critique is necessary. If you know the problems, you have a chance to solve them. However, for critique to be effective it requires a degree of trust and respect. It always takes time to refine and focus the vision necessary to move a project forward. The original idea for Monsters, Inc. was about a middle-aged man coping with a cast of frightening characters only he could see. “What nobody knows is how many wrong turns the story took, over a period of years,” says Catmull. So far, Pixar’s feature films have garnered 15 Academy Awards and have grossed more than $600 million per film—a performance that has placed nearly all of the company’s films on the top 50 of all time. The company is an outrageously successful creative enterprise and that success is a product of thoughtful management practice. Teams are assembled to help directors refine their ideas, “You must kill your darlings.” but in the early stages of development, emphasis is more on the —William Faulkner working relationships among the team than the idea. Pixar has created an environment that both promotes and “Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. manages creativity. The company invests heavily in its employees, It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial.” educating them and expanding their skills. Though the management —Steve Jobs structure is informal and fluid, there is a shared understanding of the organization, processes, and work that goes into making A statement of vision unites a team and focuses its ideas. It also a successful product. Like Toyota, where a worker can stop the becomes a yardstick against which you can measure the value of entire production line, Pixar practices a culture of humility which a concept. If an idea doesn’t support the vision, if it’s not loadallows new problems to be identified, discussed, and addressed bearing, it’s irrelevant. openly and honestly. Pixar’s executives are wary of success and A caution here. Remember those rules apply to you. Subdue the complacency it may engender and—again like Toyota— your ego and kill your darlings. The first ideas to question are your the company treats every project as an occasion for continuous own favorites, and be especially critical with the ones you think improvement, and opportunity to identify and solve are your best. They’re often not, and falling in love with them new problems. usually blinds you to something better and certainly makes it Catmull again: “I often say that managers of creative enterprises difficult to generate the environment that enables all to work must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions. . . . At Pixar, we toward the success of the project. Talk about aims and goals, are willing to adjust our goals as we learn, striving to get it right, don’t get fixated on specific solutions. not necessarily to get it right the first time. Because that, to my And note that the decisiveness most manager/leaders seek to mind, is the only way to establish something else that is essential project can often ruin the creativity of a team. Actor John Cleese to creativity: a culture that protects the new.” is best known for his roles in Monty Python, but he’s also a well-respected business consultant. He says, “The people I find it hardest to be creative with are the people who need, all the time, to project an image of themselves as decisive, and who feel to create this image they need to decide everything very quickly with a great show of confidence. Well, this behavior, I suggest sincerely, is the most effective way to strangle creativity at birth.”
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