Ed Catmull, Co-founder of Pixar

**David Senra** (0:02)
Right before we started recording, you said that you had some Steve Jobs stories and that you wanted to add something to it. What were you going to say?

**Ed Catmull** (0:09)
Well, this is a result of just thinking a lot about the last many years and a lot of its reflection, but also trying to understand the nature of change and the process that you have of trying to come to an understanding or gain insight. In the book, I talked a lot about the Braintrust. The Braintrust is such a mechanism. Different companies have different ways of trying to arrive at truth and getting insight out there. Every company says they do that. Most of them are full of shit.
What they've got are people around them who are telling them what the leader wants to hear. The leader thinks they're hearing what they want to hear, that he got this really insightful group.
But it's not really about diving deep. There's an overlay of the politics and where I am, what's my career and so forth, all of which gets in the way. In the case of the Braintrust, we worked out a way for people to be honest with each other and feel comfortable about it. We thought a lot about how to do that and what the personal dynamics are, what the psychology is that might get in the way, and how we address it. But Steve had a very different approach in order to get inside. And I would say the others do too. So it's just like the different ways of doing it. But he did understand what he was trying to do. He did understand at an intuitive level, there's no upside in being wrong. As soon as he understood something, he would change quickly. But here's the thing that most people don't know about. And that is that Pixar was a public company for 10 years, starting in 95 when they went public, until 10 years later when we were acquired by Disney.
In that 10-year period, Steve fired two members of the Board of Directors at Pixar.
The reason he fired them was that they never disagreed. And he said, if they don't disagree with me, then they aren't bringing any value to the company.
That's an unusual way of thinking. And he really believed that. Our board meetings were lively, they were loud, and they were thrilling. And, you know, we made great progress. And they were arenas of disagreement. And these were people, the rest of the people on the board had very strong opinions, did not agree. And Steve loved that. And I would say a lot of executives probably say they want that, but Steve really meant it.
He and I disagreed a lot. We didn't argue. We disagreed, and we'd have long, week-long discussions about something. And in the end, about the third time, I would realize he was right. And about a third time, a third of the time, he would realize I was right. But the other third of the time, I just did what I wanted. And he was fine with that because we discussed it.
The whole point is, how do you get to the inside? How do you surface things? Because it's hard to get underneath things. I would say that a lot of people like to go down one layer. You get on the one layer and you form a decision. You can't do that. You got to keep peeling away the layers to figure out what's really underneath it. And it's a shortcut to make a decision quickly based upon a little bit of information. And getting at underlying factors is inherently a long-term strategy. And it's a difficult one and it's timely. And you need different mechanisms within an organization in order to get to better insight.

**David Senra** (4:07)
What are some of these mechanisms? Because Steve has famously said, and I've heard a few other people say this, that he learned more about the art of management from you than anybody else that he ever met.

**Ed Catmull** (4:18)
Boy, you didn't tell me that. I would say we were just completely different.

**David Senra** (4:24)
But what are these mechanisms you're saying to get to these other levels that you used?

**Ed Catmull** (4:28)
Well, one of them is the discussion is always about the topic.
It isn't about who's right. So for me, the example would be in a healthy Braintrust meeting. Because you've got people working on a film. So what are the dynamics when you come together as a group in order to discuss something, and you're discussing something that has problems? Just the nature of all these films. It may be a great idea underneath it, but it's not jelling or it's not working right.