April 16, 2008
Pixar director’s recipe for teamwork
The new McKinsey Quarterly has an excellent interview with Brad Bird, the Oscar-winning Pixar director responsible for The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Among other things, Mr Bird describes how he persuaded Pixar’s animators to strike a balance between perfectionism and expediency.
There are purists in computer graphics who are brilliant but don’t have the urgency about budgets and scheduling that responsible filmmakers do. I had to shake the purist out of them—essentially frighten them into realizing I was ready to use quick and dirty “cheats” to get something on screen if they took too long to achieve it in the computer.
He describes the value of having what he calls “black sheep” in a team: frustrated but committed individuals who want to do things differently but haven’t had the chance to prove their theories. He also praises Pixar for offering staff optional classes that foster a well-rounded workforce.
If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system.
His peeves include “passive-aggressive people… who don’t show their colours in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away”.
Discussing the role of teamwork on the way to the business success, directors have to pay more attention to and encourage the individual contributors to the team performance toward the business innovation and ultimate success. Directors can not expect that the team will perform well without competition between the team members!
Posted by: Viktor O. Ledenyov | April 17th, 2008 at 2:53 pm | Report this commentWhile competition is very good it is important that individual contributors should be acknowledge as stated in the earlier comment, the refusal to do this had always make individuals to become lackaidasical or better still move to a greener pasture. Acknowledging and rewarding excellence can foster cohesion, as long as the “black sheep” does not feel that the other people are being given prefrential treatment he will continue to contribute positively to the teamwork and expect to be rewarded sometime in the future
Posted by: osu akande LONDON | April 18th, 2008 at 9:12 pm | Report this comment