Michael Lee Stallard

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.

Connection Cultures have three elements: Vision, Value and Voice.  When people feel connected to the organization’s identity, to their colleagues and to their day-to-day tasks, they thrive (and so does their organization). Here’s a link to an article in Harvard Business Review by Pixar CEO Ed Catmull about how Pixar fosters creativity. It should come as no surprise that Voice is an integral part of Pixar’s culture.  With a string of hits that are the envy of the entertainment industry, I think it’s fair to say Pixar is thriving.  You might even conclude, they’re “Incredible!”

To learn more about Connection Cultures and how they increase employee engagement, productivity and innovation, download “The Connection Culture Manifesto“at changethis.com. 

Thus far it appears that the Disney acquisition of Pixar has worked well.  Brooks Barnes wrote an excellent article about it in today’s The New York Times entitled, “Disney and Pixar - The Power of the Prenup. “There is an insightful quote in the article made by Disney’s CEO Bob Iger. He says “There is an assumption in the corporate world that you need to integrate swiftly…my philosophy is exactly the opposite. You need to be respectful and patient.” Iger’s view reflects his recognition of one of the Post-Merger Traps that companies frequently fall into. We call it the “Urgency Trap.” Read more »