Ed Catmull’s “starting points”

  1. Get the team right.
  2. Hire people for their potential to grow.
  3. Hire people smarter than you.
  4. Solicit ideas from everyone in your organisation.
  5. Solicit ideas proactively.
  6. Identify barriers to candour and address them.
  7. Understand disagreements, people disagree for a reason.
  8. Root out fear.
  9. Don’t assume you’re right, cultivate doubt.
  10. Create structures and processes that uncover what’s real.
  11. Truth should be in meetings, not hallways.
  12. Forget line-of-command, just communicate.
  13. Share problems, don’t tone them down.
  14. Measuring success and failure without evaluating process is deceiving.
  15. The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
  16. Change and uncertainty are part of life, build capability to recover.
  17. It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks; it’s their job to make it safe to take them.
  18. Failure isn’t evil, it’s a necessary consequence of doing something new.
  19. Trust doesn’t mean you trust people to not screw up; it means you trust them even when they do.
  20. Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job; anyone can stop the production line.
  21. Measure people by their ability to solve problems, not by the mistakes they make.
  22. Share early and share often; don’t wait until things are perfect.
  23. Organisational structure is not communication structure; everybody can talk to anybody.
  24. Don’t make too many rules; most don’t need them; address those who do directly.
  25. Imposing limits often encourages creativity.
  26. Exceptionally hard problems force us to think differently; welcome them.
  27. Organisations are conservative; it takes substantial energy to move them.
  28. If one agenda wins, we all lose.
  29. Protect new ideas, even not-so-great ones.
  30. Crises are not always lamentable; they test values and bond people.
  31. Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us.
  32. Balance is more important than stability; do not make stability a goal.
  33. Making our product great is the goal; don’t confuse the process with the goal (Catmull, 2014, pp. 315–319).

Spotted in Flyvbjerg, B. (2024). Heuristics for Better Project Leadership: Teasing Out Tacit Knowledge. Project Management Journal, 55(6), 615–625.



Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2025, July 16). Ed Catmull’s “starting points” [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/ed-catmulls-starting-points/

This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀