More on hiring for collaborative innovation: Pixar's Brad Bird and his flock of black sheep

Following up on my blog post last week - Spanning Silos...Fostering Collaboration...How do you hire for that? - a friend passed along a great interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird from last month's McKinsey Quarterly. In the article, the director talks about how he pushes teams of animators beyond their comfort zones, encourages dissent, and builds morale. He also explains the value of "black sheep" - restless contributors with unconventional ideas.

What's interesting about Bird's hiring at Pixar is that he joined the company in 2000, just at the height of Pixar's success with Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2. Rather than wide the wave and continue on the tried and true path (as so many established companies are prone to do) senior executives at Pixar worried about complacency and that feeling that they "had it all figured out." So Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter hired Bird to "shake things up." (Ironically, Bird himself was coming off a huge financial failure with a film called The Iron Giant.)

Bird: "For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, 'Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up' - when do you run into that?"

Bird's first project at Pixar was The Incredibles. According to Bird, it completely broke with tradition because it represented everything that computer-generated animation had trouble doing; from human characters to multiple sets. Although the creative team loved the idea, the technical team "turned white." No way was their response, telling Bird it would take 10 years and $500 million to get the job done.

Bird's response: "So I said, 'Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody's listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.' A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well."

In the end, Bird's approach worked really well. For less money per minute than was spent on Pixar's previous film, Finding Nemo, Bird and his black sheep team delivered a movie that had three times the number of sets and everything that was considered too hard to do by the previous technical team.

The article continues with several examples of Bird's ability to change mindset. It's clear that he's a phenomenal team leader. My belief has always been that innovation without leadership is a lost cause. Harmonious orchestration requires a conductor. Otherwise, as Bird says in the interview, "each individual piece might be beautiful, but together they're crazy." Undoubtedly, Bird is a creative genius but what sets him apart is his ability to build morale, take risks, engage across silos and wrap it in unwavering ambition to do what others haven't done before. Those are lessons we can all learn from.

The full article is behind the pay wall at McKinsey and I recommend its purchase. Or, GigaOm has a decent write-up of the article here.

Posted May 13, 2008 09:27 AM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink