Inc Disney Quotes

Nothing is more important than our friendship.

It was the end of the day before John, Steve, and I had a chance to take a breath, heading upstairs and ducking into my office. The minute the door shut behind us, Steve put his arms around us and began to cry, tears of pride and relief—and, frankly, love. He had succeeded in providing Pixar, the company he’d helped turn from a struggling hardware supplier into an animation powerhouse, with the two things it needed to endure: a worthy corporate partner in Disney and, in Bob, a genuine advocate.

Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our people’s intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason—our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover. CHAPTER 7 THE HUNGRY BEAST AND THE UGLY BABY During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as an ascendant Disney Animation was enjoying a remarkable string of hit films—The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King—I began to hear a phrase being used again and again in the executive suites of its Burbank headquarters: “You’ve got to feed the

He saw firsthand the way that the Disney people took advantage of the open floor plan, sharing information and brainstorming. Steve was a big believer in the power of accidental mingling; he knew that creativity was not a solitary endeavor.

My aim at Pixar—and at Disney Animation, which my longtime partner John Lasseter and I have also led since the Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar in 2006—has been to enable our people to do their best work. We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

Right away, we realized that we’d made a terrible mistake. Everything about the project ran counter to what we believed in. We didn’t know how to aim low. We had nothing against the direct-to-video model, in theory; Disney was doing it and making heaps of money. We just couldn’t figure out how to go about it without sacrificing quality. What’s more, it soon became clear that scaling back our expectations to make a direct-to-video product was having a negative impact on our internal culture, in that it created an A-team (A Bug’s Life) and a B-team (Toy Story 2). The crew assigned to work on Toy Story 2 was not interested in producing B-level work, and more than a few came into my office to say so. It would have been foolish to ignore their passion.

When I look back on Pixar’s history, I have to recognize that so many of the good things that happened could easily have gone a different way. Steve could have sold us—he tried more than once. Toy Story 2 could have been deleted for good, bringing the company down. For years, Disney was trying to steal John back, and they could have succeeded. I am distinctly aware that Disney Animation’s success in the 1990s gave Pixar its chance with Toy Story and also that their later struggles enabled us to join together and ultimately merge.

Why was a problem that took a few days to solve originally projected to take six months? The answer, I think, lay in the fact that for too long, the leaders of Disney Animation placed a higher value on error prevention than anything else.

As we developed the ability to tell a story with a computer, we still didn’t have storytellers among us, and we were the poorer for it. So aware were Alvy and I of this limitation that we began making quiet overtures to Disney and other studios, trying to gauge their interest in investing in our tools.

In 1997, executives at Disney came to us with a request: Could we make Toy Story 2 as a direct-to-video release—that is, not release it in theaters? At the time, Disney’s suggestion made a lot of sense. In its history, the studio had only released one animated sequel in theaters, 1990’s The Rescuers Down Under, and it had been a flop. In the years since, the direct-to-video market had become extremely lucrative, so when Disney proposed Toy Story 2 for video release only—a niche product with a lower artistic bar—we said yes. While we questioned the quality of most sequels made for the video market, we thought that we could do better. Right away, we realized that we’d made a terrible mistake. Everything about the project ran counter to what we believed in. We didn’t know how to aim low. We had nothing against the direct-to-video model, in theory; Disney was doing it and making heaps of money. We just couldn’t figure out how to go about it without sacrificing quality. What’s more, it soon became clear that scaling back our expectations to make a direct-to-video product was having a negative impact on our internal culture, in that it created an A-team (A Bug’s Life) and a B-team (Toy Story 2). The crew assigned to work on Toy Story 2 was not interested in producing B-level work, and more than a few came into my office to say so.

Athletes and musicians often refer to being in “the zone”—that mystical place where their inner critic is silenced and they completely inhabit the moment, where the thinking is clear and the motions are precise. Often, mental models help get them there. Just as George Lucas liked to imagine his company as a wagon train headed west—its passengers full of purpose, part of a team, unwavering in their pursuit of their destination—the coping mechanisms used by Pixar and Disney Animation’s directors, producers, and writers draw heavily on visualization. By imagining their problems as familiar pictures, they are able to keep their wits about them when the pressures of not knowing shake their confidence.

Disney animation was sort of like a dog that had been beaten again and again Byron Howard, the director, told me when I asked him to describe the mindset back then. The crew wanted to succeed, but they were afraid of pouring their hearts into something that wasn’t going to succeed. You could FEEL that fear and in notes meetings everyone was so afraid of hurting someone’s feelings that they held back. We had to learn we weren’t attacking the person. We were attacking the project. Only then could we create a crucible that boils away everything that has not working and leaves the strongest framework. Earning trust takes time. There is no shortcut to understanding that we really do rise and fall together.

For five straight years, we’d fought to do Toy Story our way. We’d resisted the advice of Disney executives who believed that since they’d had such success with musicals, we too should fill our movie with songs.

Well,” more than one Disney executive told me that day, “until computer animation can do bubbles, then it will not have arrived.

Companies like Airbnb, Disney, and the NBA gain moral clout when they preach about how much they care about stakeholders at home. But then they turn around and use that moral clout to implicitly endorse atrocities abroad when foreign dictators flex their own stakeholder status. That’s the key difference between stakeholder and shareholder capitalism:

That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where. That requires us to step up to the boundary of what we know and what we don’t know. While we all have the potential to be creative, some people hang back, while others forge ahead. What are the tools they use that lead them toward the new? Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. And that, according to the people who make films at Pixar and Disney Animation, means developing a mental model that sustains you. It might sound silly or woo-woo, this kind of visualization, but I believe it’s crucial. Sometimes—especially at the beginning of a daunting project—our mental models are all we’ve got.

studios down. (He also thought, frankly, that making us the stewards of both entities would guarantee that Pixar’s traditions didn’t get overtaken by those of the much larger corporation, the Walt Disney Company.)

This was a critical decision that was not obvious to most people. Most people assumed that Pixar would do 3D movies and Disney would do 2D. Or

Walt Disney was one of my two boyhood idols. The other was Albert Einstein. To me, even at a young age, they represented the two poles of creativity. Disney was all about inventing the new. He brought things into being—both artistically and technologically—that did not exist before. Einstein, by contrast, was a master of explaining that which already was.

John often plays the role of inspirer-in-chief, and the people at Disney and Pixar alike rely on his energy and optimism. But this was no rah-rah call to action. Ambling to the front of the stage, John proceeded to deliver the most heartfelt and emotional speech I had ever heard him give. He started by talking about candor, and how we spend a lot of time at Pixar talking about its importance. But

After The Lion King was released in 1994, eventually grossing $952 million worldwide, the studio began its slow decline. It was hard, at first, to deduce why—there had been some leadership changes, yet the bulk of the people were still there, and they still had the talent and the desire to do great work. Nevertheless, the drought that was beginning then would last for the next sixteen years: From 1994 to 2010, not a single Disney animated film would open at number one at the box office. I believe this was the direct result of its employees thinking that their job was to feed the Beast.

Byron Howard, one of our directors at Disney, told me that when he was learning to play the guitar, a teacher taught him the phrase, “If you think, you stink.” The idea resonated with him—and it informs his work as a director to this day. “The goal is to get so comfortable and relaxed with your instrument, or process, that you can just get Zen with it and let the music flow without thinking,” he told me. “I notice the same thing when I storyboard. I do my best work when I’m zipping through the scene, not overthinking, not worrying if every drawing is perfect, but just flowing with and connecting to the scene—sort of doing it by the seat of my pants.

One top executive at Disney got my attention right away by telling me that he didn’t know why Disney had bought Pixar in the first place. Apparently a lover of sports analogies, he told me that Disney Animation was on the one-yard line, ready to score. He felt Disney was on the verge of fixing its own problems—and finally ending its sixteen-year fallow period without a single number one film. I liked this guy’s moxie and his willingness to push back, but I told him that if he were to continue at Disney, he needed to figure out why, in fact, Disney was not on the one-yard line, not about to score, and not about to fix its own problems. This executive was smart, but over time I realized that to ask him to help dismantle a culture he had built was too much, so I had to let him go. He was so fixated on existing processes and the notion of being “right” that he couldn’t see how flawed his thinking was.

As it turns out, woke activists are more easily appeased: to mollify them, Disney made the Tibetan monk a woman instead of a man, casting popular actress Tilda Swinton in the role.

Companies like Airbnb, Disney, and the NBA gain moral clout when they preach about how much they care about stakeholders at home. But then they turn around and use that moral clout to implicitly endorse atrocities abroad when foreign dictators flex their own stakeholder status.