Ed Catmull

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

“He worked with Steve for 26 straight years. Nobody else worked continuously for Steve for that amount of time”

“I came to think of our meltdowns, our problems, as a necessary part of doing our business, like investments in research and development.”

“Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional, but by understanding the ways in which they aren't exceptional.”

“Unless you impose limits, people will always justify spending more time and more money by saying, we're just trying to make it a little better.”

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. The takeaway here is worth repeating. Getting the team right is the …”

“Steve says, if you don't have any problems, you should be very, very worried.”

“You are not your idea. And if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”

“What interested me was that the leaders of these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work.”

“When you lose your mission, it doesn't matter how rich you are, you're gonna feel depressed and adrift, just like Ed Catmull does.”

“The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be aside, assigned to every employee. If anyone at any level spotted a problem, Deming believed they should be encouraged and expected to stop the assembly line. Deming's approach gave ownership of the …”

“So one of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape.”

“A subversion takes place In which streamlining the process or increasing production supplants the ultimate goal, which goes back to what is the ultimate goal? Making something great is the goal. That supplants the ultimate goal. This kind of thinking yields to…”

“A motivated workaholic workforce pulling together to make a deadline could destroy itself if it's left unchecked. Though I was immensely proud of what we had accomplished, I vowed we would never make a film that way again. It is my job to protect our people fr…”

“Steve had a remarkable knack for letting go of things that didn't work. If you were in an argument with him, and you convinced him that you were right, he would instantly change his mind. He didn't hold onto an idea because he had once believed it to be brilli…”

“The brain trust has no authority. The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. The brain trust notes are intended to bring the true causes of a problem to the surface, not to demand a specific remedy.”

“I think the person that was most influential on how he managed when he came back to Apple was actually the time he spent with Ed Catmull. Seeing how Ed Catmull actually ran Pixar.”

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

“In fact, Ed Catmull told this great story where Steve was talking about that he had fired two people from Apple's board, and the reason Steve gave Ed surprised Ed, and Steve said, is because they didn't ever disagree with me.”

“Years later, he confided in Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull That he had learned a lesson from the collapse of the IBM deal. Never overplay your hand.”