Brad Bird on Management

We have all had some bad bosses. I've had a lot of bad bosses. The kind who would blame HIS boss for me not getting a raise that year. The kind that would berate me in front of colleagues and then take me aside to apologize profusely in private. The kind who would take steal my ideas. The kind who told me I was so invaluable to the company that, this year, I could not take a vacation. (I quit that job.) I could go on. We've all been there, right?

Mark Mayerson's Mayerson on Animation blog gives us a peek at Pixar director Brad Bird's management techniques and how he was able to make such good movies by NOT being one of those kinds of bad bosses.

"Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit."