Care and Feeding of the Golden Goose

I recently did a board section for a company that refused to pay for it ( unless I agreed to do more ) When I refused, the supervising producer at the parent company thought I was crazy for "burning a bridge".

I wonder. A very famous ( or infamous ) leader once spoke : Politicians are the same all over ; they promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers " . It was Eisenhower or perhaps Patton that knew the importance of a bridge......which was to get over it as soon as possible and move forward.

I also read something recently on an animation website about career coaching for artists that I took up on and wrote a rebuttal . Enjoy and comment !



Care and Feeding of the Golden Goose
an article on animation production by Dermot Walshe

A few months ago I read a supposed horror story about a young man who was hired to work for one animation company and then took a job somewhere else instead. While some might be tempted to say that this person may have burned a bridge or ruined his career with such a move, I wondered what had really happened.....and reflected on a number of anecdotes and stories I have heard over the years . Certainly I have more than my share of first hand experience with hiring....on both sides of that fence, and I can say that in my twenty years in the business I have seen some companies do it a lot better than others !

All of that got me thinking again about that great void in expectation between companies and artists . Jim Collins said in his book "Good to Great" that great is not a matter of luck or circumstance . Too often companies pat themselves on the back for doing OK but as Jim points out in his exhaustive study it's only the companies that truly focus on being number one or number two in their field that really succeed . To quote Jim here ;"Everyone would like to be the best, but most organizations lack the discipline to figure out with egoless clarity what they can be the best at and the will to do whatever it takes to turn the potential into reality."

Everyone knows the story of the poor farmer who found the golden goose, but I wonder how well the lesson is understood. In the original story the farmer takes care of the goose and it rewards him with eggs of solid gold , but when the farmer becomes impatient and greedy he kills the goose to get to what he believes will be more golden eggs hidden inside.
I have many times been in situations where artists have been recruited or dismissed with what I would call reckless abandon as companies search for a quick fix to whatever crisis situation they are in . Artists that become labelled as having the "wrong attitude" or as being "too precious" drift from one studio to another depending on the season or project. One producer even explained to me in 1995 that all artists are more or less interchangeable and what really mattered was enthusiasm. Strangely enough that same company only received three ( external ) portfolios for layout positions after running full-page recruitment ads in a number of industry magazines including Variety. Clearly the company had a reputation that preceded it . To make matters worse there was one excellent portfolio in the group ; I suggested that hiring such a talented person would be a coup but they had neglected to reply to any of the submissions and only told me that "someone that good would probably leave us soon after anyway "
Artists don't abandon a company for no reason .

I have a long list of similar horror stories from the trenches that I can spare you......but it's with that knowledge that I spare judgement on rumours of bad hires either way.

The question is really if there IS such a thing as a golden goose , and then where are they and how can we tell them apart from the gaggle ? If you permit me I would say listen to the experts.
Long time motivational speaker Tony Robbins often talks about making great transformations in either personal or professional life and he pretty much covers it with these three phrases :

1 : See things for what they ARE....not what you think they are.
2 : Seek advice ; ask good questions from the people who know best.
3 : Act

Of course all of this requires good judgement to work well.......but there is also an old saying that practise makes perfect as long as you learn from your mistakes.

In case any of you recoiled at the mere mention of Tony Robbins listen instead to another expert in the field of animation . Do a youtube search on Ed Catmull lecturing at Stanford . I was particularly struck by some of the things that Ed Catmull said about requirments for success at Pixar :
1 : A culture of truth.....people need an environment where they are not afraid to speak the truth.
2 : Great people are more important than great ideas ; a poor crew will ruin a great idea but a great crew will throw out a bad idea and come up with a better one.
3 : A culture of peers....where artists, technicians and management are respected and paid equally

If your company has seen your gross revenue drop from almost $200 million to nearing $60 million in the last ten years I suspect that you are not performing up to potential . If you are a senior level executive in animation and you dont really understand the success of a TV show like Spongebob then I suspect you don't have merchandise earnings measured in the billions .If you screen a show or film internally and no-one either laughs OR criticizes, you also have a problem . As a CEO said to me a few years back while having coffee ;" we've never been in a multiple offer situation on any of our shows except once....and that was a Disney co-pro ". I humbly suggested that if it was managed well the creative staff could help to fix that, but he replied "I hear you on the creative thing but we know what we're doing". I suddenly got a visual image of a dog chasing it's tail there.....my apologies.

Prominent financial analyst and writer William J. Bernstein in his article The Executioner of Excellence writes that if mutual funds and even hedge fund managers are continuously earning less than market return how can one do better ? His advice is to "actually think for yourself"...."......money managers at large investment companies, banks, and insurance companies, too focused on next quarter’s bottom line and next year’s bonus, gradually disengage from the slow, methodical development of their skills. Add a soupçon of fear of failing unconventionally, stir in a large dollop of groupthink, cook slowly for several years, and competence eventually simmers off. " The conflict between compensation and competence resonates far beyond finance and the corporate world. Bernstein goes on about another industry where returns are measured by quotas "......... a field which requires exquisite judgment in ambiguous situations—exactly the circumstances in which cognitive psychologists have found "external incentives" to be the most corrosive."
What William is alluding to is that if your company rewards management with bonuses for cost saving or earning quotas, then the system will adapt for the short term gains and ruin both the stability and the long term viability of the system. I have often thought that incentives or bonuses in animation ought to be tied to sales success ; can CEO's or boards of directors not see that rewarding producers for being under-budget is actually counter productive in a business that requires a blockbuster hit to earn big ?

Lets take a moment to take on that bugaboo word technology. Strictly speaking, technology just means " a way of doing things" Better technology therefore means "a better way of doing things" .When it comes to the creative process there are innumerable ways of making something......and any number of ways to waste both time and resources. When I was first hired to work on an animation series I was dumbfounded to see the co-directers arguing bitterly over whether a character would carry an umbrella under its arm or by the handle ; the real problem to my mind was that the show itself seemed rather boring. Is there a better technology for "funny" ?
I always remember a great scene where Spongebob yells from his house to Squidword to ask him if he can play his clarinet any......( expecting quieter )......BETTER .

A few years back an associate was heading to China to start an animation company. He had been a lawyer at one time and spent many years in the tech industry with cel phones and consulted with me . I told him very carefully to search for great directors and the best studios he could find and learn what they needed to get better . He insisted that staffing was a lower priority and instead made deals for fitting out a large building with expensive workstations . He has since returned home broke and confused. I had told him to " go find the next Miyazaki" and start small, but he didnt understand the technology of animation .
Technology is variable and most people think it means hardware and software , but how many people know that Miyazakis films STILL employ cel paint technology in many ways. I remember reading that his Oscar- winning film Spirited Away was approximately 50% cel-painted as was Princess Mononoke. It was simply less expensive and more convenient to continue using a crew that was already expert at cel paint, and he complemented that already-existing crew with workstations and digital paint for those that could make the jump to the new method. If you don't know who Miyazaki is you should.

Another serious misconception about technolgy still abounds based on the old Hanna Barbera assembly line method of producing TV series. Many studios or producers feel that scripts should be written by writers and handed to Directors in yet another assembly-line fashion in an effort to control costs and schedules. I myself have a project optioned for development into a feature film, but the first sticking point was the studios' assumption that they would hand the outline over to a "real" writer . Miyazaki himself reminds us that he never had a script for any of his movies and when I mention that to some people they ignorantly insist that it is a technical and factual impossibility to produce a film without a script. Miyazaki only has screencredit as a writer for film copyright reasons and not because there actually was a script.
Yes , it IS technically possible to make a film without a "script" ( but not without a plan ! )..... the industry environment has to evolve to know when it CAN be done and when it can't. No focus group will solve that dilemma ; it takes good judgement and a passion for the craft. Fred Silverman overruled the focus groups that rejected All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore. Bill Wattersons cartoon Calvin and Hobbes was rejected by a focus group that didnt understand it . Miyazaki conceives his own stories and works his own methods. It's an agelong question that confounds humanity as I now remember the story of Polyclitus that I read in the book "The Creators" ( Random House ) . 2500 years ago in Greece a reknowned sculptor was commissioned by a group of patrons to create a statue for public display . Polyclitus took it upon himself to prove a point to those that tried to influence his work :

"Polyclitus made two statues at the same time , one which would be pleasing to the crowd and the other according to the principles of his art . In accordance with the opinion of each person who came into his workshop , he altered something and changed its form , submitting to the advice of each . Then he put both statues on display . The one was marvelled at by everyone , and the other was laughed at . Thereupon Polycitus said , " But the one which you found fault with you made yourselves ; while the one which you marvel at , I made . "

If your animation studio is reeling in this economy while others are experiencing fabulous success, it may be time to hire !

If the golden goose is fed it will reward you.

Just don't let the rumour mill affect your judgement

Dermot