Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, reflects on building a sustainable creative culture, working with Steve Jobs for 26 years, and the subtle mechanisms that allow groups of talented people to do their best work together.
Most companies claim they want honest feedback and insight, but in practice, people around leaders tell them what they want to hear, and politics and career concerns get in the way of truth.
Catmull’s central insight is that getting to real insight requires deliberately designed mechanisms and constant attention to group dynamics, not just good intentions.
The Brain Trust: A Mechanism For Honest Problem-Solving
The Brain Trust was Pixar’s signature feedback mechanism: a small group of experienced directors and writers who would screen a film in progress and give candid notes to the filmmaking team.
The key rule: the discussion is always about the problem, never about who is right. Ego must leave the room.
The original group formed organically during Toy Story, where a handful of people had intense, fearless discussions focused purely on solving problems, with no fear of embarrassment.
As Pixar grew, Andrew Stanton and others formalized the Brain Trust to replace the role Tom Schumacher at Disney had played—an outside voice who could jar the team out of fragile assumptions.
The Brain Trust wasn’t truly “outside” since everyone worked in the same building, but it functioned as a powerful problem-solving group rather than an outside check.
People with real or perceived power are asked to stay quiet for the first 10–15 minutes so they don’t set the tone and derail open discussion.
Why Steve Jobs Was Banned From The Brain Trust
Steve Jobs was explicitly kept out of Brain Trust meetings because his voice was so powerful and articulate that it would dominate the room regardless of when he spoke.
Catmull told Steve the dynamics wouldn’t work if he attended, and Steve understood and accepted this.
Instead, Steve served as the outside force the Brain Trust couldn’t be: he saw films fresh, at long intervals, and gave notes with such clarity and force that directors heard things they’d been told before but hadn’t truly absorbed.
Catmull notes that everything Steve said in these meetings had already been said by someone else in a Brain Trust session—but because Steve was Steve, it broke through.
Steve would call Catmull on the morning of screenings to get a read on how things were going, but Catmull would never tell him what to think, preserving Steve’s fresh perspective.
Steve Jobs’s Approach To Insight And Disagreement
Steve fired two Pixar board members during Pixar’s decade as a public company because they never disagreed with him—he believed they brought no value if they wouldn’t push back.
Board meetings were loud, lively, and full of genuine disagreement, and Steve loved it.
Catmull and Steve disagreed frequently. Their process: they’d have long discussions, and roughly a third of the time Catmull would realize Steve was right, a third Steve would realize Catmull was right, and a third Catmull just did what he wanted, and Steve was fine with it because they had talked it through.
Steve understood intuitively that there’s no upside in being wrong—once he grasped something, he changed quickly.
Your Job Is To Manage The Dynamics
Catmull describes his primary role at Pixar as observing and managing group dynamics, not making movies.
When the Brain Trust works well, “magic” happens—ego leaves the room, people enter a state of flow, and the group solves problems at a level no individual could.
When things go off the rails, he reconvenes smaller groups where people are past the psychological barriers and can focus on the problem.
This is a long-term strategy. Getting at underlying factors requires peeling back layers rather than making quick decisions based on surface information.
Betting The Company On Toy Story
When Pixar was in dire financial straits, Steve Jobs proposed betting everything on Toy Story and going public the same week the film opened.
His logic: after Toy Story proved Pixar could make a hit, they’d have created Michael Eisner’s worst nightmare—a competitor partly funded by Disney. Eisner would be forced to renegotiate, and Pixar would need money to come in as equal partners, hence the IPO.
Catmull thought it was crazy, but Steve was exactly right. The IPO funded Pixar’s leverage, and the deal was renegotiated into a five-picture partnership where sequels didn’t count as original films.
The Sequel Problem And The Breakdown With Disney
Disney initially wanted Toy Story 2 to go direct-to-video, treating sequels as lesser products. Pixar pushed for theatrical release, and it became the first successful animated theatrical sequel, changing the industry’s assumptions.
By Toy Story 3, Steve argued the old contract terms were obsolete—Pixar was now a public company making first-rate theatrical films. Michael Eisner stuck with the letter of the agreement.
Eisner’s refusal strained the relationship. Disney began developing its own version of Toy Story 3, which Catmull describes as akin to someone else raising your child.
Steve, who by then knew he had cancer and wanted to ensure Pixar was secure, began talking to other studios about distribution.
Bob Iger’s “Crappy Hand”
When Bob Iger was named Disney CEO, his first call after his daughter was to Steve Jobs. He started the conversation by saying, “I’ve got a crappy hand. Can we talk?”—an act of honesty that immediately earned Steve’s trust.
Iger told Steve that Disney Animation wasn’t nearly fixed, despite what others claimed, and that the only people who knew how to run animation were at Pixar.
Iger’s solution: buy Pixar. The board resisted, but Iger pushed through, beginning a close partnership with Steve that lasted the rest of Steve’s life.
Why Disney Never Asked What Pixar Was Doing
For roughly 15 years, Disney had the contractual right to see everything Pixar did. Even as Pixar rose and Disney declined, nobody from Disney ever asked what Pixar was doing differently.
Catmull’s theory: Disney’s leadership formed a shallow first conclusion—that Pixar’s success was due to some magic combination of John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and Steve Jobs—and stopped thinking. They assumed it couldn’t be copied.
The real answer was cultural and structural: how Pixar built teams, solved problems, and maintained quality. There were no secrets; nobody cared to look.
When Iger visited Pixar alone—no entourage, no assistants—he spent a day seeing how they worked and immediately concluded Disney had to acquire the company.
Take The Hard Problem
Catmull’s philosophy: if a project is easy, the result is likely derivative and mediocre. Hard problems force you to be different, and that difficulty is what makes the result interesting.
Example: “A rat that wants to cook” sounds like a terrible pitch, but because it was a hard problem to solve, it became Ratatouille—a film nobody would copy and that stood apart.
Under Catmull’s leadership, Pixar completed 21 of the 22 films they started. The one exception was reworked by Pete Docter into Inside Out after he argued his idea was stronger.
The Director Can’t Lose The Team
Pixar’s guiding principle for leadership changes: a director can make many mistakes, but they cannot lose the team’s faith. If the team loses confidence, a change is made.
This happened on Toy Story 2, when John Lasseter took over and established the mantra “quality is the best business plan.”
Catmull never used a formal mission statement because he believed the organization should always be questioning what it’s doing, not retreating to a fixed answer.
What Walt Disney Taught Him
As a child, Catmull was captivated by Walt Disney’s television show and Disneyland. As an adult, he recognized that Walt’s core belief was that technology invigorated storytelling.
Walt adopted every new technology available—sound, color, blue screen matting, sodium matting, Xerox copying for animation cels—and pushed the art form forward.
After Walt died, the company lost that technological DNA. Roy Disney Jr., Walt’s nephew, recognized this and was the one who initiated the contact with Pixar to bring technology back into Disney Animation.
George Lucas Wanted The Whole Industry Healthy
George Lucas founded Industrial Light & Magic because he couldn’t buy the technology he wanted. ILM solved problems like motion blur (strobing) in ways that made Star Wars look unlike any previous special effects film.
Lucas wasn’t a technologist, but he knew technology was changing rapidly and hired smart people to stay at the frontier.
Unlike many competitors, Lucas wanted the entire film industry to be healthy. He understood that when you don’t have a film in theaters, you benefit from other people making great movies that bring audiences to cinemas.
Catmull recalls Lucas and Spielberg celebrating each other’s opening-day successes—Star Wars and Jaws—because both benefited from a thriving industry.
Lucas published everything his group developed and actively shared techniques with other filmmakers, including Scorsese and Spielberg, who would visit to see what was being built.
Refusing To Let Anyone Feel Second Class
At many companies Catmull visited, there was an unspoken first-class/second-class divide between the people seen as pivotal and everyone else. Pixar was determined to avoid this.
From the start, artists, animators, and technical people were treated as peers. The goal was never to have technology in service of art or art in service of technology—everyone was there to make great movies together.
Despite this intention, the problem arose three times in Pixar’s history. One example: new hires saw the early team (who had been irreverent and fun) now going home to their families at night, and emulated that more conservative behavior. Meanwhile, the original team wondered why the new people had no sense of fun. Neither group said anything until Catmull recognized the subtle signals.
The solution wasn’t a top-down edict to “have more fun.” Catmull quietly asked instigators to organize activities, sending a signal that the tent was wide and irreverent behavior was still welcome.
He deliberately avoided making rules for every mistake, because too many rules make people afraid to act without permission. The goal was a culture where people felt free to do things on their own.
The Truck In The Building
One weekend, the animation group disassembled a truck and brought it into their workspace. It’s still there years later.
Catmull sees this kind of self-organized, bottom-up creativity as a sign of health. Even after his retirement, he visited and found the team still remodeling and redecorating their spaces—keeping the culture alive as part of their legacy.
Half Right, Half Wrong
Catmull’s personal management philosophy: he assumes he’s wrong about half the time. The key is catching mistakes early rather than defending them.
He noticed that many successful founders he observed in Silicon Valley would rise to fame, make obvious mistakes, and crash. His new mission after Toy Story’s success was to build a culture that could outlast him and avoid those patterns.
He wrestled with the question “how much of this success was me?” and concluded that trying to answer it was an act of separation that missed the point—nothing would have happened without many people coming together.
