The gestation of Toy Story 2 offers a number of lessons that
were vital to Pixar’s evolution. Remember that the spine of the story – Woody’s
dilemma, to stay or to go – was the same before and after the Braintrust worked
it over. One version didn’t work at all, and the other was deeply affecting.
Why? Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the
evolution of this storyline made it abundantly clear to me: 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.
The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right
is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you
want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one
another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team
if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is
performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is
made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle
here that may seem obvious, yet – in my experience – is not obvious at all.
Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting
the right idea.
This is an issue I have thought a lot about over the years.
Once, I was having lunch with the president of another movie studio, who told
me that his biggest problem was not finding good people; it was finding good
ideas. I remember being stunned when he said that – it seemed patently false to
me, in part because I’d found the exact opposite to be true on Toy Story 2. I
resolved to test whether what seemed a given to me was, in fact, a common
belief. So for the next couple of years I made a habit, when giving talks, of
posing the question to my audience: Which is more valuable, good ideas or good
people? No matter whether I was talking to retired business executives or
students, to high school principals or artists, when I asked for a show of
hands, the audiences would be split 50-50. (Statisticians will tell you that when
you get a perfect split like this, it doesn’t mean that half know the right
answer – it means that they are all guessing, picking at random, as if flipping
a coin.)
People think so little about this that, in all these years,
only one person in an audience has ever pointed out the false dichotomy. To me,
the answer should be obvious: Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are
more important than ideas.
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