DOMOPALOOZA 2017: ATTITUDE CAN TURN FAILURE INTO SUCCESS, SAYS PIXAR CHIEF.

• Author: Christensen, Lisa
• Position: Around Utah

Salt Lake City -- There are two kinds of failure, said Pixar president Ed Catmull: one that sets a person back, and one that helps them grow. The trouble is that it's hard to tell the difference between the two of them--and the mindset a person has undergoing them is vital.

"There's a palpable aura of real danger in failure. This meaning is deeply engrained in us and we often mix the two together. It's often difficult for most people to separate these meanings from each other, and we must be conscious of the impact of the second meaning on ourselves and others," he said.

Catmull, speaking at DOMO's annual user conference, Domopalooza 2017, said even at Pixar, one of the most successful movie-making entities in history, every film save one has been such a failure in its beginning stages that it has had to be restarted two or three times. Up, for example, had three failed iterations before the creative team came up with the version that hit theaters and has become a beloved story for many. To a certain degree, that kind of initial failure is to be expected as a part of the creative process to make a well-crafted finished product, though it can be tricky to keep the ideas that work safe from being cut with the ones that don't.

"We made what was a fantastic movie, but there was nothing about this path that was predictable. New ideas are fragile and they have to be protected, and they can often go off track. So we had to protect them even as we were going through this process, even though we weren't sure they would work," said Catmull, a University of Utah graduate.

When Disney bought Pixar in 2006, the latter was a shot in the arm for the former's animation studio, which had been suffering through a lengthy slide. Catmull said one of Pixar's jobs was to help spread its successful culture to the Disney departments. Workers and leaders of both halves quickly agreed on what needed to be changed and what everyone needed to work together to do, he said, but the actual adoption thereof took much longer.

"We could outline our principles in four hours and everybody nodded their heads in agreement. Didn't matter. It took four years for that mindset to become engrained in them," he said. "It is always easy to state your values and agree on them; the hard part is living them."

It can be hard living with failure, too, Catmull said. Directors who made a movie that flopped would often want to quit, he said, and many did. But those who stayed and learned from...