• A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. • Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent—address abuses of common sense

There are many valid reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them.

• It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.

• Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.

I couldn’t have put it any better. My goal has never been to tell people how Pixar and Disney figured it all out but rather to show how we continue to figure it out, every hour of every day. How we persist. The future is not a destination—it is a direction. It is our job, then, to work each day to chart the right course and make corrections when,

“To Whom it May Inspire,” Austin wrote. “I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, ‘in the zone’ seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This

Putting like with like, Tom’s team distilled the thousand ideas down to 293 discussion topics. That was still way too many for a single day’s agenda, so a group of senior managers then met and whittled those down to 120 topics, organized into several broad categories such as Training, Environment and Culture; Cross-Show Resource Pooling (we often

When people asked for guidance on how to be involved, Tom nudged them along, sending this hypothetical prompt to anyone who asked: “The year is 2017. Both of this year’s films were completed in well under 18,500 person-weeks.… What innovations helped these productions meet their budget goals? What are some specific things that we did differently?”

What if we couldn’t achieve the expected level of excellence? What if we couldn’t break new ground, visually? As a company, our determination to avoid disappointments was also causing us to shy away from risk. The specter of past excellence was sapping us of some of the energy that we’d once used to pursue excellence. In addition to this, many new