Ed Catmull Quotes

“Failure isn't a necessary evil. In fact, it isn't evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.”

“You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

“Don't wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It'll be pretty when we get there, but it won't be pretty along the way.”

“If you aren't experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.”

“You don't have to ask permission to take responsibility.”

“Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.”

“Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.”

“A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms.”

“When faced with a challenge, get smarter.”

“Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.”

“Quality is the best business plan.”

“From the outside, Pixar probably looked like your typical Silicon Valley startup. On the inside, however, we were anything but. Steve Jobs had never manufactured or marketed a high-end machine before, so he had neither the experience nor the intuition about how to do so. We had no sales people and no marketing people and no idea where to find them. Steve, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, me — none of us knew the first thing about how to run the kind of business we had just started. We were drowning.”

“The fundamental tension is that people want clear leadership, but what we're doing is inherently messy. We know, intellectually, that if we want to do something new, there will be some unpredictable problems. But if it gets too messy, it actually does fall apart. And adhering to the pure, original plan falls apart, too, because it doesn't represent reality. So you are always in this balance between clear leadership and chaos; in fact that's where you're supposed to be.”

“A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people — it was finding good ideas. Since then, when giving talks, I've asked audiences whether they agree with him. Almost always there's a 50/50 split, which has astounded me because I couldn't disagree more with the studio executive.”

“Most people would agree that you need to create environments where it's safe for people to say what they think. But a lot of managers don't realize that they're not actually making safe environments. In other words, it's an agreement in idea but not in practice. There's a perception that they're doing it when they're not.”

“If something works, you shouldn't do it again. We want to do something that is new, original — something where there's a good chance of failure.”

“Rather than thinking, "OK, my job is to prevent or avoid all the messes," I just try to say, "well, let's make sure it doesn't get too messy.”

“In meetings, if there were three people in the room with more power than the others, for the first 15 minutes, they knew they had to remain silent. If they spoke first, they would set the tone, and we didn't want that.”