Ed Catmull: Strong Principles
Notes from the co-founder of Pixar
Pulled from the Founders podcast interview (David Senra × Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar). Source: transcript.
Two through-lines worth holding onto first:
Nearly every principle is about designing a mechanism to defeat a known human failure mode, not exhorting people to be better.
The honesty is what makes it credible. He repeatedly admits the thing didn’t fully work (the Brain Trust as an outside force, the three second-class failures).
Surfacing truth (the Brain Trust core)
1. Most “candor cultures” are theater. Engineer the real thing. “Every company says they do that. Most of them are full of shit. What they’ve got are people telling the leader what he wants to hear.” The Brain Trust wasn’t a value statement, it was a designed mechanism: they studied the specific psychology that stops people being honest and built around it.
2. Keep the discussion about the problem, never about who’s right. The mechanism Catmull names first. The failure mode is people treating an idea’s rejection as a personal verdict (”is my idea accepted, am I worthy”). When ego leaves the room, “magic happens” once or twice per film: group flow, where someone’s idea can die and they don’t flinch because they’re still on the problem.
3. Disagreement is the only thing that brings value. Jobs fired two Pixar board members because they never disagreed: “If they don’t disagree with me, they aren’t bringing value.” He and Catmull disagreed constantly. The outcome split into thirds: a third Ed conceded, a third Steve conceded, a third Ed just did what he wanted, and Steve was fine because they’d actually discussed it. Disagree without arguing, then let people act.
4. Don’t decide on one layer. Keep peeling. “A lot of people get on one layer and form a decision. You can’t. It’s a shortcut based on a little information. Getting at the underlying factors is inherently a long-term strategy, and it’s difficult.” Insight needs mechanisms, not instinct.
Power dynamics
5. The powerful person shuts up first. “If a person with power speaks, they set the tone for the rest of the discussion.” Powerful voices stay silent for the first 10-15 minutes, then enter as a peer. Jobs was banned from the Brain Trust, not because he lacked insight (he gave notes no one else saw) but because his voice was so strong it warped the room no matter when he spoke.
6. Power distorts what people will tell you, and no one will admit it. “When you’re in a position of real or perceived power, people react to you differently. Nobody will tell you that. But if you’re aware of it, you can be more tuned in.”
7. You need an outside force. A fresh perspective to “jar you from the fragile thing you’re building in your head.” Pixar deliberately preserved an external corrective (first Disney’s Schumacher, then Jobs at board level, staying fresh because he saw the film rarely). The honest failure: the Brain Trust was meant to be that outside force and couldn’t be, because insiders always know what’s going on. It became something else valuable (a problem-solving group) instead.
Standards and the creative process
8. Hard problems are what make the work non-derivative. “If it’s easy, it’s more derivative. You know the three-act structure, you assemble the pieces, you get something mediocre fairly cheaply. If you take on a hard problem and keep pushing, the fact that it was hard is what makes it different.” A movie about a rat who wants to cook: “Nobody’s gonna copy it.”
9. Early work always sucks. Measure the team’s spirit, not the output. Films start broken. So what’s your basis for continuing when the thing in front of you doesn’t work? “For me the basis was the spirit of the team. If they’re working together, laughing and angsting together, you keep going.” Receipt: Pixar finished 21 of 22 films started; Disney 10 of 11.
10. The one unforgivable failure: the director loses the team. “They can screw up in all sorts of ways, but they can’t lose the team.” Everything else you shore up. That’s the trigger for a change, nothing else.
11. Quality is the best business plan. Set explicitly against Jack Welch / GE: optimizing the short-term annual growth rate produced something fragile that later split apart. Quality is inherent in a durable plan. Pixar was never the low-cost producer (”we may have been the highest cost”).
12. No mission statement. Keep asking the question. “A mission statement is an answer. We should always be asking questions: are we doing the right thing, are we going in the right direction. It was stronger to keep that question open.”
Self and people
13. Assume you’re wrong half the time, so you catch it sooner. Ed believed half his management theories were “a crock” and that the ratio would hold for life. The payoff isn’t humility for its own sake: “If I know I’m wrong half the time, I catch it earlier and spend less time on the wrong decision.”
14. “How much can I do with others,” not “how much can I do alone.” He spent a year gnawing on “how much of this success was me,” then concluded the question itself is “an act of separation, and it’s not good for your soul.” A colleague once left to do a short film “without the safety net” of the Brain Trust. “It’s not a safety net. Those are your colleagues. Wrong question.”
15. Culture problems are subtle, fester in silence, and the fix is bottom-up. The “sense of fun” story: new hires copied what they saw (people leaving for home), veterans thought the new hires were joyless, neither group said anything, it festered. You can’t mandate fun top-down (”everybody lighten up” means nothing). You read the subtle signals, then seed instigators and let it self-organize.
16. Don’t make a rule for every violation. When someone crosses a line of common sense, call them on it personally. Don’t make a rule so no one repeats it: “As soon as you make more rules, people worry about who they have to ask permission from.” Keep the tent wide so people act without asking.
17. Remove first-class / second-class. In most companies, anyone outside the “pivotal rung” feels second-class. Pixar fought to make technical and creative people genuine peers, not one in service of the other. He’s honest that they failed at this three times and missed it: “It’s really hard and very subtle.”
18. Share knowledge freely. It’s a recruiting magnet, not a leak. Two receipts: in his own job interview, asked “who else should we talk to,” Ed listed every rival candidate; the insecure ones wouldn’t. And publishing everything (SIGGRAPH) drew the best people to an unglamorous Long Island lab. Openness is the talent strategy.
Bonus: honesty disarms negotiation
Bob Iger opened the Disney–Pixar talks with “I’ve got a crappy hand, can we talk.” A show of honesty that’s unusual: you don’t start a negotiation conceding the other side has the leverage. That single move convinced Jobs this was someone he could partner with, and it held for the rest of his life.