As I wrote a few months back, Huggy Rao from Stanford, Allen Webb from McKinsey and I interviewed Pixar’s Academy Award winning director Brad Bird for the McKinsey Quarterly. Brad was one of the most lively and insightful people I've ever had the privilege of interviewing. You can read it here (there is also multi-media with it). It seems that the Quarterly readers love Brad Bird too, as this article was the most popular among readers last quarter.
The two main things about innovation that Brad reinforced for me are the value of tolerating and celebrating constructive friction and of never being satisfied with good enough -- he made very clear about how the mediocrity of the once great Disney animation studio could be traced directly to the attitude that "we are satisfied with our work, it is good enough." In contrast, my daughter and I were lucky enough to see a preview of WALL-E earlier in the week at Pixar (an astounding movie, especially the first 30 minutes are pure magic), and although the Pixar people we talked to were clearly very proud of this film, the main thing they seemed worried about was that all their success would make them complacent and less creative. That kind of paranoia and hungriness is, I think, a hallmark of people and organizations that are creative over the long haul.
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