Why morale matters

The McKinsey Quarterly has a good interview with Brad Bird (director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille). I’ve been following Pixar with great interest over the years, partly because I have a couple of old friends who work there (Hi guys!), and partly because I really believe in what they are doing (changing from being a software vendor in a niche market to being a major motion picture studio: brilliant!). In my opinion, Pixar is the poster child for the “eat your own dog food” school of management, and deserves their success. (How good is Renderman? Well, it’s good enough that we’ve won Oscars with movies we’ve built on it!)

In my experience, THE key issue on the performance of teams is to get the morale and the synergy of the teams going. This involves selecting the right people, keeping the great players in the team, and keeping the ideas flowing.

Here’s a great quote from the interview:

The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Brad is being very low-key here; the emphasis is mine. In my experience, this is exactly correct.

Read the rest of the interview for how and why Brad worked on morale.

What are you doing to increase the morale of your team (and your family, and the broader group of people you work with) TODAY? I’m talking about hugs and compliments; what are you doing to recognize people as individuals, to listen to them, and to make them feel listened to?

More later in the blog, on building a team of “Developers versus Programmers.”

Have a great weekend,
Dak

Announcing Dakworks, and doing today’s "idea warmup"

Dakworks is an information technology, software development, editing, and management consultancy. As the principal consultant, I believe that systems and software must be built to make great things possible, to generate new possibilities, and to liberate people from onerous and repetitive tasks.

At present, the purpose of this blog will be occasional commentary, opinion, and links to “things that I found interesting” in the spirit of the new, trendspotting, and nifty uses of leading and trailing edge technologies.

Today’s cool toy spotting (Thanks to Malcolm Stanley at Strategic Thinking and Execution for pointing it out):

This uses the Arduino controller and an add-on sensor package to monitor plant status and post the results on Twitter.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/02/how_to_make_plants_talk_t.html

The application itself is silly, but think about the implications: Twitter can serve as a personal mash-up dashboard for your home, your car, your pets, your pre-writing kids, and not just your blogosphere and mobile device friends.

For example, imagine an outdoor motion sensor and camera *as a Twitter feed*. Outdoor motion sensor goes off, not worth an alarm…but if you get a call from your alarm company, AND the outdoor motion sensor went off, you’d check your camera and confirm that it’s likely NOT a false alarm. Twitter’s ongoing ‘low quality’ information stream is a great way to moderate and present this data, since it’s redundant, and truly a ‘value add’ rather than a primary source of data.

The key here is to put people in the loop when interpretation is required. This is exactly what Dakworks is all about.

Thanks for reading,
Dak