“I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful,” Ive told the assembled mourners, “they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts.”
Jonathan Ive about Steve Jobs as quoted in Robert Sullivan, "A Rare Look at Design Genius Jony Ive: The Man Behind the Apple Watch," Vouge, 1 Oct 2014,
www.vogue.com/1415025/apple-design-genius-jonathan-ive via Robb Perry.
I shall never forget his plea, "Oh, give me one man who says, I can make it work." The difference between the critic and suggester of a better way may seem slight in words, but it looms large in life. What a leap between, "I see your error" to "I see a way that might make it better." Both point out the error. But one pushes down, the other lifts. The lifting takes the tougher mind.
Henry B. Eyring, BYU Commencement, 18 Aug 1972 as quoted in Robert I. Eaton & Henry J. Eyring, I Will Lead You Along: The Life of Henry B. Eyring, Deseret Book, 2013, p. 81.
For all the care you put into artistry , visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.
ED Catmull, Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Random House Publishing Group, Kindle Edition. 2014.
We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don’t have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don’t think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues. But we live in a technical society; technology is just fundamental to our way of life. Technical understanding should be a core competency of any company.
Ed Catmull, "Pleasing Wall Street is a Poor Excuse for Bad Decisions," Harvard Business Review, 20 Oct 2009,
blogs.hbr.org/2009/10/outsourcing-in-and-of-itself/
We have had a substantial difficulty with every film that we made. That has included complete restarts. Toy Story 2 was a restart. Ratatouille was a restart. And The Good Dinosaur is a restart. In the past, because we were a little company, nobody paid attention or they didn’t know. It’s because Pixar is successful that now people are paying attention and saying, “Oh, what’s going on there?” What’s going on is what has always gone on: Ultimately, there’s a criterion whether the film is good enough and we don’t let the other stuff get in the way of it.
One thing I don’t believe in is the notion of a perfect process. Our goal isn’t to prevent all the problems; our goal is making good movies.
Ed Catmull as quoted in in David A. Price, "Managing Creativity: Lessons from Pixar and Disney Animation," Harvard Business Review, 9 Apr 2014, blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/managing-creativity-lessons-from-pixar-and-disney-animation/.
The reality is that we each have limited working memories, meaning we can only retain a certain amount of new information in our minds at any given time. If we’re forever flooding the brain with new facts, other information necessarily gets crowded out before it’s been retained in our long-term memory. If you selectively reduce what you’re taking in, then you can retain more of what you really want to remember.
Tony Schwartz, "In Praise of Depth," The Energy Project, 17 Jan 2014,
http://theenergyproject.com/blog/in-praise-of-depth.
Define creativity.
Giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing.
Kelton Reid, "Here’s How Daniel Pink Writes," copyblogger, 20 Feb 2013 (?),
www.copyblogger.com/how-daniel-pink-writes/.
"Part of your role is to disappoint people for the right reasons which is hard to do." (3:47)
"The audience laughing at that particular thing comes at a price that the film can't afford to make. So sometimes you have to say no to really good creative things." (4:41)
Brad Bird: Directing - The Incredibles and Ratatouille Director Brad Bird discusses directing an animated feature, Pixar.com, video accessed 24 Jun 2013, www.pixar.com/behind_the_scenes/Brad-Bird%253A-Directing.
This in particular is the room for the K12 education project. You see lots of post-its and photos on the walls that represent the different projects that this initiative is working on. One thing that is very important, that is that this room doesn't belong to a person, but to a project. And so, as soon as anyone working on the project gets inside the room they're smarter about the project. They know, they see the ideas and everything is very visible on the walls. This is the main area where student teams come to work on their projects. As you can see we have, furniture that can be moved and reconfigured, as well as boards that slide to create private spaces for the teams to work.
The Context of the Innovator: Space,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7o19ta4sMk.
We have ingredients that come in every day. Hundreds of varieties of stuff. It's difficult to understand, but take watercress. You have it in one week, you do this new dish, you write a recipe for it and it's really good. The watercress is spicy. Then it rains two days later. The watercress is not so spicy. Then it's the cook at the section cooking that dish who needs to make the adjustment so that the magic can happen again in the flavor.
If people are in an environment where they're afraid of making decisions, making mistakes or speaking up, those decisions aren't made. They simply just follow the recipe. They become robotic. Our kitchen became less robotic, leaving more space for the individual. Because of that, the food tastes better.
....
The first book we did -- the previous one, which is 3 years old -- that was a different story. But in the past 3 years, we've become more confident. As a result, the food has become more simple. For instance, there's a recipe that is essentially just a roasted cauliflower. Then it's served with a dollop of whipped cream. Everybody can do that.
Rebecca Sheir, "Noma's Rene Redzepi on fame, fun and not freaking out," The Splendid Table, 12 Jan 2014,
www.splendidtable.org/story/nomas-rene-redzepi-on-fame-fun-and-not-freaking-out, (bold added).
