Here is what I learned (there is much more in it, these are just my points):

1) Create a team that can be necessarily honest. It must be safe to speak the truth.
As Catmull says, it takes a lot of maturity and professionalism to do this. This is the most important and the hardest thing.

2) Review frequently, best daily. Review when incomplete, in-the-works stuff. Do not wait until done, because when you’re done, you’re done. First, this takes embarassment, because you do it every day. It enables to make things right and better before they are past the line of no return and it makes you more creative.

3) To achieve quality, you have to aim for quality without compromise. It’s never too late for quality or great. If you go for good enough you’ll get less than good enough.

4) Very simple principle: “Once one can articulate an important idea into a concise statement, then one can use the statement and not have to have a fear of changing behavior.”

So many mantras do exist but do in no way change the behavior of the companies claiming them. It is true for brands, for advertising agencies, for account planners, for any creative venture. Especially in advertising because we formulate these concise statements all the time (Disruption, Brand Ideals, Truth well told and so forth). Too often they become blinds that hide the question “What do we actually do?”.

There is a very nice illustration making the rounds on the web, which captures the difference between Pixar and, well, everybody else. (Note that there are no images needed to sell the idea, just simple sentences)

On a side note, Catmull’s background was neither business manager nor a creative, but computer science. His approach is more like a programmer searching for a bug. More managers should be like him.

So you have tried everything: you brought the Chess World Championship to your capital in your position as the President of the World Chess Federation. You introduced mandatory chess lessons in schools, but still nobody really remembers you, your republic nor heard of a chess child prodigy…

Here is what you do: You go on television and tell everyone you have been abducted by aliens.

This is what Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, President / Economic Dictator of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia did. And – Wow! – it worked. Because now I know where Kalmykia is.
In case you are interested, too: Kalmykia.

I am still wondering why there were so few flights to accumulate data to confirm or falsify the data of the models that predicted the ash concentration over Europe and were the basis for the airspace lockdown. I only heard of one flight over Germany. Do we know the data was right?

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.