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VOLUME 11
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Welcome to Volume 11 of The Mark of a leader E-zine. The year got off to a fast and early start for us - wow! We're thrilled to be working with the Xerox Central Ontario sales team using The Mark of a Leader to drive new levels of sales results. Thanks Xerox - you rock! We were also thrilled to be part of the Atlantic Wholesalers leadership conference in January, helping them drive their already strong lead as a retailer in Atlantic Canada. We'll be part of several MPI chapter events through the next several months, where we hope to show North America's meeting planners why The Mark of a Leader is the greatest thing to hit conferences since 18' ballroom ceilings! If you belong to an organization like MPI, where you think promoting The Mark of a leader to your members would be a 'win win' for both of us, please let us know. In this month's E-zine we feature John Lasseter who, along with Steve Jobs and Pixar Animation Studios, has contributed consistent hits and breaths of fresh air to the world of films over the last ten years. We hope you enjoy the story of this tremendous leader and his company. Have a great month. Yours in leadership.
Please visit our website at www.themarkofaleader.com |
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FEATURE
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QUOTABLE QUOTES "You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him." Leo Aikman, "True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." Kurt Vonnegut |
JOHN LASSETER - WORLD'S GREATEST PRODUCER/DIRECTORTrivia Quiz. Who has been the most successful producer/director in films for the last decade? Not Steven Spielberg. Not Clint Eastwood. Not Peter Jackson. No. The answer is John Lasseter, the genius behind Pixar, the company that has given us little films like Toy Story 1&2, It's a Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. 
Only Dreamworks has competed reasonably against Pixar in the world of animated feature films. Disney, Pixar's marketing and distribution partner, has not had their own mega hit in longer than anyone can remember. When Steve Jobs, Chairman of Apple, bought the Industrial Light & Magic computer animation studio from George Lucas in 1986, he was quick to realize that its greatest asset was not just great software and racks of servers. It was the incredible talent of John Lasseter. Today they are partners in the world's best animation studio. A kid like many who grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons, John's talents were nurtured by his high school art teacher mother. At age 5, when most kids are still struggling to draw stick figures, he won a $15 prize from a local California market for a drawing of the headless horseman from Sleepy Hollow. Good grief! In high school he got hooked on animation and the world of Disney, who completely dominated the market at the time. He won awards for his short films, and was accepted into Walt Disney's animation program at the California Institute of the Arts where he studied first hand with Disney animators. And when school was done, off he was to a dream career at Disney. |
But he soon bored. While Disney had pioneered hand-painted cell animation with classics like Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty, as he said, "Animation reached its plateau there with 101 Dalmatians. Somehow, I felt that the films after that, while they had wonderful moments and characters, overall, they were just the same old thing." The breakthrough for him, and any of you old enough to remember, was working on a classic 1982 film called Tron (rent it if you haven't seen it). In Tron, real actors were pulled into the world of video games. The technique used to make the film was unlike anything ever done before - a combination of live action and primitive computer graphics. Tron was a breakthrough, and showed Lasseter a glimpse of the new world ahead of him. "It was exciting," Lasseter says, "but at the time, Disney was only interested in computers if it could make what they were doing cheaper and faster. I said 'Look at the advancement in the art form. Look at the beauty of it.' But, they just weren't interested. "This was 1981; Disney was not ready to push the animation art form to another level. To them animation was still just for kids and would never amount to more than that." Lasseter disagreed. He left Disney in 1984 to join Industrial Light and Magic. Along came Steve Jobs who turned it into Pixar. Recognizing his talent, Jobs gave Lasseter pretty much free rein, and POW! Pixar was on the path of industry domination. |
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QUOTABLE QUOTES "Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common." Satchel Paige "Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." Warren Buffet |
He directed the studio's first short film, 1986's Luxo Jr., which starred a desk lamp. "We had absolutely no money, no computers, no people, no time to do the fancy flying camera moves that you were seeing and all the glitzy tracing and all that stuff - we just had no time. We just locked the camera down and had no background, but it made the audience focus on what was important in the film - the story and the characters." The computer was just a tool to help tell a great story. Luxo Jr. was a huge hit in the graphics industry and the buzz started. They followed it with Toy Story, the first computer generated feature film. It was a grand slam home run of a hit, and won Lasseter and Pixar their first Academy Award. They followed it with an unbroken string of box office and critical successes which have reaped billions at the box office and merchandising shelves, and a shelf full of Oscars. So what is John Lasseter's magic - his Midas Touch? What does he understand better than most others in the industry? 
I think it is this. #2. Build a great team, give them guidance, and let them do their thing. John Lasseter is beloved in an industry of tough SOBs. With The Incredibles, he was the impetus for bringing in outside director Brad Bird because he knew that they needed fresh blood and a new look. The result was the Best Animated Feature Oscar. #3. The Devil is in the Details. John and his team have built an amazing workplace at Pixar, where imagination and playfulness are allowed to expand and express themselves while being constantly pushed to the highest possible standards. But the fun of riding the halls on scooters is mixed with continual no-nonsense project meetings where the most minute details are brought under scrutiny to see where they can be improved. Lasseter will tell you that it is the little things that make a difference in an animated character - expressions, movements, styles, choice of words, tone of voice. All of these nuances are the core of what any character is about. They make them 'real', and are what connects us with a Woody or a Buzz the way we connect with "real" people. Perhaps John Lasseter's Mark is his deep understanding of that. It's the little things that make people... whether they are in a computer or sitting at one next to you. Pay attention to the little things in the people around you, and, as it has at Pixar, the world becomes a much more magical place. |
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Please visit us at www.themarkofaleader.com. Copyright 2006 Mark of a Leader |
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