Pixar co-founder: You have to embrace failure to succeed

Pixar Animation Studios has made about $3.8 billion on its 15 feature films - seven of which have won Oscars - making it among the most successful organizations on the planet.

It may surprise some to learn that an important element of its culture is failure.

Ed Catmull, the president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, said the leadership at Pixar prizes an environment where employees know they can fail without fear of dismissal or embarrassment.

Catmull was a keynote guest on day one of the Global Leadership Summit held at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington.

"We will fail, and we need to make it safe for you to do that," Catmull said. "If you get over the embarrassment, you become more creative because it frees you up."

Willow Creek Senior Pastor Bill Hybels interviewed Catmull about the lessons he's learned at Pixar, which he co-founded with John Lasseter and Steve Jobs in 1986, and more recently at Disney, which he runs with Lasseter after Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 for $7 billion.

The interview, held in front of around 8,500 people on the Willow Creek campus, was part of the first day of the two-day summit that features leaders from all walks of life. An estimated 102,000 other audience members were watching on big screens at 449 locations around the country.

Catmull said they have to work hard to eliminate the fear of failure in their workforce because it is so ingrained in our world.

"If a politician makes a mistake or a businessman makes a mistake, there are opponents out there who are going to bludgeon you with those mistakes," Catmull said. "There is a real aura of danger around failure."

The other important element of Pixar and Disney's culture is for employees to be both candid and kind to each other when discussing their work. Catmull said they have meetings where the company's top leaders will meet with a movie's creative team to work through issues it may have. He said that during these "brain trust" meetings there is no power structure and everyone works together in the best interest of the movie.

"We have to have it so while they are all friends with each other, their vested interest is in the film being right," Catmull said. "The best thing they can do for their friends is to tell them the truth."

Hybels asked Catmull about the challenges he and Lasseter faced after they were asked to lead the Disney Animation Studio, which Catmull writes about in his recent book, "Creativity Inc."

Catmull said Disney had been on a downward creative trajectory since its success in the late 1980s and early '90s with films such as "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King" and "Aladdin."

"By this time they were completely broken, they had the wrong concept about how to make a film," Catmull said. "So the question was, could we fix it? Would our principals apply to a different group (from Pixar) or would they be so broken that we couldn't fix it?"

He said it took four years before the culture at Disney significantly changed and people were once again functioning in a healthy way. Interestingly, there was no major bloodletting or housecleaning along the way.

"It was largely the same people who were there when they succeeded as when they failed," Catmull added. "We'd taken them when they couldn't work (together) and turned them into a team that was great."

It took four hours to lay out their principals to Disney, Catmull said, but it took four years for it to work.

"Stating values is easy to do and agreeing to them is easy to do," Catmull said. "The hard part is asking yourself why you're not living up to them and what you can do to live up to the ideals."

Because the leadership summit is translated and shown to 150,000 people in 123 countries, a short video featuring scenes from Pixar movies was played to familiarize anyone who'd never seen them. One of the clips was from "Inside Out," its newest film, which is playing to critical acclaim.

Catmull said one of the messages of "Inside Out" is that people have complex emotions and that it is fine to feel sadness when things aren't going right.

"If we understand that and allow for that, we are healthier people," Catmull said. "The real goal of what we're doing (at Pixar) is to have a positive impact on the world."