Ed Catmull

“Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like high-minded”

— Ed Catmull

“Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.”

— Ed Catmull

“Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.”

— Ed Catmull

“Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of learning.”

— Ed Catmull

“When it come to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.”

— Ed Catmull

“The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.”

— Ed Catmull

“If the crew is confused, then their leader is, too.”

— Ed Catmull

“taking a risk necessitated a willingness to deal with the mess created by the risk.”

— Ed Catmull

“We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.”

— Ed Catmull

“What’s needed, in my view, is to approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they…

— Ed Catmull

“Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional.”

— Ed Catmull

“The Braintrust is valuable because it broadens your perspective, allowing you to peer—at least briefly—through others’ eyes. Brad”

— Ed Catmull

“If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.”

— Ed Catmull

“Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it…

— Ed Catmull

“The Hidden—and our acknowledgement of it—is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress:”

— Ed Catmull

“What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we…

— Ed Catmull

“By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. Over the years, I have met people who took what seemed…

— Ed Catmull

“Since making movies is such a messy process, we need to be able to talk candidly, among ourselves, about the mess without…

— Ed Catmull

“So I tell myself that I have time, even when I don’t. As in, ‘Okay, I’m going to proceed as if I…

— Ed Catmull

“We had learned long ago that while everyone appreciates cash bonuses, they value something else almost as much: being looked in the…

— Ed Catmull

“Steve Jobs was quite aware of this story and used to repeat it to people at Apple, adding that he never wanted…

— Ed Catmull

“• Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover…

— Ed Catmull

“If all our careful planning cannot prevent problems, then our best method of response is to enable employees at every level to…

— Ed Catmull

“Sometimes you talk about the problems in fifty different ways until you find that one sentence that you can see makes their…

— Ed Catmull

“Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas. Why are we confused about this? Because too many of us…

— Ed Catmull

“Toy Story went on to become the top-grossing film of the year and would earn $358 million worldwide. But it wasn’t just…

— Ed Catmull

“One of the first people I interviewed was Alvy Ray Smith, a charismatic Texan with a Ph.D. in computer science and a…

— Ed Catmull

“That they liked so much of what they were doing allowed them to put up with the parts of the job they…

— Ed Catmull

“To our surprise, they readily agreed. Suddenly, we were making two ambitious feature films at once—doubling our theatrical output overnight. This was…

— Ed Catmull

“The trust comes from knowing that we are safe, that our colleagues will not judge us for failures but will encourage us…

— Ed Catmull

“Think of it like a patient complaining of knee pain that stems from his fallen arches. If you operated on the knee,…

— Ed Catmull

“WHILE I THINK the reasons for postmortems are compelling, I know that most people still resist them. So I want to share…

— Ed Catmull

“Notably, one item was not on our list: Find the person responsible who typed the wrong command and punish him or her.…

— Ed Catmull

“I know that a lot of our successes came because we had pure intentions and great talent, and we did a lot…

— Ed Catmull

“How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear? Part of the answer is simple: If we as…

— Ed Catmull

“That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths…

— Ed Catmull

“TO UNDERSTAND WHAT the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth:…

— Ed Catmull

“A management team brought in by George to restructure Lucasfilm seemed concerned mostly with cash flow, and as time went on, they…

— Ed Catmull

“To Whom it May Inspire,” Austin wrote. “I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first…

— Ed Catmull

“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,…

— Ed Catmull