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Lessons from Pixar’s Brad Bird on fostering innovation in the workplace.
In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget — but never shows up in a budget — is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Some say the Disney magic is back. Hit TV shows (Hannah Montana), increased revenue from movies (Enchanted), and the acquisition of Pixar are all contributing factors, but new CEO Bob Iger is getting the most credit.
Mr Iger’s management style is said by many to have unlocked Disney’s creativity. “There was already creativity inside Disney, but Bob removed the barriers to it,” says Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of News Corporation, a rival media group. “Michael Eisner was all about his own creativity,” says Stanley Gold, a former Disney board director who led a campaign to oust Mr Eisner in 2004, referring to the way in which the former boss meddled in the detail of Disney’s parks and movies. In contrast, he says, “Bob pushes creative decisions to the people below him.”
Said it before and I’ll say it again: hire good creative people, let them do their thing, and ye shall reap the benefits. And Christ, no wonder Disney was sucking so bad:
Before Mr Iger took over, Disney had a factory-like process for animation in which a business-development team came up with ideas and allocated directors to them.
Just got around to reading Ben McGrath’s New Yorker profile of Lenny Dykstra, the former baseball All-Star who has, somewhat improbably, become rich post-baseball as a business owner and day trader.
Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach (“the best car”) and a Gulfstream (“the best jet”).
But maybe not so improbably…Dykstra has a canny sense for business:
Dykstra chose car washes, he says, because of the automobile-centric culture in California, and because “it was a business that couldn’t be replaced by a computer chip.” He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices-startup, high-mileage, various blends-from his inventory. “You get the shit out of the ground,” he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, “or the shit made in the laboratory that’s the perfect lubricant” (Syntec). “Meaning, it’s either A or B. It’s not about the oil. It’s about the people. They got confused.” He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee (“the good kind”), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores.
One of the characteristics of Dykstra the businessman is his constant use of baseball metaphors and comparisons. Here’s a listing from the article:
The Players Club, in contrast to the television installation, would be “major league,” he explained, and to that end he was assembling an editorial staff of “.300 hitters,” and lining up sponsors to match.
Dykstra’s business card gives an address for the “headquarters” of The Players Club, at 245 Park Avenue, which he describes as “big league-like, top five addresses in the world.”
Next, he took a call from a designer he wanted to hire for the magazine. “You worked for Esquire and In Style,” he said, delivering a pep talk. “That’s called the big leagues. It’s like in baseball. You can’t go above the major leagues. There’s not another league. We’re teeing it up high, dude.”
He quoted from Confucius, Dickens, and Billy Joel, and balanced straight stock picks (“Intel is the N.Y. Yankees of the chipmakers”) with musings about fatherhood and current events, like the war in Iraq, seldom passing up the opportunity to draw extended sports analogies.
“My approach in investing is much the same as my approach to hitting,” he wrote. “I would rather take a walk or single and reach first than shoot for a home run and strike out swinging.”
Dykstra hopes the magazine will help players recognize the importance of marriage and family. He drew three stick figures and named them Tom, Dick, and Harry. Above Tom, he drew a man and a woman-two parents. Dick got a father but no mother, and Harry the reverse. “Do you know the studies and what they’ve proven?” he asked. “You should look that up, dude. Like, bad things. It’s like the one-one count.” The one-one count is another of Dykstra’s baseball metaphors for life, meant to illustrate that some moments, and the choices they bring, are more fateful than others (i.e., the next pitch makes all the difference), or, in this case, that circumstances set in motion during the early stages of development are difficult to overcome later on. If a batter falls behind, one ball and two strikes, he’s in a hole from which, the statistics augur, he will not recover, even if he is Barry Bonds; and if he gets ahead, to two balls and one strike, he wrests control from the pitcher and takes charge of his own destiny. Having two parents puts you in control of life’s count, and enables you to become a .300 hitter.
Here’s an archive of Dykstra’s articles on trading for The Street.
Update: Not so fast, Nails. Seems as though Mr. Dykstra’s business sense was not that good; he recently filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The 46-year-old has no more than $50,000 of assets and between $10 million and $50 million of liabilities, according to a petition filed Tuesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Central District of California.
Dykstra’s filing comes in the wake of more than 20 lawsuits he faces tied to his activities as a financial entrepreneur, including The Players Club, a glossy magazine for athletes he had helped launch in 2008.
Sounds like he was a little over-leveraged. (thx, todd)
The top five reasons why “the customer is always right” is wrong. I like the idea that a company should be as ready to fire bad customers as they are to fire bad employees.
The Navy Federal Credit Union has embraced green architecture, but not for any of the usual reasons.
“You’ve been asking for data,” Ebbesen says to me. “Well, we definitely have energy savings: we’ve had one study that said 25 percent and another that said 40 percent. We pay a lot of attention to the energy model because we want to be efficient, because that leads to less pollution. But that’s not where the savings are. The savings are all related to productivity.” Navy Federal’s wealth (they don’t exactly have trouble getting long-term financing) means that Ebbesen could swallow higher up-front costs if it means a longer life span-and indeed this building is designed for a 40-year cycle (generous for its type). But to be conservative he sticks to 30 years for the following calculation: over that time 92 percent of the organ-ization’s costs goes to employees, 6 percent go to maintenance and operation, and a mere 2 percent are represented by the initial construction investment. “When I show that on a slide,” Ebbesen says, “it’s kind of like, ‘Duh, now are you paying attention?’”
With their new environmentally friendly buildings, Navy Federal has reduced their annual employee turnover rate from 60% to 17%.
You can see it coming…just like in 1999/2000, the failure of all these shitty businesses built on sand will be blamed on an economic downturn and not that companies who make widgets for Facebook are not worth anything close to $500,000,000.
A list of the stocks that have been added to and deleted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1929. Got this from What I Learned Today, which has more information about the Dow (General Electric is the only remaining member of the original 11 Dow stocks).
The Riverdale Garden Restaurant in the Bronx is trying out a novel way of staying in business: they’re asking for their regulars to pledge $5000 in exchange for a year of free dinners.
Michael had put The Riverdale Garden up for sale for the past several months and had a buyer. However, the landlord “killed” the deal. We are now forced to close for good or rely on our best customers to put their money where their mouths are! Quite literally…….. You will be eating your investment. Bottom line is we have 12 couples so far ready to invest $5000 in dining credits, however we need 38 more.
(via eater)
Kevin Kelly has written a thoughtful post about how to make money in a world where the rules are:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
He then lists eight reasons why people pay money for things that could be free, one of which is immediacy:
Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on the opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via rental or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good.
Why take the hands-off approach to management?
Taking someone else’s idea and increasing the quality by 5% occurs at the price of a 50% decrease in their commitment to execution.
More at the Harvard Business blog, which adds:
One of the greatest leaders I know once said, “Achievement was about me. Leadership is about them.”
I’ve never wanted to be a manager…maybe I’m just too selfish?
1. Usually when you order meat or cheese at the deli counter (e.g. “I’ll have a 1/2 pound of pastrami, please”), the person behind the counter tries to get as close as they can to the weight you ordered but it’s often a little over and you’re charged for the overage. I’ve noticed that what they do at Whole Foods is that they only charge you for what you asked for but they give you the little extra for free. So yesterday I asked for a 1/2 pound of roast beef, but it came out to 0.57 when he weighed it. He lifted a bit of the meat off the scale until it read 0.50, printed the ticket, and put the little extra back on the scale. It’s a nice gesture and a good example of using customer service instead of marketing or advertising to give a current customer a warm and fuzzy feeling about the company…and it only costs them 20 cents-worth of roast beef.
2. We went out to eat with some friends the other night but the restaurant was tiny, packed, and didn’t have anywhere to put Ollie’s stroller. So the owner took the stroller and put it in the back of his truck that was parked out in front of the restaurant. (While there, we dined on a cheese plate with, like, 30 to 40 different cheeses on it, some of which were made by the stroller valet himself.)
Very interesting paper on the economics of prostitution by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh.
The transaction-level data we collected suggests that street prostitution yields an average wage of $27 per hour. Given the relatively limited hours that active prostitutes work, this generates less than $20,000 annually for a women working year round in prostitution. While the wage of a prostitute is four times greater than the non-prostitution earnings these women report (approximately $7 per hour), there are tremendous risks associated with life as a prostitute. According to our estimates, a woman working as a prostitute would expect an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex.
The authors also noted that a prostitute was “more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one”. (via marginal revolution)
Really interesting interview with artist/designer Tobias Wong by Rob Walker.
That question hits an important point in my work (and pet peeve), because many people are always interested in how I get work out there, financially. And it’s quite simple. If there’s something I really believe in, I just find a way to make it happen. No daily Starbucks (US$4) or cigs ($8) or dining out ($20), and before you know it you’ve got the money to do something.
Everyone’s pissed at the airlines, even their employees.
Why can we not get better quality snack items for our coach customers? One customer recently compared the generic pretzel nubs we serve to the fish food you buy in a .25 gumball machine at any zoo or park.
I like the openness policy of the US Airways CEO…the “employees are going to talk about it anyway” line is exactly right.
Big feature in the NY Times Magazine about online craftsters, specifically Etsy. Thought that this bit about the downside of the site was especially interesting:
Others grouse about another side effect, price pressure: The competition is so intense on the site that new crafters can’t break out, and some established ones feel they cannot raise their prices. That’s a particularly thorny problem if part of your sales pitch is that you’ve made a thing yourself; a careful artisan can’t respond to lower prices with greater volume.
Artisanship doesn’t scale, apprentices take time to train, and people buy products based on price. How do artisans compete?
A fundamental rule of the internet:
Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don’t overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.
Cartoonist Scott Adams is going to be blogging a lot less on The Dilbert Blog because it’s bad for business.
I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert, and make my flagship product stronger. Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it. And a startling number of readers couldn’t tell when I was serious or kidding, so most of the negative reactions were based on misperceptions.
(thx, hurty elbow)
When Italian police recently arrested Salvatore Lo Piccolo, the suspected head of the Sicilian Mafia, they also found a list of ten commandments that served as a guide for the behavior of Mafia members.
1. No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it.
2. Never look at the wives of friends.
3. Never be seen with cops.
4. Don’t go to pubs and clubs.
5. Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty - even if your wife’s about to give birth.
6. Appointments must absolutely be respected.
7. Wives must be treated with respect.
8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.
9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.
10. People who can’t be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values.
I smell a future bestseller: Leadership Secrets of the Cosa Nostra…it’s the new 48 Laws of Power.
Update: There are already business books inspired by the Mafia: The Mafia Manager: A Guide to the Corporate Machiavelli and Tony Soprano on Management: Leadership Lessons Inspired By America’s Favorite Mobster for a start. (thx, gleb)
A few days ago, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell noted that he’s almost finished with his third book. I’ve learned that the subject of this book is the future of the workplace with subtopics of education and genius. (That topic dovetails nicely with business consulting/speaking, no?) As with his previous books, hints of what the book will cover appear in his recent stories and interviews. Most relevant is an October interview with Gladwell in The Globe and Mail on “our working future”.
We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it’s not that we’re going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We’re going to have to graduate more people from high school who’ve done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it.
Other recent and not-so-recent writings and talks by Gladwell on working, education, and genius include:
- his talk on genius from the 2007 New Yorker Conference
- The Risk Pool - What’s behind Ireland’s economic miracle and G.M.’s financial crisis? (more, more)
- The Myth of Prodigy and Why It Matters
- Getting In - The social logic of Ivy League admissions
- Brain Candy - Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up?
- Gladwell’s personal work space
- Making the Grade
- The Talent Myth - Are smart people overrated?
- The Social Life of Paper - Looking for method in the mess
- The Bakeoff - Project Delta aims to create the perfect cookie
- Designs For Working - Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village
- The New-Boy Network - What do job interviews really tell us?
What will air travel in the US look like in ten years? Five industry insiders respond.
Online shoe seller Zappos demonstrates how to provide customer service on a human level:
I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself. I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy.
And that’s not even the best part…read down to the end. (via 37signals)
In the ongoing battle between the iTunes Music Store and Amazon’s MP3 store, Amazon is giving a 20% referral fee to their associates for each song sold through the end of the year. Wow. That’s $1.80 on a $8.99 album…I wonder if Amazon’s selling these for below cost (like they did with Harry Potter.) (via nelson)
Marginal Revolution and CNN (and New York magazine and Reddit and etc.) asked their respective readers: how much did you pay for In Rainbows, Radiohead’s new album which is only available as a pay-what-you-want download. I paid around £8.50 (~ US$17), which splits the difference between a typical album price in the UK and the US. (Actually, what I did was download it from elsewhere because Radiohead’s online store was down yesterday morning and then went back to pay for it just now.)
As dentists push their fees higher and make more money on high-end services like cosmetic dentistry, a growing number of people cannot afford treatment for even minor work like fillings. And even though the dentists won’t treat those patients who can’t pay, the ADA has “fought efforts to use dental hygienists and other non-dentists to provide basic care to people who do not have access to dentists”.
“Most dentists consider themselves to be in the business of dentistry rather than the practice of dentistry,” said Dr. David A. Nash, a professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Kentucky. “I’m a cynic about my profession, but the data are there. It’s embarrassing.
A Delhi man is doing a booming business in virtual airplane flights. Indians who have never been on an airplane before come from miles around and, for a small fee, experience the interior of an Airbus 300 and meal service.
As on an ordinary aircraft, customers buckle themselves in and watch a safety demonstration. But when they look out of the windows, the landscape never changes. Even if “Captain” Gupta wanted to get off the ground, the plane would not go far: it only has one wing and a large part of the tail is missing.
(thx, catherine)
The last we heard from Malcolm Gladwell, he wrote about Enron and information overload, got hammered by his blog audience about it, and then stopped blogging and wrote nothing more for the New Yorker for the next 10 months. Rumor is that he’s busy working on a new book, not shellshocked from the feedback. Anyway, the Globe and Mail interviewed Gladwell the other day about the “working future”.
You’re going to have to create internal structures that will help people grow into positions; that’s really where the real opportunity is going to be. That’s what we’re going to have to do. That means being more patient with people, being willing to experiment with people, and being willing to nurture people. Those are three things we’re reluctant to do at the moment.
A 13-step guide for buying a car while controlling the sale and the price.
It works only if you truly are willing to walk away…and then refuse to bend when they try to put you off or change the terms. Stay civil, do not let any emotion in. You are on a mission, Marine!
Fantastic advice. My dad is a skilled car buyer and on one particular occasion, spend two grueling hours dinkering with a used car saleman over a junky but good-running truck. He walked out at least twice and kept escalating up to the manager before getting the price down from $2300 to around $400.
A few cost-cutting recommendations for restaurants, focusing on discontinuing “several practices that have been introduced to impress rather than to deliver value”.
I also think that the array of amuse-bouches, breads and petits fours that an ambitious restaurant now makes an integral part of the meal has got completely out of hand.
(via bruni)
A list of 15 of the top small workplaces of 2007. If you run a small company, there are lot of good examples to follow here.
Dr. Jay Parkinson M.D. emailed in to tell me about his new medical practice in Williamsburg. He’s got no office (housecalls only), takes appointment requests via SMS, email, or IM, handles some follow-ups over video chat, and specializes in the 18-40 age group without traditional health insurance. The goal, states Parkinson, is to “mix the service of an old-time, small town doctor with the latest technology to keep you and your bank account healthy”.
To give you an idea of how the practice operates, here’s a recap of his first day on the job:
Yesterday went quite well and I was very happy with the amount of money I kept out of the hands of companies that attempt to take advantage of how difficult it is to find prices for medications and healthcare services. For example, the first patient I saw needed a medication that Walgreens offered for $60. I called my tried and true Williamsburg mom-and-pop pharmacy only a few blocks from Walgreens and talked to Arthur the Pharmacist who said he sells it for $15. “Thanks Arthur.” “No thank you Jay.” The way it should be done.
My second patient was getting a certain medication for years every month by mail from Walgreens that costs $63 per month. I knew where she could get the same medication for $42 a month. I just saved her $252 per year. After she made her $200 down payment on my services via PayPal, her monthly fee for my services is now only $17 a month. But I just saved her $21 a month on her monthly mail order medication. She’s essentially getting the rest of the year of my services for free. Not bad.
Sounds fantastic. If only every doctor was this much of an advocate for his patients.
P.S. Parkinson also happens to be a heck of a photographer (@ Flickr). Some photos NSFW. I linked to this interview about his photography between him and Joerg Colberg last May.
Update: The WSJ Health blog has a short interview with Parkinson, followed by a lengthy comment thread.
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