Routinely, Braintrust attendees become so energized and excited that they talk over each other, and voices tend to rise. I’ll admit that there have been times when outsiders think they’ve witnessed a heated argument or even some kind of intervention. They haven’t—though I understand their confusion, which stems from their inability (after such a

It took a serious and unexpected problem to give me a new sense of mission.

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

“You can and should make your own solution group,” Andrew Stanton says, adding that on each of his own films, he has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate from the official Braintrust. “Here are the qualifications required: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short

Clearly, it wasn’t enough for managers to have good ideas—they had to be able to engender support for those ideas among the people who’d be charged with employing them.

I often say that managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions.

Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.

The truth is, as challenges emerge, mistakes will always be made, and our work is never done. We will always have problems, many of which are hidden from our view; we must work to uncover them and assess our own role in them, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; when we then come across a problem, we must marshal all our energies

ARPA’s mandate—to support smart people in a variety of areas—was carried out based on the unwavering presumption that researchers would try to do the right thing and, in ARPA’s view, overmanaging them was counterproductive. ARPA’s administrators did not hover over the shoulders of those of us working on the projects they funded, nor did they demand