About a week before Brad Bird won his Oscar for directing Ratatouille, Huggy Rao (from Stanford) and Allen Webb (from McKinsey) had the good fortune to interview him at Pixar headquarters. Bird was remarkably fun to interview and he reflects the spirit and crazy proposed practices in Weird Ideas That Work more strongly than anyone I've ever met ( Alice Waters might be an equally good fit, but I have never met her). The McKinsey Quarterly used the interview to do a bit of innovation themselves. I believe it is one they've ever done that has both sounds clips from an interview and pictures to go along with the audio. Brad is a very sharp guy and simply a delight as a human being. I was especially impressed by the degree to which he thinks of seeing a movie in much the same way that a great design thinker would -- thinking not about not just what is on the screen, but the public setting in which the film is seen as something that is ripe for re-invention.
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What a marvelous interview - gracias. I've used good movie making as an exemplar and model for innovation without knowing the details and Brad brings it out in this interview. If you comb thru and parse it out he offers lesson on structure, staffing, morale & leadership, technical and content innovation and tied together into a package. The DVD special features are great supplementary materials with Brad's discussions as well as Kelleher's; between the two you see the soul of innovation across two apparently separate domains. Brad briefly alludes to the bigger picture - what kind of environment the executives must create and invest in with his implicit contrast between Pixar and Disney (btw - how deep must Jobs' understanding of people be for him to do this by design ?). An integrated case study of how important this whole thing is would include "Disney Wars" for how Eisner's ego and excess cost-control destroyed the legacy (created the rusty Phaeton) and Slywotzky's "Art of Profitability" has a chapter on Disney's business model where the core criticality of the creation process is the engine that drives the whole thing. Disney lives or dies in the long-run by creating compelling characters that then show up in their theme parks and other venues. When Eisner destroyed that capability he destroyed Disney.
Posted by: dblwyo | April 29, 2008 at 03:24 AM
Wow. Usually there are one or two points made in an article that I feel add to my playbook. This one had about a dozen. Great interview.
Posted by: David Willson | April 24, 2008 at 10:53 AM