Wrapping up today’s trifecta of psychological judo, Brad Bird discusses lessons on encouraging innovation he applied at Pixar, as well as what institutional enablers the company offers:

Pixar’s Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation

GigaOM extracts his interview with the McKinsey Quarterly into 9 lessons. While all make for interesting insights into creative teambuilding, perhaps the most universal is morale as multiplier:

“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.”

Although occasionally given mention, it’s still uncommon to hear morale recognized so starkly as a driver of value. Compare, for example, the divergent way in which Wal-Mart and CostCo treat their employees. ‘Cost’ as measured strictly on the balance sheet does not factor in lost productivity due to malaise or innate rebellion resulting from poor employee morale.

The availability of interdisciplinary learning via Pixar University also offers an antidote to the two previous articles’ recognition of skill calcification. One interesting aside about the company offering Krav Maga as a class alongside storytelling and improvisation is that, in contrast to most other fighting styles, KM is built much more around principles instead of techniques. Students are trained for real-world contingencies, and great emphasis is placed on conditioning the student to react instictively against an attack and escape versus get caught in a traditional ‘battle’ as found in other styles. Thus, Krav Maga could be seen as much as psychological adaptation as physical defense.

Finally, the influence of Steve Jobs is evident in the overall layout of the campus, such as a central atrium to maximize crossover contact between functional teams as they visit the cafeteria or even the bathrooms. One other example of cross-disciplinary inspiration comes from today’s Fortune story “Apple and Eve” about the role of chief Apple designer Jonathan Ive in affirming the character of Eve from the upcoming Pixar film Wall-E. What caught my attention more than even the premise of a character based on Apple projected into the 28th century is the limits placed on Ive’s involvement:

“Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”

Whether this reticence was at Ive’s own initiative or reinforced by the looming ire of Jobs and lawyers et al., it reminds me of how straitjacketed corporate culture can become—’corporate’ here referring to almost any size company whose investments of intellectual property and shareholder value demand these precautions of silence and measured response. Even the tiny startup Epiphyte in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon has to employ elaborate security to protect their corporate interests.