The Law of The Big Mo

Lesson 16 from The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

John C. Maxwell

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781400275755
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Operations

Jaime Escalante has been called the best teacher in America. But his teaching ability is only half the story. His and Garfield High School's success came because of the Law of the Big Mo.

THE LAW OF THE BIG MO

Momentum Is a Leader’s Best Friend

If you’ve got all the passion, tools, and people you need to fulfill a great vision, yet you can’t seem to get your organization moving and going in the right direction, you’re dead in the water as a leader. If you can’t get things going, you will not succeed. What do you need in such circumstances? You need to look to the Law of the Big Mo and harness the power of the leader’s best friend: momentum.

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

If ever there was a person with talent and vision, it was Ed Catmull. As a boy, Catmull had grown up wanting to become an animator and filmmaker. But when he went to college, he had a realization: he wasn’t good enough. He promptly changed his focus to physics and computer science, earning a bachelor’s degree in each during the next four years. After working for Boeing for a few years, he decided on graduate school and enrolled in a new field within computer science—computer graphics. There he discovered that he could draw with the aid of a computer. It rekindled his dream to make movies. Even before he earned his PhD in 1974, Catmull was developing innovative software and looking for opportunities to make computer-generated movies.

In 1979, filmmaker George Lucas hired Catmull to run the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. For the next seven years Catmull hired some of the best technicians in the country and attracted other talent, such as John Lasseter, who had once worked at Disney. Catmull’s group broke new ground technologically and produced some incredible work, such as the “Genesis” sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. However, the division was very expensive to keep running. Catmull tried to convince Lucas to let him try to make computer-generated feature films, but the technology was still in its early stages and too expensive. Instead, Lucas decided to sell the division. In 1986 Steve Jobs bought it, paying five million dollars for it and putting an additional five million dollars into the company. He named it Pixar.

BABY STEPS

While it was struggling to become profitable, Pixar began making short films to demonstrate the power of its technology. The first was called Luxo Jr. It shows two animated desk lamps interacting as a parent and child would. Typically in those days after showing any kind of film demonstrating computer animation, filmmakers were asked a bunch of technical questions by industry experts who watched the film—about the algorithms they wrote or the software they used. Catmull and Lasseter knew they had made a significant step forward when one of the first questions asked was whether the “parent” lamp was the mother or the father. That’s when they knew they had connected with their audience and succeeded in telling a story, not just showing off new technology. Lasseter says,

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 audien...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• THE LAW OF THE BIG MO
• NOTES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR