Podcast Notes: Ed Catmull on David Senra

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview. (If you like the interview, you should read his book.) Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for groups of people working together. To do this, he would pull people out of meetings, make groups smaller, make them bigger, just constantly work on fine-tuning getting the right people together at the right time with the right feedback (without ego). Granted he didn’t always do it, but that was his goal. He says: This is so important to get [these group dynamics right] because this is what our product is based on: getting this group of people to work well together. So paying attention to the dynamics of the room is the job. They’re the ones making the movies. I’m not making the movie. I’m just trying to get them to work well together. When Steve Jobs came to Ed and essentially said, “We’re gonna bet everything at Pixar…