Pixar’s Ed Catmull: Throw out your rules

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's no perfect process for achieving your goals. Accepting that the rules you play by need to be constantly tweaked, hacked or reinvented will open you up to new ways of innovating. Instilling this attitude throughout your organization will help you be boldly differential in your experimentation.

Ed Catmull literally wrote the book on creating a dynamic and sustainable creative culture. Drawing on his experience as co-founder of celebrated animation studio Pixar, and president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Ed shares his hard-won insights from his career as a pioneering technologist, animator and storyteller.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,
0:07.8	with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.
0:17.0	We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.
0:24.8	So search for rapid response in your podcast player
0:28.0	and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.
0:31.2	I'll see you on the other side.
0:36.0	When Steve Jobs bought us, at the beginning,
0:40.0	to be honest, we were nervous because we did know what Steve was like and what the
0:47.9	reputation was.
0:48.9	And I have to say for several years, I didn't see any sense of humor at all.
0:57.0	That's Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, recalling Steve Jobs as a creative genius.
1:05.2	Yes, but a genius who was demanding, brash, abrasive, and that's putting it mildly.
1:12.0	I would say from 91 to 95 was a dramatic change in him as a person.
1:17.0	He became more empathetic and caring. They paid attention to people.
1:22.0	They actually begin to see him having a... caring, they paid attention to people.
1:22.8	They actually begin to see him having a sense of humor.
1:27.2	But this reputation stuck with Steve,
1:29.7	even after the changes Ed is talking about.
1:33.0	So when the stories were written about him,
1:36.0	they're about the early public stories,
1:38.0	because frankly it's kind of sexy,
1:40.0	to talk about bad behavior or various things like that makes for more dramatic
	...

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