A summary of a keynote by Ed Catmull at The Annual Stanford Entrepreneurship Conference. Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios.
Pixar’s Ed Catmull Highlights Value of Post Mortems
The 2007 Stanford Entrepreneurship Conference featured Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, as its keynote speaker. Ed gave a great presentation on lessons learned from structurally organizing a company for effective communication across its departments.
In the beginning, Ed believed they had created a very strong culture at Pixar. They had paired up programmers and animators as peers. Other companies had positioned one group as clearly dominant, creating either a technical or an animation culture. He believed that the artists, the technical people, and the production managers were all interacting well. He felt that it was a fun, energetic, and social work environment. Pixar’s open-door policy of “necessary honesty” meant anyone could talk to anyone at any time.
In actuality, this was far from the truth. After Toy Story’s great success, Ed called for a company post mortem. He discovered that there were major disconnects among different staff members. The artists and the technical people felt like the production managers got in the way and slowed production. The production managers felt like they were treated as second-class citizens.
Ed asked himself how he had missed these problems and concluded that Pixar’s success had masked them. Ed found out that the production managers put up with the situation because they loved working on a groundbreaking project with a great leader. Ultimately, he would have lost some valuable employees if the project had not been so productive and rewarding. Ed’s key insight was that:
Often, companies tend to focus on “what’s working” vs. trying to figure out “why is this not working?”
Ed Catmull
This is why the post mortem is so important. Pixar has incorporated the post mortem process at the end of every project. The challenge is getting each person to be completely honest and share intimate details about their experience. The post mortem is a grueling process that everyone hates. For the most part, everyone is tired, burned out, and has no patience to reflect on everything that has gone wrong. The things that went well are usually obvious, so they spend the majority of the time trying to figure out what needs improvement
PostScript 2014: Catmull published a book on Pixar called “Creativity, Inc.”
In April 2014 Ed Catmull published “Creativity Inc.,” a book I highly recommend. Here is one quote I find very valuable:
“I’ve always been intrigued by the way people use the analogy of a train to describe their companies. Massive and powerful, the train moves inexorably down the track, over mountains and across the plains, through dense fog and darkest night. When things go wrong, we talk of getting “derailed.” When projects fail, we talk of “train wrecks.” And I’ve heard people refer to Pixar’s production group as a finely tuned locomotive that they would love the chance to drive. What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position— that driving the train is the way to shape the future. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.”
Ed Catmull in “Creativity Inc.“
The Stanford Entrepreneur Conference is now part of https://sen.stanford.edu/
Related Blog Posts
- W. J. King’s “Unwritten Laws of Business”
- Newsletter: Retrospectives, Post Mortems, and After Action Reviews
- Moe Arnaiz: Lessons Learned Bootstrapping eMOBUS and Weeldi
- Time to Market: Making Tough Decisions as Founders
- Howard Marks: “Dare To Be Great”
- Constructive Pessimism
- Learning the Right Lessons From Failure
- Feeling Lucky Is Not a Strategy
- Overnight Success