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Do you apply the leadership principles used at Pixar? This is the first of a two-part series about running your business like Pixar with 5 key lessons from the book Creativity Inc. written by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace.
This episode covers:
- Getting the right team is more important than the right idea
- Great products require constructive tension
Podcast Transcript:
Joshua MacLeod:
Great leaders not only find the right team, a team that’s good for their future, a team where you’re hiring people smarter than you, a team that everyone shares the same values, but they also are really good at building environments where you can have candid and constructive conversations.
Podcast Announcer:
Welcome to the Growability Podcast, teaching business and nonprofit leaders a more excellent way to run a business. Visit growability.com for your leadership, coaching consultation and business collaboration needs. This is the first of a two-part series about how to run your business like Pixar. Let’s listen as Joshua and Bernie discussed five key lessons from the book Creativity, Inc. Written by Edwin Catmull and Amy Wallace. Here are your hosts, Joshua MacLeod and Bernie Anderson.
Bernie Anderson:
I really am enjoying, Joshua, the conversation we’ve had over the last couple of weeks talking about leaders, and I understand you have another book today that we can maybe take some time to talk about.
Joshua MacLeod:
I made a tactical error, Bernie, on our podcast by starting with Abraham Lincoln. Like what? So I started thinking about, okay, great. We’re talking about leaders who make leaders, let’s start with Abraham Lincoln, and now it’s like, oh crap, where do you go from Abraham Lincoln? Like we should have ended with that. But yeah, I thought today we could talk about the book Creativity, Inc. Creativity, Inc. is kind of the story of Pixar. I’m thinking like 15 years ago is actually when I picked up this book. I came out with five key concepts, and I thought let’s just talk through the same way that we did with the Abraham Lincoln book. Let’s talk through some of these five key concepts in the Creativity, Inc. book.
Joshua MacLeod:
Number one, getting the right team is more important than getting the right idea. I think sometimes we assume that if I have the right idea, everything’s just going to work. The ideas are going to make it easier. The ideas are going to make it more beautiful. All I need is the brilliant idea. I was into conversation this week actually, and I reminded everybody, okay, hey, let’s remember the idea is 1% of the solution. 99% of the solution is blood, sweat and tears. Ideas don’t create paychecks.
Bernie Anderson:
Right, right.
Joshua MacLeod:
Completed ideas actually create paychecks. So if you have the right team, and if you build the right team, your ideas are going to become realities. Hire people who come up with lots of solutions in a short amount of time. If you can find people who are able to come up with options, that’s what really smart people do. People who are smart think smart, and they help you learn how to think smart. Hire people who are definitely smarter than you.
Bernie Anderson:
Steve Jobs who was very much involved with Pixar, he’s the prime example of someone who hired people smarter than he was. Steve Jobs didn’t know anything about the computer animation of making Woody, the cartoon character, right? He got the right people in the right place at the right time to do that and did that really, really well.
Joshua MacLeod:
Hire people who are little intimidating.
Bernie Anderson:
Yeah.
Joshua MacLeod:
If they come and work with you, you’ll get smarter. And if you are hiring them, first of all, you’re the one hiring them. You’re giving them an opportunity. You’re giving them a job. And people, when they go to work somewhere, they go to work somewhere where they can use their gifts and talents. There’s nothing better than being able to bring a lot of value and bring a lot of joy into your life and your work. If you go somewhere and they celebrate your smart, no matter what that smart looks like, then it really does, it’s going to help them explore and reach their full potential.
Joshua MacLeod:
So I got two more points about getting the right team being more important than the right idea. First point would be, A, hire people who are smarter than you. The second is hire people who are a good fit for your future. Often we want to hire people who are a good fit for our right now, but then once you achieve whatever’s done in the right now, they may not be a good fit for your future.
Joshua MacLeod:
So one of the things I wrote down from this Creativity, Inc. book is protection of the future must be a conscious action. If we don’t put a lot of thought into our future and protecting our future, and hiring people towards our future, you look at Apple and Steve Jobs has been deceased for several years, well, Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook. Tim Cook just got some like $500 million payout because all of the stock projections were well above where they thought they were going to be. So when Pixar was hiring, they didn’t just hire people who were good for their present, they hired somebody that’s going to be able to figure out the programs that work for the next 20 years.
Joshua MacLeod:
I want to say this quote, I really like this quote, “Find, develop and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop and support good ideas.” So when you get the right people in your organization, they are the kind of people that find, develop and support good ideas. If you are the only one in the organization that can find, develop and support good ideas, then the organization is only going to grow towards your own capacity. If you can find support and develop the kind of people that find support and develop ideas, then the organization can grow to an unparalleled capacity, like your future is really great.
Bernie Anderson:
Yeah, I feel like that’s really important. How does a leader do that? How does someone in the hiring process, what are they looking for when they’re looking for someone who’s a good fit for the future?
Joshua MacLeod:
My opinion on this is hire someone old. Now that makes seem way counterintuitive.
Bernie Anderson:
As an old person now, I feel like that’s a good thing.
Joshua MacLeod:
So the thing is when you hire someone young, they’re really trying to accomplish everything on their own. They’re trying to prove a point. When you hire someone old, they’re really trying to leave a legacy. They’ve learned that the journey is more important than the destination. They take life in more stride, they have more insight. So if you want to hire somebody for the future, hire someone old.
Joshua MacLeod:
Now, what you may not get from that person is the longest shelf life. They might say, “Okay, I’m 60 years old. I’m going to retire in five years.” But in that five years, you’re going to be able to develop five other people or five really good ideas. So if you want to hire somebody for the future, one of the first things I’d say is hire somebody old.
Bernie Anderson:
Yeah.
Joshua MacLeod:
The second thing I would say is understand your business season. So we can’t really go into that right here, but there’s four different seasons of business growth. So you have organizations that are in startup, organizations that are in growth, organizations that are in maturity, and then organizations that are in renewal.
Bernie Anderson:
Right.
Joshua MacLeod:
So if I’m thinking about a hire for my organization and I’m a startup, I might hire somebody that’s more of a growth mode person. If I’m in an organizational mode of a growth, I might hire someone for a more mature position. If I’m in maturity, I might hire the next startup thinker in the organization.
Bernie Anderson:
That’s good. And if someone is interested in knowing more about business seasons, you can go to growability.com and reach out for a coach, and we will be happy to walk you through that.
Bernie Anderson:
Back to the one thing, Joshua, about hiring someone old, but hiring someone old who has the heart of a coach, I think is really important. I’m about others. I’m about coaching others. I’m about serving others. That’s the kind of old person you want. As I, again, step into middle-agedness, I find there’s two different kinds of people. There are the kinds of people who are willing to give and teach and serve and cheer on the younger generation. And then there’s the kind of people that continue to hold onto power. And if you hire someone old who’s holding onto power, then you’re not actually working for the future.
Joshua MacLeod:
No.
Bernie Anderson:
But if you hire someone old who’s willing to let go of power to the next generation, that’s the person you want to hire.
Joshua MacLeod:
People who are able to do that, that have kind of the internal fortitude of just being like, “Hey, I’m a going to step out of the way here,” is really critical.
Joshua MacLeod:
Okay, so getting the right team is more important than getting the right ideas. Hire people who are smarter than you.
Bernie Anderson:
Good.
Joshua MacLeod:
Hire for the future. And then third thing is hire people who share your values. If you have a person on your team who does not have your same values, it doesn’t matter how exceptional they are, eventually it’s not going to work out. Values are what drive us to make decisions. If I understand what someone’s core values are, I’ll understand the decisions that they’re going to make for the future. So if I have somebody that has opposing values than our organization has, then I’m going to bring somebody in who’s going to have opposing decisions than what our organization makes. They might be the most exceptional person in the world, they might help my organization grow, but after a while, it’s going to be like we don’t see eye to eye here. We have a major problem. So you always want to hire people based on whether they share the exact same values that you share as an organization.
Joshua MacLeod:
Okay, number two. Number to key point from Creativity, Inc,, great products require constructive tension. If you want to know what goes into creating an iPhone, or you want to know what goes into creating a Pixar film, or you want to know what goes into creating a Fortune 500 company, all of those companies recognize the value of constructive tension. If I’m on a team where I say to everybody, “Hey, here’s my best idea,” and everybody just says, “Oh, they’re the boss. Great, let’s not attack that idea,” then you’re never going to reach the best idea. The thing that the leaders of the organization have to do is invite people to challenge the idea. They’re not challenging the person, but they’re challenging the ideas. Great leaders facilitate constructive tension. Great leaders facilitate conversations that challenge the norm of an idea. So the manager’s job is to figure out how to help people have conversations that are constructive, but not destructive relationally. Constructive in getting the best idea out, without crossing the line and becoming destructive in the relationship.
Joshua MacLeod:
Now, you can mature in this. And I think that Creativity, Inc. book does a really good job of talking about how Steve Jobs matured in this. So Steve Jobs was really great at pushing people, but he matured and got a little bit more order about when is it appropriate to push someone versus when is it appropriate to kind of pull back from that push so that you don’t break them. So what you want to do, you want to push them up to the point where they’re close enough to the fire where it’s warm. You don’t want to push them into the fire. Where it’s warm is where you can bend the metal, but you don’t want to break the metal. You want to bend it but not break it.
Bernie Anderson:
I feel like that’s a really cool way to actually just run any kind of business, is that, hey, we can always make this idea better. It’s not about excellence in the sense of great first draft. The quest for excellence is having an environment where it’s okay to have a not excellent rough draft. In fact, you want that because actually you need something to edit and to make better. And so getting the draft out and being okay with the fact that, hey, isn’t very good yet. And they talk about this in this book a lot. When Toy Story first came out, they were in a meeting and they were like, “This isn’t very good.” It just wasn’t great. But it’s okay because in that environment, they were able to be free and candid enough with each other to eventually make one of the best movies of all time.
Joshua MacLeod:
Well and that formula continued. Toy Story 1 worked because of candid communication, challenging ideas and showing people the rough draft. Well, so did Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 and Toy story 4. They all worked out.
Bernie Anderson:
It all worked.
Joshua MacLeod:
So what candor does, we think that candor might make it so that people aren’t going to like me or they’re not going to trust me because I told them that they have some ketchup on their face. The opposite actually happens. When I tell somebody you have ketchup on your face, then they go, “Oh, you’re the kind of person I can trust. You’re going to tell me if I have ketchup on my face.” Without candor, you cannot have trust. And without trust, you cannot have collaboration.
Joshua MacLeod:
What great leaders do, great leaders not only find the right team, a team that’s good for their future, a team where you’re hiring people smarter than you, a team that everyone shares the same values, but they all so are really good at building environments where you can have candid and constructive conversation.
Podcast Announcer:
Thank you for listening to the Growability Podcast. The mission of growability is to equip leaders to flourish in their life and work by developing vision, rhythm and community. To discover if there is a more excellent way to run your business, visit growability.com and speak with a certified growability coach. Bernie and Joshua are also available for speaking engagements, workshops and conferences. Subscribing to this podcast helps Growability equip leaders throughout the world and we appreciate your support.