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If left up to the editors, no new tool would ever be designed and no improvements would be possible. They saw no advantage to change and couldn't imagine how using a computer would make their work easier or better. But if we designed the new system in a vacuum, moving ahead without the editors' input, we would end up with a tool that didn't address their needs. Being confident about the value of our innovation was not enough. We needed buy-in from the community we were trying to serve. Without it, we were forced to abandon our plans.

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This paragraph starts with a link.In Hollywood, studio executives typically communicate their criticisms of an early cut of a film by giving extensive “notes” to the director. The movie will be screened and suggestions will be typed up and delivered a few days later. The problem is, directors don’t want the notes, because they are usually coming from people who aren’t filmmakers and are seen as ignorant and interfering. There is a built-in tension, then, between directors and the studios that employ them; to put it in stark terms, the studios are paying the bills and want the films to be commercially successful, while the directors want to preserve their artistic vision. I should add that some notes offered by studio executives are quite astute—people outside of the production can often see more clearly. But when you add oft-held resentments about input from “non-creative” people to how difficult it is to be a director in the first place—presiding over a project that, as I’ve said, sucks for months before it gets good—this tension makes it difficult to bridge the divide between art and commerce.

Simply put, managing was hard. No one took me aside to give me tips. The books I read that promised insight on the topic were mostly devoid of content. So I looked to George to see how he did it. I saw that his way seemed to reflect some of the philosophy he had put into Yoda. Just as Yoda said things like, Do, or do not. There is no try, George had a fondness for folksy analogies that sought to describe, neatly, the mess of life. He would compare the often arduous process of developing his 4,700-acre Skywalker Ranch compound (a minicity of residences and production facilities) to a ship going down river that had been cut in half and whose captain had been thrown overboard. We're still going to get there, he would say. Grab the paddles andlet's keep going!

Whether evoking wagons or ships, George thought in terms of a long view; he believed in the future and his ability to shape it. The story has been told and retold about how, as a young filmmaker, in the wake of American Graffiti's success, he was advised to demand a higher salary on his next movie, Star Wars. That would be the expected move in Hollywood: Bump up your quote. Not for George, though. He skipped the raise altogether and asked instead to retain ownership of licensing and merchandising rights to Star Wars. The studio that was distributing the film, 20th Century Fox, readily agreed to his request, thinking it was not giving up much. George would prove them wrong, setting the stage for major changes in the industry he loved. He bet on himself and won.

Lucasfilm, in those post “ Star Wars days, was a magnet for big names. Famous directors, from Steven Spielberg to Martin Scorsese, were always stopping by to see what we were working on and what new effects or innovations they might use in their films. But more than the drop-ins from A-listers, the visit that would stick with me most was the group of Disney animators who came for a tour just after Valentine's Day, 1983. As I showed them around, I noted that one of them a kid in baggy jeans named John seemed particularly excited about what we were up to. In fact, the first thing I noticed was his curiosity. When I showed everyone a computer-animated image that we were so proud of we'd given it a name The Road to Point Reyes he just stood there, transfixed. I told him we'd developed the image of a gently curving road overlooking the Pacific Ocean using a software program we'd developed called Reyes (for Renders Everything You Ever Saw), and the pun was intended: Point Reyes, California, is a seaside village on Route 1, not far from Lucasfilm. Reyes represented the cutting edge of computer graphics at the time. And it bowled this John guy over.

Soon, I learned why. He had an idea, he told me, for a film called The Brave Little Toaster about a toaster, a blanket, a lamp, a radio, and a vacuum cleaner who journey to the city to find their master after being abandoned in their cabin in the woods. He told me that his film, which he was about to pitch to his bosses at Disney Animation, would be the first to place hand-drawn characters inside computer-generated backgrounds, much like the one I'd just shown him. He wanted to know if we could work together to make this happen.

That animator was John Lasseter. Unbeknownst to me, soon after our meeting at Lucasfilm, he would lose his job at Disney. Apparently, his supervisors felt that The Brave Little Toaster was like him a little too avant-garde. They listened to his pitch and, immediately afterward, fired him. A few months later, I ran into John again on the Queen Mary, of all places. The historic Long Beach hotel, which also happens to be a docked ocean liner, was the site of the annual Pratt Institute Symposium on Computer Graphics. Not knowing of his newly unemployed status, I asked if there was any way he could come up to Lucasfilm and help us make our first short film. He said yes without hesitation. I remember thinking it was almost as if Professor Sutherland's exchange program idea was finally getting its moment. To have a Disney animator on our team, even temporarily, would be a huge leap forward. For the first time, a true storyteller would be joining our ranks.

John was a born dreamer. As a boy, he lived mostly in his head and in the tree houses and tunnels and spaceships he drew in his sketchbook. His dad was the parts manager at the local Chevrolet dealership in Whittier, California instilling in John a lifelong obsession with cars and his mom was a high school art teacher. Like me, John remembers discovering that there were people who made animation for a living and thinking he'd found his place in the world. For him, as for me, that realization was Disney-related; it came when he stumbled upon a well-worn copy of The Art of Animation, Bob Thomas's history of the Disney Studios, in his high school library. By the time I met John, he was as connected to Walt Disney as any twenty-six-year-old on earth. He had graduated from CalArts, the legendary art school founded by Walt, where he'd learned from some of the greatest artists of Disney's Golden Age; he'd worked as a river guide on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland; and he'd won a Student Academy Award in 1979 for his short film The Lady and the Lamp an homage to Disney's Lady and the Tramp whose main character, a white desk lamp, would later evolve into our Pixar logo.

This was a success in itself, but it came with an added and unexpected benefit: The act of thinking about the problem and responding to it was invigorating and rewarding. We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions. Questions like: If we had done some things right to achieve success, how could we ensure that we understood what those things were? Could we replicate them on our next projects? Perhaps as important, was replication of success even the right thing to do? How many serious, potentially disastrous problems were lurking just out of sight and threatening to undo us? What, if anything, could we do to bring them to light? How much of our success was luck? What would happen to our egos if we continued to succeed? Would they grow so large they could hurt us, and if so, what could we do to address that overconfidence? What dynamics would arise now that we were bringing new people into a successful enterprise as opposed to a struggling startup?

What had drawn me to science, all those years ago, was the search for understanding. Human interaction is far more complex than relativity or string theory, of course, but that only made it more interesting and important; it constantly challenged my presumptions. As we made more movies, I would learn that some of my beliefs about why and how Pixar had been successful were wrong. But one thing could not have been more plain: Figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture—one that didn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence, communication, originality, and self-assessment but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became—wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. And one that I wanted to do.

As I saw it, our mandate was to foster a culture that would seek to keep our sightlines clear, even as we accepted that we were often trying to engage with and fix what we could not see. My hope was to make this culture so vigorous that it would survive when Pixar’s founding members were long gone, enabling the company to continue producing original films that made money, yes, but also contributed positively to the world. That sounds like a lofty goal, but it was there for all of us from the beginning. We were blessed with a remarkable group of employees who valued change, risk, and the unknown and who wanted to rethink how we create. How could we enable the talents of these people, keep them happy, and not let the inevitable complexities that come with any collaborative endeavor undo us along the way? That was the job I assigned myself—and the one that still animates me to this day.

During the Lucasfilm years, I definitely had my periods of feeling overwhelmed as a manager, periods when I wondered about my own abilities and asked myself if I should try to adopt a more forceful, alpha male management style. I'd put my version of hierarchy in place by delegating to other managers, but I was also part of a chain of command in the greater Lucasfilm empire. I remember going home at night, exhausted, feeling like I was balancing on the backs of a herd of horses only some of the horses were thoroughbreds, some were completely wild, and some were ponies who were struggling to keep up. I found it hard enough to hold on, let alone steer.