Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. — Anton Ego, in Pixar’s Ratatouille The source of every new idea is the same. There is a network of neurons in the brain, and then the network shifts. All of a sudden, electricity flows in an unfamiliar pattern, a shiver of current across a circuit board of cells. But sometimes a single network isn’t enough. Sometimes a creative problem is so difficult that it requires people to connect their imaginations together; the answer arrives only if we collaborate. That’s because a group is not just a collection of individual talents. Instead, it is a chance for those talents to exceed themselves, to produce something greater than anyone thought possible. When the right mixture of people come together and when they collaborate in the right way, what happens can often feel like magic. But it’s not magic. There is a reason why some groups are more than the sum of their parts. Furthermore, there’s evidence that group creativity is becoming more necessary. Because we live in a world of very hard problems — all the low-hanging fruit is gone — many of the most important challenges exceed the capabilities of the individual imagination. As a result, we can find solutions only by working with other people. Ben Jones, a professor of management at the Kellogg Business School, has demonstrated this by analyzing trends in “scientific production.” The most profound trend he’s observed is a sharp shift toward scientific teamwork. By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed papers and 2.1 million patents from the last fifty years, Jones was able to show that more than 99 percent of scientific subfields have experienced increased levels of teamwork, with the size of the average team increasing by about 20 percent per decade. While the most cited studies in a field used to be the product of lone geniuses — think Einstein or Darwin — Jones has demonstrated that the best research now emerges from groups. It doesn’t matter if the researchers are studying particle physics or human genetics: science papers produced by multiple authors are cited more than twice as often as those authored by individuals. This trend was even more apparent when it came to “home-run papers” — those publications with at least a thousand citations — which were more than six times as likely to come from a team of scientists. The reason is simple: the biggest problems we need to solve now require the expertise of people from different backgrounds who bridge the gaps between disciplines. Unless we learn to share our ideas with others, we will be stuck with a world of seemingly impossible problems. We can either all work together or fail alone. But how should we work together? What’s the ideal strategy for group creativity? Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, has spent his career trying to answer these crucial questions, and he’s done it by studying Broadway musicals. Although Uzzi grew up in New York City and attended his fair share of productions as a kid, he doesn’t exactly watch A Chorus Line in his spare time. “I like musicals just fine, but that’s not why I study them,” he says. Instead, Uzzi spent five years analyzing thousands of old musicals because he sees the art form as a model of group creativity. “Nobody creates a Broadway musical by themselves,” Uzzi says. “The production requires too many different kinds of talent.” He then rattles off a list of the diverse artists that need to work together: the composer has to write songs with a lyricist and librettist, and the choreographer has to work alongside the director, who is probably getting notes from the producers. Uzzi wanted to understand how the relationships of these team members affected the end result. Was it better to have a group composed of close friends who had worked together before, or did total strangers make better theater? What is the ideal form of creative collaboration? To answer these questions, Uzzi undertook an epic study of nearly every musical produced on Broadway between 1877 and 1990, analyzing the teams behind 2,258 different productions. (To get a full list of collaborators, he often had to track down dusty old Playbills in theater basements.) He charted the topsy-turvy relationships of thousands of different artists, from Cole Porter to Andrew Lloyd Webber. The first thing Uzzi discovered was that the people who worked on Broadway were part of an extremely interconnected social network: it didn’t take many links to get from the librettist of Guys and Dolls to the choreographer of Cats. Uzzi then came up with a way to measure the density of these connections for each musical, a designation he called Q. In essence, the amount of Q reflects the “social intimacy” of people working on the play, with higher levels of Q signaling a greater degree of closeness. For instance, if a musical was being developed by a team of artists who had worked together several times before — this is common practice on Broadway, since producers see “incumbent teams” as less risky — that musical would have an extremely high Q. In contrast, a musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q. This metric allowed Uzzi to explore the correlation between levels of Q and the success of the musical. “Frankly, I was surprised by how big the effect was,” Uzzi says. “I expected Q to matter, but I had no idea it would matter this much.” According to the data, the relationships between collaborators was one of the most important variables on Broadway. The numbers tell the story: When the Q was low, or less than 1.7, the musicals were much more likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “After all, you can’t just put a group of people who have never met before in a room and expect them to make something great. It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” However, when the Q was too high (above 3.2) the work also suffered. The artists were so close that they all thought in similar ways, which crushed theatrical innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway during the 1920s. Although the decade produced many talented artists — Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and Oscar Hammerstein II — it was also full of theatrical failures. (Uzzi’s data revealed that 87 percent of musicals produced during the decade were utter flops, which is far above the historical norm.) The problem, he says, is that all of these high-profile artists fell into the habit of collaborating with only their friends. “Broadway [during the 1920s] had some of the biggest names ever,” says Uzzi. “But the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity. All the great talent ended up producing a bunch of mediocre musicals.” What kind of team, then, led to the most successful musicals? Uzzi’s data clearly demonstrates that the best Broadway shows were produced with intermediate levels of social intimacy. A musical produced at the ideal level of Q (2.6) was two and a half times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced with a low Q (<1.4) or a high Q (>3.2). It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. This led Uzzi to argue that creative collaborations have a sweet spot: “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently — they had a familiar structure to fall back on — but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.” Low Q Ideal Q High Q The most creative teams aim for the sweet spot of Q. Uzzi’s favorite example of intermediate Q is West Side Story, one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time. In 1957, the play was seen as a radical departure from Broadway conventions, for both its willingness to tackle social problems and its extended dance scenes. At first, West Side Story might look like a play with a high Q, since several of its collaborators were already Broadway legends who had worked together before. The concept for the play emerged from a conversation among Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents. But that conversation among old friends was only the beginning. As Uzzi points out, West Side Story also benefited from a crucial injection of unknown talent. A twenty-five-year-old lyricist named Stephen Sondheim was hired to write the words (even though he’d never worked on Broadway before), while Peter Gennaro, an assistant to Robbins, provided many important ideas for the choreography. “People have a tendency to want to only work with their friends,” says Uzzi. “It feels so much more comfortable. But that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. If you really want to make something great, then you’re going to need to seek out some new people too.” 1. The screenwriter William Goldman in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade famously declared that “the single most important fact of the entire movie industry [is that] NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.” To demonstrate his point, Goldman cited a long list of Hollywood flops and surprise successes. For instance, one of the highest-grossing movies in history, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was offered to every studio in Hollywood, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: “Why did Paramount say yes?” Goldman asks. “Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars…? Because nobody, nobody — not now, not ever — knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.” Hollywood, in other words, is like a slot machine: every movie is a blind gamble. Pixar Animation Studios is the one exception to Goldman’s rule. Since 1995, when the first Toy Story was released, Pixar has created eleven feature films. Every one of those films has been a commercial success, with an average international gross of more than $550 million per film. These blockbusters have also been critical darlings; the studio has collected twenty-four Academy Awards, six Golden Globes, and three Grammys. Since 2001, when the Oscars inaugurated the category of Best Animated Feature, every Pixar film has been nominated; five of those films have taken home the statue. The only way to understand Pixar’s success is to understand its unique creative process, which has slowly evolved over the course of its thirty-year history. Before Pixar was a movie studio, it was a computer manufacturer. The roots of the company date to 1980, when the director George Lucas started a computer division within Lucasfilm, his movie production firm. At the time, Lucasfilm was flush with profit from Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and George Lucas was interested in exploring the possibility of using these new machines to create cinematic special effects. (All of the effects for Star Wars had been done manually; the lightsabers, for instance, were painted onto each frame of film.) And so, in 1980, Lucas hired Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, two computer scientists who specialized in the creation of digital imagery. Although Lucas was funding this avant-garde research, he showed little interest in using special effects in his films. In fact, the first cinematic application of this new technology came in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when the camera swooped onto the surface of a distant planet. “That was our big break,” Smith remembers. “It took a long time to make just a few seconds of film, but I was jazzed right to the teeth about what we’d done. We showed that even these slow machines could make something that looked pretty remarkable.” But Catmull and Smith weren’t content to work on short digital illusions; they wanted to make their own feature film, an animated movie that would be created entirely on the computer. Unfortunately, Lucas had no intention of letting his scientists become filmmakers. As a result, Catmull and Smith had to shroud their animation project in secrecy. Their first hire was a Disney animator named John Lasseter, who was given the vague official title of user-interface designer. Catmull and Smith had been working on a short cartoon called The Adventures of Andrй and Wally B — it featured a character being woken by a pesky bumblebee — and Lasseter immediately made several major changes. He replaced the rigid geometry of circles and squares with more varied shapes and injected some comedy into the interactions of Andrй and the insect. “It was very clear from the beginning that John was a master storyteller,” says Catmull, who is the current president of Disney Animation Studios and Pixar. “He had a skill set that we desperately needed. And so we basically listened to everything he had to say.” While Andrй was a technical triumph — it’s widely celebrated for spurring interest in computer animation among the major Hollywood studios — George Lucas was getting tired of funding a bunch of computer geeks and their expensive mainframes. Enter Steve Jobs. At the time, Jobs was still smarting from being forced out of Apple, and he saw the computer division at Lucasfilm as a potential investment. But Jobs wasn’t that interested in animation. He was drawn to the Pixar Image Computer, a $135,000 machine capable of generating complex graphic visualizations. (Catmull and Smith justified their cartoons as marketing tools that showed off the power of the hardware.) In 1986, Jobs bought the computer division for $10 million from Lucasfilm. The new company was named after its only product: Pixar. Unfortunately, the expensive computers were a commercial flop. (“We were just a little too far ahead of the curve,” says Smith. “People weren’t ready to spend that much money on a computer that could only produce pictures.” ) Jobs was forced to extend a personal line of credit to Pixar, which was losing millions of dollars every year. Meanwhile, Catmull and Smith were scrambling to bring in revenue, if only to keep their creative team together. The two scientists soon came up with a plan: they would start producing commercials. While the technology wasn’t yet ready for a feature film — the computers were still too slow — the Pixar machines could efficiently render fifteen-second television spots. Before long, Lasseter was animating ads for Listerine, Lifesavers, Volkswagen, and Trident gum. It wasn’t particularly fulfilling work, but it paid the bills. Despite these financial struggles, a unique creative culture was developing within Pixar. This culture was defined by the free flow of ideas, by the constant interaction between computer scientists and cartoon animators. At first, these interactions were a byproduct of the technology, which remained so fraught with problems that each short film became an endless negotiation. Was this irregular shape possible to animate? What could be done about motion blur? How could a facial expression become more expressive? Because Pixar was inventing its own art form, every aesthetic decision had technical consequences, and these would then require more artistic tweaks. “In those early days, we had no idea what we were doing,” says Bobby Podesta, a supervising animator. “We were groping in the dark. That meant we needed to constantly consult the computer guys — ‘Can you do this? What about this?’ — and then push them when they said it couldn’t be done. It became this never-ending conversation where we were all trying to figure out what was even possible.” To help sell the hardware, Pixar continued making short films. The most impressive was Tin Toy, a story about a wind-up toy running away from a baby. Lasseter was inspired to make the short after watching a home video of his nephew: “The video was half an hour of him just sitting there, playing with his toys,” Lasseter says. “Everything he picked up went into his mouth, and he slobbered all over it. I thought, Ahh, imagine what it must be like to be a toy in the hands of a baby. That baby must seem like a monster. And that idea is where Tin Toy came from.” Tin Toy was such a critical success — it became the first computer-animated film to win an Oscar — that Disney Studios decided to collaborate with Pixar on a feature film, one that would also revolve around the emotional relationship between a toy and its owner. The working title of the movie was Toy Story, if only because nobody could think of anything better. “This was our big break,” says Catmull. “But it was also pretty intimidating. We were used to making short commercials, not an eighty-two-minute film.” At the time, Disney pressured Pixar to create a separate production company for Toy Story. This was standard Hollywood procedure: “Everybody told us that when you made a movie, you formed a company within a company and separated out the cultures,” Catmull says. “We’d never made a movie before, so what did we know? We came up with a name” — the production company was going to be called Hi-Tech Toons — “and even printed up stationery. But then I went to John [Lasseter] and showed him the logo and stuff, and he said ‘That’s a really bad idea.’ So we canceled the plans. We told all the Hollywood people we were going to do it our way.” The reason Pixar decided against an independent production company was that it didn’t want to place any constraints on the interactions of its employees. Pixar realized that its creativity emerged from its culture of collaboration, its ability to get talented people from diverse backgrounds to work together. (Lasseter describes the equation this way: “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.”) While the studio was determined to hire gifted animators and ingenious computer scientists, it was just as determined to get these new hires to interact with one another and with older, more experienced employees. The meritocracy needed to mingle. Of course, the only way to cultivate this kind of collaboration — the right level of Q — was to have everyone in the same building, and not scattered among various spinoffs and independent entities. “The modern Hollywood approach was to put together a team for one project and then disband the team when production was finished,” Catmull says. “But we thought that was dumb. When it comes down to it, the only way to make a good movie is to have a good team. The current view in Hollywood, in contrast, is that movies are all about ideas, and that a good idea is rarer and more valuable than good people. That’s why there are so many copycat movies: everyone is chasing the same concept. But that’s a fundamentally misguided approach. A mediocre team will screw up a good idea. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team and let them work together, they’ll find a way to succeed.” 2. Pixar Animation Studios is set in an old Del Monte canning factory just north of Oakland. The studio originally planned to build something else, an architectural design that called for three buildings, with separate offices for the computer scientists, animators, and management. While the layout was cost-effective — the smaller, specialized buildings were cheaper to build — Steve Jobs scrapped the plan. (“We used to joke that the building was Steve’s movie,” Catmull says. “He really oversaw everything.”) Before long, Jobs had completely reimagined the studio. Instead of three buildings, there was going to be a single vast space with an airy atrium at its center. “The philosophy behind this design is that it’s good to put the most important function at the heart of the building,” Catmull says. “Well, what’s our most important function? It’s the interaction of our employees. That’s why Steve put a big empty space there. He wanted to create an open area for people to always be talking to each other.” But Jobs realized that it wasn’t enough simply to create an airy atrium; he needed to force people to go there. Jobs began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria and coffee bar and gift shop. But that still wasn’t enough, which is why Jobs eventually decided to locate the only set of bathrooms in the atrium. “At first, I thought this was the most ridiculous idea,” says Darla Anderson, an executive producer on several Pixar films. “I have to go to the bathroom every thirty minutes. I didn’t want to have to walk all the way to the atrium every time I needed to go. That’s just a waste of time. But Steve said, ‘Everybody has to run into each other.’ He really believed that the best meetings happened by accident, in the hallway or parking lot. And you know what? He was right. I get more done having a bowl of cereal and striking up a conversation or walking to the bathroom and running into unexpected people than I do sitting at my desk.” Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, agrees: “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space . . . But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.” And it’s not just the atrium; the atmosphere of interaction is evident all across the campus. When I visited the studio, during the final, frantic days of production on Toy Story 3, it seemed as if every common space echoed with conversation. There was, as Jobs predicted, plenty of chatter inside the bathroom (I eavesdropped on two animators talking about the dirt on Lotso the Bear’s fur while washing their hands at the sink.), but there were also crowds talking in the coffee bar about the Randy Newman soundtrack, and large groups sharing jokes over plates of Thai curry at the Luxo Cafй. I saw people collaborating in the art gallery and listened to animators talk shop while sitting in their Barcaloungers. (In the evenings, the social activity transitions to the bars — there are eleven drinking holes on the Pixar campus.) And then there’s Pixar University, a collection of 110 different classes, from creative writing to comic improv, that are offered to all employees. The classes are filled with a diverse group of students, so John Lasseter might learn how to juggle in the atrium alongside a security guard. The Latin crest of Pixar University says it all: Alienus Non Diutius, which means “alone no longer.” The sociologist Ray Oldenburg referred to such gathering spots as “third places,” which he defined as any interactive environment that is neither the home (the first place) nor the office (the second place). These shared areas have played an outsize role in the history of new ideas, from the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century England where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modernist Paris frequented by Picasso and Gertrude Stein. The virtue of these third places, Oldenburg says, is that they bring together a diversity of talent, allowing people to freely interact while ingesting some caffeine or alcohol. What makes the Pixar studios so unique is that these spaces have become part of the office itself. There are cubicles and desktops, of course, but there are also whiskey lounges and espresso bars. The end result is a workplace filled with the clutter of human voices, the soundtrack of an effective third place. While such interactions might seem incidental and inefficient — the kind of casual encounters that detract from productivity — Pixar takes them extremely seriously. The studio knows that the small talk of employees isn’t a waste of time, and that those random conversations are a constant source of good ideas. This is because Pixar has internalized one of the most important lessons of group creativity, which is that the most innovative teams are a mixture of the familiar and the unexpected, just like those Broadway artists making West Side Story. (The company 3M and Google both promote a similar ethos by emphasizing horizontal interactions.) Although most people at Pixar work in tight-knit teams, the culture of the studio encourages them to chat with colleagues working on completely unrelated projects. “We think a lot about the geography of where people are sitting and how the offices are laid out,” Anderson says. “Part of my job [as a producer] is to make sure everyone is smooshing together. If I don’t see lots of smooshing, I get worried.” If Anderson knows that an animator will be working on a technical aspect of the film, she’ll place him at the end of a corridor filled with computer scientists. If a writer is struggling with a scene involving a certain character, then Anderson will make sure the writer bumps into the animators drawing that same character. “The assumption is that a few of those random talks in the hallway are going to be really useful,” she says. “Most of them won’t be, of course. They’ll just be talking about their kids or football or whatever. But every once in a while that random conversation is going to lead to a breakthrough.” In order to understand the wisdom of Pixar’s office design, it helps to know about the research of Tom Allen, a professor of organization studies at MIT. In the early seventies, Allen began studying the interaction of engineers in several large corporate laboratories. After several years of tracking their conversations — counting all those exchanges in the hallways and coffee room — he came up with the Allen curve, which describes the likelihood that any two people in the same office will communicate. The curve is steep; according to Allen, a person is ten times more likely to communicate with a colleague who sits at a neighboring desk than with someone who sits more than fifty meters away. It’s not particularly surprising, of course, that we make small talk with those who are nearby. But Allen also discovered something unexpected about all these office conversations. After analyzing the workplace data, he realized that the highest-performing employees — those with the most useful new ideas — were the ones who consistently engaged in the most interactions. “High performers consulted with anywhere from four to nine organizational colleagues [on a given project], whereas low performers contacted one or two colleagues at most,” Allen wrote in his 1984 treatise Managing the Flow of Technology. “This suggests that increasing the number of colleagues with whom an employee consults contributes independently to performance.” The key word in that sentence is independently. According to Allen’s data, office conversations are so powerful that simply increasing their quantity can dramatically increase creative production; people have more new ideas when they talk with more people. This suggests that the most important place in every office is not the boardroom, or the lab, or the library. It’s the coffee machine. A similar lesson emerges from a recent study led by Brian Uzzi, the sociologist who measured the Q of Broadway musicals. In 2009, Uzzi got access to a vast trove of data from a large hedge fund, giving him a complete record of every instant message sent by every trader over an eighteen-month period. The first thing Uzzi and his collaborators discovered was that these traders sent out an astonishing number of messages. They amassed more than two million exchanges, with the average trader engaging in sixteen different IM conversations at the same time. What Uzzi wanted to know was how this constant stream of information affected the financial performance of the traders. He was particularly interested in the flurry of messages that occurred whenever a new financial report was released. “What you often see is [that] some new information comes over the Bloomberg terminal, and there’s this sudden spike in communication,” Uzzi says. “What’s happening is that everyone is trying to figure out what the news means. Is it good news? What’s it going to do to the stock?” Uzzi refers to this as the disambiguation process, since the traders are trying to make sense of the unclear information. They’re asking one another questions and benefiting from the diverse thoughts of colleagues. “There’s a big incentive to figure this stuff out fast,” he says. “The faster you are, the more money you make.” By comparing the messaging habits of the traders, Uzzi was able to document the power of these electronic interactions. He discovered that Tom Allen was right: the best traders were the most connected, and people who carried on more IM conversations and sent more messages also made more money. (While typical traders generated profits on only 55 percent of their trades, those who were extremely plugged in profited on more than 70 percent of their stock trades.) “These are the guys who get embedded in multiple chats,” Uzzi says. “They’re just sucking up information from everybody else, like a vacuum. And when they start to trade, they don’t go silent. They don’t stop talking. They IM even more.” In contrast, the least successful traders tended to engage in the fewest electronic chats. They also stopped exchanging messages right before making an investment decision. Says Uzzi, “They’d get cut off from the conversation. And this meant that they weren’t able to make sense of what was happening.” Uzzi compares these financial conversations to the creative process. “The act of investing is like solving a difficult puzzle,” he says. “These traders are trying to connect the dots. And if you look at these IM exchanges [in the hedge fund], what you frequently find is that they lead to a good idea, a successful trade. Because the traders are listening to their network, they manage to accomplish what they could never have done by themselves.” While all the instant messages might seem like a distraction — a classic example of multitasking run amok — Uzzi argues that they’re an essential element of success. “If I had to choose between a trader who was a little smarter or one who was a little better connected, I’d definitely go for the connections,” Uzzi says. “Those conversations count for a lot.” Pixar tries to maximize such conversations. The studio knows that an office in which everyone is interacting is the most effective at generating new ideas, as people chat at the bathroom sink and exchange theories while waiting in line for lattes. “The secret of Pixar from the start has been its emphasis on teamwork, this belief that you can learn a lot from your coworkers,” says Alvy Ray Smith. “Ed and I were really determined to create a kind of mutual admiration society, so that the techies thought the artists were geniuses, and the artists thought the techies were magicians. We wanted people to want to learn from each other. That’s always when the best stuff happens: when someone tells you something you didn’t already know.” The computer scientist Christopher Langton once observed that innovative systems constantly veer toward the “edge of chaos,” to those environments that are neither fully predictable nor fully anarchic. We need structure or everything falls apart. (The classic demonstration of a space without structure is the “nonterritorial office” developed by the ad agency TBWA Chiat/Day. In 1993, the company decided to do away with every tradition of the corporate office. Employees were no longer given fixed desks or cubicles or computers. Instead, they were encouraged to assemble with their colleagues based on the task at hand; the model was the college campus, in which students were free to work anywhere and everywhere. (Time magazine hailed the Chiat/Day office as the “ forerunner of employment in the information age.”) The reality of the new space, however, failed to live up to the hype. Although the freeform interior was designed to encourage interaction, it actually derailed it. Because there were no offices, people couldn’t find one another. Productivity plummeted. The couches with the nicest views became the subject of petty turf wars; fistfights broke out over meeting spaces. By 1995, it had become clear that the new Chiat/Day model was broken. The walls were reinstalled.) But we also need spaces that surprise us. Because it is the exchanges we don’t expect, with the people we just met, that will change the way we think about everything. 3. Every day at the Pixar studio begins the same way: A few dozen animators and computer scientists gather in a small screening room filled with comfy velour couches. They eat Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch and drink organic coffee. Then the team begins analyzing the few seconds of film produced the day before, ruthlessly shredding each frame. (There are twenty-four frames per second.) No detail is too small to tear apart: I sat in on a meeting in which the Toy Story 3 team spent thirty minutes discussing the reflective properties of the plastic lights underneath the wings of Buzz Lightyear. After that, an editor criticized the precise starting point of a Randy Newman song. The music began when Woody entered the scene, but he argued that it should start a few seconds later, when Woody began running. Someone else disagreed, and a lively debate ensued. Both alternatives were tested. (It’s not uncommon for a Pixar scene to go through more than three hundred iterations.) The team discussed the motivations of the character and the emotional connotations of the clarinet solo. By the time the meeting was over, it was almost lunch. These crit sessions are modeled on the early production meetings at Lucasfilm, when Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, and Ed Catmull would meet with the animators to review their work. At first, the meetings were necessary because nobody knew what he was doing — computer animation remained a hypothetical. But Lasseter soon realized that the meetings were incredibly efficient, since everybody was able to learn from the mistakes of everybody else. Furthermore, the crit sessions distributed responsibility across the entire group, so that the entire team felt responsible for catching mistakes. “This was a lesson I took away from the Toyota manufacturing process,” Catmull says. “In their car factories, everybody had a duty to find errors. Even the lowly guys on the assembly line could pull the red cord and stop the line if they saw a problem. It wasn’t just the job of the guys in charge. It was a group process. And so what happened at Toyota was a massive amount of incremental improvement. People on the assembly line constantly suggested lots of little fixes, and all those little fixes had a way of adding up to a quality product. That model was very influential for me as we set about figuring out how to structure the Pixar meetings. I wanted people to know that if a mistake slips through the production process, if we don’t fix something that can be fixed, then it’s everybody’s fault. We all screwed up. We all failed to pull the red cord.” The harsh atmosphere of Pixar’s morning meetings — the emphasis on finding imperfections and mistakes — may at first seem to contradict one of the basic rules of group creativity, which is to always be positive. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborn, a founding partner of the advertising firm BBDO, came up with a catchy term for what he considered the ideal form of group creativity: brainstorming. In a series of bestselling books, Osborn outlined the basic principles of a successful brainstorming session, which he said could double the creative output of a group. The most important principle, he said, was the absence of criticism. According to Osborn, if people were worried about negative feedback, if they were concerned that their new ideas might get ridiculed by the group, then the brainstorming process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” Osborn wrote in Your Creative Power. “In order to increase our imaginative potential, we should focus only on quantity. Quality will come later.” Brainstorming is the most popular creativity technique of all time. It’s used in advertising offices and design firms, the classroom and the boardroom. When people want to extract the best ideas from a group, they obey Osborn’s instructions; criticism is censored, and the most “freewheeling” associations are encouraged. The underlying assumption is simple: if people are scared of saying the wrong things, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. There is, of course, something very appealing about brainstorming. It’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback, which is why most participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contributions to the group. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations, the output of the unchained imagination. At such moments, brainstorming can seem like an ideal mental technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. There’s just one problem with brainstorming: it doesn’t work. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, summarizes the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” In fact, the very first empirical test of Osborn’s technique, which was performed at Yale in 1958, soundly refuted the premise. The experiment was simple: Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to carefully follow Osborn’s brainstorming guidelines. As a control sample, forty-eight students working by themselves were each given the same puzzles. The results were a sobering refutation of brainstorming. Not only did the solo students come up with twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups but their solutions were deemed more “feasible” and “effective” by a panel of judges. In other words, brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group. Instead, the technique suppressed it, making each individual less creative. The reason brainstorming is so ineffective returns us to the importance of criticism and debate, the very elements that define the Pixar morning meeting. (Steve Jobs has implemented a similar approach at Apple. Jonathan Ives, the lead designer at the company, describes the tenor of group meetings as “brutally critical.”) The only way to maximize group creativity — to make the whole more than the sum of its parts — is to encourage a freewheeling discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces its cost. When you believe that your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you’re less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation. We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong. Consider this clever study led by Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley. She divided 265 female undergraduates into five-person teams. Every team was given the same difficult problem: How can traffic congestion be reduced in the San Francisco Bay Area? The teams had twenty minutes to invent as many solutions as possible. At this point, each of the teams was randomly assigned to one of three different conditions. In the minimal condition, the teams received no further instructions; they were free to work together however they wanted. In the brainstorming condition, the teams got the standard brainstorming guidelines, which emphasized the importance of refraining from criticism. Finally, there was the debate condition, in which the teams were given the following instructions: “Most research and advice suggest that the best way to come up with good solutions is to come up with many solutions. Freewheeling is welcome; don’t be afraid to say anything that comes to mind. However, in addition, most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticize each other’s ideas.” Which teams did the best? The results weren’t even close: while the brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, people in the debate condition were far more creative. On average, they generated nearly 25 percent more ideas. The most telling part of the study, however, came after the groups had been disbanded. That’s when researchers asked each of the subjects if he or she had any more ideas about traffic that had been triggered by the earlier conversation. While people in the minimal and brainstorming conditions produced, on average, two additional ideas, those in the debate condition produced more than seven. Nemeth summarizes her results: “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the [most] important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.” There is something counterintuitive about this research. We naturally assume, like Osborn, that negative feedback stifles the sensitive imagination. But it turns out we’re tougher than we thought. The imagination is not meek — it doesn’t wilt in the face of conflict. Instead, it is drawn out, pulled from its usual hiding place. According to Nemeth, the reason criticism leads to more new ideas is that it encourages us to fully engage with the work of others. We think about their concepts because we want to improve them; it’s the imperfection that leads us to really listen. (And isn’t that the point of a group? If we’re not here to make one another better, then why are we here? Just look at the Beatles: Lennon and McCartney had a famously combative and competitive relationship. But that turned out to be blessing in disguise, since all the internal disagreements inspired the songwriters.) In contrast, when everybody is “right” — when all new ideas are equally useful, as in a brainstorming session — we stay within ourselves. There is no incentive to think about someone else’s thoughts or embrace unfamiliar possibilities. And so the problem remains impossible. The absence of criticism has kept us all in the same place. (The emotion of anger also seems to have short-term creative benefits. That, at least, is the take-away message of a 2011 series of studies led by Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad. In their first experiment, they demonstrated that anger was better than a neutral mood for promoting creativity. In their second experiment, they elicited anger directly in some of the subjects, and then asked all of the study participants to brainstorm on ways to improve the environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas than nonangry people. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.) Of course, this doesn’t mean that anger is a cure-all or that nastiness is always wise. For one thing, anger is resource depleting: although angry subjects generated more ideas initially, their performance quickly declined. To better understand the power of criticism — why it acts like a multiplier for the imagination — it’s worth looking at another experiment led by Nemeth. While the typical brainstorming session begins with an instruction to free-associate — to express the very first thoughts that enter the mind — that’s probably an ineffective strategy. In study after study, psychologists have found that people just aren’t very good at free-associating. For instance, if I ask you to free-associate on the word blue, there’s a 45 percent chance that your first answer will be sky. Your next answer will probably be ocean, followed by green, and, if you’re feeling creative, a noun like jeans. Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of clichйs. How do we escape these clichйs? Nemeth found a simple fix. Her experiment went like this: A lab assistant surreptitiously sat in on a group of subjects being shown a variety of color slides. The subjects were asked to identify each of the colors. Most of the slides were obvious, and the group quickly settled into a tedious routine. However, in some groups, Nemeth instructed her lab assistant to occasionally shout out the wrong answer, so that a red slide would trigger a response of “Pink,” or a blue slide would lead to a reply of “Turquoise.” After a few minutes, the group was asked to free-associate on these same colors. The results were impressive: people in the dissent condition — they were exposed to inaccurate descriptions — came up with far more original and varied associations. Instead of saying that blue reminded them of sky, they were able to expand their loom of associations, so that the color triggered thoughts of Miles Davis, Smurfs, and berry pie. The obvious answer had stopped being the only answer. More recently, Nemeth has found that the same strategy can lead to improved problem solving on a variety of creative tasks. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to invent a new brand name or decipher a hard insight puzzle. Beginning a group session with a moment of dissent — even when the dissent is wrong — can dramatically expand creative potential. The power of dissent is really about the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer — red is called pink — you start to reassess your initial assumptions. You try to understand the strange reply, which leads you to think about the problem from a new perspective. And so your comfortable associations get left behind. The imagination has been stretched by an encounter that you didn’t expect. These experiments demonstrate the value of Pixar’s morning production meetings. When the animators and engineers sit down on those couches with their cereal bowls, they know the meeting isn’t going to be very much fun. “Nobody likes to begin their day by learning about all the stuff they got wrong the day before,” says Bobby Podesta, the lead animator on Toy Story 3. “But we know that, if you want to make the best stuff, then you’re going to have accept some tradeoffs. You’re going to have to stay late at the office. You’re going to have to deal with critiques. Your feelings might occasionally get hurt.” Nevertheless, Pixar strives to ensure that the criticism never gets out of control, that all the mistakes don’t become too demor-alizing. This is why the team leaders at Pixar emphasize the importance of plussing, a technique that allows people to improve ideas without using harsh or judgmental language. The goal of plussing is simple: whenever work is criticized, the criticism should contain a plus, a new idea that builds on the flaws in a productive manner. “Since we spend most of our day in these group meetings, it’s really important that the meetings stay relatively cordial,” Podesta says. “It could get pretty depressing if all we did was shoot each other down. And that’s why, when we do engage in criticism, we try to make sure the criticism is mixed with a little something else, a new idea that allows us to immediately move on, to start focusing not on the mistake but on how to fix it.” When plussing works, it’s incredibly effective at generating creative breakthroughs. The criticism feels like a surprise, and that makes everyone in the room more likely to invent a plus, a new idea that moves the movie forward. According to Podesta, many of his best fixes come after the meeting, as he continues to contemplate the morning conversation. “It might be hours later, but I’m often still thinking about what the group talked about,” he says. “Maybe I’m still a little upset because I got taken apart. Or maybe we just exposed a really tough problem, and none of the proposed fixes really worked. But it’s like I put the problem on the back burner of my brain. And then, when I’m doing something else” — Podesta can often be found at the Pixar gym — “I come up with a better solution. I suddenly know how I should animate the face, or how that scene should go. I’m still plussing.” This is why the Pixar process is so effective: while the groups engage in critical debate, it is a debate shot through with the unexpected, with the innovative ideas that emerge from relentless dissent. “The most wonderful part of working here are the surprises,” says Lee Unkrich, a Pixar director. “Before we begin every movie, there’s always the worry that maybe we don’t have any good ideas left. Maybe all our good jokes have been used up. But then the process begins and those worries mostly disappear. The team finds a way to make it happen. Because if it was just me making this” — he points to a computer screen with a frame from Toy Story 3 — “then the movie would stink. I’m not capable of surprising myself every day with some great new idea. That kind of magic can only come from the group.” Sometimes, the dramatic improvements unleashed by the Pixar process can startle outsiders. In August of 2002, Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, was given an advance screening of Finding Nemo, Pixar’s third full-length release. At the time, Disney wasn’t sure if it would renew its distribution contract with the fledgling studio. Eisner was not impressed by the film. As James Stewart recounts in DisneyWar, the CEO immediately e-mailed the Disney board: “Yesterday we saw for the second time the new Pixar movie Finding Nemo. This will be a reality check for those guys. It’s OK, but nowhere near as good as their previous films.” Eisner used the mediocrity of the movie to explain why he wanted to wait until after its release before restarting contract negotia-tions with Pixar. The creative failure would allow Disney to get a better deal. But Eisner was wrong: Finding Nemo turned out to be a huge box-office success, grossing more than $868 million. While the rough cut was deeply imperfect, Eisner underestimated the power of Pixar’s iterative method. He didn’t realize that the studio excelled at fixing its failures, transforming a problematic draft into a polished final cut. (The director Andrew Stanton ended up restructuring the entire movie, cutting a series of flashbacks.) Ed Catmull summarizes this creative journey in typically blunt terms, describing it as the ability to go from “suck to non-suck.” The original Finding Nemo sucked. But then, after nine months of morning crit sessions, it ended up firmly in the nonsuck category, winning the 2003 Academy Award for best animated film. Disney ended up paying dearly for the negotiating delay. It’s important not to sugarcoat the struggles of the Pixar process. Even plussing can’t prevent the occasional heated argument, and many employees complain about the grueling hours. (“At least they give us free food on the weekend,” Podesta says.) When I spent time at the studio, people answered many of my questions with references to the same traumatic experience: the making of Toy Story 2. Although the movie is more than a decade old, it remains a frequently cited parable at Pixar. Catmull, for instance, referred to the struggle of Toy Story 2 as “our defining moment. . . A lesson we should never forget.” The problems with the film began in the fall of 1998, during the final days of story development. (Disney originally urged the studio to make the sequel a direct-to-video release, which meant it would have a smaller budget and shorter running time. However, Catmull and Lasseter concluded that the decision was a mistake. “We came to believe that having two different standards of quality was bad for our souls,” Catmull says. “You either always make the best stuff you can or you shut up shop.”) Pixar takes its stories very seriously. In fact, it often takes the studio longer to develop the narrative than to animate the movie. The process begins when the Pixar brain trust — a group composed of John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and eight directors — hashes out the initial plot, often while sitting at a burger joint down the street. That sketch of a story is then turned into a treatment, a two-page document outlining the basic arc of the movie. Several drafts and plenty of crit sessions later, the treatment is handed over to a screenwriter. (Pixar frequently brings in outside talent to write the scripts. It’s one of the many ways they inject fresh voices into the process, ensuring the team maintains the right level of Q.) The studio doesn’t want a polished screenplay — it just wants something to get the process started. And so the script gets revised. And then revised again. Scenes are cut; scenes are added. New characters emerge to fill narrative holes. After a year of edits, the script is turned into a story reel, an elaborate sequence of storyboards. There is no animation yet, just drawn poses like in a comic book, with the lines read by Pixar employees. “The reels look very rough,” Catmull says. “But they’re an essential part of the iterative process. When you see the script as a movie, you see all the mistakes in the story. And there are always many, many mistakes.” It’s at this point that Toy Story 2 began running into serious setbacks. Because the studio had been frantically trying to finish A Bug’s Life, its second feature film, Toy Story 2 hadn’t benefited from the usual process of plussing. Instead of interacting with the entire studio, the creative team had been largely isolated in a separate building. (The current campus was still under construction.) “The movie was going off course in a way that we had gone off course on the other movies,” remembers Unkrich. “But the problem was, we were all so busy trying to get A Bug’s Life made that we couldn’t take the time to help them fix the film, to add our critical voices to the mix.” It wasn’t until the winter of 1998 that the brain trust was finally able to start focusing on the troubled cartoon. The first screening of the story reels went horribly. “Everybody knew that the movie wasn’t working,” says Catmull. “Our process was broken — the story wasn’t getting better.” And so, with less than a year until the release date, the Pixar team decided to do the un-thinkable: they threw the script in the trash and started over. Tom Schumacher, an executive at Disney, was terrified. He remembers the first meeting after the screening: John and I were sitting at the table with some of my Disney colleagues, who said, “Well, it’s okay.” And I can’t imagine anything being more crushing to John Lasseter than the expression, “Well, it’s okay.” It’s just unacceptable to him, and it’s one of his most endearing, most exasperating qualities, and probably the biggest reason for his success. So nine months before it was supposed to come out, John threw out the vast majority of the movie. Which is unheard of. How did Pixar fix Toy Story 2? The first change was physical. Lasseter immediately moved everyone into the same space, so the engineers and storytellers and directors were all crammed into a small cluster of cubicles. He realized that the movie was missing that Pixar spark, those minor epiphanies and surprising ideas that occur when people interact in unexpected ways. “We decided that from then on we always wanted everybody in one building,” Lasseter says. “We wanted all the departments, no matter what movie they were working on, to be together.” Lasseter then scheduled an emergency story summit in Sonoma, a two-day retreat that would give people the freedom to think about the movie in an entirely new way. (The new location turned the team into temporary outsiders.) The brain trust soon realized that the fundamental problem with Toy Story 2 — the reason the reels weren’t working — was that the plot felt too predictable. Although the story revolved around Woody’s capture by a toy collector who plans on selling him to a museum in Japan, this scenario never felt like a real possibility. “This film is coming out of Disney and Pixar,” Catmull says. “So you already know Woody’s going back to his original family in the end. And if you know the end, there’s no suspense.” Once this narrative flaw was identified, the Pixar team began fixing it. Wheezy, the broken squeaky toy, was moved to the beginning of the film; a plot twist involving the two Buzzes was dramatically expanded; “Jessie’s Song,” a sad la-ment about no longer being loved by a child, was inserted into the second act. This intense creative process took its toll, with many team members suffering from stress-related health problems. In To Infinity and Beyond, Pixar’s official history, Steve Jobs remembers the difficult first months of 1999: “We killed ourselves to make it [Toy Story 2]. It took some people a year to recover. It was tough — it was too tough, but we did it.” Toy Story 2 wasn’t just finished on time; it went on to become one of the most successful animated films ever made. (The reviews were literally all positive. According to Rottentomatoes.com, Toy Story 2 is one of the best-reviewed movies of all time, with 146 positive reviews and 0 negative reviews.) Nevertheless, the agonizing production process remains an essential lesson for everyone at the studio. “I’ll worry about Pixar when we unlearn what we learned from Toy Story 2,” Catmull says. “Meltdowns are always painful, but they’re a sign that we’re still trying to do something difficult, that we’re still taking risks and willing to correct our mistakes. We have to be willing to throw our scripts in the trash.” Because Pixar knows that talent is not enough. Talent fails every day. And that’s why Jobs put the bathrooms in the center of the building and why the production team begins every day with a group critique. It’s why the producers think about where people sit and why the best ideas come when a story is being plussed apart. Everybody at Pixar knows that there will be many failures along the way. The long days will be filled with difficult conversations and disorienting surprises and late-night arguments. But no one ever said making a good movie was easy. “If it feels easy, then you’re doing it wrong,” Unkrich says. “We know that screwups are an essential part of what we do here. That’s why our goal is simple: We just want to screw up as quickly as possible. We want to fail fast. And then we want to fix it. Together.” 4. Dan Wieden is cofounder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, one of the most innovative and honored ad agencies in the world. Wieden’s firm has a reputation for designing unconventional campaigns, from the Levi’s commercial featuring the voice of Walt Whitman to those yellow rubber bracelets that support Lance Armstrong’s foundation. The agency created the classic Michael Jordan Nike ads and produced a Miller beer television spot directed by Errol Morris. Its employees conceived of the viral Old Spice ads on YouTube and reinvented SportsCenter with the satir-ical “This is SportsCenter” campaign. I met Wieden at the W+K headquarters in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon. The building is a former cold-storage factory that’s been hollowed out. This means that the interior is mostly empty space, a soaring lobby framed by thick concrete walls and weathered pine beams. Wieden gives me a tour of the building as he explains his unorthodox approach to fostering group creativity. At first glance, the Wieden+Kennedy office can seem like a case study in creativity lite, dense with the kind of “innovation en-hancers” that fill the pages of business magazines. There’s modern art on the walls (The office feels like a gallery; every surface is covered with art. My favorite installation is a huge white canvas filled with tens of thousands of clear plastic pushpins. It’s only when you take a step back that the mural makes sense. The pushpins spell the following slogan: Fail Harder.) and the coffee room is plastered with invitations to team-building exercises, including pie-making competitions and company-sponsored trips to the museum. While Dan believes in the virtue of such events — he’s particularly proud of the bian-nual pub-crawl — he thinks they work only if the right people are present. For Dan, this is what creativity is all about: putting talented people in a room and letting them freely interact. “It really is that simple,” he says. “You need to hire the best folks and then get out of the way.” How does Wieden find these people? How does he ensure that his office is filled with employees who will inspire one another? Wieden takes the problem of hiring so seriously that, in 2004, he decided to start his own advertising school, which he called WK12. (The name is a misnomer, since the school actually consists of thirteen people who work together for thirteen months.) There are no classes at WK12. Instead, the curriculum consists of real assignments from real clients, with the students working under the direction of seasoned Wieden+Kennedy employees. The advantage of the school, Wieden says, is that it allows him to not worry about experience — “CVs can be so misleading” — and instead focus on those intangible qualities that are essential for creativity. “What I’ve learned to look for is the individual voice,” he says. “It might be an aesthetic, or a sentence style, or a way of holding the camera. But having that unique voice is the one thing I can’t teach. I can teach someone to write copy. I can show someone how to crop a photo. But I can’t teach you how to have a voice. You either have something to say or you don’t.” Not surprisingly, the applicants to WK12 come from every conceivable field. A recent graduating class included a struggling poet, a grad student in anthropology, a chemist, a chef, a cinema-tographer, and two novelists. (The advertisements for WK12 feature a single question: “Tired of a pointless life?”) For Wieden, the school is an important means of ushering in fresh blood, forcing the agency to incorporate new voices from new disciplines. The inexperienced students ask naive questions and come up with plenty of impractical suggestions. They turn in assignments late and can’t figure out the technical equipment. “You could look at these students, and you could easily conclude that they are wasting everyone’s time,” Wieden says. “They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” But that’s the point. Wieden describes the challenge of advertising as finding a way to stay original in a world of clichйs, avoid-ing the bikinis in beer ads and the racing coupes in car commercials. And that’s why he’s so insistent on hiring people who don’t know anything about advertising. “You need those weird fucks,” he says. “You need people who won’t make the same boring, predictable mistakes as the rest of us. And then, when those weirdos learn how things work and become a little less weird, then you need a new class of weird fucks. Of course, you also need some people who know what they’re doing. But if you’re in the creative business, then you have to be willing to tolerate a certain level of, you know, weirdness.” Wieden is describing the advertising version of Brian Uzzi’s research on Broadway musicals, as the constant influx of students ensures that his creative teams remain in the sweet spot of Q. And so, every year, a new class of WK12 students walks into the headquarters of Wieden+Kennedy and sets up shop in the lobby. Most of their work will be thrown away. Most of their drafts will be ignored. But their weirdness will be contagious. (David Ogilvy, one of the founding fathers of modern advertising, pursued a similar approach. When Ogilvy tested his ideas for a particular marketing campaign, he always included several pitches that he was sure would not work. “Most were, as expected, dismal failures,” Ogilvy wrote. “But the few that succeeded pointed to innovative approaches in the fickle world of advertising.”) One of Wieden’s favorite stories illustrates the importance of incorporating a little weirdness into the creative process. In 1988, Wieden was hard at work on a series of television spots for Nike. The campaign consisted of eight video clips, each of which focused on a different athlete in a different sport. Wieden knew that the campaign needed a tag line, a slogan that could link the disparate commercials together. Unfortunately, he was drawing a blank. “I’d been struggling to find that line for months,” he says. “And it was late at night, and we had to have it ready to go in the morning. And so I’m getting nervous, thinking about how this really wouldn’t work without a slogan. But I couldn’t come up with a slogan! It was killing me.” But then, just when Wieden was about to give up and go to sleep, he started thinking about a murderer named Gary Gilmore who had been executed in 1977. “He just popped into my mind,” Wieden says. “And so it’s the middle of the night, and I’m sitting at my desk, and I’m thinking about how Gilmore died. This was in Utah, and they dragged Gilmore out in front of the firing squad. Before they put the hood over his head, the chaplain asks Gilmore if he has any last words. And he pauses and he says: ‘Let’s do it.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That is so fucking courageous.’ Here’s this guy calling for his own death. And then, the next thing I know, I’m thinking about my shoe commercials. An