Wise Startup Blog

When putting together a great company, you start with the best talent. In our article, how to retain the best talent, we told you the best perks to help you keep your best people happy, but how do we maximize our talented workforce?

Great minds like to work in numbers, and nobody knows that better than Pixar. They are the Hollywood-blockbuster producing Animated Powerhouse that has brought us Toy Story, Cars, The Incredibles, etc.

Their first big hit came with Toy Story, where the entire core teams focused on creating this masterpiece. After its success, Pixar had to figure out how to recreate the success of Toy Story, and that’s where they looked to the power of teams.

The Power of Teamwork

From an article in the Harvard Business Review, by Ed Catmull, the President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, titled “How Pixar fosters collective creativity.”

It’s been obvious for a long time that no one gets very far in the movie business believing in the myth of the lone genius “artiste”. Catmull says, “Creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working together to solve a great many problems…A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas.” Depending on one brilliant creator to come up with all of those ideas just wouldn’t make any sense; “every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.”

Although each movie has a core team who are responsible for the coherence of the overall product, everyone is expected “to show work in an incomplete state to the whole animation crew” so that “people learn from and inspire each other”.

Pixar believes in the power of what I call “collaborative webs”–networks of expertise that extend beyond the boundaries of any one organization. For example, their artists are encouraged to publish their research and talk about it at industry conferences, rather than to guard it as a trade secret. Why? “The connection is worth far more than any ideas we may have revealed.”

And finally, Pixar’s office space is designed to foster “maximum inadvertent encounters,” just as I advise in Group Genius. The central atrium contains the cafeteria, bathrooms, meeting rooms, and mailboxes, and Catmull writes “It’s hard to describe just how valuable the resulting chance encounters are.”