As I
wrote a few months back, Huggy Rao from Stanford, Allen Webb from McKinsey
and I interviewed Pixar’s Academy Award
winning director Brad Bird for the McKinsey
Quarterly. Brad was one of the most lively and insightful people
I’ve ever had the privilege
of interviewing. You can read it here (there is also multi-media
with it). It seems that the Quarterly readers love Brad Bird too,
as this article was the most
popular among readers last quarter.
The two main things about
innovation that Brad reinforced for me are the value of tolerating and
celebrating constructive friction and of never being satisfied with good enough
— he made very clear about how the mediocrity of the once great Disney
animation studio could be traced directly to the attitude that “we are satisfied
with our work, it is good enough.” In contrast, my daughter and I
were lucky enough to see a preview of WALL-E earlier
in the week at Pixar (an astounding movie, especially the first 30 minutes are
pure magic), and although the Pixar people we talked to were clearly very proud
of this film, the main thing they seemed worried about was that all their
success would make them complacent and less creative. That kind of
paranoia and hungriness is, I think, a hallmark of people and organizations
that are creative over the long haul.
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