Posts Tagged ‘success’

The IT Manager’s Dilemma: Smart People Or Good Ideas?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Pixar Can Teach IT Leaders A Lot About Selecting Staff For Teams

Pixar Can Teach IT Leaders A Lot About Selecting Staff For Teams

When an IT manager is given an assignment to complete a project, who should he/she want to have on their team? Within the world of IT, there are many different types of people that you can choose from, but all too often it comes down choosing people who are as smart as (or less) that you or choosing people who are smarter than you are. What should an IT manager do?

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed how managers at Pixar deal with this problem.

Catmull is a firm believer that you really need to have the smartest people possible on your team – even if they are smarter than you are. In fact, Catmull is a firm believer that smart people are even more important than good ideas.

All of Pixar’s films have been big commercial successes. However, there have been projects that have almost caused the company to fail. It’s from these stories that Catmull has become convinced that having smart people on your team is a necessity.

Pixar’s first big successful film was called Toy Story. After this hit, the creative team that made it got busy on Pixar’s next film that was to be called A Bug’s Life. Pixar also wanted to make a follow-up film to Toy Story which would be called Toy Story 2. Because the original creative team was busy, a second creative team was assembled to mange this project.

Originally Disney who was distributing Pixar’s films at the time wanted Toy Story 2 to be a direct-to-video release which meant that both the cost and the quality could be lower. However, Pixar decided that having two different standards for quality would be bad for the studio’s morale and so Disney was convinced to make it a full theatrical release.

The way that you make an animated movie is to create storyboards which are crude pencil sketches of the movie’s action and mate them with dialogue and temporary music. The result of this is called a story reel. As the team worked on Toy Story 2, these story reels were not improving like they should have been.

The reasons for this were many. The Directors and the Producers were not able to work together in order to meet the challenges that they were facing. One key point to realize is that there was nothing wrong with the story – everyone was very happy with the initial story. It’s just that the team was having problems turning it into a compelling movie.

In the end, Toy Story 2 was saved and went on to be a big commercial success for Pixar. How was this done? The original creative team was able to wrap up their work on A Bug’s Life and they swooped in to save the day. The specific things that they did changed it from a ho-hum movie to an interesting one.

All Disney released movies have a happy ending; so this was never in doubt in the work that the original creative team had put together. The new creative team took this, tore it apart, and inserted several points in which a happy outcome was by no means guaranteed. This made the movie much more interesting.

Pixar’s lessons from this project should resonate with IT leaders everywhere. Catmull says that the most important of these lessons “…is that if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, then they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.”

The other lesson that IT Leaders need to learn from Pixar is that every IT department needs to have only one quality bar by which to measure each project. You need to be able to communicate to the entire department that it is unacceptable to have some ok projects as well as great projects. This is how you move beyond lip service for quality…

When you are pulling together a team for a project, are you willing to choose the best people for the project? How do you feel about having people who are smarter than you on a project? Does this cause friction? Does your IT department grade every project when it’s done? Are all projects of the same quality? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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How Can An IT Manager Get Ahead At Your Company?

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Is Getting Ahead At Work Due To Genetics Or Is There Another Way?

Is Getting Ahead At Work Due To Genetics Or Is There Another Way?

If we agree to take a step back from the world of IT for just a moment, how about if we spend just a bit of time talking about your career. How’s it going?  Are you where you’d like to be right now? Perhaps more importantly, have you been seeing your peers do better than you lately? Us IT Managers are generally pretty good at the technical side of doing our jobs; however, when it comes to managing our careers we are all too often just a bit clueless. Good news, some smart folks have been thinking about this problem and they have some suggestions to help us…

Geoff Colvin has written a great book called Talent Is Overrated in which he talks about just what it takes to be successful. He’s got some good news for us and some bad news. Which would you like first? Let’s start with the good news. All too often we tend to think that genetics plays a large role in somebody’s success. In sports we have Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong and in business we have Jack Welsh, Richard Branson, and even Warren Buffet. Clearly all of these folks must have come from amazing genetic stock, right?

Colvin throws this idea out the door. Yes, sports superstars probably do have some natural talents that help them during their career; however, that’s not what made them a superstar. In business, if you’ve ever seen pictures of the really BIG names, then you’d quickly understand that they don’t LOOK like they are anything special. However, Colvin says that great performance (from which comes great success) basically rests on one specific action more than anything else: deliberate practice.

Let’s be real clear what is meant by practice here. We’re not talking about going out and hitting 2,000 golf balls on a practice tee and then declaring that you are as good as Tiger Woods. We’re not talking about hosting and running 1,000 business meetings and then telling the world that you have Sir Richard Branson’s leadership skills. Nope, what we are really talking about is practicing with a focus. This means that you hit a ball / run a meeting and at the end you sit back and ask yourself “…what could I have done better?” You then make a change in how you hit a ball / run a meeting and then you do it again. You ask the same question at the end of the activity and repeat it over and over again. Just in case you are missing this subtle point: this is no fun to do whatsoever. However it is necessary if you want to be better.

Colvin pointed out two great examples of people who have done just exactly this and gone on to greatness. The first is Jerry Rice who was an NFL wide receiver who wasn’t really all that big nor was he really all that fast (in comparison to the other wide receivers on the field with him). However, Jerry noticed that by the end of a football game, all of the players on the other team were totally exhausted. Jerry spent the time focused on one thing: building up his endurance. What this meant is that when everyone else had nothing left to give, he had an extraordinary advantage over them during the final 15 minutes in the game. He used this advantage to score, score, score. Colvin also talks about the comedian Chris Rock. Chris is a huge star and puts on shows in large stadiums. However, long before those shows, he spends months going from small comedy club to smaller comedy club in order to practice new material and refine, refine, refine his act.

Here’s some of the bad news: Colvin believes in something called the “10-year rule”. What this means is that he believes that it can take 10-years to achieve a high level of excellence in just about any field. However, you can still do it. What it will take is deliberate practice. Two key activities are called for here: over practicing and getting feedback from others. One final point: Colvin says that if your job feels easy, then you are unlikey to ever become a star. Words to think about…

How do you feel about your career right now: are you on track or falling off track? Are you currently working on improving any parts of your job that you have difficulty with? Are you willing to work at getting better for 10 years in order to reach the top? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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