Judgment Over Ideas

From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Random House, 2014), p. 53, in a section on the Toy Story 2 production. Catmull had voiced an earlier form of the same idea seven years before, at the Stanford GSB Conference on Entrepreneurship in January 2007, in a talk titled “Keep Your Crises Small.” Two paragraphs later, on page 54, he continues: “Why are we confused about this? Because too many of us think of ideas as being singular, as if they float in the ether, fully formed and independent of the people who wrestle with them. Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.”

Read straight, the line says good teams matter more than good ideas. Catmull’s sharper claim is that a movie isn’t an idea you hand to a team to execute. The team makes thousands of small choices over months and years: this scene stays, that one is cut, this character changes, that line is rewritten. The finished film is what those choices add up to. Pick a different team and the same starting idea becomes a different film.

That logic changed how Pixar worked. After Toy Story 2, Catmull rewrote the job of Pixar’s development department. In a movie studio, the development department is the team that looks for scripts and decides what gets made. Catmull changed that. Its new job was to hire good people who would, in his words, “find, develop, and own good ideas.” If a film is just what a good team produces, you can’t hunt for ideas. You hunt for the people.