Oct 15th (Day 3) Pixar: a company with soul
Amazon Prime has totally spoiled me. I ordered the book The Pixar Touch on a whim two days ago and it arrived this afternoon. I’d always deeply admired Pixar and this is a sentiment many others similarly share. Pixar, just the word seems to be imbued by a touch of magic and the company itself seems blessed, if not by God, then at least by some ineffable air of genius.
Deciding to do a bit of light skimming tonight, I dove into the book and didn’t put it down until the last page. By dissecting and laying out the Pixar story, David Price brings to life the human, behind the scenes elements to the seemingly larger than life success story. Like any retrospective, the history is gentlely massaged and bits are snippet to form some core of a story but even looking past this, I learned some surprising lessons.
At Bumblebee Labs, one of the things I’ve instinctively felt is that [i]soul[/i] is one of your most precious and yet most luxurious assets at the early stages. That for a company to be truely successful, not only from a marketplace perspective but also from personal accomplishment, it needs to be infused with a deep and consistent sense of personality and purpose. At the same time, it’s often justifiable criticism that spending the early stages focusing on establishing the “philosophy” and “branding” of a company is just so much mastabatory wank that is a more pleasant alternative to getting more work done.
I think both approaches are valid and part of the tension to becoming successful is to balance these two competing demands. At the same time, soul is one area in which it’s incredibly hard to seek objective advice because soul is all about stories and to have soul is to spin larger than life stories that amplify it.
One of the major surprising lessons to me is that so much of what made Pixar, Pixar was not neccesarily there at the early stages. That the fundamental philosophies of the founders were able to shift and adapt as they were thrust into new circumstances and brought new people on board. So much of what I identify with Pixar: the intense commitment to quality, the belief in a risky singular vision over a safe committee, their focus on story over technology, those traits were unrecognisable in the early Pixar. At the same time, the seeds of many others were there right from the start: Their belief in the importance of people and the rewarding of talent, their faith in the sheer rightness of what they were doing in the face of countless naysayers, their freewheeling, independant experimentation.
Another was just how unsystematic things were back in those days. After reading startup and VC blogs all day long, you get the sense that there’s a process and system in place which you need to understand before even attempting to enter the industry. In contrast, the early days of Pixar seemed truly like a frontier. I think for a lot of technology people, technological progress is something they intuitively understand on the visceral level because they’re surrounded by it every day. What can be far less obvious is how our understanding of management is growing and almost a similarly torrid pace.
Few people realise just how young management is as a discipline. The roots of the idea that companies required some sort of systematic, formalised process for directing the course of operations only really took root during the American railroad boom and the need for communication and synchronisation across large distances. Looking back just twenty years some things were back then and give you a sense of how management could change twenty years from now. Just being aware of this velocity of change can keep you aware and on the lookout for some of the genuinely new and lasting innovations which are coming down the pike.
Ultimately, though, the story of Pixar is about the story of talent and that’s something which can never be learned just from a book. At some point, each and every one of us has to face up to the fact that no amount of planning or luck or preparation can make up for the need to be simply good at what you do.
