'Wallace and Gromit' Producer Aardman Animations Gives Ownership to Employees | Hacker News Reader

'Wallace and Gromit' Producer Aardman Animations Gives Ownership to Employees

hollywoodreporter.com

138 pointswalterbell9 comments

There’s two episodes of How I Built This with the founders of other employee-owned companies that are worth listening to:

- Bob’s Red Mill https://www.npr.org/2018/05/17/612108005/bobs-red-mill-bob-m...

- New Belgium Brewing Company https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/645620049/live-episode-new-be...

When Aardman began to have the big hits with Wallace and Gromit they did not have professional management structures, some consultants later and they had all of these tiers of management with the enterprise becoming more like a sausage factory. This was noted by people who worked with them creatively as contractors, making content with them and collaborating.

So they went from being one of those happy companies where everyone knows everyone and works as a team of one to one of those siloed companies with people knowing everyone on their team in their department but not having a clue as to what is going on in the next team. It kills creativity when all communications have to go up three tiers of the management tree and back down again to another department, who could be the guys in the next room.

Sometimes you wonder whether growth is really what you want with a company, why do all of those adverts on the back of the legendary Nick Park stuff? Why spread the brand out so thinly and why get the consultants and venture capital in to make the brand go big?

> why do all of those adverts on the back of the legendary Nick Park stuff?

You've gotta pay the bills and keeps the lights on while you're painstakingly crafting the next masterpiece.

IIRC ads are typically one of the places in the animation industry where you can get the highest budget per second. You can turn out acceptable-but-not-amazing work and save the big fee you got to extend your runway to work on the huge projects - or you can experiment with some crazy ideas you've been kicking around, on someone else's dime, without committing to an untried new technique for the length of an entire short or feature.

This doesn't always work out well - see Richard Williams'The Thief And The Cobbler for instance, with years of amazing animation by some of the early masters of the craft left on the cutting room floor, both before and after Williams got investment money that came with a deadline he couldn't finish that glorious mess of a film before - but it's a common pattern for animators.

There are of course many pitfalls. Once you staff up, you've got a crew that you may be loathe to break up - they work together well, they're used to your workflows. Do you lay them off, wish them luck finding the next gig, and hope you can get a bunch of them back the next time you need help on a project? Or do you come up with more stuff for them to do? There's lots of successes and failures along both of these paths.

>Sometimes you wonder whether growth is really what you want with a company, why do all of those adverts on the back of the legendary Nick Park stuff? Why spread the brand out so thinly and why get the consultants and venture capital in to make the brand go big?

The question to me is, given a set of goals and missions what is the ideal scale. I often reflect on a particular essay on organizational scale:

"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object." - On Being the Right Size by J. B. S. Haldane http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html

The Creature Comforts adverts were a good part of building their name in the first place. The original Creature Comforts shorts, and there weren't many of them, were on Channel 4 out of peak hours, on the channel with least viewers in the 80s. Channel 5 and Sky didn't yet exist.

Without those 1980s and 1990s ads on the #2 channel daily at prime time I'm not sure the rest would have followed quite the same.

So perhaps not surprising they were inclined to do more ads.

An event that is encouraging to the model that Professor Richard D. Wolff speaks well of.

For those who aren't familiar with his work, Richard Wolff is the author of [Democracy at Work][0] and strong proponent of worker owned and governed businesses.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...

Thank you for posting that, it sounds like an element of my own long held thesis that I've been mulling over for a few years (I'm a communist of sorts working mentally on the issue of transition from capitalist structures). Any other authors/works along this line that you know of - namely moving away from capitalist structure by reacquisition of ownership for workers and/or the demos?

Michael Albert - Participatory Economics.

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