How Pixar’s Ed Catmull and Pete Docter make magic on and off screen
39:15 Share

Ted Audio Collective. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive? Drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average, and auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Multitask right now. Quote today at Progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations.

These days, we're surrounded by photo editing programs. Have you ever wondered what something or someone actually looks like under all the manipulation? I'm Elise Hugh, and you might know me as the host of TED Talks Daily. This October, I am giving a TED Talk in Atlanta about finding true beauty in a sea of artificial images.

I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. ♪

My guests today are two of the brains behind some of my favorite films. Ed Catmull is a computer animation pioneer. He co-founded Pixar and served as the longtime president there as well as at Disney Animation. Ed is the author of Creativity, Inc., which, in my opinion, is the best book ever written about building teams that build great ideas and cultures that enrich them. An expanded edition of Creativity, Inc. just came out, and it's filled with new stories and insights.

Pete Docter is the chief creative officer at Pixar and an accomplished director, producer, screenwriter, animator, and voice actor. The first film he both wrote and directed was Monsters, Inc., and he went on to become the first person ever to win three Oscars for Best Animated Feature for Up, Inside Out, and Soul. I've learned a lot from Pixar over the years, and Ed and Pete worked together for decades, so I couldn't wait to talk with them about making creative magic in teams where people have strong opinions.

and of course about working with Steve Jobs.

Adam, have you and Ed met before? We have. We've met several times. Okay. And Ed lived to tell the tale. Yes, I'm still around. And he's willing to talk to you again, which I take as a good sign. I mean, we'll see. We'll see what happens today. I've had a few conversations before, so I'll do my best. I feel like we need to set the scene a little bit. Ed, you co-founded Pixar. You ran it for many years.

How did this come to be? For me, it's a journey that took more than 50 years. And it started with something which was, I'd say, very lucky in that my first teacher of computer science was Alan Kay, who later received the Turing Award. But he's the one that gave this, the principle, which I did get, which was that things are going to change more dramatically than you think. If you've got a vision in your head,

You still need to take a step-by-step process of getting there. So when I went to the next place, I had these theories. Half my theories were right and half were a complete crock. And when I went to Lucasfilm, I realized that I'd keep the stuff that worked. I was going to try some new theories, but I'll bet that my ratio of wrong to right was probably going to stay the same for the rest of my life.

Which is true. And I don't know what the actual number is, but I do think it was important to believe and understand that I was wrong more than I thought I was. We didn't even know we needed that when we started. I know. That's the whole point. You don't know, and then you find it and say, oh, this is gold. Yeah. Well, I like you were talking from a scientific standpoint about

the idea of solving problems one step at a time. It's exactly the same in the creative end of things. I think people generally have this idea that, you know, there's a genius like Walt Disney and he's just lying in bed, "Dumbo!" And he has the whole thing in his head. And really, it's one step at a time. I have an idea about a Dumbo who maybe could fly with big ears. Well, where would he live? Well, maybe let's try the circus. And having met the guy who came up with that story,

It's the same thing they did then as we're doing now. It's problem solving one step at a time. Pete, you've said that directing, and I think this might be true of creativity more generally, is like going into a long, dark tunnel. Oh, yeah. I fall for this every single time. There's this delusion that this time...

I'm going to solve it right off the bat. This time, the vision is clear. So at the very beginning, you're like, okay, this is going to be great. And you get in just enough into the tunnel that the light starts to disappear from where you came. And then it's just all dark. And that stays the case for a long, long portion of the journey. The thing is the colleagues around it understand that. You've got the thing in your head. And once you get lost...

Who helps you get unlost? Because so many times, and this is something we talk a lot about too, is like given that you could change anything at any time, right?

which you can, what are you going to hold on to? Because if you don't hold on to anything, it's just a, I don't know what, slippery fish, whatever analogy you want to come up with, it's not good. You have to hold on to something. And yet, there are times inevitably that I think you have to let go even briefly of the things that got you into it, the things that seemed like that North Star that you were holding on to.

if only to prove that, yes, indeed, that is the North Star. What does it mean to hold on to something tight and also be willing to let it go? Like, these are contradictory statements. That's why it's hard. And Pete can do that. It's like, okay, they're both true. Well, that was something that Steve Jobs modeled time and again, and you probably saw more than I. He would, what was he called? The strongly held beliefs held loosely, right? Although I don't remember him saying that. Okay. I do know. That's just my interpretation, because he would, like,

Go at it, right? If he believed something, he would pitch it with 100%. And then if he decided that was wrong, throw it out. He said at one point that if he dies and comes back, he'd like to come back as a Pixar director. Yeah. And he really bonded with the directors because he understood the concept that you commit to something. You really commit. And when it doesn't work, you let it go. Yeah. With Steve's force of personality...

They think when he's committing, it's like he's really, it's an overwhelming claim. It's the law now. Yeah, we better nail that to the door of the church, you know? This is what's always bothered me about the idea of having strong opinions weakly held, is when you express an opinion strongly, people don't know that you're holding it weakly.

They think it's a deep conviction. They think it's a gospel. Yeah. Well, and you're right, Adam. Unless somebody lays down the ground rules, how are you supposed to know? What if I argue with the boss and he thinks I'm cutting at the knees and I get fired? I mean, that could happen too, right? I think that what you're describing is something I've come to call a challenge network as opposed to a support network. The group of people that you would say are core to your brain trust are

who hold up a mirror and help you see your blind spots more clearly, who bring you the critical feedback you did not want to hear but you desperately needed to hear. And I think this is so central to the creative culture that you built at Pixar. How did the two of you shape that? How do you set those ground rules so that people are not afraid to disagree? As the brain trust was being developed, and originally it was five people, maybe six, I think, the very first time,

But then it evolved because the thing that it was built for was as the feedback mechanism for the director. And it didn't quite do that because they were also lost in the vision of the director. So they weren't objective about it. But we found that it was an incredibly valuable feedback tool. So it evolved into a way of running certain meetings, not all meetings, but

just these meanings to help solve problems. I know on Up, when I was working on that, it was a particular tone and reality that we were setting in the film.

with the old man who flies his house. So what we did instead was to go back and say, well, let's have Carl as a balloon salesman. His cart starts to float up into the air. If you remember, that's very subtle in this montage at the beginning. But what that did, little things like that, I think we had one or two more, that just set up, okay, these are the sort of rules we're playing with in this world. So instead of being quite as literal as Brad was talking about, we were able to take the spirit of what he's saying

going after and solve it in our own way. Part of what's interesting about that example is I think oftentimes when people bring in dissenting voices or they invite a challenge, they think then that if they don't listen to the feedback, they're being defensive. And what I always want to remind people of is, listen, the reason it's helpful to have that kind of sounding board is they have psychological distance. They can see problems that you can't. But because of that distance, they often don't know what the right solutions are to those problems.

And so the brain trust is often more helpful at diagnosing a problem than at fixing it. That was certainly true of Disney early on. We always felt like we have the benefit of making a movie with Disney. So we'd fly down, we'd get great notes, and often they would offer up suggestions and we'd be like, "Oh boy, that stinks," you know. But we would fly back and we could be like, "All right, how do we want to solve this?" And I think that's what they wanted anyway. They're just trying to help by offering up some solutions.

And that's certainly what we're trying to replicate here. I'll usually, even if I'm directing, I'll offer up, here's what I would do. That's just my dumb idea. The spirit of it is I'm trying to get to this. You know, the more you can articulate the underlying emotional reason for something, I think the more helpful those things are if people understand that. This goes to one of your most counterintuitive philosophies.

Which is, Ed, you like, or at least you tolerate complaining. There are always people who complain. Whether you like it or not. Like it or not. And at first there's a recognition that they do see things that I don't see. I just don't know everything and I can't know everything. And they have a view of things that I don't have.

Now, I also can see things they don't see because I'm dealing with a different group of people. So what it means is they might be right, I might be right, or there's some combination, or you have to make a choice because you can't have it every which way. But the critical thing is if somebody pokes their head in the door and they've got something that is wrong, I do need to listen and I need to hear them out. So while I will learn things and sometimes it does change what I see, I

I actually think one of the most important things is it's just accepted that they're seeing things and they need to be heard. And basically at every level, it's like people are participating. We're doing this together. And if people see things different ways, what you want is to know that the other person values what you've got, even if we can't do it that way. Yeah.

And likewise with the films, what makes the outside force valuable, like we had at Disney, was that we knew they wanted us to succeed. So as long as we know they want us to succeed and that's their motive, not something else, but that's their motive...

then that gives their observations a great deal of power for us. Sometimes I think it's still hard for people to bring complaints to the table. You created what I think is a really clever solution to this problem called Peer Pirates, which is a great label, by the way. The interesting thing about this particular thing is that we took the suggestion as they gave it, and so somebody was picked from every department,

And they made their issues for their department known. And when we did that, we then said to the peer from each department, okay, you pick somebody in your department to represent your whole department to like five or six people, small groups. Then they would come in and then they would focus on the needs for their department and go through all their issues. We got a view that we didn't get before.

And that's what we were looking for. What are people seeing and believing that we're not seeing? Because if we walk in the room, it changes the dynamics.

We don't want to change the dynamics. We want to hear it. But how do we make it safe for them to do it? Well, something I've always been curious about you, Ed, is how, like most people, at least I'll speak for myself, when people load on you and tell you what's going wrong, you take it very personally. And so you don't really want that. And yet somehow you are able to live with

this idea of complaining and dissension as somehow a positive thing. Is there some psychological trick you play on yourself, or is that just the way you're wired that that's... I know if somebody pokes my head in my room to tell me a complaint, then my feeling is... I have two feelings. One is, uh-oh, this is probably... Here we go. But it's true, right? It's a real feeling. But the other one was...

I feel actually happy that they're willing to come and talk to me. And I remember one time, three people called me or came into my office and said that I made a mistake. I screwed it. And my feeling at the time was that I was so happy and lucky that they're willing to tell me that I said something which wasn't helpful. And it got me to rethink also the thing I said.

I had thought. There was another time that I think this may have been Cars 2, which came out, didn't do so well. At any rate, whether it was that or something, all of us felt like we have a major problem. And for a lot of us, it was very dark, gloomy, like a sense of oppression. And for Ed, he was almost buoyant, like, oh boy, a problem to solve. And I always thought, okay, it must be that you sort of lead with a sense of curiosity for those kind of things.

You've had a career as a creative scientist observing and affecting this whole experimental project, but looking at it very analytically, getting in and stepping back and going, how do we affect change in this? The outside world likes the simplified story. The reality is, as you know very well, it's really like this mesh of people and this network that solve these problems. And it's hard to convey to the outside world

the depth of appreciation or the contribution of all the friends around who are all aligned and trying to solve a difficult problem. You know, it's interesting to me, Pete, that you frame this as a question about a psychological trick because, first of all, as a psychologist, I'm not a fan of tricks in any way, shape, or form. I just can't get on board with that.

Call it a skill. It's a skill. Thank you. But I think the skill stems from character. And Ed, if I can embarrass you for a second, a number of people who have worked with you closely and know you very well have said, listen, the reason this is easier for Ed than the rest of us is because Adam exemplifies everything you've spent your career studying. He is a giver, not a taker. He's always trying to figure out how can I make other people better?

He's a humble, curious re-thinker who doesn't worry about being wrong but wants to get it right. He's an original. He has no attachment whatsoever to the status quo and is basically highly motivated to find a better way whenever there is one. I'm like, yeah, you are all those things, Ed Catmull. And that makes it really easy. It doesn't require a trick because the skill is built into your values in some ways.

I guess I would say it's a trick because I do feel like all of us operate from a sense of fear and insecurity at some level. Or maybe I'm just exposing my own inner demons here. But I think everybody, even people who appear super confident sometimes are doing that to compensate for that.

That deep insecurity. And I'm always curious, like, where is that on Ed? As a storyteller, you're always trying to find like the vulnerability in the character because that's what makes them relatable. And so I'm always curious about that. I wanted to zoom in on the response you gave on that note, which is you feel the threat or the ego blow. You're human, but you also are grateful that they told you.

It seems like that is where the skill comes in, to say there are dueling emotions there. I want to focus more on the gratitude than on the threat. I've never kept it secret, but most people aren't aware of even here at Pixar. But I was president of Pixar three times.

Which meant that I was unmade the president of Pixar twice. Was that Steve Jobs both times? Yes. Yeah, predictable. We start, and I'm the president of the company. And the truth was, nobody knew what they were doing from marketing to sales to manufacturing. Is that making the image computers? Yeah, we're making the image computer. And Steve had never had experience with a high-end product before.

So he said, you don't really know enough to be the president. So I need you to take a different role like this CTO. And I want to bring in somebody else as president. So he brought in this very nice guy. And we got along very well. But it was actually a painful thing to go through because I knew he was right. And because he was right, I said, OK, I can live with that. I want to let go of the long-term vision. And then we weren't really making it in the hardware business anymore.

So we went back to me being the president, and then we started to make the commercials and the software, and then got into the contract to make the film for Disney in 1991 for Toy Story. And then as we got near the end of it, Steve wanted to take us public. And he said, well, as we go public, you don't really have the experience to be the CEO of a—the president of a public company. Yeah.

So, again, that was not fun. You weren't by that time, you're like, all right, well, we'll see how long this lasts. Maybe a year and a half or something like that. Steve came to me and says, okay, now you're ready to be president again. So then I was the president, only this time when he announced it to the company that

They all kind of scratched their heads and said, I thought he already was. Yeah, exactly. I remember that. Ed, did that make you feel like an imposter? It wasn't that I ever felt like an imposter, but I did have a recognition that I wasn't like the people who were the presidents of other companies where I knew the people pretty well. And I wasn't anything like them.

So I knew that I didn't have the skill set or the public persona that they did, and I wasn't likely to get it. But having gone through that, I could then recognize that one of the things that happens to a lot of people when you actually get the role is

that the actual job you have isn't what you thought it was. And Pete went through this too. It's like... You're imposing imposter syndrome on Pete. Just Pete, I feel like we should get your consent for that. No need for imposition. I wear it every day. When you have the job, then there's one or two things you've got. One is to feel like, oh, I failed because I'm not doing what I thought it should be. Or the other recognition is to say, oh...

It isn't what I thought it was. What do I need to do? And frankly, not every director actually was able to do that or every leader was able to do it. But for a lot of them, it's like, I'm going to do what's needed to get the job done. I don't need to be like somebody else. There's the story cliche, which is be yourself. Just be true, authentic to who you are. It's actually, it's not quite that simple. For me as a director on Monsters, the first thing I did, I was like,

I was taken out of my comfort zone every day. I was not used to addressing people and saying, all right, here's what we're going to do. But that's the sort of clarity that is required of the job. So you have to step out from where you were, but then do it in some way that's authentic to you. I remember people trying to be helpful saying,

you know, in these situations, and what I would hear from them is, you're a failure, you know? So I think what you have to, in the long run, figure out, like, okay, again, what's the spirit of the note? What are they trying to get to? And how can I do that in a way that feels comfortable and authentic to who I am? I want to come back to Steve Jobs because I think, Ed, you worked for him longer than anyone else that I can count. Yes. Pete, you had a chance to work with him from the very early days, for better or worse. Yes.

I've heard a lot of stories about how he evolved into, I don't want to say kinder, maybe less... I would say that. A less cruel version of himself is the less charitable? No, I think the stronger story is, is that Steve, whom we knew at the beginning, we saw the behavior that resulted in being booted out of Apple in a very public and humiliating way for him. But he still had that behavior. The first version of...

Pixar failed as a hardware company, and then Next failed as a company. Now, in both cases, he had something of great value. That is, there was this team that had been built at Pixar. That's when Pete came in and Andrew came in, and there was a bonding that took place. And Steve recognized that was of great importance. And Next, they had this operating system called Next Step. It's based upon Berkeley Unix.

And that was a great value when it resulted into the return to Apple. So around the early 90s, when we were working on Toy Story, then he also got married to a wonderful woman and had kids. He went through a fairly dramatic change and he became kinder and more empathetic. Now, he was always passionate and always had that persona. That didn't change. But he did have the empathy.

and kindness, and I didn't even see it before. I didn't know he could change it that way, but he did. But once he did that in the early 90s, the people who saw that stayed with him for the rest of his life. So the public story about him, the stuff that's written, didn't even have access to that story because nobody was talking about it. So the story gets skewed, and the reason I think it's an important story is that it's more like the classic hero's journey. Mm-hmm.

And the person who came back to Apple to turn it around was not that thing that's done publicly. It was that changed person. And the important thing to realize, it was the changed person who had those abilities to make this amazing impact in the world.

So that's what we were seeing. It's interesting to hear you narrate the temporal arc because I've heard that even though it was a more generous, more caring Steve Jobs that came back to Apple,

Pixar got a better version of him than Apple did at the same point in time. That late 90s Steve was more likable and more helpful at Pixar than he was at Apple. So I want to know what the secret sauce is. How did you guys bring out the best in him? I thought we got a better Steve Jobs even earlier than that in the 90s. Is that true or not? Part of this phenomenon was that Steve actually recognized that the directors on a film were doing the kind of thing which he got and he liked.

He loved it when people really committed to something, and then when it didn't work, they changed what they were doing, and that we'd set up a system to get the feedback. He loved that. The only time Steve would see the meetings, because Steve never came to a brain trust meeting, because he knew we had a delicate kind of dynamic in the meeting that

And he recognized in himself that it wasn't possible for him to be in that room without screwing up the dynamics in the room. So that was a self-awareness. So when did he see the films to give his feedback? It was at the board meetings. So the night before a board meeting, Steve would call me up.

And he would say, how's it going? Leading question. A leading question. But I would only say one of two things. I would say, it's actually going well. And he'd say, oh, great. End of conversation. Or I would say, we have a problem. End of conversation. I never ever did I tell Steve how to think. It was part of our relationship. I could be very stubborn, but I never argued with him.

So if we disagreed, then that disagreement may last over weeks. But it was never resolved by arguing. But I never believed that if somebody has a powerful personality or has a lot of power, that that makes them right. But the weird thing I saw, because I was in every one of these meetings, is there was nothing that Steve ever said that had not been said by the other directors or people in the brain trust. Right.

But they also learned how to ignore each other. It's one of the phenomenons in a group. Like, you get to know each other really well, and you also know likely what they're going to say, so you sort of write it off, and then you don't hear it. You couldn't ignore Steve, though. No, yeah. He was super articulate and clear and strong in the way he would state things. I remember once seeing him in a bathroom somewhere and talking about some completely small topic, and he said, well, there are three things in vocabulary.

It was as though he had rehearsed it or thought about it. He just always had just a real gift with expressing himself in a very clear way, unlike I'm doing right now. He would say, "I'm not a filmmaker," which I've seen so many people in positions of power, they think it's their job to have the final say. And so to actually have that position and pass it on to other people, I think was super empowering for us.

It made us more receptive to his notes. And it also gave us a little bit more pressure because we realized, oh, there's nobody I can point to. You know, this is on me. My colleague Brad Owens has, from his research, labeled Steve Jobs in those kinds of moments as a humble narcissist.

It's such a paradox, and I don't love the use of the term narcissism here, but what's intriguing about it is that I don't think, from my outside perspective, Steve Jobs became any less grandiose in his vision or his estimation of his capabilities. But he did add in a sprinkle of humility. He knew what he didn't know in ways that were clearly not present earlier in his career. I think it's really interesting to recognize that even somebody with an abundance of confidence can...

can develop the self-awareness to say, you know what? I'm in one of my areas of ignorance right now, and I should probably acknowledge that so that the room doesn't put too much stock in what I say. Yeah, and I think one of the things people miss even about him at Apple was that he wanted people who disagreed with him.

Because as you all know, you know the history there, is that he originally thought they should do the iPad first, followed by the iPhone. But it was his people that convinced him he was wrong. And he went with them and said the iPhone comes first. But he was adamant that he wanted to have, that Apple provide the apps for it. His own people didn't agree, and he overrode them. But within a few months of the phone coming out...

He recognized that they were right, and he changed his mind. Now, the point of all this was he had people around who didn't agree with him. He wasn't getting rid of people just because he disagreed with them or he thought they were wrong. He actually wanted them. And that's the thing I think that people were missing about how this dynamic works is you really want the value of the people. Even if you think they're wrong, you want them there.

to be pushing because we're doing this as a group. We all have this ownership in whatever these solutions and these problems are. Often, I will be kind of fuzzy on whether I believe something until someone pushes me on it. And sometimes it's as valuable to have somebody that I disagree with because it'll bring out of me like, no, that's wrong. I know exactly that is the wrong decision, but I wasn't really aware of that until you have that sort of confrontation. I think he understood that...

the ultimate purpose of dissent and debate is not to produce consensus. It's to promote critical thinking. And sometimes that critical thinking crystallizes your own ideas. Yes. And we've gotten in the chat, well, this person is the complete package. Only to realize, no, they're not, actually. They're brilliant at some things, like two or three things. But because they're brilliant at those two or three things, that's getting in their way of actually solving their real problems. Right.

Sometimes people come up with these really amazing pearls, but a movie is not a string of pearls. So you can admire every one of these amazing pieces, but that's not the same thing as holding together and how it works. Lightning rounds. Tell me something you've both rethought about creative culture. Inside Pixar, even though we don't shy away from the term if something goes wrong, there's

people don't use the terminology of failure. They refer to it as, this doesn't work, what do we do to fix it? And there's one thing I just was like, I didn't actually get it right the first time. Instead of saying it needs to be safe to fail, it's like, no, we have to think about it as what did we do that didn't work and what do we do next? I kind of love that you failed in your analysis of failure. You meta-failed. It's true. Mine's a super psychological one. People say, oh, I had an idea. My idea is this. And now I kind of feel like

None of these I can take any credit for. It's not like I can work harder and have better ideas. I guess the Greeks I've read had an idea that they wouldn't say, you're a genius. They'd say, you have a genius. And so the more you can kind of like open your head to the ideas coming through you seem more accurate to me than earning it or doing it yourself. Excellent. Worst career advice you've both gotten? Oh, I received a lot. Oh, yeah? This is when we started Pixar, really. It's like,

Focus, focus, focus. What the hell does that mean? It's not even the problem. I can focus. What am I supposed to focus on? And that's just one that pops to my head. I remember in high school writing class, my teacher literally wrote across the top of the paper, you seem to think you can get away with bad writing because you like to draw cartoons.

It wasn't even you're good at drawing cartoonists. It was you like to. I was close to when I first got nominated for an Oscar for writing to say something, but I didn't. Vindication. Yeah. What do you think is the most underrated Pixar movie? I think that A Bug's Life was underrated. That seems to be the consensus, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We still have Bugs Life Appreciation Day here at Pixar because nobody talks about it, but the animators have a big shindig that day, the day it came out. Do you know that? No, I did not know that. I did not know that. I'm glad. Yeah. It's appreciated here. Exactly.

Amazing. Okay. And then a question you have for me as an organizational psychologist about the future of Pixar. Oh, if so, at the beginning of like Toy Story, we had all these people who provided different points of view, didn't try to be what the other person was doing, and yet somehow came together in a way that supported and lifted everything. If you don't have that organically, how do you get it?

Well, I think most people try to solve that problem through team composition. The thought is, all right, we're going to go out and find the perfect talent, and we're going to build a dream team. We need the Avengers, or we need the Justice League. My read of the evidence is this is actually not a selection problem. It's a culture problem. Empirically, who you have in the team is less important than how the team is run. This has been shown in field studies and experiments. Google also found it when studying their high-performing teams against the rest's.

The lesson fundamentally is you need to create a dynamic whereby a group becomes more than the sum of its parts. You all know this. You've lived it. And that means you have to understand what each part is able to contribute that elevates the group.

And I don't think we spend enough time on that. I think we get a group of people together, we assign them to roles, and we assume that the role that they got was the one that was going to leverage their creative talent. And very often it's not. So I want to do a much deeper dive into what does this person bring to the table? How do we create an environment where we can see the skills they have that aren't in their job description? Good answer. The difficulty is I've tried to explain certain things to people, and I've basically felt

It felt like a lot of things I was not able to get the message through. Or they won't understand what I said. And I don't know... Pixar is an accessible story to talk about some principles. But then they actually, they're thinking it's more about making films. Not understanding that it's how one thinks about a culture.

But I've often felt like I wasn't able to actually make the connection. And it's just been difficult to even think how to do that.

I have a thought on that, which is I think the most underrated skill in culture building and shaping is storytelling, which happens to be a skill that you excel at much more than I do. But I don't think we spend enough time telling our culture stories. I know, Ed, you were involved in a project not too long ago where you collected some of the stories of the archetypal moments that have shaped Pixar culture.

And my question is, what are you doing with those stories? Because we know that values are communicated through the stories people tell. They're also created through the stories people tell. And I wonder how much of Pixar's storytelling muscle has been applied to the internal work of, you know, sustaining and strengthening a culture. Well, it's tricky because a lot of the stories here, it's like personal information. Right. Right.

I think it's true with a lot of companies, even though they're successful and people talk about it, but they tend to be more about what they did that were right and stay away from the sort of painful things. It's probably because they don't want to embarrass people or because it's like using them as fodder to tell stories.

And that would actually not be good either. I think it's interesting that stories so often are focused on successes and not failures. That's a problem, obviously. But also, I want stories to focus on principles, right? Here's a story when somebody upheld a value. Here's a story when somebody violated a value without naming names. But this is what that looks like. And I think this is timely because I don't need to tell you, you've seen the headlines that people are claiming that Pixar has lost its creative mojo.

And it's really easy to get defensive and blame the decline of theaters, the competition in animation, the ruthless critics, the lack of audience appreciation for originality. Nobody makes all their shots.

If you were to put all that aside, how do you think about internally changing that dynamic and rejuvenating the creativity that's made Pixar great? When people talk about what's it like at Pixar or whatever, you say, well, which Pixar? There's been at least five that I've been a part of, and we're going through a radical change here right now. We're seeing a lot of new voices, which is great. It also means that finding the new characters

working method of how everyone interfaces and connects with each other is going through changes as well. It's very tricky and it's a moving target. You know, it's not like you can do this once and be done. It changes and I think that's the other thing just about human nature is that

We're constantly outwitting each other. Once we think we have understood each other, there's another whole level, you know, another basement below the basement. So you're constantly learning and discovering more about how people work and how to work better with people. There really hasn't been a time when we've had various problems. Some are more internal and some are external. And then you come together and say, okay, we have to fix this problem. That's what we do.

That's never changed. It was one of the things I was just trying to say in the book is like, this never goes away. You don't actually reach the stable point because there is no stable point. A successful group is fundamentally unstable. If you recognize the instability, that means, okay, we're continually adapting and changing. And when something doesn't go the way you thought it was going to go, okay, what do we do? But that's what we apply to life, to everything we're doing.

And let's take on the next problem because they're coming. What do we do when they come? Beautifully put. It reminds me of the metaphor of truing a bicycle wheel where you spin it and you find the spoke that sticks out and then you move it into alignment and then you spin it again and there's another spoke sticking out and the process is never done. Very true. Well, thank you both. This has been a joy. I've learned a lot. Appreciate you taking the time. Cool. Thank you. That was fun. All right. Thank you, Adam. Appreciate it.

Such a rich conversation, so many takeaways. One thing that strikes me right off the bat is this idea that successful groups are unstable. So many people have an image of a great team as always in harmony, and that's just not realistic. The idea that instability can lead to flexibility, adaptation, creativity, and learning, I think makes it a lot easier to accept the fact that we may have some tension, we may have some conflict.

Instability can be threatening. We don't have to make the threat go away. We just have to overshadow it with gratitude. There are so many reasons to be grateful when someone points out a problem. It means they trust you. They trust you to care. They trust you to be capable of solving the problem. And they want your help. That's a huge compliment. We should not forget that. For more on Pixar culture, check out our work-life episode, "The Creative Power of Misfits."

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Asia Simpson, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quinn, Ben Ben-Cheng, Hannah Kingsley-Mogg, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our fact checker today was Kate Williams. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown. Your flipbook got us through COVID. Ah, cool.

Yes, flipbooks. I love flipbooks. It's the same thing we do, only it's like 15 cents worth of paper instead of millions of dollars worth of computer equipment. But it's the same idea, right? Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.