Disney Pixar: “The Day Our Bosses Saved Our Jobs”
Pretty hard to hate the people at Pixar* …
“(George) Lucas had brought in a guy named Doug Norby as President to bring some discipline to Lucasfilm, and as part of his efforts, Norby was pressing Catmull and Smith to do some fairly deep layoffs. The two couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Instead, Catmull tried to make a financial case for keeping his group intact, arguing that layoffs would only reduce the value of a unit that Lucasfilm could profitably sell. (I am relating this story with Craig’s permission, and he double-checked its accuracy with Catmull.) But Norby was unmoved. As Craig tells it: “He was pestering Ed and Alvy for a list of names from the Computer Division to lay off, and Ed and Alvy kept blowing him off. Finally came the order: You will be in my office tomorrow morning at 9:00 with a list of names.”
So what did these two bosses do? “They showed up in his office at 9:00 and plunked down a list,” Craig told me. “It had two names on it: Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.”
Rest of the story at The Harvard Business Review.
* Unless you work at Dreamworks Animation 🙂
Those interested in the history of Pixar – available at Amazon.
You can check out Alvy Ray Smith’s pages on the history of Pixar including fun items such as Steve’s Jobs $5 million cashier’s check to buy Pixar …
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20 January 2011
13 Comments
Many good companies are killed by guys like Norby.
I wonder if they need a printing press operator
Or a Spanish translator..haha!
Or an actor that does Canadian accents!!!
don’t like this DROUGHT of cars
I recently read “The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company” by David Price, and it deals with all the miraculous saves by Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith that allowed Pixar to survive throughout the most difficult of times. It’s a great read which gave me newly found respect for the founding father’s of Pixar.
As a member of the computer graphics community, I have always held a tremendous amount of respect for these men — specially Ed Catmull’s contributions to the the field, but after reading what he went through early on in his career, I am in awe of the man and all of his achievements.
I have to say this, because I feel that Mr. Catmull’s contributions tend to be overshadowed by all the great artists and scientists that have since joined Pixar. Biographical stories like these need to be more widely circulated. Yes, John Lasseter is a creative genius and certainly deserves to be in the spotlight, but Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith were the technical genius’ without whom Pixar may have never come into existence.
my 2 cents
woo hoo! Steve Jobs bank account number
funny. 🙂
It’s a cashiers check-no account number
I know silly, it was a joke.
Real leadership is a rare commodity.
Imagine life if Ed and Alvy had not been willing to do what they did for their team… it’s possible that there could have been life without Pixar… no Cars…
Great story!