I am ashamed at how long it has been since I covered an interesting article in Harvard Business Review. In fact, I'm not going to look back to see how long it has been! But on a plane ride I managed to read the September issue, and a couple of quotes caught my attention.
They are from an article by Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar, the amazing computer animation studio (thank you, Pixar, for making kid movies fun for the grown ups!).
The first quote comes from their "operating principles," which are: (1) Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with everyone; (2) It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas; and (3) We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community. Under the first one, he explains:
Imagine. People can talk about things, even if they aren't the ones with final decision making authority. He points out that sometimes that means that you as a manager will come into a meeting and be surprised (because people outside your chain have been talking about your work). This is a good thing. In fact, it's a more efficient way to do things. But you have to trust people to work things out on their own.