The McKinsey Quarterly sent out a list of their most popular interviews of 2008, and I was surprised, but pleased, to see that two of the interviews I was involved in doing were #1 and #2 in popularity. See the list here of the top 10; you have to register to read them, but it is free. The top rated one was with Pixar's Brad Bird, who has won two Academy Awards -- including for Ratatouille (that is the star pictured to the left, Renny the rat). The second was Mozilla's founder and chair Mitchel Baker. These are two people with radically different careers, but both are similar in that they spent years and years fighting for what they believed in -- high quality animation and stories in Brad's case and open source software in Mitchell's case and both lost jobs along the way and kept fighting for their beliefs. Both are also people who have succeeded by elevating rather diminishing the people they work with -- and come to think of it, both also demonstrate the power of innovation as a social process rather than a solo act.
P.S. As I blogged about here, the history of Pixar is one of the most amazing I have ever read -- check out The Pixar Touch if you want to learn about it.
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