Pixar co-founder shares 6 tips for startup success

Photo credit: Pixabay.

In the introduction to Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull describes the Pixar Studios campus, which has a soccer field, volleyball court, swimming pool, and theater that sits 600. He describes the human-sized Woody and Buzz Lightyear statues that are in the company’s lobby (Ed casually mentions that Steve Jobs designed the entire building), constructed completely out of Lego.

He talks of it with fondness and nostalgia. “Although I’ve made this walk thousands of times, it never gets old,” he writes.

I had a much less mature response to this passage: jealousy. I want to work at Pixar. It’s exactly the response I was supposed to have, and the book proceeded for the next 300 or so pages to talk about how Pixar had gone from its scrappy startup days to merging with Disney Animation.

The thing is, the book reads less like a how-to manual and more like a conversation over coffee with an old friend. Ed launches into flashbacks and mentions several of his colleagues as he writes, like their advice over the years has become part of his own repertoire.

Perhaps fittingly, the key advice I took away from the book was heavy on the empathy, advising organizations to work with human nature rather than against it. Much like a Pixar movie, Creativity, Inc. is encapsulated in story, but its advice is easy to pick out. Here are six lessons that stuck out to me.

See: How to unlock creativity in the workplace – advice from Pixar CEO

1. You’re your own worst enemy

Photo credit: dennis.pope85.

You know the flight attendant speech, the one where he or she says to look around for the closest emergency exit, keeping in mind that the closest exit may be behind you? The same goes for competition. Except in this case, the exits are competition, and Ed argues that the biggest competition – the biggest threat to a company’s livelihood – is the company itself.

A company needs as many different employee perspectives at the table as possible, all with equal opportunity for input.

“What interested me was not that companies rose and fell or that the landscape continually shifted as technology changed but that the leaders of these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work,” Ed writes.

No matter how much perspective management has, the people in those positions are fallible because there is no omniscient position. Ed suggests that the vantage position in management might actually be the worst position because there’s always going to be at least one perspective missing. Ed believes that the best way to fight against this ignorance is to have as many different employee perspectives at the table as possible, all with equal opportunity for input.

Throughout Creativity, Inc., Ed practices this by referencing several of his co-workers and mentors throughout the book, presenting their advice alongside his.

2. Fighting insecurity is half the battle

3. Invest in a good team

4. Success means developing a sustainable culture

5. Candor is vital

6. Failure is an opportunity