Business Lessons from Pixar's Toy Story 2 Turnaround Ep. 020

Discover how to break through business plateaus and unlock your company's potential! Join us as we explore the compelling story behind Pixar’s Toy Story 2—a film that overcame near-disaster with only six months to go before release. With storyline issues and a lack of emotional depth in it's characters threatening the project, Pixar's leaders made the audacious decision to start from scratch, a move that ultimately paved the way for some of the studio's most beloved classics. Learn how their emphasis on collaborative problem-solving and an iterative creative process became key to their success and how these strategies can be applied to any business facing a similar crisis.

Tune in to Brightside Business to glean actionable business insights from Pixar's creative strategies, which encouraged teams to fail early and often. By rapidly testing and iterating on multiple ideas, they improved character arcs and created a more compelling story. Discover how you can challenge initial solutions, embrace patience, and be willing to test and iterate on ideas to transform your business. Whether you're stuck at a revenue plateau or simply seeking inspiration, this episode offers valuable lessons in innovation and perseverance that will resonate with entrepreneurs and business leaders alike.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Bright Side Business, where we talk to online entrepreneurs like yourself about how to grow your business. My name is Joey Young. I help my family's professional services business go from the low six figure in revenue to over seven figures in revenue in under two years, and there's a lot of fits and starts, a lot of plateaus, a lot of problems along the way. So we're gonna talk about that today. If you're a business owner facing a revenue plateau, facing a problem you keep banging your head against the wall about, let's unpack how we can push through that using the case study of one of the greatest project turnarounds in history. That's the movie Toy Story 2. Yeah, pixar ran into some major issues creating this film that got turned around to be not only a film that succeeded beyond the original's gross income, but also was critically acclaimed and allowed the studio to create incredible films we know and love today, like Up and Inside Out and WALL-E and other classics. So what did this company do to push through one of the greatest disasters in filmmaking history and ultimately create a classic? Now I love Toy Story 2. I'll be honest with you a lot of people like Toy Story 3, whatever. My favorite and always will be of all the Toy Story movies is Toy Story 2.

Speaker 1: 1:13

And you can imagine the incredible pressure Pixar was under when they started developing Toy Story 2, because the first one was a success in its own right. So there was a lot of pressure on them to deliver even bigger, even better characters and sets and spectacle of the story and visuals than the first film. But the problem was six months before the film was slated to release. It was a complete disaster. It was, for all intents and purposes, a massive failure. There were storyline issues. It just wasn't really compelling. The same way the were storyline issues. It just wasn't really compelling the same way the original film was. The characters didn't have the emotional depth that Pixar films were known for, and the whole team knew this. And so there was this through line of frustration at the company because they knew they weren't delivering at the level they were able to. So John Laster and Ed Catmull, the co-founder and president of Pixar at that time, scrapped the entire script six months before the release. They made the whole movie null and void because they were not settling for something that was less than what they knew they could deliver. So now they were on an even tighter deadline. They had less funds, but they had to deliver a higher quality product than the first film or everything they had done to develop the second film up until that point. So how did they do it and how did they turn it all around to create a classic Pixar film? Well, they reworked the story completely. They pushed things forward like collaborative problem solving and the iterative creative process, and we're going to unpack each of those things now. Each of these things again led to almost a billion dollars, adjusted for inflation, of revenue from this one film and critical success.

Speaker 1: 3:00

The first thing that Pixar did is they really pushed an iterative creative process, so they pushed their teams to fail early and to fail often. Instead of having each person needing their idea to work and having their emotions and their identity and their reputation tied up with a specific idea tied up with a specific idea, they really said, all right, guys, we're going to test things and iterate quickly so there's less time in between a hypothesis if this little story arc or this scene is gonna work and the test results being on the table for us to review. We're gonna shorten that gap so we can try 10 ideas in the time. It took to test one idea previously, and that led to a multitude of ideas being able to be tested, as opposed to just one or two, which ultimately led to better scenes, better character arcs and a better story. And so, really, at our businesses.

Speaker 1: 3:56

What we got to look at is, you know, are we getting attached to the quick first solution that we suggested because we had an idea, or are we embracing a slower process when it comes to problem solving? Are we really able to sit down and say, listen, this idea is not working, obviously. So, instead of just doing what I think is fun next, or is my first idea, can I have the courage to throw out what I had before and test a whole new approach to solve this problem, or can I have the patience to iterate on an idea? You know, I always say a great idea is a bad idea in need of a haircut. Sometimes the seed of an idea can be iterated on so much in terms of a you know, a solution for a problem that we're facing in operations or a new product. Sometimes the seed of an idea can be iterated on to the point where the initial idea is completely gone. But we have this one throughput of iteration that leads to an idea that completely knocks our socks off in business, and so that's what we're trying to encourage. It's like how can we test ideas rapidly, how can we embrace the slow process of maybe throwing out ideas and trying new ones, or on iterating a idea. So that's the idea of an iterative creative process.

Speaker 1: 5:13

The second thing that Pixar did is they put together these teams called brain trusts, and these were directors. These were narrative storytellers, people who weren't directly related to the project of Toy Story 2, but could provide some really knowledgeable and specific feedback to the narrative designers of Toy Story 2. So what they did is they sat in a room and they would give honest feedback to the people making Toy Story 2 about their thoughts on different story arcs and different scenes and characters, their thoughts on different story arcs and different scenes and characters. So it was an environment where people could be completely honest. There were no emotions in the room, there was no offense. It was just here's what the experts think honestly about this idea that you're putting forward, and for us as business owners, we need to have outside voices of reason when we're thinking about going down path A or path B. We need to have someone who has no investment in which way we go. They have no ties to point A or point B, but they can just give us some honest, clear advice about like honestly, I would do A, or have you considered, if you did B, what would happen down the road? Or if we're even just considering whether to take advantage of an opportunity and we're a little bit unsure about it, do we, as business owners, have that team of counselors around us who are going to speak into us, who don't have any say in what we do? Obviously they're just counselors, but they can provide that outside clear voice of reason. That's really, really important.

Speaker 1: 6:45

The third thing that Pixar did is they built a culture of psychological safety. So new ideas and failures of ideas were not only accepted but they were expected, because a lot of people in the culture at that time, before they made the shift, were afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes and failures were very much pushed down on and shamed in that culture that they had built at their company. So they had to flip it around and say, okay, we're not only going to accept mistakes that people make, but we're going to expect them from our teams, because when we have many, many, many mistakes, we can see that we're trying things, that we're actually testing ideas, that're trying things, that we're actually testing ideas that may not work, that we're actually innovating here, that we're actually taking calculated risks. So what happened was because people were less afraid of making mistakes. In that culture they were building. Better work came out of it because they were able to work faster. They weren't so concerned about their reputation. They were able to create better quality work.

Speaker 1: 7:44

And a culture where people are psychologically safe is made up of people who can say things like I don't know this concept fully, can someone explain this to me? Or like, hey, I have an idea. I'm not sure if it's going to work, but I have an idea. Or it's a culture where people can say things like hey, I don't think that's going to work and here's exactly why. And they're not going to be punished for that. Or a culture where people can speak up and say I tried this and this and this and I was wrong. I thought it would work and it didn't. We don't shame those things. We don't push people down for speaking up and putting their two cents in the hat or for trying something and failing those cultural norms where it's okay to make those mistakes, to ask for help, to speak up. Those things are expected from the team.

Speaker 1: 8:42

Aspect of healthy company culture is when you have heated discussions that are focused around discussing the right play for the business to win. So if your team meetings are heated discussions, meaning people are getting a little bit emotional, there's a little bit of tension in the room. That's a good thing. Again, it's not people fighting each other. It's not like people are angry because they're trying to protect an idea and they think that the person's wrong, but they're emotionally invested in creating the right play to make the company win, make the project win, and so they get emotionally invested and the arguments get a little heated when we're talking about what to do next. So those conversations should be taking place and that's when you know you have a culturally safe place to share honest thoughts, when you can have a little bit of heat in the conversation and you can have a lot of fun going back and forth about what the right play is to make the company win.

Speaker 1: 9:42

And the last thing that Pixar did is they took calculated risks. They understood that at some times it's better to swing for the fences, even though there's a chance of missing, than taking the guaranteed first base with a line drive hit. And for businesses all over all sizes gigantic corporations, small startups there's a truism that most of them, who are successful and who grow steadily over time, are able to double down on their unfair advantages, which means they're saying no to a lot of opportunities, they're saying no to a lot of revenue, even right, or to certain customer bases, because they know here's what we're good at, here's what we want to double down on, here's where we wanna play our cards. We wanna sit at this table and play this game and we're gonna say no to all the distractions around us and we're really gonna double down on this thing working because we feel like we're really well positioned in the marketplace because of the team that we have, or the technology or the IP or the systems of the team that we have, or the technology or the IP, or the systems or the resources. We feel like we can play in this area and smash it. And so calculated risk-taking is essential for a really healthy company to grow. So that's how Pixar turned around Toy Story 2. And, of course, the results speak for themselves.

Speaker 1: 11:03

Hopefully this has been helpful for you to think through how you can break through your problem or your company's barrier right now to growing revenue and solving the challenge in front of you. And if you really like this, I'd love to hear your question so I can address it here on the show. Shoot me an email, joey, at joeyhyoung. Just include the question and your name and I'd love to address whatever is on your mind for your business to help you break through and get to the other side of your problem. You can also DM me on Instagram. It's at joeyhyoung if you want to shoot me the question there. Also, if you're at this point in the show, you must have loved something you've heard, so leave that thumbs up. Please Like, subscribe, hit that five-star review. If you're on my podcast platform, wherever you're hearing this, watching this, really appreciate it, really helps spread the show around with the algorithm and stuff. And until next time, my friends, happy scaling.