I was having a conversation last week with an executive. His company was having a bit of a conundrum with one process (although a major process) in the company, and I said “Listen…you have great people…we can get this fixed.”

In the September issue of Harvard Business Review, there is a great article: How Pixar Fosters Creativity, and one quote from the article that really jumped out at me is this one “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.” This is the magic of Pixar.

I recently saw the movie WALL-E, (everyone should see this movie!) and I was completely blown away. I then learned that the story did not come from the “outside world”. It came from the vivid imaginations of a great team at Pixar. And…the team at Pixar knows that their job is to be as creative as possible and to quickly recover from risk when things go sour.

I don’t want to give away the article…every business owner needs to read this, but the company does has 3 operating principles:

1. The freedom for everyone to communicate with ANYONE.

2. Safety to offer up new ideas

3. Stay close to innovations happening in the academic community.

As I read this article and considered these principles, it just makes me wonder how many executives are unreachable. How many are locked away in a tower without access to people in the company. And, how afraid are employees to offer up new ideas? And, how often do we stay inside our on communities, thinking we know the answers when the top academic communities can help us gain access to the research we need to make big decisions? I would say more often than not, and this article is a shining example of how to do things right. Pixar is taking the world by storm, and we all need to learn from their best practices to stay ahead.

Pick up a copy of the article at Harvard Business Review.

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