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Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird

Bird joined Pixar in 2000, when the company was riding high following its release of the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and the subsequent hits A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2. Concerned about complacency, senior executives Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter asked Bird, whose body of work included The Iron Giant and The Simpsons, to join the company and shake things up. The veteran of Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, and FOX delivered-winning Academy Awards (best animated feature) for two groundbreaking movies, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.

Inside the interview with Pixar's Brad Bird - An interactive feature including a brief biography, audio clips from the interview, and stills from several of Bird's projects

Brad Bird:

... involved people make for better innovation. Passionate involvement can make you happy, sometimes, and miserable other times. You want people to be involved and engaged. Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between --what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: "I want to get to the problem. There's something I want to do." If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved.

... to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete.

Passive-aggressive people-people who don't show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away-are poisonous.