Live Blog: 2015 Leadership Summit – 41 Leadership Quotes From Pixar’s Ed Catmull

In an effort to add value to pastors and church leaders, INJOY Stewardship Solutions has dispatched me to attend the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit.  During the next three days, I will be bringing the top leadership lessons from the incredible faculty the WCA has assembled.

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Next up was Bill Hybels interview with Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, President of Walt Disney Animation Studios and author the best leadership book I read in 2014 Creativity, Inc.

The following are 41 Leadership Quotes From Ed Catmull from the Global Leadership Summit:

1. No one likes to be around climbers. They repel everybody. – Bill Hybels
2. Creativity, Inc is the finest book of its type I’ve ever read. – Hybels
3. I didn’t see the path of how to become a Disney animator so when I went to college, I went into Physics.
4. Creativity is the same on both sides – art and technology.
5. Art isn’t about drawing. It’s learning to see.
6. By doing something that was inconceivable at the time, it forced me to think about hard problems.
7. Stories are the way we communicate with each other at every level.
8. There are stories that are well told and stories that are poorly told.
9. The good stories are the ones that connect with the emotions.
10. If it doesn’t work well, how do we judge the people who are working on it?
11. How do we measure progress? How the team is working together.
12. We accidently happened upon the Brain Trust.
13. Peers talking to peers. Filmmakers talking to filmmakers.
14. There is no power structure (in the Brain Trust).
15. They (Brain Trust) have a vested interest in each other’s success.
16. Their best interest is in the film being right.
17. We give and listen to good notes.
18. Magic is seeing a loss of ego in the room.
19. People do not become attached to their ideas.
20. When you are working on something and end the middle of it, you can help but lose objectivity.
21. Your peers, with mutual respect, help pull you out.
22. We all have problems. It is the nature of life. This is what creativity is about. It is not drawing. It is about solving problems.
23. Solutions is a creative act.
24. We want simple explanations. Simple explanations actually delude us.
25. There are two meanings of failure – We have all failed. We learned from it. The second is failing a test is you weren’t smart enough.
26. There is a real aura of danger around failure.
27. Problems re-occur because there is a fear of failure.
28. We will fail. We need to make it safe to fail.
29. If you get over the embarrassment of failure, you will become more creative.
30. All good artists know they have to operate within constraints.
31. The problem with being unbounded, the constraint forces you to reorder.
32. If you spend too much time on something, you sap the energy from it.
33. In order to make something beautiful, you can’t waste your energy on something not worth seeing.
34. You can talk about trust but trust is something you earn.
35. Stating values is easy to do. Agreeing to them is easy to do. The hard part is asking yourself is why you are not living up to them.
36. Having a building that is executive driven is a terrible way to do things.
37. Allow for inadvertent and accidental encounters.
38. We don’t have very many rules.
39. We select people because they have a passion for something.
40. The real goal of what we’re doing is to have a positive impact on the world.
41. Most people find the notion of being with themselves a scary idea.

It has been an amazing morning.  I am looking forward to the afternoon sessions.  And if you have not already, don’t forget to click the image below for your free resource from INJOY Stewardship Solutions.