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Ed Catmull: Keep Your Crises Small:

Now, Toy Story 2, as he returned, had to be delivered in nine months. So it was already a tight schedule for all they were. So he came back. He watched Toy Story 1 before he came in to work from this trip to Europe, came in to watch the reels. He walked in and said, “You’re right. We’ve got a major problem.”

So basically, we took the A team - we put them on the project. We went down to Disney and said, “The film isn’t good enough. We have to throw it away and start all over again.” And the answer was, “Well, actually, it’s better than you think. We think it is good enough, but more importantly, it’s too late. You literally do not have the time between now and then to deliver it to redo this film.” So we said, “It’s not good enough, and we know we don’t have enough time, but we’re going to do it anyway.” So we came back. John told the story crew to take a good rest over the holidays and come back on January 2nd. We were reboarding the movie. So we then started - we now had eight months left.

We then started this incredibly intense effort to get this movie out. It was boarded quickly. It was pitched to the company. It was an electrifying pitch. We had a lot of overachieving people working for overachieving managers to get the movie out - worked brutal hours with this. When I say “brutal”, we had a number of people that were injured with RSI. One of them permanently left the field.

We had, actually, a married couple that worked there - and this was in June, so it’s summer. And the father was supposed to drop the baby off at daycare, but forgot - don’t know why. But he came and left the baby in the car and came into work. And given, you know, as the heat was rising, the mother asked about - and they realized - they rushed out, and the baby was unconscious.

The right thing was done, they put ice water on the baby; and the baby ended up being fine in the end. But it was one of those traumatic things like “why did this happen?” Are we working too hard? So when I say it’s “intense,” I mean it really was intense.

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So, I come back to the first question. Which is more important? What’s the central problem? Finding good ideas or finding good people? And the answer is very clear: the idea [with Toy Story 2] was the same.
If you have a good idea and you give it to mediocre group, they’ll screw it up.
If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they’ll fix it, or they’ll throw it away and come up with something else.

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Because initially, the films they put together - they’re mess! It’s like everything else in life. The first time you do it, it’s a mess. And sometimes it’s labeled, “well, the first time it’s a failure,” but it’s not even the right word to use, right? It’s just like you get the first one out, you’ll learn from it.
The only failure is, if you don’t learn from it - if you don’t progress.

Continued…

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