Image: 3dnews.ru

Well way back in September, a copy of the Harvard Business Review crossed my desk and had an intriguing cover that caught my eye. On the left were Pixar’s light icon and the phrase: Creativity at PIXAR. This company has fascinated me for years and I was determined to check out the article and see what kind of creativity – aside from the movies smartass – was lurking behind their animated gates.

Well as you can see by the date, days turned into months and the magazine was lost in a scrap/trash pile never to be heard from again, until at the end of January, my team had to move our location. Thus forcing the cleaning process, it was here that the magazine popped back up. While a month may have passed before I got the chance to give it a read, the wait was well worth it.

The article is penned by Ed Catmull a cofounder of Pixar and current president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. The first person narrative goes on to show what makes Pixar so special as a company. Again, more than the movies, the company relies on innovation and creative thinking to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Teamwork and a nurturing & creative environment allows for the company to have everyone make a difference in a movie. Pixar’s goal to always one-up themselves is only matched by their ability to grow/learn from a failure while not settling for anything less.

We all know that their movies have been box office successes, however the one thing that the movie-going public will never see is the behind the scenes postmortems where the crew lays out what went wrong and what they can do better rather than being content to have a product out the door. This kind of thinking has not only elevated them to a top-tier theatrical company, but also may have saved Disney’s movies from the straight-to-DVD imposed hell.

The key takeaway from the article is not only the nurturing of talent and cultivating a goal orientated team, but also the three core principles of the company.

Pixar’s Operating Principles

1. Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone
2. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas
3. We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community

I would suggest checking out the article, found in its entirety here, for anyone looking for ways to motivate their direct reports or team, HR reps or anyone like me who is a five-year old caught in a adult’s body who loves movies.

Random Tangent

My only wonder is why we never saw this Pixar commercial during the World Series?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_7_xz2OtoI]

After ripping through all of the books I had in the house, I heard author, Michael Connelly on the morning

Image courtest Motorbooks.com

show on WEEI talking about his new book Rebound! Basketball, Busing, Bird and the rebirth of Boston. At first it sounded like just another sports book, but then the author went into details about how the book not only chronicled the Celtics glory days and the rise of Bird’s team, but also the tumultuous time in the city of Boston during the busing fiasco.

Figuring it sounded like an appealing read I picked up the book and started away and quickly couldn’t put it down.

Not only was the jumping between stories seamless, but the racial unrest in Boston actually seemed to parallel the falling from grace of the NBA’s most storied franchise.

Originally coming from Jersey, I had heard stories of how the city was racist and how there was a scandal around busing, but never really understood it.

Chapter after chapter, I was shocked that some of the happenings of the book were something happening in one of the country’s oldest most revered cities and not in the pages of Mississippi Burning.

With the emphasis put on the history of the city, I almost think that it should be added to the curriculum of the Boston Public School System in an effort to educate less history repeat itself.

Connelly’s most powerful image in the book is the culmination celebration in Government Center of the Celts championship, almost washing away the racial unrest that consumed the city less than three years earlier.