Building a sense of purpose at Pixar

The cofounder of Pixar Animation Studios recalls how a serious organizational rift led him to a new sense of mission—and how it helped Pixar develop a more open and sustainable creative culture.

I wish I could bottle how it felt to come into work during those first heady days after Toy Story came out. People seemed to walk a little taller, they were so proud of what we’d done. We’d been the first to make a movie with computers, and—even better—audiences were touched deeply by the story we told. As my colleagues went about their work, every interaction was informed by a sense of pride and accomplishment. We had succeeded by holding true to our ideals; nothing could be better than that. The core team who had joined us in 1994 to edit Toy Story immediately moved on to A Bug’s Life, our movie about the insect world. There was excitement in the air.

But while I could feel that euphoria, I was oddly unable to participate in it.

For 20 years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer-graphics movie. Now that this goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose. Now what? The act of running a company was more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn’t special. Pixar was now successful, yet there was something unsatisfying about the prospect of merely keeping it running.

It took a serious and unexpected problem to give me a new sense of mission.

For all of my talk about the leaders of thriving companies who did stupid things because they’d failed to pay attention, I discovered that, during the making of Toy Story, I had completely missed something that was threatening to undo us. And I’d missed it even though I thought I’d been paying attention.

Throughout the making of the movie, I had seen my job, in large part, as minding the internal and external dynamics that could divert us from our goal. I was determined that Pixar not make the same mistakes I’d watched other Silicon Valley companies make. To that end, I’d made a point of being accessible to our employees, wandering into people’s offices to check in and see what was going on. John Lasseter and I had very conscientiously tried to make sure that everyone at Pixar had a voice, that every job and every employee was treated with respect. I truly believed that self-assessment and constructive criticism had to occur at all levels of a company, and I had tried my best to walk that talk.

Now, though, as we assembled the crew to work on A Bug’s Life, I discovered we’d completely missed a serious, ongoing rift between our creative and production departments. In short, production managers told me that working on Toy Story had been a nightmare. They felt disrespected and marginalized—like second-class citizens. And while they were gratified by Toy Story’s success, they were very reluctant to sign on to work on another film at Pixar.

I was floored. How had we missed this?

The answer, at least in part, was rooted in the role production managers play in making our films. Production managers monitor the overall progress of the crew; they keep track of the thousands of shots; they evaluate how resources are being used; they persuade and cajole and nudge and say no when necessary. In other words, they do something essential for a company whose success relies on hitting deadlines and staying on budget: they manage people and safeguard the process.

If there was one thing we prided ourselves on at Pixar, it was making sure that Pixar’s artists and technical people treated each other as equals, and I had assumed that same mutual respect would be afforded to those who managed the productions. I had assumed wrong. Sure enough, when I checked with the artists and technical staff, they did believe that production managers were second class and that they impeded—not facilitated—good filmmaking by overcontrolling the process, by micromanaging. Production managers, the folks I consulted told me, were just sand in the gears.

Further reading: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/building-a-sense-of-purpose-at-pixar