"Quality is the Best Business Plan," Pixar's John Lasseter

I was reading back through the interview that we did with Academy award winning director Brad Bird for The McKinsey Quarterly last year, and came on this wonderful quote from Brad about his boss at Pixar, John Lasseter.  I found it when searching on the word "quality" in the transcription, and realized that during the 90 or so minute interview we did with Bird, "quality" and "ideas" were terms that he used over and over, sometimes together and sometimes separately. And when he talked about money, he emphasized that, although it was necessary, no matter how much money you throw at an idea, if the concept is flawed in the first place, you end-up with high quality but dull movies -- which had helped cause the decline of the Disney Animation studios.  As Bird described his brief career there: "I went to Disney at time where they were doing really beautiful quality of really boring ideas.  That was right after the great masters had left and I basically got fired for, quote, rocking the boat."

Interesting stuff. And a reminder that the greatest innovators are willing to fight for their ideas, something I have been worrying is stifled in these tough times, that innovation and entrepreneurship are slowing down.  I did feel a little better the other day when a sharp Stanford student  argued to me that, since jobs are so hard to come by, he figured it was a great time to start his own company.  He also figured that the stigma of failure is at an all-time low, because it is happening so widely.  How is that for a twisted but weirdly logical reason to take a big risk? He figures that if he succeeds in this economy, people will be REALLY impressed, and if he fails, well, it won't reflect badly on him at all because so many great companies and people are struggling.

Comments

[Seattle Interview Coach]

Great post Bob, especially the "quality" theme. I referenced your post in my blog: http://blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com/2009/03/how-not-to-answer-weakness-question.html

[Wally Bock]

Congratulations! This post was selected as one of the five best business blog posts of the week in my Three Star Leadership Midweek Review of the Business Blogs.

http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2009/03/18/31809-midweek-look-at-the-independent-business-blogs.aspx

Wally Bock

[dblwyo]

Bob - think you have to put things in context. IMHO innovation requires a team, a great team leader + good ideas and air cover; i.e. sponsorship, funding and political protection. In my time at Fedex we went from $300M to $6B. During my stint at IBM I was involved in the e-Bizz task forces in '94 as area expert and lead strategist yet IBM never managed to make it work.In that same period they copperized chips, converted the mainframe family to a new architecture that saved then revived it and since have migrated all large-scale servers to new chip architectures.
CONTEXT !
This is a great interview and making movies has a lot in common with making new products. If you want to understand good ideas and team-building & leadership the added features on Ratatouille and LofR are post-grad seminars. If you want to understand the gamble that the guys who backed Bird had to take the "making the movie" on Patton with Zanuck, Jr. is another. Without that air cover no good idea sees the light of day. Without good ideas and teams no pool of money results in effective innovation.