Dear all,
Recently talking to my daughters and their boyfriends as well as friends and clients about how their respective companies are working their way back from the Covid crisis, I am hearing many things that I believed to be on the way out in the 21st century.
Apparently some managers are retreating in uncertainty; hierarchical leadership styles are re-emerging, desires to painstakingly project-plan increasing – recipes of an industrial past for an even more VUCA (and digital!) world ahead.
In today’s weekend readings I would like to propose a different model, driven by the power of a shared vision, the creativity of teams of peers, and the impact of blameless post mortems.
PIXAR, now a division of Disney, whose blockbuster products (Finding Nemo, Toy Story 1-4, Monsters Inc.,…) many of us – or at least or children – love, was built on exactly these principles.
In case you don’t have the time to read or listen to all of Ed Catmull’s eminently readable „Creativity Inc.“ here are three links for the weekend:
How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity –
Ed Catmull’s short introduction to PIXAR’s most important principles in HBR.
Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture –
John Allspaw’s view on how to better deal with the unavoidable errors we are making
Ed Catmull: Inside the Braintrust
A Stanford Technology Ventures Lecture on the team of peers that made PIXAR
Have a great and sunny weekend. (I am in Southern Tyrolia and promise to drink an Aperol Spritz to these ideas!)
Cheers,
Godehard