keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, has written an article for the Harvard Business Review that can be read here. There is also a podcast you can find here . Both focus on organizational structure and the steps that Pixar has taken to prevent the mistakes that are all too common in business. Here are some excerpts from the article: "To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new. That’s why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren’t very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to re...

Animated features originate under two sets of circumstances today. One set of features comes from ongoing studios such as Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky. They are characterized by large staffs and high overhead, which result in films with high budgets and the need for massive success at the box office. Budgets are routinely $75 million and up. The danger of this model comes from a box office failure. Should a film flop, the loss is enormous. Pixar and Blue Sky are owned by larger corporate entities (Disney and Fox respectively), while DreamWorks is independent. While Pixar and Blue Sky might be better positioned to survive failures, Disney (which shut down drawn animation) and Fox (which closed down Don Bluth's Arizona studio) have both proved that corporate parents are not always forgiving. The benefits of the Pixar-type model is continuity. Mistakes and breakthroughs that occur on a project increase the corporate knowledge base, improving the quality of each successive fi...