2006 State Of The Business Incubation Industry Pdf Free. Within the overall objective of improving the delivery of small business. A business incubator in.

• State Of The Business Presentation

Executive Summary Reprint: R0809D Many people believe that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than good people. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, couldn’t disagree more. That notion, he says, is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in developing an original product. And it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to manage the large risks inherent in producing breakthroughs. In filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many inherently unforeseeable problems.

The trick to fostering collective creativity, Catmull says, is threefold: Place the creative authority for product development firmly in the hands of the project leaders (as opposed to corporate executives); build a culture and processes that encourage people to share their work-in-progress and support one another as peers; and dismantle the natural barriers that divide disciplines. Mindful of the rise and fall of so many tech companies, Catmull has also sought ways to continually challenge Pixar’s assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy its culture. Clear values, constant communication, routine postmortems, and the regular injection of outsiders who will challenge the status quo are necessary but not enough to stay on the rails. Strong leadership is essential to make sure people don’t pay lip service to those standards. For example, Catmull comes to the orientation sessions for all new hires, where he talks about the mistakes Pixar has made so people don’t assume that just because the company is successful, everything it does is right.

A robot falls in love in a post-apocalyptic world. A French rat sets out to become a chef. A suburban family of superheroes defeats a power-hungry villain. Unexpected ideas, all—yet Pixar Animation Studios is turning these and other novel ideas into blockbuster films. As Catmull explains, Pixar’s leaders have discovered potent practices for structuring and operating a creative organization. For example, they give writers, artists, and other “creatives” enormous leeway to make decisions. They make it safe for people to share unfinished work with peers, who provide candid feedback.

And they conduct project post-mortems in ways that extract the most valuable lessons for mitigating risk on subsequent projects. The effort has paid off. Pixar’s has racked up a unique track record of success: It’s the leading pioneer in computer animation. It has never had to buy scripts or movie ideas from outside. And since 1995, it has released seven films—all of which became huge hits. The Idea in Practice Catmull suggests these principles for managing your creative organization: Empower your creatives.

Give your creative people control over every stage of idea development. Example: At most studios, a specialized development department generates new movie ideas. Pixar assembles cross-company teams for this purpose. Teams comprise directors, writers, artists, and storyboard people who originate and refine ideas until they have potential to become great films.

The development department’s job? Find people who’ll work effectively together. Ensure healthy social dynamics in the team. Help the team solve problems. Create a peer culture. Encourage people throughout your company to help each other produce their best work. Example: At Pixar, daily animation work is shown in an incomplete state to the whole crew.

This process helps people get over any embarrassment about sharing unfinished work—so they become even more creative. It enables creative leads to communicate important points to the entire crew at once. And it’s inspiring: a highly innovative piece of animation sparks others to raise their game.

Free up communication. The most efficient way to resolve the numerous problems that arise in any complex project is to trust people to address difficulties directly, without having to get permission. So, give everyone the freedom to communicate with anyone. Example: Within Pixar, members of any department can approach anyone in another department to solve problems, without having to go through “proper” channels. Managers understand they don’t always have to be the first to know about something going on in their realm, and that it’s okay to walk into a meeting and be surprised. Craft a learning environment.

Reinforce the mind-set that you’re all learning—and it’s fun to learn together. Example: “Pixar University” trains people in multiple skills as they advance in their careers. It also offers optional courses (screenplay writing, drawing, sculpting) so people from different disciplines can interact and appreciate what each other does. Get more out of post-mortems. Many people dislike project post-mortems. They’d rather talk about what went right than what went wrong.

And after investing extensive time on the project, they’d like to move on. Structure your post-mortems to stimulate discussion. Example: Pixar asks post-mortem participants to list the top five things they’d do again and the top five they wouldn’t do. The positive-negative balance makes it a safer environment to explore every aspect of the project.

Participants also bring in lots of performance data—including metrics such as how often something had to be reworked. Data further stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions based on subjective impressions. ♦ to Ed Catmull discuss managing creativity. A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people—it was finding good ideas.

Since then, when giving talks, I’ve asked audiences whether they agree with him. Almost always there’s a 50/50 split, which has astounded me because I couldn’t disagree more with the studio executive.

His belief is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product. And it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to manage the large risks inherent in producing breakthroughs. The view that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than good people is rooted in a misconception of creativity. When it comes to producing breakthroughs, both technological and artistic, Pixar’s track record is unique.

In the early 1990s, we were known as the leading technological pioneer in the field of computer animation. Our years of R&D culminated in the release of Toy Story in 1995, the world’s first computer-animated feature film. In the following 13 years, we have released eight other films ( A Bug’s Life; Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; Ratatouille; and WALLE), which also have been blockbusters. Unlike most other studios, we have never bought scripts or movie ideas from the outside. All of our stories, worlds, and characters were created internally by our community of artists.

And in making these films, we have continued to push the technological boundaries of computer animation, securing dozens of patents in the process. While I’m not foolish enough to predict that we will never have a flop, I don’t think our success is largely luck.

Rather, I believe our adherence to a set of principles and practices for managing creative talent and risk is responsible. Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.

In the last two years, we’ve had a chance to test whether our principles and practices are transferable. After Pixar’s 2006 merger with the Walt Disney Company, its CEO, Bob Iger, asked me, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other Pixar senior managers to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization. What Is Creativity?

People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea: This is a movie about toys, or dinosaurs, or love, they’ll say. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. The initial idea for the movie—what people in the movie business call “the high concept”—is merely one step in a long, arduous process that takes four to five years.

A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing. The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. The leaders sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coherent whole—that support the story—which is a very difficult task. It’s like an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything.

The process is downright scary. Taking Risks. Then again, if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job. We’re in a business whose customers want to see something new every time they go to the theater. This means we have to put ourselves at great risk. Our most recent film, WALLE, is a robot love story set in a post-apocalyptic world full of trash. And our previous movie, Ratatouille, is about a French rat who aspires to be a chef.

Talk about unexpected ideas! At the outset of making these movies, we simply didn’t know if they would work. However, since we’re supposed to offer something that isn’t obvious, we bought into somebody’s initial vision and took a chance. To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done.

In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new. That’s why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren’t very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover?

Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find. What’s equally tough, of course, is getting talented people to work effectively with one another. That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people coming out of schools or working at other places. I know what I’m describing is the antithesis of the free-agency practices that prevail in the movie industry, but that’s the point: I believe that community matters.

The Roots of Our Culture My conviction that smart people are more important than good ideas probably isn’t surprising. I’ve had the good fortune to work alongside amazing people in places that pioneered computer graphics. At the University of Utah, my fellow graduate students included Jim Clark, who cofounded Silicon Graphics and Netscape; John Warnock, who cofounded Adobe; and Alan Kay, who developed object-oriented programming. We had ample funding (thanks to the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency), the professors gave us free rein, and there was an exhilarating and creative exchange of ideas. At the New York Institute of Technology, where I headed a new computer-animation laboratory, one of my first hires was Alvy Ray Smith, who made breakthroughs in computer painting.

That made me realize that it’s OK to hire people who are smarter than you are. Further Reading. 28.00. Then George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, hired me to head a major initiative at Lucasfilm to bring computer graphics and other digital technology into films and, later, games. It was thrilling to do research within a film company that was pushing the boundaries. George didn’t try to lock up the technology for himself and allowed us to continue to publish and maintain strong academic contacts. This made it possible to attract some of the best people in the industry, including John Lasseter, then an animator from Disney, who was excited by the new possibilities of computer animation.

Last but not least, there’s Pixar, which began its life as an independent company in 1986, when Steve Jobs bought the computer division from Lucasfilm, allowing us to pursue our dream of producing computer-animated movies. Steve gave backbone to our desire for excellence and helped us form a remarkable management team.

I’d like to think that Pixar captures what’s best about all the places I’ve worked. A number of us have stuck together for decades, pursuing the dream of making computer-animated films, and we still have the pleasure of working together today. It was only when Pixar experienced a crisis during the production of Toy Story 2 that my views on how to structure and operate a creative organization began to crystallize. In 1996, while we were working on A Bug’s Life, our second movie, we started to make a sequel to Toy Story.

We had enough technical leaders to start a second production, but all of our proven creative leaders—the people who had made Toy Story, including John, who was its director; writer Andrew Stanton; editor Lee Unkrich; and the late Joe Ranft, the movie’s head of story—were working on A Bug’s Life. So we had to form a new creative team of people who had never headed a movie production. We felt this was OK. After all, John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe had never led a full-length animated film production before Toy Story.

Disney, which at that time was distributing and cofinancing our films, initially encouraged us to make Toy Story 2 as a “direct to video”—a movie that would be sold only as home videos and not shown first in theaters. This was Disney’s model for keeping alive the characters of successful films, and the expectation was that both the cost and quality would be lower.

We realized early on, however, that having two different standards of quality in the same studio was bad for our souls, and Disney readily agreed that the sequel should be a theatrical release. The creative leadership, though, remained the same, which turned out to be a problem.

In the early stage of making a movie, we draw storyboards (a comic-book version of the story) and then edit them together with dialogue and temporary music. These are called story reels. The first versions are very rough, but they give a sense of what the problems are, which in the beginning of all productions are many. We then iterate, and each version typically gets better and better.

In the case of Toy Story 2, we had a good initial idea for a story, but the reels were not where they ought to have been by the time we started animation, and they were not improving. Making matters worse, the directors and producers were not pulling together to rise to the challenge. Finally A Bug’s Life was finished, freeing up John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe to take over the creative leadership of Toy Story 2. Given where the production was at that point, 18 months would have been an aggressive schedule, but by then we had only eight left to deliver the film. Knowing that the company’s future depended on them, crew members worked at an incredible rate. In the end, with the new leadership, they pulled it off.

How did John and his team save the movie? The problem was not the original core concept, which they retained. The main character, a cowboy doll named Woody, is kidnapped by a toy collector who intends to ship him to a toy museum in Japan. At a critical point in the story, Woody has to decide whether to go to Japan or try to escape and go back to Andy, the boy who owned him. Well, since the movie is coming from Pixar and Disney, you know he’s going to end up back with Andy. And if you can easily predict what’s going to happen, you don’t have any drama.

So the challenge was to get the audience to believe that Woody might make a different choice. The first team couldn’t figure out how to do it. John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe solved that problem by adding several elements to show the fears toys might have that people could relate to. One is a scene they created called “Jessie’s story.” Jessie is a cowgirl doll who is going to be shipped to Japan with Woody. She wants to go, and she explains why to Woody. The audience hears her story in the emotional song “When She Loved Me”: She had been the darling of a little girl, but the girl grew up and discarded her. The reality is kids do grow up, life does change, and sometimes you have to move on.

Since the audience members know the truth of this, they can see that Woody has a real choice, and this is what grabs them. It took our “A” team to add the elements that made the story work. Toy Story 2 was great and became a critical and commercial success—and it was the defining moment for Pixar. It taught us an important lesson about the primacy of people over ideas: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works. If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they’ll screw it up. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it work.

Toy Story 2 also taught us another important lesson: There has to be one quality bar for every film we produce. Everyone working at the studio at the time made tremendous personal sacrifices to fix Toy Story 2. We shut down all the other productions.

We asked our crew to work inhumane hours, and lots of people suffered repetitive stress injuries. But by rejecting mediocrity at great pain and personal sacrifice, we made a loud statement as a community that it was unacceptable to produce some good films and some mediocre films.

As a result of Toy Story 2, it became deeply ingrained in our culture that everything we touch needs to be excellent. This goes beyond movies to the DVD production and extras, and to the toys and other consumer products associated with our characters. Of course, most executives would at least pay lip service to the notion that they need to get good people and should set their standards high. But how many understand the importance of creating an environment that supports great people and encourages them to support one another so the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts? That’s what we are striving to do. Let me share what we’ve learned so far about what works. Power to the Creatives Creative power in a film has to reside with the film’s creative leadership.

As obvious as this might seem, it’s not true of many companies in the movie industry and, I suspect, a lot of others. We believe the creative vision propelling each movie comes from one or two people and not from either corporate executives or a development department. Our philosophy is: You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone. After Toy Story 2 we changed the mission of our development department.

Instead of coming up with new ideas for movies (its role at most studios), the department’s job is to assemble small incubation teams to help directors refine their own ideas to a point where they can convince John and our other senior filmmakers that those ideas have the potential to be great films. Each team typically consists of a director, a writer, some artists, and some storyboard people. The development department’s goal is to find individuals who will work effectively together. During this incubation stage, you can’t judge teams by the material they’re producing because it’s so rough—there are many problems and open questions. But you can assess whether the teams’ social dynamics are healthy and whether the teams are solving problems and making progress.

Both the senior management and the development department are responsible for seeing to it that the teams function well. To emphasize that the creative vision is what matters most, we say we are “filmmaker led.” There are really two leaders: the director and the producer. They form a strong partnership. They not only strive to make a great movie but also operate within time, budget, and people constraints. (Good artists understand the value of limits.) During production, we leave the operating decisions to the film’s leaders, and we don’t second-guess or micromanage them.

Indeed, even when a production runs into a problem, we do everything possible to provide support without undermining their authority. One way we do this is by making it possible for a director to solicit help from our “creative brain trust” of filmmakers. (This group is a pillar of our distinctive peer-based process for making movies—an important topic I’ll return to in a moment.) If this advice doesn’t suffice, we’ll sometimes add reinforcements to the production—such as a writer or codirector—to provide specific skills or improve the creative dynamics of the film’s creative leadership. What does it take for a director to be a successful leader in this environment? Of course, our directors have to be masters at knowing how to tell a story that will translate into the medium of film. This means that they must have a unifying vision—one that will give coherence to the thousands of ideas that go into a movie—and they must be able to turn that vision into clear directives that the staff can implement.

They must set people up for success by giving them all the information they need to do the job right without telling them how to do it. Each person on a film should be given creative ownership of even the smallest task. Good directors not only possess strong analytical skills themselves but also can harness the analytical power and life experiences of their staff members. They are superb listeners and strive to understand the thinking behind every suggestion. They appreciate all contributions, regardless of where or from whom they originate, and use the best ones.

A Peer Culture Of great importance—and something that sets us apart from other studios—is the way people at all levels support one another. Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel that it’s all for one and one for all. Nothing exemplifies this more than our creative brain trust and our daily review process. The brain trust. This group consists of John and our eight directors (Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Brenda Chapman, Lee Unkrich, Gary Rydstrom, and Brad Lewis).

When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group (and anyone else they think would be valuable) and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-and-take discussion, which is all about making the movie better. There’s no ego. Nobody pulls any punches to be polite. This works because all the participants have come to trust and respect one another. They know it’s far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there’s still time to fix them than from the audience after it’s too late.

The problem-solving powers of this group are immense and inspirational to watch. Getting Real Help. After a session, it’s up to the director of the movie and his or her team to decide what to do with the advice; there are no mandatory notes, and the brain trust has no authority. This dynamic is crucial. It liberates the trust members, so they can give their unvarnished expert opinions, and it liberates the director to seek help and fully consider the advice.

It took us a while to learn this. When we tried to export the brain trust model to our technical area, we found at first that it didn’t work.

Eventually, I realized why: We had given these other review groups some authority. As soon as we said, “This is purely peers giving feedback to each other,” the dynamic changed, and the effectiveness of the review sessions dramatically improved.

The origin of the creative brain trust was Toy Story. During a crisis that occurred while making that film, a special relationship developed among John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe, who had remarkable and complementary skills. Since they trusted one another, they could have very intense and heated discussions; they always knew that the passion was about the story and wasn’t personal. Over time, as other people from inside and outside joined our directors’ ranks, the brain trust expanded to what it is today: a community of master filmmakers who come together when needed to help each other. This practice of working together as peers is core to our culture, and it’s not limited to our directors and producers. One example is our daily reviews, or “dailies,” a process for giving and getting constant feedback in a positive way that’s based on practices John observed at Disney and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucasfilm’s special-effects company.

At Disney, only a small senior group would look at daily animation work. Dennis Muren, ILM’s legendary visual-effects supervisor, broadened the participation to include his whole special-effects crew.

(John, who joined my computer group at Lucasfilm after leaving Disney, participated in these sessions while we were creating computer-animated effects for Young Sherlock Holmes.) As we built up an animation crew for Toy Story in the early 1990s, John used what he had learned from Disney and ILM to develop our daily review process. People show work in an incomplete state to the whole animation crew, and although the director makes decisions, everyone is encouraged to comment. Overcoming Inhibitions. There are several benefits. First, once people get over the embarrassment of showing work still in progress, they become more creative. Second, the director or creative leads guiding the review process can communicate important points to the entire crew at the same time.

Third, people learn from and inspire each other; a highly creative piece of animation will spark others to raise their game. Finally, there are no surprises at the end: When you’re done, you’re done.

People’s overwhelming desire to make sure their work is “good” before they show it to others increases the possibility that their finished version won’t be what the director wants. The dailies process avoids such wasted efforts. Technology + Art = Magic Getting people in different disciplines to treat one another as peers is just as important as getting people within disciplines to do so.

But it’s much harder. Barriers include the natural class structures that arise in organizations: There always seems to be one function that considers itself and is perceived by others to be the one the organization values the most.

Then there’s the different languages spoken by different disciplines and even the physical distance between offices. In a creative business like ours, these barriers are impediments to producing great work, and therefore we must do everything we can to tear them down. Pixar’s Operating Principles. Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone.

It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas. We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community.

Walt Disney understood this. He believed that when continual change, or reinvention, is the norm in an organization and technology and art are together, magical things happen. A lot of people look back at Disney’s early days and say, “Look at the artists!” They don’t pay attention to his technological innovations. But he did the first sound in animation, the first color, the first compositing of animation with live action, and the first applications of xerography in animation production. He was always excited by science and technology. At Pixar, we believe in this swirling interplay between art and technology and constantly try to use better technology at every stage of production.

John coined a saying that captures this dynamic: “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.” To us, those aren’t just words; they are a way of life that had to be established and still has to be constantly reinforced. Although we are a director- and producer-led meritocracy, which recognizes that talent is not spread equally among all people, we adhere to the following principles: Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone. This means recognizing that the decision-making hierarchy and communication structure in organizations are two different things.

Members of any department should be able to approach anyone in another department to solve problems without having to go through “proper” channels. It also means that managers need to learn that they don’t always have to be the first to know about something going on in their realm, and it’s OK to walk into a meeting and be surprised. The impulse to tightly control the process is understandable given the complex nature of moviemaking, but problems are almost by definition unforeseen. The most efficient way to deal with numerous problems is to trust people to work out the difficulties directly with each other without having to check for permission. Managers need to learn that it’s OK to walk into a meeting and be surprised. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas. We’re constantly showing works in progress internally.

We try to stagger who goes to which viewing to ensure that there are always fresh eyes, and everyone in the company, regardless of discipline or position, gets to go at some point. We make a concerted effort to make it safe to criticize by inviting everyone attending these showings to e-mail notes to the creative leaders that detail what they liked and didn’t like and explain why. We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community.

We strongly encourage our technical artists to publish their research and participate in industry conferences. Publishing may give away ideas, but it keeps us connected with the academic community. This connection is worth far more than any ideas we may have revealed: It helps us attract exceptional talent and reinforces the belief throughout the company that people are more important than ideas. We try to break down the walls between disciplines in other ways, as well. One is a collection of in-house courses we offer, which we call Pixar University.

It is responsible for training and cross-training people as they develop in their careers. But it also offers an array of optional classes—many of which I’ve taken—that give people from different disciplines the opportunity to mix and appreciate what everyone does. Some (screenplay writing, drawing, and sculpting) are directly related to our business; some (Pilates and yoga) are not. In a sculpting class will be rank novices as well as world-class sculptors who want to refine their skills. Pixar University helps reinforce the mind-set that we’re all learning and it’s fun to learn together. Our building, which is Steve Jobs’s brainchild, is another way we try to get people from different departments to interact. Most buildings are designed for some functional purpose, but ours is structured to maximize inadvertent encounters.

At its center is a large atrium, which contains the cafeteria, meeting rooms, bathrooms, and mailboxes. As a result, everyone has strong reasons to go there repeatedly during the course of the workday. It’s hard to describe just how valuable the resulting chance encounters are. Staying on the Rails Observing the rise and fall of computer companies during my career has affected me deeply. Many companies put together a phenomenal group of people who produced great products. They had the best engineers, exposure to the needs of customers, access to changing technology, and experienced management.

Yet many made decisions at the height of their powers that were stunningly wrongheaded, and they faded into irrelevance. How could really smart people completely miss something so crucial to their survival? I remember asking myself more than once: “If we are ever successful, will we be equally blind?” Many of the people I knew in those companies that failed were not very introspective. When Pixar became an independent company, I vowed we would be different. I realized that it’s extremely difficult for an organization to analyze itself.

It is uncomfortable and hard to be objective. Systematically fighting complacency and uncovering problems when your company is successful have got to be two of the toughest management challenges there are.

Clear values, constant communication, routine postmortems, and the regular injection of outsiders who will challenge the status quo aren’t enough. Strong leadership is also essential—to make sure people don’t pay lip service to the values, tune out the communications, game the processes, and automatically discount newcomers’ observations and suggestions. Here’s a sampling of what we do: Postmortems. The first we performed—at the end of A Bug’s Life—was successful. But the success of those that followed varied enormously. This caused me to reflect on how to get more out of them.

One thing I observed was that although people learn from the postmortems, they don’t like to do them. Leaders naturally want to use the occasion to give kudos to their team members. People in general would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong. And after spending years on a film, everybody just wants to move on.

Left to their own devices, people will game the system to avoid confronting the unpleasant. There are some simple techniques for overcoming these problems. One is to try to vary the way you do the postmortems. By definition, they’re supposed to be about lessons learned, so if you repeat the same format, you tend to find the same lessons, which isn’t productive. Another is to ask each group to list the top five things they would do again and the top five things they wouldn’t do.

The balance between the positive and the negative helps make it a safer environment. In any event, employ lots of data in the review. Because we’re a creative organization, people tend to assume that much of what we do can’t be measured or analyzed. That’s wrong. Most of our processes involve activities and deliverables that can be quantified. We keep track of the rates at which things happen, how often something has to be reworked, whether a piece of work was completely finished or not when it was sent to another department, and so on. Data can show things in a neutral way, which can stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions arising from personal impressions.

Successful organizations face two challenges when bringing in new people with fresh perspectives. One is well-known—the not-invented-here syndrome. The other—the awe-of-the-institution syndrome (an issue with young new hires)—is often overlooked. The former has not been a problem for us, thank goodness, because we have an open culture: Continually embracing change the way we do makes newcomers less threatening. Several prominent outsiders who have had a big impact on us (in terms of the exciting ideas they introduced and the strong people they attracted) were readily accepted. They include Brad Bird, who directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille; Jim Morris, who headed Industrial Light & Magic for years before joining Pixar as the producer of WALLE and executive vice president of production; and Richard Hollander, a former executive of the special-effects studio Rhythm & Hues, who is leading an effort to improve our production processes. The bigger issue for us has been getting young new hires to have the confidence to speak up.

To try to remedy this, I make it a practice to speak at the orientation sessions for new hires, where I talk about the mistakes we’ve made and the lessons we’ve learned. My intent is to persuade them that we haven’t gotten it all figured out and that we want everyone to question why we’re doing something that doesn’t seem to make sense to them. We do not want people to assume that because we are successful, everything we do is right. For 20 years, I pursued a dream of making the first computer-animated film. To be honest, after that goal was realized—when we finished Toy Story—I was a bit lost.

But then I realized the most exciting thing I had ever done was to help create the unique environment that allowed that film to be made. My new goal became, with John, to build a studio that had the depth, robustness, and will to keep searching for the hard truths that preserve the confluence of forces necessary to create magic. In the two years since Pixar’s merger with Disney, we’ve had the good fortune to expand that goal to include the revival of Disney Animation Studios. It has been extremely gratifying to see the principles and approaches we developed at Pixar transform this studio.

But the ultimate test of whether John and I have achieved our goals is if Pixar and Disney are still producing animated films that touch world culture in a positive way long after we two, and our friends who founded and built Pixar with us, are gone.

Ed's Guide to Alternative Therapies Ed's Guide to Alternative Therapies Contents: (goes to another page) This website collects no information. If you e-mail me, neither your e-mail address nor any other information will ever be passed on to any third party, unless required by law. This page was last modified August 23, 2011. I have no sponsors and do not host paid advertisements.

All external links are provided freely to sites that I believe my visitors will find helpful. I'm a board-certified anatomic and clinical pathologist and operator of the largest one-person medical information site on the web. As a pathologist, it's my job (among others) to examine tissue, tell what's the matter, and predict the behavior of the disease and response to therapy. Like most other pathologists, I'm extremely successful at this. Like most other pathologists, I take a lot of pride in this. (Call us arrogant if you like.

I am an honest physician who engages in public debates. When I catch somebody deliberately deceiving the public, they never defend their cases on the facts, but almost always call me 'arrogant' or 'elitist' and claim I am secretly in the pay of the wicked pharmaceutical companies.) And if I screw up even once, I'm in MAJOR trouble.

Unlike many M.D.' S, I'm open-minded about what's known as 'alternative medicine', i.e., therapies that are not recognized by mainstream medicine.

During the 1980's, I reviewed alternative medicine and found there was little to recommend. As the alternative medical community has responded to pressure to defend its claims by the usual methods of science, some areas have improved.

This site aims to let the public know what empirical evidence is available for various alternative remedies, especially studies published in refereed journals. This will enable people who must make decisions to rely on more than anecdotes and advertising. This site will always be under intensive construction.

Only a fool pretends to know everything. I cannot buy or read a book, but I am interested in your personal experiences ('anecdotes'), and especially in real work by real scientists (i.e., people taking serious precautions against self-deception.) Unless you specify otherwise, I'll feel free to quote you. I would be remiss without placing links to. The fact that I am less likely than some members to dismiss alternative claims out-of-hand probably reflects our differing life experience. Remember there are plenty of bad doctors in both 'mainstream medicine' and 'alternative medicine'. Here's the ranking system that this site will use: The remedy has a plausable mechanism and has been given some basic tests, and/or has solidly passed two good, clear, controlled studies The remedy makes sense pathophysiologically, and there is at least impressive anecdotal evidence The anecdotal evidence seemed interesting to me, but that's all there was. I can see why somebody might have thought of this.

But if this actually works better than a placebo and a little human kindness, we are all going to have to make some major readjustments in how we think about health and disease. Don't spend too much money, or get your hopes up. Bold indicates the remedy has passed a controlled, reasonable-sounding study for this use.

Underlining means it failed. Claims that lack substantial testing are unmarked. Here are some things that are NOT 'alternative medicine'. Taking time with patients, getting to know them, communicating with them, showing some (real or pretended) interest, and being polite. The less that scientific physicians do this, the more we push patients toward the sweet-talking bunko artists. Being aware of iatrogenic disease, which is inevitable nowadays.

Today we have powerful surgical and pharmacological interventions. Surgery is surgery, and all effective drugs except the vitamins and hormones are at least semi-poisons. Hippocrates had no specific therapy for any specific disease. No longer can his dictim, 'First Do No Harm', be anything more than our wish for the distant future. Being angry about the mainstream health-care system and its wanton misuse to maximize personal or corporate gain in a system filled with perverse incentives for everyone involved. You should hear how we autopsy pathologists talk among ourselves after-hours. I teach my students to treat patients holistically.

Ask one of them whether I've been successful. Here's how to evaluate an 'alternative' claim. The key is finding out whether anyone has tested the claim using controls.

For example, if you want to know what effect shark cartilage by mouth has on tumors in rats, you need to give some cancer-ridden rats cartilage tablets, and other cancer-ridden rats tablets that look the same but that do not contain cartilage or any other ingredient that is likely to be active ('placebo'). You have somebody else decide which rats get which tablets, by flipping a coin. When you've examined the rats (how long did they live, or what did the tumors look like at biopsy/autopsy, or whatever), describe each one.

State Of The Business Presentation

Only then do you, yourself, find which rat was in which group. If shark cartilage really works, the treated rats will live longer and/or be distinguishable in some other way from the sham-treated ('control') rats. People who believe their own claims will make every effort to do controlled studies. If their therapy works, it should pass some controlled study sooner or later. If positive results are obtained, some other scientist will always try to duplicate the work.

If this succeeds, the claim is 'reproduced', and you can present a truthful, honest claim to the public. People who don't believe their own claims will start complaining about 'lack of funding', 'the Heisenberg uncertainty principle', 'placebos are valuable and ethical too', 'politics in science', 'social causation', 'you create your own reality', 'Thomas Kuhn', 'closed-minded medical establishment', 'persecuted geniuses', 'we will NEVER treat individual whole-persons as statistics', etc., etc. Another very popular claim by charlatans, who admit they have no placebo-controlled studies, is to observe that the vast majority of today's therapies have not been placebo-controlled. These people either don't understand or are lying about the central model of a modern medical study - clinical equipoise. The control group isn't people receiving no treatment. It is people receiving the most popular standard treatment.

To be ethical, there must also be a reason to think the treatment will be superior. 'The Beautiful Truth' / 'Dying to have known': In Max Gerson's era, no child was ever cured of leukemia. To demand that in 2009 we randomize children with leukemia between the modern therapy that cures that vast majority, and a 'treatment' group getting only a magic raw-liver-and-vegetable-based diet and coffee enemas, without even an animal model, would be a crime against humanity. Go ahead and call me an unspiritual corrupt brainwashed bigot if you want - I've stopped answering my crank mail.

When lives are at stake, I don't think asking for a controlled study is asking too much. If there are published, controlled studies, find out what they showed. That's what this site's really for. If the statistical effect is pronounced and reproducible, you can be confident we have something real. If it is not reproduced, there may have been some intentional or unintentional bias in the original lab. CAUTION: As charlatans become more sophisticated, you occasionally find books that list refereed journal publications by the dozen.

For example, somebody promoting oral superoxide dismutase to prevent aging will cite references to the substance's activities in the body, the harmful effects of free radicals, and so forth. This is the old salesman's technique of telling a bunch of truths, so you won't notice the lies. (1) Superoxide dismutase isn't going to make it from your stomach into your cells, but will be destroyed; (2) free radicals may contribute to degenerative disease, but they do not cause aging; (3) animals that produce huge amounts of superoxide dismutase age as fast as others. If you're in doubt, feel free to phone the authors of the papers that are cited in the dubious book. I've done so occasionally, and they have been VERY unhappy to learn that.

If there are NOT published, controlled studies, ask 'Why not?' Possibility 1: There is no reason to think it works. Either the therapy makes no sense biologically, or it failed a pilot study (i.e., a tiny, no-cost study that a high-school kid could do as a science project), or the remedy is promoted by an individual who has failed to present a pilot study. Possibility 2: Everybody knows it works. I'd like to illustrate this with an example. I like working out, and in the late 1980's, I obtained an EMS unit that I'd heard could accelerate my muscle growth. The anti-quackery literature listed this as fraudulent, but it made sense biologically, and I decided to do a pilot study, using the EMS unit only on the right side of my body.

The end-point would be three people telling me (without my asking) that I was asymmetric. This took about a month.

I decided to report my study in a letter to the JAMA, but first I went again to the refereed literature and I discovered an article that described EMS as generally known to be effective in accelerating muscle hypertrophy. Possibility 3: Nobody stands to make a buck.

Nowadays I really doubt it. The unpatentable alternative remedies that obviously work (melatonin, DHEA, creatine, St.

John's wort, strontium for osteoporosis) are widely marketed, presumably for just a modest profit. In addition, ask whether the therapy makes sense Scientific knowledge is always tentative (and thankfully, science is self-correcting in the long run.) But our current thinking about how the body works has shown great predictive power, not the least in my own success in predicting the course of disease from looking at tissue sections. Any proposed mechanism of action can be wrong. For example, I was taught totally-wrong mechanisms of action for bismuth anti-ulcer remedies, dandruff shapoos, nitroglycerine for angina, and nitroprusside for hypertension. (I congratulate myself for having been skeptical as a student.) So if a proposed mechanism for an 'alternative remedy' sounds wrong or even silly, don't dismiss the remedy out-of-hand. Be skeptical about remedies that cannot work by any means presently known to science or religion.

I'm open to the reality of the supernatural - in fact, as a Christian, I'm committed to it (though not necessarily to the effectiveness of intercessory prayer or laying-on-of-hands.) Enough of this for now. I am not going to consider alternative systems of diagnosis.

As a pathologist, I remain open-minded on the subject. If you know of any that show predictive value (i.e., you can predict which people in the community will and will not come down with XYZ better than I can), please let me know. Acai Berries The fruit of the acai palm tree, which like everything else contains some biologically active molecules, was presented as a multi-level marketing scheme in 2004. Claims included weight loss and 'cleansing'. The shady work of the marketers is now history, as is Oprah's successful lawsuit against them. A pilot study of acai for weight loss was a miserable and total failure (Nutr. 10: 45, 2011).

At least the juice seems not to be toxic or carcinogenic (Toxicology 278: 46, 2010. There junk journal claims ('adding it to cigarets prevents emphysma in mice'), etc., etc. Acupuncture References to follow. Many people who have experienced acupuncture treatment believe that it caused physiologic changes beyond just suggestion and relaxation. As acupuncture moves from folk medicine into real scientific therapeutics, physicians will insist on sorting out the placebo effect and the cultural overlay. Acupuncture appears to have effects on neurally-mediated reflexes.

Because the reflexes are so subtle, studies will remain empirical for a long time to come. Positive studies will need to be replicated, especially since the strong feelings that some people have in favor of acupuncture may introduce bias.

This will probably happen soon, but to date, there are no findings of effectiveness (i.e., this particular acupuncture procedure works in this particular situation) that are robust after being replicated in several different series. Serious studies of whether traditional acupuncture is actually more effective than placebo now use sham acupuncture as the control. In 'sham' acupuncture, the operator deliberately needles the wrong points.

This isn't double-blind, but it's a start. There are positive results (i.e., real acupuncture is significantly more effective than sham acupuncture) for nausea and vomiting after gynecologic surgery (weak), epicondylitis, anxiety in the emergency pre-hospital care setting, and even parental anxiety during anesthesia induction in a child. In one study of nausea and vomiting after tonsillectomy, the control group did better and the sham group did worse than those not treated at all. In a few instances, acupuncture has proved superior to a standard medication. One example is an electrical technique for post-operative nausea and vomiting after cosmetic surgery.

In another instance, stimulation of a particular needle-point proved as effective as a standard anti-emetic for post-operative nausea and vomiting in children. Another study obtained a similar result for children undergoing anesthesia in the dentist's office. In the anesthetized patient, the placebo phenomenon is less likely to be operating.

Electro-acupuncture is now widely used in Europe to reduce the need for anesthetic agents, and the effect was strongly significant in a US double-blind study. There are also numerous negative studies, in which particular techniques applied to particular clinical problems showed no significant effect. This is in spite of the fact that acupuncture proponents might be reluctant to share a negative study. An electrical technique failed for low back pain. Another electrical technique failed to reduce the need for anesthetics. A major study showed no effect for asthma.

Urologists were unable to obtain any benefits by needling the 'kidney-ureter-bladder' meridian. 'Minute sphere acupuncture' failed to help postoperative pain or morphine use. Despite an apparent effect in one study of cocaine addicts, acupuncture did not outperform relaxation or sham treatment for cocaine addiction in a second study. Unlike some other complementary therapies, acupuncture did not show an effect in a major study of chronic low back pain. Although two non-blinded studies of acupuncture for tinnitus suggested an effect, four blinded ones showed no significant effect.

Some large studies have actually not included a sham-acupuncture group when it would be easy to do so. These do help make it clear that acupuncture is relatively safe. Recent studies without a sham control but with positive results compared to no-acupuncture include one for low back pain in the elderly, another for nausea and vomiting during cyclophosphamide infusion for rheumatic disease, another for wheelchair-user's shoulder, another for childhood constipation, and another for labor pain. Two British studies found that a trip to the acupuncturist gave good results for chronic headache patients at relatively low cost to the health care system.

The question was, 'Is this worth the money?' Rather than 'Is this anything more than a placebo?' The authors characterized their own approach as 'pragmatic'.

In turn, there are ethical questions involved in placebo treatment, even to make people feel good. Some studies of electroacupuncture claiming to show a benefit (i.e., for low back pain, nausea and vomiting of pregnancy, nausea and vomiting of myeloablative chemotherapy) have used as controls a non-electrical apparatus, which is not really blinding.

Physiologists are starting to characterize the reflexes involved in needle insertion. One surprising finding, awaiting confirmation, is the induction of mirror-image electrical activity when a myofascial trigger point is stimulated. Controlled studies showing no clinical benefit (for example, post-stroke leg spasticity) still showed curious reflex effects from treatment. Animals have reflexes in response to acupuncture treatment that may be abolished by certain medications. Despite the training they receive, several acupuncturists examining the same patient are likely to recommend widely different needle placements. This was demonstrated in a test using a low-back- pain patient, and perhaps this is no different from other physicians.

Practice is likely to become more standardized as the scientific work continues. Acupuncturists will need to decide how much to retain of the cultural trappings and imaginative physiology. We can expect that most will regard the 'theory' as something to be treasured as a bygone age's attempt to understand the riddles of the body. Instead, its practitioners will recognize that the effects are really mediated by subtle reflexes that are not fundamentally unlike the other processes by which the body maintains its health. Acupuncture seems to be safe overall. One acupuncturist perforated the right ventricle of the heart causing hemopericardium, and there have been several instances of pneumothorax.

I have been pleasantly surprised with how few other complications have been reported during the last few years. My friends in oriental medicine asked me to mention that it's now standard to use single-use, presterilized, disposable needles. Artemisinin for cancer The anti-malarial drug artemisinin and its relatives are being promoted by the alternative-medicine community for cancer in general. There is some interest in their possible anti-cancer properties, and a few decent papers, mostly focusing on which patterns of gene expression predict that the drug will kill cells in tissue culture (Pharmacogenetics Journal 6: 269, 2006). They're well-known to do this, because they are poisons, and the fact that they kill cancer cells (J. 49: 2731, 2006, from the Hop) should come as no surprise. Especially, they may have activity as angiogenesis blockers.

The foremost proponent in the US seems to be Dr. Henry Lai, whose professional degree is in psychology and who teaches in the department of bioengineering at U. His focus on the effects of non-ionizing fields on humans seems to have led him into fringe medicine, and he has been writing papers about artemisinin as an anti-cancer agent since 1995. He notes that breast cancer cells reportedly (a few old papers in obscure journals) tend to have more surface transferrin (iron-binder) than their benign counterparts. So artemisinin (which generates toxic free radicals when exposed to iron) could induce apoptosis selectively in breast cancer.

He managed to demonstrate this effect in a culture of breast cancer cells awash in iron-binder (Life Sciences 70: 49, 2001). Artemisinin alone was a dismal failure.

At least he's honest. It sounds to me as if the breast cancer cells simply were more adherent for the iron-binder; the experiment does not support the claim that they have greatly increased transferrin surface levels. However, around this time, Dr. Lai speculated about how one could saturate the allegedly-increased transferrin molecules with enough iron, not mentioning that flooding the body with iron is itself dangerous. The iron-bearing pigment that accumulates in malaria is orders-of-magnitude richer in iron than one could possibly accumulate simply from having extra surface transferrin.

(At least, both are ferric.) Readers should know that there are no reports to date (despite ten years of interest, especially by Dr. Lai) of artemisinin inducing even a partial remission of any cancer in any animal system. The claim that there are 350 papers showing an effect on cancer is just another lie.

The 88 that I found were mostly cell-culture studies without benign cells as controls. Conspiracy buffs who assume that the drug companies have shunned artemisinin since it's a naturally-occurring substance and therefore less profitable should note that taxol (a similar case) became part of mainstream breast cancer therapy as soon as it proved to work. There just might be an effect. Lai actually got a chance to try it as a breast cancer preventative in mice in 2006 (Cancer Letters 231: 43, 2006).

This was the only in vivo study I could find. He claimed an effect with p.