Lessons from Pixar: Innovation through collective creativity
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As someone who has spent an enormous amount of time studying Pixar's process, and why it works, I can tell you that the author of those slides simply cribbed material from an Ed Catmull speech, and has no clue what was important from that speech and what was not.
What would you add? What did I miss?
I didn't really think through submitting this to HN. I certainly haven't had the luxury of studying Pixar's process in depth. I guess the title gives off the wrong impression.
I quickly made these slides to try to extract some concrete lessons from Ed's article in HBR. As I grapple with creative autonomy in my own startup, these slides were a way for me to start to think about introducing ideas to the co-founders.
You might want to check out some interviews with John Lasseter. I enjoyed this video that documents one of his days at Pixar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5HN3-l_f-U
Re: What did Pixar do that is new... Pixar is fundamentally a film studio that applied tech development methods to the creation of feature films. This was huge in the film world, which uses what tech people call the "waterfall" model. (We abandoned that approach everywhere but in government back in the 70s.)
On the creative side, it's true that Pixar is a director-driven studio, but all films are basically director-driven. What's more interesting is that Pixar directors get to iteratively improve the film many times. This is something that most studios CANNOT do, due to technical limitations. The ability to iterate is HUGE, and is the main reason why Pixar films are so good when they are released.
Basically, Pixar makes bad films -- they just never release them. Instead, they take that film and make it better, over and over, for four-five years straight. THEN, and only then, do they release it to the public. (Incidentally, this is what Apple does.)
Pixar has a lot of other worthy corporate values, but in the filmmaking sphere, their success is mostly a result of having better tools and processes.
For a non-Pixar example of that in the film world, consider movie trailers. Before the advent of computer-editing (what we call non-linear editing, e.g. Final Cut Pro, Avid, etc.), movie trailers SUCKED. They were laughably bad. After computer-editing? Much, much better. Same people, same films, DIFFERENT TOOLING. And far, far better results.
Sometimes, the tools really do matter. In Pixar's case, the lesson is that iteration is huge. In the tech world, the Lean Startup approach would be the equivalent model.