While working as an animator in London in the late 1990s, Suzanne Slatcher spent her lunch breaks at the comics shop, reading a hardcover book on the making of Pixar’s then-latest film,虫虫特工队。“It was like 40 pounds, and it was so expensive I couldn’t possibly afford it. But at lunchtime I went and just pored over this beautiful artwork,” she says. “The craft of this thing…it wasn’t like movie effects, it was very much from a high quality tradition.” Slatcher worked at a traditional 2D studio, but was teaching herself 3D animation, a skill that eventually got her hired at Pixar itself, where she worked for nine years as a modeler and layout artist.
“I will never have a job as lovely as that,” says Slatcher, who was instrumental in creating寻找尼莫的悉尼歌剧院，散热器弹簧的岩层Cars，还有很棒的房子向上。Slatcher说，除了在世界上最受尊敬的电影制片厂工作的特权外，她喜欢将令人难以置信的先进技术与艺术的细微需求结合在一起的挑战。她说：“一台计算机会制作出完美的方形，完美的球形，这只是丑陋而无聊的。”“您所有的时间都花在把它弄乱，这与大多数人的工作相反……现实世界是一个大的旧混乱，大多数人的时间都花在整理它上。”
最终，Slatcher感到越来越需要追求自己的创意项目，她于2010年离开皮克斯（Pixar），这是一个短暂的休假。她永远不会预测，这最终会导致她从事健康食品营销的职业。
今天，她是好豆, a Berkeley-based company that makes roasted chickpea snacks. The products very quickly scored national distribution in Whole Foods and other retailers, thanks not only to Slatcher’s art direction and positioning of the brand, but to close attention to the snacks’ visceral attributes like flavor and crunch. However unrelated chickpea snacks may seem to animated features, Slatcher says Pixar taught her an uncompromising attention to quality, craft, and customer that was instrumental in the success of her business.
“Business is just an idea, like a movie,” says Slatcher. “What if we did this in this place at this time, in this style of packaging, with this choice of flavors? Would it work? There’s still a back and forth between creative and the audience, and you can’t be like ‘if I build it, they will come.’ No, we’re in a democratic world where everyone has opinions. If you’re making your cartoon and your joke’s not funny, it’s just not funny, it has to go. If people don’t like a flavor, they’re right, we’re not right.”
作为一个品牌，皮克斯（Pixar） - 连续14次连续1号票房打击和70亿美元的全球门票销售 - 已经代表一贯奇妙的卓越表现，这在很大程度上要归功于总统埃德·卡特穆尔（Ed Ed Catmull）和首席创意官约翰·拉塞特（John Lasseter）的领导长期所有者史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）的监督时代。而且已经写了很多 - 最近，埃德·卡特穆尔（Ed Catmull）Creativity, Inc.–about how exactly the company goes about creating lightning in a bottle time and time again. Recently, Disney has adopted some of its tactics thathelped push its hit film冷冻to a $1 billion box-office smash.
But the question remains: can that kind of success be replicated anywhere?
Twitter COO和前皮克斯首席财务官阿里·罗加尼（Ali Rowghani）说，“永远不会再有皮克斯（Pixar）”，并以皮克斯（Pixar）的令人难以置信的娱乐能力来谈论电影制片厂，他可能是对的。但是，有可能想象任何公司都遵守工作室的质量和管理原则的“另一个皮克斯”。
Pixar alums (many of whom joke that they’re a small club, because no one wants to leave) have gone on to lead in a range of fields, from entertainment to consumer technology to healthcare.德赢提款spoke with more than a dozen executives, entrepreneurs, and storytellers from all eras of Pixar’s three-decade history, all of whom have moved on but attest that Pixar’s influence over their ongoing work is invaluable and profound. Whether they’re selling healthy snacks, like Slatcher, or building potentially lifesaving technology for type 1 diabetics, like Tidepool founder and former Pixar VP of software Howard Look, these alums are applying Pixar’s values in unexpected but highly successful ways.
我们的对话揭示了有关在其他组织中应用皮克斯原则的反复主题：喜悦和讲故事作为驱动力，消除自我作为管理策略，创造力可以来自任何人的想法以及耐心和行动之间的平衡。每一种都是前员工在其新组织中采用的一种理念和方法，以创建革命性的产品和强大的团队，并可以将其转化为包括您在内的任何业务。
民主化喜悦
EVERYBODY DESERVES QUALITY.“Delight” may be an intangible concept, but it’s a useful term to describe Pixar’s relationship with its audience, and one that any company can strive for even if they don’t make heartwarming cartoons.
It seems counterintuitive that simple pleasure would be a core principle of something as elaborate as a Pixar production, but Suzanne Slatcher says she has translated this idea directly to her new career.
“食物有点像动画片，” Slatcher说。“人们认为自己应该应该这样做，这不是一个胸怀的高思想。食物必须在那个非常简单的水平上工作，只是有人在看电视，他们在嘴里推了它。”
“每个人都应该得到质量”的想法是Slatcher同样适用于零食食品的基本皮克斯概念。
“Pixar makes amazing, beautiful, hilarious, deep, wise films for kids, and adults can watch them and everybody watches them 25 times if they’ve got kids, and it’s still funny. It’s really, really great quality, where most things made for kids are made very cheaply. A lot of time and money is spent making the most accessible thing possible, and that’s such an inspiration and so not what you learn at art school,” Slatcher says. “The Good Bean could choose to be the darlings of the foodie world, using obscure, exotic spices, trying to be clever, but we’d rather make affordable, accessible food.”
Maintaining quality over the long haul can be a challenge for the best of companies. At Pixar, a laser focus on delivering something wonderful to the end user was what kept everyone on task. Jorgen Klubien, a Danish story artist and screenwriter who attended CalArts with Lasseter, helped develop some of Pixar’s most successful films from 1994 to 2003, and is now practicing this principle at the fledgling animation division of Paramount. He calls he and his 1970s CalArts cohort–which also included Brad Bird, Henry Selick, and Tim Burton–“Walt’s children,” who bonded over a feeling that the Walt Disney animation studio had lost its attention to quality. Working together on 1981’sThe Fox and the Hound, says Klubien, “we were at the holy ground of Disney, but we were sort of there after the real, most excellent guys had retired and moved on. We had a sense that it could do better, and in our youth, that we could do better.” At Pixar, they were given that opportunity.
When Lasseter finally got a chance to direct his own feature animated film, it was as a Pixar animator. But the distributor was Disney, so he and his creative team had to hold their ground to serve the audience above all. “We were being driven down one road by the creative execs at Disney, one who kept saying ‘edgy, edgy, make it more edgy,'” says鳄鱼皮CEO Ralph Guggenheim, one of the original members of Catmull’s NYIT group, who producedToy Story并在皮克斯（Pixar）工作直到1997年。“我们努力将其带回到拉塞特（Lasseter）和故事的真正想要的故事，这是一个关于玩具的真诚故事，没有这种令人讨厌，前卫，讽刺的语气。”
There’s No Monopoly On Creativity
A JANITOR’S TALE:在1982年在Lucasfilm雇用Craig Good之前，他在一大堆工作之后就失业了，包括音频设备销售和私人调查员的卧底工作。他听说了工作室的总服务部门的开放，该部门处理了清洁和安全，并根据以前的安全经验获得了工作，尽管他说他主要擦洗厕所。他说：“如果您想学到很多有关公司的知识，成为一个看门人是一个很好的方法。”
Pixar at that point was still Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group, and Ralph Guggenheim was offering an after-work programming course to anyone who worked at the company. Good signed up, and the experience turned into an entry-level position in the computer division. “I was what I called a ‘digital janitor,'” says Good, “doing backups, and varied stuff on a lot of the old industrial videos we did to sell the Pixar Image Computer.”
Even though Good didn’t consider himself a true programmer, he was given the assignment of doing some coding to help John Lasseter with an animation project. “I pulled a bunch of all-nighters, and got something that worked,” says Good. He remembers the morning that Alvy Ray Smith, who cofounded both the Graphics Group and Pixar with Ed Catmull, came into his office and said “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but I think you proved it.” Good went on to be a camera artist at Pixar for three decades, and was the entire layout department when they started work onToy Story。他为某些电影做了画外画的作品，是皮克斯语音邮件系统的配音。自去年离开公司以来，他已经开始制作一本儿童读物和一本年轻的成人小说，并刚刚为作家汤姆·皮克西里利（Tom Piccirilli）的小说演唱了音频书十六进制。
Good’s story illustrates an element of Pixar’s culture that nearly every alum we spoke with points to as central to the company’s success–that everyone in any position is valued for their potential creative contributions. For example, most mention the fact that Pixar screens each film multiple times as it’s being made for everyone in the company, and accepts comments from anyone.
“One of the characteristics that made Pixar, and is very rare and important, is that the corporate culture recognized that contributions can come from everybody, anybody,” says Pam Kerwin, who served as Pixar’s vice president and general manager from 1989 to 1998. Now the COO of tablet periodical developer Luminous Publishing, Kerwin has spent most of her post-Pixar life at tech startups. “You have to consider that everyone can make contributions–that’s important both in the growth of a company, and also in the motivation of everybody involved.”
According to Gabriel Schlumberger, Disney Publishing Worldwide’s director of digital creative, who worked as a layout artist and technical director at Pixar from 2000 to 2005, this practice has an even deeper purpose than making everyone feel valued. “They threw you into a lot of different things to try and eliminate fear from the creative process,” he says. This meant improv classes, drawing classes, learning from people who were the best in their field–all in the interest of attaining confidence in your own artistic ideas. “Fear is the biggest killer of creativity,” Schlumberger says. “In order to cultivate a strong creative environment, you need to make people comfortable in expressing their ideas.”
其中很大一部分意味着不让人们进入创意和非创造盒子。Schlumberger说：“无论您的工作是编码，绘画，绘画，雕刻，都没有人对创造力有所垄断。”“随着我将更多地转向管理，我试图培养它。”
Never Be The Smartest Person In The Room
…OR AT LEAST NEVER ACT LIKE IT.泰·罗伯茨（Ty Roberts）说：“皮克斯（Pixar）是异国动物园动物的异国动物园。”gracenote。“Like, the guy who wrote my college textbook on computer graphics was in the next office.”
克雷格·古德（Craig Good）说，在与埃德·卡特穆尔（Ed Catmull），阿尔维·雷·史密斯（Alvy Ray Smith）和皮克斯（Pixar）联合创始人洛伦·卡彭特（Loren Carpenter）等人合作之后，“我有时会告诉别人，我觉得我认识了发明了车轮和轴的家伙。”
但是善还说直到几年后他才知道“埃德”和“洛伦”是开创性的博士学位，他们正在发明一个全新的世界。“关于埃德的事情是，他是你见过的最杰出的人之一，”良好说。“在数学世界中，他是一个半神。CATMULL-ROM样条（数学中的平滑多项式功能）以他的名字命名。他建立了这个地方 - 但他的理念总是比他更聪明。他是令人难以置信的智力和零自我的罕见组合。”
“Ed likes to joke about how he’s the dumbest person at Pixar, which is funny given how brilliant the guy is,” says Jeffrey “JJ” Jay, a technical director and engineering manager at Pixar from 1995 to 1999 who spent 11 years as a character technical director at Dreamworks, a job he left just last month to work full time at the Petaluma Hills Brewing Company in Sonoma, which he founded as a labor of beer love in 2012. “It was a great lesson to learn about giving up your ego when you work with other people.”
In practice, the value of this philosophy is empowering others to exercise their unique strengths and serve as each other’s checks and balances.
As Pixar’s CFO, Ali Rowghani’s job was often to set practical parameters around the extraordinary imaginations at work. “The way I thought of my role was to define the rules of the game for the creative leadership, and to help them understand that those rules are really in place to afford them as much latitude and permanence in making films as possible,” says Rowghani. “It helped that Ed Catmull believes and would say vocally that all great art needs constraints.”
Craig Good tells the ultimate story of Pixar leadership’s humility and faith in its staff, one he also shared with无混蛋规则author Robert Sutton for his blog in 2011, but is worth retelling.
1985年说：“卢卡斯影业（Lucasfilm）激怒了550人。乔治（卢卡斯）认为这是难以管理的……他雇用了一个名叫道格·诺比（Doug Norby）的家伙，他是乔治·克鲁尼（George Clooney）的真实版本。在空中。He kept hounding on Ed and Alvy to come up with names to lay off from the graphics group. They kept blowing him off. Finally, they got ‘You will be in my office tomorrow morning with a list of names.’ They went to his office, 9 the next morning. They handed him a list that had two names on it: Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.”
“We only heard about that because Ed’s now wife, then girlfriend, Susan Anderson, who worked with us, blabbed to us,” says Good. “Everybody, including me, the low guy on the totem pole, was saved.”
故事驱动了一切
TECHNOLOGY IS JUST A BETTER PENCIL.1979年，将成为皮克斯（Pixar）的小组是卢卡斯影业（Lucasfilm）的计算机图形研究部，由卡特穆尔（Catmull）与纽约理工学院的小组成员创立。当乔治·卢卡斯（George Lucas）于1986年将该集团卖给了史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs），并且该公司成立为皮克斯（Pixar）时，它演变成一家出售硬件（$ 135,000的工作站）的公司和管理图形（一个关键客户端：迪士尼）的软件。
John Lasseter led an animation division that created short films to demonstrate what the technology could do. For a short time, the division even made animated commercials for the likes of Listerine and Tropicana. From the very first film, the endearing and quirkyAdventures of André and Wally B, it was clear that Pixar’s creative application of its technology had storytelling potential far beyond stunning visuals.
拉尔夫·古根海姆（Ralph Guggenheim）说：“约翰·拉塞特（John Lasseter）明白，这是一种新媒介，但基本媒介是讲故事的，而不是技术。”“这项技术有所帮助，但这只是一支更好的铅笔 - 它以他们俩都真正理解和赞赏的方式将艺术家和讲故事的人嫁给了这项技术。那是皮克斯创造成功的关键，但仍然如此。”
如果皮克斯以外的任何人正在以新的方式发展公司的讲故事传统，那么它是技术主管，最终在皮克斯的CTO Oren Jacob已有20年了。最近，他的公司ToyTalk发射这Winston Show，一个由语音识别驱动的iPad应用程序，其角色与孩子进行对话。Winston展览是通过ToyTalk的Pullstring Technology开发的，该技术使作家能够根据儿童的潜在反应进行分支对话。该系统还收集孩子在云中的答复，以供作家学习和使用故事发展。
Jacob is eager to clarify that perfecting the technology is not ToyTalk’s mission. Writers spend endless hours reading transcripts from children’s interactions with Winston and other characters, assessing the audience’s thoughts, imaginations, and emotional needs to create a more entertaining and engaging world. “Our vision is less about honing the technology than the craft of conversation,” says Jacob.
讲故事在电影和游戏业务中的应用很明确，但是可以为任何产品或组织的创建或增长而利用它。Tidepool是一家非营利性初创公司，致力于帮助患有威胁生命的I型糖尿病的人。由皮克斯（Pixar）的前软件副总裁Howard Look创立，在其女儿被诊断出患有这种疾病后，该组织正在建立一个平台，以收集医疗，饮食和健康数据，以帮助患者跟踪和管理健康。他们的产品Blip甚至连接所有相关方，例如父母和医生，并在数据需要注意时通知他们。
Look and his colleagues designed the platform, which is still in pre-market testing, with each user’s story in mind. “What is a day in the life of a kid with type 1 like? What is a day in the life of their parents like?,” says Look. “We actually have some of our user profiles or personas hanging on the walls of our office; they help guide us. It is absolutely the case that this is not about the technology for us. It’s about reducing the burden of people with type 1 diabetes, and our ability to tell that story and deeply understand it is what drives us.”
共鸣的讲故事依赖于有效的故事板，Pixar开发了帮助他们有效地完善和迭代的过程。“Because Pixar started in the ’70s and the technology they needed didn’t exist at the time, they needed to invent it,” says Brendan Donohoe, a design lead at Twitter who worked for nine years as a senior user interface designer at Pixar, where his projects included a storyboarding tool that cuts rough art together and projects it.
“The idea was to see ideas as a movie as quickly as you can, because that’s the medium it will be consumed in,” says Donohoe. “The same principle applies to any project where you’re trying to figure something out, like software design.”
在Twitter上，这意味着即使是粗略的，也可以在消耗的媒介中创建一个工作版本的新消费者功能。“我想了解的是这个故事……我是否了解该怎么办，以及它的工作原理？如果我可以在手机上获取它，即使它不是真实的，即使这是我可以戳的图片，这比查看静态屏幕截图更具说服力。”他说。“白天和白天在如何分辨什么是有效的，什么是无效的。”
Jorgen Klubien说，多么高级项目的视觉效果和功能，最重要的元素是“坐在篝火旁”。“这是一个故事，这是一个道德故事，以下是一个有观点的东西。如果您只有一堆动物奔跑，您将步履蹒跚。”
耐心与枢轴
了解何时继续课程。不久之后Toy Storywas released in 1995, Pam Kerwin was put in charge of a new interactive division at Pixar to create two CD-ROM games based on the movie. The project was challenging, not only because the company wanted to time one of the products with the video release, but because it was a technical challenge–no one would want to playToy Storygames with lower quality graphics than the film, and home computers couldn’t handle the resolution.
“每个人都真正升起了这一场合，”克温说。游戏售出了超过一百万册，但史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）想要更多。具体来说，要出售1000万。
“I said ‘You can’t sell 10 million, there aren’t 10 million people who have little kids with computers. These usually sell 250,000 to 500,000, and we’re on top with a million.’ Steve said ‘Well, if that’s all we can sell, we should take these people and let them make another movie’” instead of another game.
奥伦·雅各布（Oren Jacob）记得乔布斯（Jobs）在公司范围内的会议宣布这一转变。“他说‘恭喜，您创造了人类历史上最受欢迎，最畅销的CD-ROM。今天的星期二。在星期五，我们倒闭了。星期一，您将开始工作玩具故事2。’ It was like ‘What? We just won the market!’ But with the Internet on the rise, that market wouldn’t exist in a week.” Jobs knew it, and made the call.
重要的是要注意的是，互动项目在领先时退出，而不是在努力团结在一起的时候。“在皮克斯，我们了解到您必须有耐心，” Kerwin说。“我一开始就在那里，所以我知道，拉尔夫[古根海姆]都知道，其他几个人知道我们花了多长时间才能到达那里，有多少个枢轴。这就是关于皮克斯（Pixar）的东西，我们的开始非常艰难。（但是）我们正在为一个共同的目标而努力，我们学会了耐心，直到世界赶上皮克斯在做什么。”
Ty Roberts has seen Gracenote through to the payoff of this philosophy. “I’m here now in my 15th year at Gracenote,” says Roberts. “The reality is that stuff just got really good maybe like five years ago. Get in and work on something and just keep working on it. It’s the antithesis of the normal Silicon Valley philosophy.”
流浪的互动故事书CEO Mickey Mantle, whom Pixar hired in 1986 as the general manager of graphics to head up software production, says that the often-accelerated timeline of projects, particularly in technology, does no company any good if the result is an inferior product, or if it takes twice as long anyway. “The important concept that Ed taught me, and that I have repeated and used hundreds and hundreds of times, is that you have to manage projects like you’re running a marathon–you can’t sprint the whole way,” says Mantle. “You’ve got to set a pace where you can win the race and be ready to sprint for the finish line. And then you’ve got to let people recuperate.”
Stephan Bugaj, who worked as a story developer and technical director at Pixar for 11 years, says the key to Pixar’s success was its insistence on making something great, and not rushing movies just to get them out there.
“有了很多好莱坞项目，作家带有初稿，高管就像‘哦，我的上帝！这是有史以来最糟糕的事情。这种持续这一过程的意愿将是他作为Telltale Games创意开发总监的新角色的指导原则，他负责公司所有故事驱动的游戏标题的写作和指导团队行尸走肉and权力的游戏。
Of course, Pixar has the luxury to make many improvements over time that companies with fewer resources may not. But that doesn’t mean the principle isn’t replicable.
阿里·罗加尼（Ali Rowghani）因在去年的IPO之前提高了Twitter的商业模式而获得了极大的荣誉，他说皮克斯（Pixar）教他“对任何事物的初稿都不是宝贵的。埃德（Ed）曾经说过，电影的第一版总是很糟糕，这并不是婴儿的丑陋，而是每次迭代都会变得更漂亮。这个概念适用于任何人的工作。”
Most important, though, is awareness and even embrace of potential failure.
“Ed Catmull says the purpose of an organization isn’t stability, it’s balance,” says Rowghani. “Stability is when you sort of pour concrete around something and just bolt it down. Balance is a state where if you think about yoga, you’re standing on one leg and you’re swaying left and right in these tiny little movements, but you’re able to stay balanced.”
在任何组织中，都有各种派系旨在推进自己的利益，即产品，市场，传播，销售 - 可能会或可能不会保持一致。这是平衡至关重要的地方。
“如果任何一个功能获胜，我们都会输。这是这些竞争力量的平衡以及将它们保持在这种并置的紧张局势中的能力，这确实导致了伟大的，伟大的事物正在创造和完成。” Rowghani说。“我试图保留该公司内部各种职能和组之间的正确张力。我认为真的很棒的想法来自这种感觉，您可能随时跌倒。创新来自某种程度的认识，即事情没有被束缚，我们不知道接下来会发生什么。”
But even amid uncertainty or instability, companies can and should, like Pixar, be guided by the value they have the potential to bring to customers’ lives, says Suzanne Slatcher, the chickpea entrepreneur.
“There was a question on Quora about surprising Pixar facts, and someone estimated that if 500 people worked on a given film for however many years, like three years each, and it’s been watched by however many people, that means for every minute that each of those people worked, they created six hours of enjoyment,” says Slatcher. “So I was thinking about that–what does that mean for the Good Bean? By the end of this year I think we should be selling about 20,000 bags a day, between 10 people. That’s 2000 happy snackers a day each. That’s a really good thing to be in the world, isn’t it?”