Reading this guy's
book now and I highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LXw2PYvdN8
As we struggled to get Pixar off the ground, Deming's work was like a beacon that lit my way. I was fascinated by the fact that, for years, so many American business leaders had been unable to even conceive of the wisdom of this thinking. It wasn't that they were rejecting Deming's ideas as much as they were utterly blind to them. Their certainty about their existing systems had rendered them unable to see. They'd been on top for a while, after all. Why did they need to change their ways?
It would be decades before Deming's ideas took hold here. In fact, it wasn't until the 1980s when a few companies in Silicon Valley, such as HP and AAPL, began to incorporate them. But Deming's work would make a huge impression on me and help frame my approach to managing Pixar going forward. While Tootay was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don't have to ask permission to take responsibility.
A few years ago, when Toyota stumbled - initially failing to acknowledge serious problems with their braking systems, which led to a rare public embarrassment -
I remember being struck that a company as smart as Toyota could act in a way that ran so counter to one of its deepest cultural values. Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments.
IN the 80s, while we were building Pix, Steve was spending most of his time trying to establish PeST, the personal computer co he'd started after being forced out of AAPL. He came to the Pix offices only once a year - so rarely, in fact, that we had to give him directions each time. But I was a regular visitor to PeST. Ever few weeks, I'd head down to Steve's office in Redwood City to brief him on our progress. I didn't relish the meetings, to be honest, because they were often frustrating. As we struggled to figure out how to make Pix profitable, we needed frequent infusions of Steve's money to stay afloat. He often tried to put conditions on the money, which was understandable but also complicated because the conditions he imposed - whether they involved marketing or engineering new products - didn't always correspond to our realities.
No time? Here's someone trying to make money off a
summary :)
Toyota Culture : Another pending
read
