I’m in San Francisco this week filming SmartBytes for Athenaonline.com, speaking at ALI’s social media conference, doing a television interview and meeting John Walker, a producer at Pixar Animation. John was the producer of “The Incredibles” and pre-Pixar he produced “The Iron Giant.” John’s the business guy in a partnership with director Brad Bird.

Presently, I’m working on an article about Pixar Animation and why it has been so successful. My thesis is that Pixar has a Connection Culture that provides a competitive advantage. I also suspect that there is so much pressure to produce results that the risk to Pixar is that it focuses on task excellence alone to the detriment of its Connection Culture. To sustain its success, Pixar must keep its eye on maintaining both task excellence and a Connection Culture that produces relationship excellence.  When organizations fail to maintain relationship excellence it ultimately sabotages task excellence because disconnected workers don’t give their best efforts to their work and stop communicating (which leads to ill-informed decisions.)

I’m pulling for Pixar and believe as long as it stays keenly aware of this risk and actively maintains a Connection Culture, it will continue to be the shining star in the dismal motion picture production industry.