#124: Unlocking Excellence
Good morning
You’ll remember that earlier this year I dived into the basics of running effective organisations. I did so because we are all confronting profound uncertainty. And, in uncertainty, the most powerful strategy is to build resilience, to ensure that we are our best. The excellence insulates us, it provides protection.
As the year progressed, the uncertainty intensified. This cartoon captures what most of us are feeling. And so today, we return to the theme of unlocking excellence.
/strategy
I recently finished Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc. Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, and the book shares his insights on leading a creative business. I will return to it in detail in a future letter, as it is indispensable inspiration for any business leader.
Today we’re focused on a narrow period of time, in early 2013, when Pixar tackled three interlocking challenges that threatened them. External economic conditions were adverse, they needed to reduce costs by 10%, and a core part of their culture – “good ideas can come from anywhere, so everyone must feel empowered to speak up” – was being weakened by fear of failure. At the moment, the first two apply to all of us. Most of us will confront the third at some point in our leadership life.
The Pixar executive team decided that the best way to unlock excellence was to ask the entire company (about 1,200 people) for their ideas. After all, they were closest to the opportunities for improvement.
One of Catmull’s core beliefs is “If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill-prepared to lead.”
At this point, the process often goes wrong for most organisations. They set up suggestion portals or do a whirl of focus groups, but nothing gets done.
Pixar was intentional, systematic, and action-oriented from the get-go.
They chose a day two months in the future, on which the whole business would spend the day generating ideas and actions. That’s critical – they committed. It wasn’t an open-ended idea; it was a point in time that they declared. Commitments create action.
Then, they told everyone it was happening. Communication solidifies commitment.
Tom Porter, Pixar’s Head of Production, led the process. He said “This is not a call for working faster or doing more overtime or making do with fewer people. This is about making three films every two years with roughly the same number of people we’ve got today.” And, with that, the frame was set.
Porter fueled the process by asking more pointed questions; “what innovations helped these productions meet their budget goals? What are some of the specific things we differently?” He kept everyone focused on looking for actions that would make a difference.
In the end, his team received 4,000 e-mails. They discarded those that were just grumbling but kept even obscure ideas in case they might lead somewhere. Not all the e-mails were immediately action-oriented, some were suggestions about topics to explore. Porter reflects that the criterion for selection was “Can you imagine 20 people talking about this topic for an hour?”
Ultimately, they had 120 topics. Then, they ran a survey to establish who was interested in discussing what topics.
Some topics (like reducing costs by not ten but thirty per cent!!!) had so many people interested that they set up multiple discussion groups on the same theme.
In parallel, they trained Pixar’s production managers in facilitation skills so that they could run the groups. In this way they ensured that the day’s knowledge was embedded in the business’s collective intelligence.
On the day, everyone first went into departmental meetings where they shared ideas about what they could do better in their domain. Catmull reflects that it was a warm-up for the day, getting people into the idea of sharing ideas.
Then, they moved into the discussion groups with themes like “Returning to a ‘Good Ideas Come from Anywhere’ Culture”, “Developing and Appreciating a Great Workplace”, and “Helping Directors Understand Costs in Story.” These groups had people from all over the business. An unexpected immediate dividend was deeper relationships and cooperation.
At the end of the discussion, each participant was asked questions like “What are the next steps required to make this reality?” and “What are the drawbacks?” They kept the action orientation alive throughout, and they were careful not to look for one magical solution.
Catmull notes that in addition to bigger changes, the process yielded smaller procedural changes. Changes that individually may have seemed insignificant, but together had a quantum effect on Pixar’s performance.
He reflects that “Notes Day wasn’t an end point but a beginning – a way of making room for our employees to step forward and think about their role in our company’s future. I said before that problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult.”
This is a powerful reminder. It is easy to list the problems we encounter in our businesses and lives. The leadership challenge is to find the source and implement solutions.
(Thank you to my clients who’ve been prompting my thoughts about operational excellence.)
/self
In May last year, I told you about Aqeela Davids.
She was a trainee accountant who had failed her board exam. Her LinkedIn post asked for, “Any advice from anybody that failed first time and passed thereafter will be highly appreciated.” The post received 380 comments.
A few weeks ago, I re-read that letter and wondered where she was in her journey. I was thrilled to discover that she had passed her exams and as of March 2022 is a member of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants. You can add to the congratulations here.
When she got her results she wrote, “To those that didn’t make it – keep your head up. Surround yourself with individuals who will uplift you and remind you that you do have what it takes. You are all in my prayers, and I’m confident that you will smash it next month.”
Davids reminds us that failure is often part of our journey and that unlocking excellence requires persistence, confidence, and community.
/soul
On Friday night we attended Bertha House’s launch of their 2s and 4s concert series. Bertha House is a space for activists to connect and collaborate.
Any change requires imagination. Music, like art, like fiction, gives us new ways of seeing, understanding, and connecting – the very basis of a new beginning.
Neo Muyanga opened the series. Muyanga is a musician of multis – multi-instrumentalist, multi-awarded, multi-dimensional – crossing easily from pop to opera to the songs of struggle.
It was the latter that informed Friday’s performance. In the midst of the seriousness, there were sparkles of the trickster gods – Pan, Anansi – those spirits whose mischievousness upend convention, and so a playful segue into Jackson Brown’s Givin Up Food for Funk, was an entrée into Hugh Masekela’s heartbreaking Stimela. Sometimes its best to fight with a smile on your lips. It is always good to remember that the fight is so that we are free to have fun.
He noted wryly that many songs of struggle are very old, and that we have grappled with these themes for a long time.
Woven into his performance were tracks from Miriam Makeba’s Grammy-award-winning An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba.
She won it in 1966, becoming the first African musician to do so.
Makeba was in exile. As was O.R. Tambo and hundreds of others. Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, and many more were imprisoned for life. Makeba ensured that the world saw apartheid as it truly was. She kept the anger of hope alive.
It includes the song, Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd!, written by activist Vuyisile Mini. Mini sang that song as he walked to his execution on the gallows of Pretoria Central Prison. This New Frame article by Charles Leonard is a beautiful retelling of Mini’s story.
In putting it, and other songs, like Cannon, onto a global stage Makeba protected the dying embers of hope, she made it possible for a new generation to imagine possibility and take action.
In the face of the unknown, it requires courage, sometimes even faith, to keep being excellent.
Muyanga and Makeba remind us that even in the darkest days our intentional actions can create new possibilities.
It took another twenty-four years before Nelson Mandela was freed, but there is no doubt that Makeba’s excellence, was an integral part of that moment.
We may not always be able to see a clear path between our actions and the outcomes, but that there is one, there is no doubt.
(Thank you to historian and yogi Ruqayya Bryce who told me about this event.)
I wish you a week of excellence. Please share this letter with your community. If you would like to subscribe, you can do so here.
Best wishes
Karl
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